Suchergebnisse

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to 'rehabilitate' the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the 'lived' body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body's power to act and exist.

"Realism" in phenomenology -- The rhetoric of realism in phenomenology -- Phenomenology as strong correlationism -- Phenomenology: a philosophy of access -- Proliferating the real

Sensation and sentiment: on the meaning of immanence -- The sensuality and the sensitivity -- A phenomenology of substances -- The elements -- The levels -- The pageantry of things -- The weight of reality -- Metaphysical habitats -- Intentionality and corporeity -- I am a ... -- Orchids and muscles -- Cause, choice, chance -- Return of the first person singular -- Contact -- Mortality -- The unlived life is not worth examining -- Lust -- Fluid economy -- The navel of the world -- Araouane -- Rings -- Typhoons -- Faces, idols, fetishes -- The murmur of the world -- The elemental that faces -- Phantom equator -- Violations -- Unknowable intelligence -- Breakout -- Wounds and words -- Sacrilege -- Our uncertain compassion -- Dignity -- Irrevocable loss -- Love junkies -- Truth in reconciliation -- Catastrophic time -- Trust -- War and splendor

Alphonso Lingis is the author of fourteen books and many essays. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. While many know him only as an eccentric ex-professor or as the translator of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski, he is arguably the most distinctive voice in American continental philosophy. This is no doubt due to the perpetual travel that fuels his arresting written prose and unorthodox public readings. Lingis's lifelong itinerary includes visits -- some brief, others extended or recurring -- to 109 countries. Along the way he has photographed innumerable strangers whose faces adorn the pages of his books. Photography is as essential to Lingis's multidisciplinary philosophical perspective as is his knowledge of phenomenology, anthropology, or psychoanalysis. Some of his photographs have been recently collected and published in the book Contact. Unlike most career academics, Lingis has made a name for himself collecting exotic birds and other creatures, staging performance readings at professional conferences, keeping up a diligent correspondence with friends at home and abroad, and splicing together high theory with intimate autobiography. Those who know him speak of his warmth, sincerity, and noncombative style of argumentation -- rare traits among university scholars. Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis's life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, "Doubles," along with copies of several of his letters to a friend