An interview with Alphonso LINGIS

Hugo Letiche, Jean-Luc Moriceau
2018 Society and Business Review  
An interview with Alphonso LINGIS (1) Our experience is that reading a text by you, above all, entails being precipitated into a relationship with the Otheroften an-Other who is distant, with her/his culture and assumptions about what nature is. But the Other is never captured or reduced to an abstraction. The writing is always in the first-person singular; emphasizing the personal, experienced and immediate. The texts are stories of encounters that neither leave you nor your reader
more » ... The narrative choice(s) seem to imply a textual ethic; could you expand on that ethics, its sources and its philosophical/political significance as you see it. We can distinguish between "different" and "other." I can perceive someone in some ways similar to me as different by noting traits that are unlike (different sex, color, language, affirms different things). But even where the differences are minimal someone situates himor herself apart, on his or her own, by addressing me, appealing to me and contesting me, requiring a response from me with words, with gestures, with a look. Here there is an ethical imperative; before the other I have to respond and to respond directly and honestly. There is this presence of the other at the origin of writing; when I write, I am responding to what has been said to me, demanded of me. When I write about someone I have encountered, I seek to make that someone present to the reader. That someone addressed me, questioned me, and continues to do so as I seek to represent him or her faithfully. The reader is the third presence of yet another. The reader is present as someone to whom I offer what I say to his or her questioning and judgment. The writing is held within these three relationships to another, three ethical relationships. The writing becomes precise and concrete in the measure that the questions and demands put to the writer are singular. Thus, I do not see philosophical texts simply subjected to an abstract value of truth. But the relationship with others in writing requires behavior and action that are open to contestation and judgment. Certain political institutions exclude this. The ethical relationships involved in writing invoke a fundamental political ethic. (There are, to be sure, also philosophical texts in the form of mathematical logic, meditation and autobiography.) (2) Meeting an-Other through your text provides an opportunity for learning and awareness. The encounter is grounded in life experiences that have affected you. The author of the text has learned; he has been affected; he is no longer the same as before. Often the texts begin by recalling an aspect of the "natural attitude" or a conviction widely shared that will be challenged by the meeting with the Other that ensues. You seem to learn more than you're looking for. What skills are needed to develop this ability at openness and at learning? What could social studies or science research, learn from this? And why do you rarely specify precisely what it is that you have learned? We do pick up and pass along what is said about implements and ornaments, about people in other posts and in other lands, about neighborhood developments and political events and also what is felt about them. We pick up from others how to talk and what to feel and pass them on to others.
doi:10.1108/sbr-10-2018-128 fatcat:5bt2fo22jnezncn6xtsyf7i7va