A New Justice, a New Watchword: On Alphonso Lingis’s Irrevocable

People’s voices are like found poetry — raw, uncrafted, imperfect. Still, we do them the greatest justice when we choose carefully and get out of the way.

— Kelley Benham, “Hearing Our Subjects’ Voices”

Transparency

Imagine if we were fully transparent. This value so promoted in political, academic, and ethical forums could lead to a bizarre outcome if humans resembled jellyfish, the most transparent creature on the planet. Our conventional modes of secrecy or deception would be ruined in formal and intimate environments. We would find it difficult to hold hands or engage in passionate kisses while at the same time casting an eye on our kidneys preparing to excrete bile or feeling each other’s intestines at work. Were we truly transparent, speculates Alphonso Lingis, “we could not imagine how we could move and act among the things spread out about us” (5).

Thus begins chapter 1, “Outside,” of Lingis’s seventeenth book, Irrevocable. The etymology of the title is clear-cut, “not to call back.” Yet the title resonates with different meanings or implications of keeping a promise, breaking one’s word, retrieving a moment in our past, dwelling over a deed that is irreversible, or recognizing that which has disappeared forever. With a twist of humor in his eerie speculation on completely transparent human beings, Lingis examines the various limits and excesses of our efforts to convey and experience the range of human thoughts and imaginations. The most dramatic limit and excess of the irrevocable appear in the subtitle: “A Philosophy of Mortality.”

Since translating major works by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and publishing his first book, Excesses, Lingis has continually reworked the ancient philosophical themes, from love, justice, and friendship to beauty, evil, violence, and embodiment. Deathbound Subjectivity formulates his most theoretical concerns and disputes with continental thinkers on their views of human finitude and subjectivity. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common depicts numerous episodes of other human beings confronting their own mortal moments during unexpected encounters with lovers, comrades, family, or strangers. From his travels and research, Lingis uses his phenomenological methods to describe numerous unfamiliar attitudes or practices with regard to dying and ceremonies of death. He gratefully admits that on several occasions perfect strangers risked their lives to save his.

What distinguishes Irrevocable is a sustained shift toward the contours and depths of natural life. While Lingis has always studied the ambivalent relations between human and nonhuman creatures, here there is a more intense focus on the possibility that human death might not be full of dread, angst, or anxiety, but a joyful and mysterious return to nature — perhaps the fate of any other creature on this planet. That fate does not mean humans are simply equivalent to primates or the rest of nonhuman creatures, nor does it deny the weight of mortality in human thought and culture. After all, as far as we can tell, nonhuman creatures neither engage in debates or seminars about mortality, nor do they create temples, books, and paintings on the fatal aspects of their own species.

This is not solely a philosophical issue. As presented in Irrevocable, Lingis inter-weaves cultural and historical approaches to death as a renewed effort to encourage a political and ethical attitude that celebrates, welcomes, or incites still more voices from strange venues and locales. As such, we might then pave the way to see or create possibilities that offer more moments of joy and insight on this planet.

According to Tom Sparrow, editor of The Lingis Reader, over the last three decades Lingis has been among the most prominent interdisciplinary thinkers. He is also one of America’s most widely respected international philosophers. Though his public talks are well known for being intellectual spectacles, his books have been translated into several languages, and his work has reached disparate fields of inquiry. In the following I address...