Lingis - Mirages in the Mud

7/30/2019 Lingis - Mirages in the Mud

1/12

http://vcu.sagepub.com

Journal of Visual Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1470412904042265

2004; 3; 107Journal of Visual CultureAlphonso Lingis

Mirages in the Mud

http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/1/107The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Journal of Visual CultureAdditional services and information for

http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on April 22, 2008http://vcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts


2/12

journal of visual culture

Mirages in the Mud

Alphonso Lingis

journal of visual culture

Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Vol 3(1): 107-117 [1470-4129(200404)3:1]10.1177/1470412904042265

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has taken over the whole domain of childhood fan-tasies and subjected them to what it takes to be scientific scrutiny. Itsinterpretation presupposes that they have meaning. But the fantasiesof infancy, prior to the acquisition of language, have no conceptual

meaning. How should they be described? Is not the question of howthey acquire symbolic meaning misconceived? How do infantile fan-tasies survive in adulthood?

Keywords

adult fantasies infantile fantasies interpretation meaningless

psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has taken over the whole domain of childhood fantasies andsubjected them to what it takes to be scientific scrutiny. In view of treatingour adult neuroses.

Political theory has also turned to childhood fantasies in view of understand-ing our adult sense of, and reactions to, the political structures of modernsociety. Recently George Lakoff (1997) has undertaken a major work toexpose the fantasies about childhood that for him underlie the twoopposing ideologies that battle in US politics: the conservative, Republicanexperience of a protective, responsible family that must educate and disci-pline the vulnerable and innocent children it procreates, and the liberal,

http://www.sagepublications.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepublications.com/


3/12

Democratic experience of an open family that must nurture and care for thefree spirit of children. Political theory thus builds on childhood fantasies andon the adults conception of childhood fantasies.

But I wonder if our infantile fantasies really have the meanings psychoanalysisfinds or puts in them. I wonder if they really have meaning.

In his bookLooking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan throughPopular Culture, Slavoj Zizek (1992) proposes a new rule for respectingothers:

Avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other,i.e., respect as much as possible the others particular absolute, the

way he organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particularto him. (pp. 1567)

But is not the very aim of the psychoanalytic process (Zizek goes on to say)to shake the foundations of the analysands fundamental fantasy, i.e. to bringabout the subjective destitution by which the subject acquires a sort ofdistance toward his fundamental fantasy as the last support of his (symbolic)reality? Is not the psychoanalytic process itself, then, a refined and thereforeall the more cruel method of humiliation, of removing the very groundbeneath the subjects feet, of forcing him to experience the utter nullity ofthose divine details around which all his enjoyment is crystallized (p. 156)?

But I wonder if our infantile fantasies have the meaning Zizek assigns to

them I wonder if they have meaning. And I wonder if respect is the rightword for our attitude toward infantile fantasies when we encounter them inourselves and in others.

For the Enlightenment, fantasy is a subjective production, but this power ofthe subject is a weakness in the subject. Fantasy images screen-off reality. Agreat deal of the mental life of individuals, but especially of societies, consistsof fantasies. To become enlightened is to progressively replace fantasies withpercepts and concepts. The concepts one introduces to identify and relateones real percepts have to be consistent and coherent. This is to becomerational. The effective way to eliminate fantasy is with reasoning. One usesreason to determine that the image of a stick that is bent when plunged into

water is an illusion. Descartes uses reason to determine whether the images

he sees are or are not produced by an Evil Genius.Images are particular, but concepts are universal. With its universal concepts,the rational mind encompasses the greatest expanse the universe.

The mind of every rational subject encompasses the universe, in the sameway. What then happens when one rational agent encounters another? Herecognizes another in, Immanuel Kant says, respect. Respect is respect forthe imperative for the universal and necessary, the imperative for law thatrules in the other. And that binds me also. Does that make every rationalsubject the same anonymous?

journal of visual culture 3(1)108

http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/http://vcu.sagepub.com/


4/12

Not really: a rational subject can act effectively in the universe. The subjectthat indulges in fantasies has only a private domain, one closed off by theopacity of images. The rational subject is really a cause, really an effectiveagent. He is subject only to the laws he conceives in his rational mind. Thereis no limit to the field of entities and events open to the rational I, while theindividual who indulges in fantasies is disconnected from the universe.

The Meaning of Fantasy

The Enlightenment held the strong conviction that the mental lives of wholepeoples were filled with religious superstition, myths, old wives tales,legends. They elaborated hagiographies instead of biographies, mythsinstead of history. Over immense periods of time, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974: 110) said, the intellect produced nothing but errors.

But anthropology revised this view of prescientific societies. It is hard tobelieve that societies that have survived over generations could have done soif their mental life was largely disconnected from their environment. Whenone observes how they have endured in often harsh environments, one

would have to believe that their knowledge of their environment was funda-mentally sound.

It is meaningful that philosophers of knowledge today invoke to separate thevision of visionaries from delusions. What the vision presents is not what isthere and seeable; instead it anchors meanings in visualized heroes,

demigods and demons. Our epistemology admits that the vision can well bemore meaningful than what is given to perceptual sight and more meaning-ful than what can be represented in the universal and abstract terms of a con-ceptual diagram or mapping.

Anthropologists take the visions recounted in myths and legends of a cultureas symbolic mappings of the environment and the institutions of a people.The images of fantastical deities and demons are interpreted as a constella-tion of symbols, each materializing a connection or relationship. Themeanings in symbols group entities, and relate them, in space and time,concomitantly and consequentially.

Shamans and healers work to integrate individuals into the understanding of

the community and into the community by dramatically reenacting the greatmythic conflicts and victories in the bodies of their clients.

It happens that two societies, and two myths, enter into contact the Islamof the Arab invaders and the old Zoroastrianism of the Persians; the whitemythology of priests and missionaries and the old African mythologies ofenslaved peoples in Mississippi, in Brazil, in Haiti. Two political systems, twoeconomies, and also two mythologies pull in opposite directions in the activi-ties and also in the understanding of people. There results not only mentalconfusion but physical inability to function in this field of contradictions.

It is in this in-between zone, where the two cultures and mythical systems

Lingis Mirages in the Mud 109



5/12

imperfectly overlap, that marginal leaders medicine men, faith healers,Voodoo serviteurs, cargo cult messiahs work. They interpret the enslave-ment and deportation from Africa to Brazil, Haiti and Mississippi in terms ofthe deportation and enslavement of the Jews in Egypt; they identify thetriumphant white-skinned saints set up in the altars of Catholicism, St Georgeand St James, with Ogun and Olodum, African gods of thunder and blood-shed. But their work is not simply to construct coherence between theuniversal categories of divergent myths; it is to construct coherence betweenthe universal categories of myths and the concrete experience of individualpeople. They have to enable individuals to make sense of their ametropiclives.

There is an intrinsic particularism of myth: it is bound to a space and a

community. But is it that particular traits of the location and the communityparticularize the myth? Or does the myth particularize the community havethe Jews maintained their identity because they share a stock of myths? Doesthe infotainment industry deliberately maintain a stock of myths in order toconstitute a US identity? It is striking that colonial powers set out to discreditthe myths of a conquered people, to convert them to their own Christianmyths or to scientific rationalism that white mythology, as Jacques Derridahas called it.

Private Myths

Sigmund Freud laid down that dreams and fantasies are not just disconnectedpatterns; they have meaning. They persist then as meanings persist, in anintemporal or ideal sphere where they can always be found again the same.Psychoanalysis is a practice of interpretation. It works on the supposition thatimages are symbols, whose meaning can be verbalized. It supposes that theimages of nocturnal and diurnal fantasy have suppressed and unconsciousmeanings. The talking cure only brings to light the meanings the imageshave. The patient will recognize the verbal meanings in emotional adhesion.The awakened emotions function as an assent to the meanings that havebeen brought to light, verbalized, expressed. To ascribe meaning to fantasiesis to presuppose that there is a context already there, a layout of identitiesand categories and intelligible relationships that are held open to the mind.

Claude Lvi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan proposed that the eccentric images ofindividual fantasy constitute a private myth (Zizek, 1992: 1567). In hisfantasy space which psychotherapists scrutinize, that individual works to fillin, with meaningful symbols, the gap between the universal meanings of thepublic myth or, today, of science and the particularities of his own situa-tion. A private myth thus presupposes the prior existence of that individualin the public myth of his culture. Thus Daniel Paul Schreber elaboratesa private mythology derived from fragments of scientific psychology andphysiology, and Christian and Zoroastrian myths. Hence fantasies are gener-ated by a general need for, demand for, meaning.




6/12

Can one conceive of an individual for whom the public myth accounts for allthe events of his life? There certainly are individuals who claim that, who try.The Pope, for example, or religious fundamentalists?

Do not the rest of us elaborate private myths? The common language ofphysical dynamics and electromagnetism, and of physiology, neurology, psy-chology and pragmatic reason the meaning-system of our culture has tobe applied to our own environment and our own bodies in order to enableus to make sense of how our bodies function or do not function in thesituations in which we find ourselves. In seeking to do so, we may find thesymbolic system has internal flaws, or else that it does not adequately fit ourown environment. Moreover, the meaning system, the categories, are general,

while we are individuals in particular situations. There is a gap; each one has

to fill in, with meaningful terms, this gap. The symbols each one devises tocover over the gaps will be always particular. They are visualized in imagesthat we detach from our own situation.

It is especially with regard to what we find gives us pleasure, what elicits andstimulates our desires, what gives us a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment,that the meaning-system of the culture is wanting. It is especially with regardto our own bodily cravings and carnal desires that we elaborate our fantasies,our private myth. Fantasy, according to the psychoanalytic interpretation, isintrinsically bound to the sensual impulses of ones own body. Fantasy is,Zizek says, the particular way each of us dreams his world, organizes hisenjoyment.

Fantasy, according to psychoanalysis, reenacts the drama of the originalprohibition, the original castration. It depicts the lost object of drive as some-thing that was taken from us by another, and must be found in the other. Thisother is the symbolic system, but it is also the one who utters the prohibitionand subjects us to the unending pursuit of symbolized objects, symbolicobjectives.

Immanuel Kant (1965: 52, 53) argued that we have no real concept of happi-ness. We can give this abstract idea of it, but no thinker has been able togive the working formula. None of us who pursue happiness really knows,really can say, what this happiness is. In Lacans and Zizeks terminology,

jouissance, the excessive and monstrous paroxysms of pleasure in pain, isthe objective intrinsically absent from the objects of desire. It is also absent

from its concept, absent from our understanding, unrepresentable.But the fantasy space in another commands our respect. Respect is attentionto, considerateness for, deference to another. It is to avoid violating theotherness of the other. This otherness, that part of him that we can be sure

we can never share, is not an abstract separate identity, but the particularfantasy that organizes his enjoyment and thus his desires and his behaviors.It is the private myth that each one elaborates for himself, that makes him anindividual, a person. It is the very illusionary, fragile and helpless character ofthat fantasy, Zizek says, that requires our respect.

Thus Zizek opposes the Enlightenment and Kant: it is not the universal




7/12

power of the rational faculty that makes us effective agents in the universethat individualizes us as agents and commands our respect, but the fantasyspace in which each individual elaborates his private myth and acts in a worldof his own design.

But does the private myth individualize the person, or does the particulari-ties of the person individualize the meaning-system? Is it not because theperson finds particular events and impulses in himself or that the publicmyth does not account for that these events and impulses leave images inhimself to which he or assigns meaning and thus makes them into symbols?

Infancy

I for my part was attentive to the title of our conference: Infans: Fantasies ofChildhood.1 Infans: it is Latin for without speech. So I concentrated myattention on the first year or two of childhood, when the infant has a percep-tual, and also imagistic mental life, but where the percepts and images areutterly without names or concepts, without meaning.

For psychoanalysis, dreams and diurnal fantasies have an intrinsic relation-ship to discourse. They are fragments of discourse that have been censored,leaving gaps in the conscious discourse. They fill in the gaps and interstices,or they double up the conscious meaning of discourse with second orconflicting meanings. There is a fundamental problem with this account. Fora year or two the infant is infantile, without speech. Infantile mental life is

prelinguistic, and preconceptual. If later infantile images that have persistedfunction as symbols, that was not their infantile function. What then arereally infantile fantasies?

I shall not here attempt an interpretation of them that is, conceptualize andverbalize a meaning we suppose they have. Instead I shall describe them. Ishall describe them with language, to be sure, but that language does nottake them to be symbols, that is, imbued with meaning. The words simplycircumscribe their contours, designate their qualities, and trace out theempirical relations, relations of simple spatio-temporal contiguity, betweenthem.

The task is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The infantile mind persists in the

adult. We still have access to infantile fantasies.I shall take but two instances, drawn from my own infancy. The first is myearliest memory, which I think is from about a year or a bit more. I think thatbecause in this memory I was not really walking yet still toddling.

The second is a pattern of sound. This sound pattern seems to me to havebeen there in my infancy, and fundamental, and to persist underneath thespaces and the sounds, melodies, rhythms and noises of the adult world.




8/12

Mud

In my back yard I recently dug out a pond, and behind that pond dug out amuch shallower basin for a marsh. I was wading in the marsh, planting reedsand cat-tails in the mud. It brought back again what is my earliest memory inlife: that of playing with a mud puddle after the rain. It must have been a

warm summer day, the sun was shining. I was wading clumsily through thepuddle, gliding over the soft mud, lurching, splashing the muddy water backand forth. My sister, a year and a half older, was there too, also fascinated bythe puddle, but more reticent already. I was wading back and forth for per-haps a half hour, until our mother came upon us and ordered us to stop. Shedid not immediately order us to go wash up, so I wandered off, in search of

more mud puddles out of her sight.I think it is far-fetched to try to assign meaning to the mud. Do we today havea concept of mud? Indeed, do we really have an intelligible concept of, forexample, lemon? The word lemon designates something we can knowonly through a sensuous experience, and later recall, of color, sourness, juicyand fibrous texture. The mud puddle was something I as a speechless infantencountered through movement, movement of the toddling feet through it,feeling its warmth through contact, feeling it give way, gluey and sucking atmy feet, but slippery as I slid through it, splashing its grey substance throughthe air but then it sticking onto my hands and clothes.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1993[1943]) in his analysis of the slimy in Being andNothingness, broke it down into an experience of consciousness, which is all

transparency and resistantless movement, and being-in-itself, which isopaque and inert. But it is not consciousness as he describes it that madecontact with the mud; it is the clumsy and lurching movement of theinfantile legs and swinging hands, which were warmed and made slippery

with the mud. And the mud is not opaque and inert being-in-itself; it is asubstance the infant experiences to be like that of his own body, warm andunstable and, when seen through the muddy water and splashed in the sun,translucent.

In fact, mud is not some compound of consciousness and being-in-itself; it isa mundane substance. In playing with the mud, my infant self was intro-duced into a region of the material world. It is a region I could move in, aregion that did not confront me with inert force, an infantile region. It wasa region of play, gratuitous expenditure of energy. Playing in the mud was apleasure. It was not a symbol of some unrepresentable happiness.

I also find forced the psychoanalytic theory that the mud must represent thelost object of desire. There is not nostalgia for something lost in this earliestmemory, but discovery.

When people view slums, in third-world countries or in the USA, the dirt, theuncleaned streets, the muddy back alleys and empty lots, the garbage, thedust is for them the visible evidence of destitution. It is not the men goingoff to work in dirty work shoes and jeans that strikes them; it is the children.




9/12

The dirty kids, in unwashed rags and faces, crawling over the weedy back lotsand wastelands. I vividly remember one of the kindest women I have known,

whom I met during her trip in Mexico, looking at the dirty street kids and thewomen coming up to beg, and who murmured: Why do they breed so? Yet shewas a pious Catholic, ignoring her churchs injunction against birth control.

Most of my time in La Paz, in Istanbul, in Jakarta, in Old Delhi, in Marrakesh,I spent in the company of street kids. In the third world, they have not beentold by a hysterical press and parents that they must not talk to strangers, andthey know the whole place, all its ins and outs, like rats. One day in IstanbulI came upon some kids playing in a dirt lot, who greeted me and led medown a hole in the ground, which they lit with torches made of pop bottlesand kerosene, and showing me a Byzantine palace, now completely under-

ground. We descended the three flights of rubble-strewn steps to the threefloors of the ancient palace; at the bottom they warned me that a madman

was living there. And indeed there he was, shouting at us and waving hishands in insane greeting.

And so I have come to think that the street kids of third-world slums have agreat time in the dirt. Infancy has an affinity for the mud. Is this some kindof instinctual affinity for the primal slime from which all life was generated?Perhaps, but I do not think we have evidence to go beyond the innerpleasure of playing in the mud.

Reverberant Spaces

When I am alone I tend to hum, not a melody, just some tones that rise anddip. Sometimes, in my bedroom, the humming itself awakens bedroomscenes from my infancy. Did I not anchor myself in the dark back then byhumming? The humming spreads about this vibrant substance of myself aresonant space which was animated by me. It was in this space that theimages began to take form the farm animals I had played with during theday, and also personages from comic books and magazines. Fantasies did notemerge in the silence, in the empty sky or in the forms of a silent room orlandscape; they emerged in the vibrant zone. From the first, these were notsilent visual images, they were animate and made sounds, they hummed too,they uttered vocalizations. An imaginary playmate emerged, a girl, though I

had a sister already. I distinctly remember when she began speaking it waswhen I myself had already learned some language. Would Lacan and Zizekidentify there the moment when, in a tte--tte with an imaginary playmate,I began elaborating my private myth? But before that she was there, emerg-ing in humming and vocalizations of her own.

I was sometimes startled to hear anothers sound in my space: the voice ofmy mother, or the sound of my sister thrashing through the high grass and

weeds. I remember it was always with embarrassment that I heard someonewho came upon me murmuring and humming to myself and vocalizing withthe insects, winds and birds.




10/12

I spent a great deal of my infancy in a gully near the house, but out of sightof my parents and sister. Seated there in the high grass I played with thebeetles and buzzing flies. When I got up and headed off in the weeds anddaisies, it was a different kind of humming, a line of sound. As the sound

went off into a distance, it led me. It varied as I turned in one direction oranother. Paths I took several times came to invoke their specific sound line,such that the gully paths came to be overlaid with mappings of vocalization.Like an Australian aborigine following songlines, I recognized paths byintoning their sound pitches and timbers.

Martin Heidegger claimed that we lay out space about ourselves in practicalmoves. The primary movement is the movement that reaches out to things,to use them, manipulate them, work with them. The primary movement that

lays out distance is this reach for things. The things are used as implements;they refer beyond themselves to some task to be done, some goal. Thereaching hand extends an axis from here, where the body is energized andactivated, to there, the implement beyond being reached for. When we go tomake lunch, we station ourselves in the kitchen, take out the roast, opendrawers for knives and forks and open plate. Beyond the roast there is thedining-room table to be set. When we go the cellar to fix a broken chair, westand before the workbench, and survey a limited field of implements. Wereach out for tools. The practicable field, the workspace, opens before ourstance, and our movements stabilize implements and line them up in view ofthe task.

This is the space of work and reason. Our feet are on the ground, we see the

inert implements stationed in their places; we deal with reality. Fantasies arebanished.

But I continue to hear an undercurrent rumble from my infancy. This rumblespreads about me still the infantile space of sound. Humming or whistling ortrilling some melody I find myself anchored back in the vibrant substance ofan infantile body. My body reverberates its vibrations outside, filling a zoneof space, a car, a bedroom, a glade in the forest. It is out of these reverbera-tions and rhythms that fantasies begin to take form. Their visual lines aredrawn by patterns of sound. Fantasies that have persisted in that undercur-rent of rumble since my infancy.

Fantasies open us upon dimensions of reality that are not that of the

practicable field, the workspace, nor that of conceptual meanings. Fantasiesthen are not simple images produced in a mental space disconnected fromreality.

Mature Fantasies

Is that fantasy space in us the zone in which we remain infantile? That isanother Freudian idea it is time to cast into question.

Some years ago I went to Sils Maria, high in the Swiss Alps, where Friedrich




11/12

Nietzsche had spent the last seven summers of his productive life. I was therein September, when the August vacationers were gone and the winter sportscrowd had not yet arrived: almost all of the hotels were closed. It is a minerallandscape, only a few larch trees lingered at the tree line in the space belowthe eternal glaciers. Below were the Silser and Silvaplana lakes, filled with icy

water from the melting snows, without algae and transparent, whereNietzsche wrote the drunken song from the last book of Zarathustra. I spentthe days climbing that zone, thinking like Nietzsche that I did not know howold I was nor how young I was yet to be. The afternoon of the first day on amountain slope I realized there was nobody within sight or hearing, and Icould talk out loud to myself without risk of embarrassment. Then I began toopen the verbal confines around my voice. I hummed, vocalized, yodeled,

yelled, groaned, screamed. I continued whole days that followed. We knowthat infants release the most astonishing array of vocalizations, sounds codedin all kinds of human languages, every kind of animal rumble and cry. Then,

when they begin to pick up the phonetics of a given language, they little bylittle silence all that vocal virtuosity, to the point that once they are proficientin English they are no longer capable of Arabic gutterals or Chinese tones. I

was recovering all those long suppressed hisses, grunts, wails, trillings,warblings, lowings, barkings, clickings, cluckings, cacklings. But I nowise feltinfantile; on the contrary I felt beyond all stages of development, I felt, asnever before, sovereign, 6,000 feet, as Nietzsche wrote, above man and time.I felt supremely able to undertake any responsibility. I strode about in aZarathustran ecstasy. I had so often read Nietzsches account of the overman,never before had I felt the inner force of the overman. This feeling came in

the liberated and wild vocalization.

And contact with the mud now does not make me feel like an infant again,but like an adult. Planting the mud of my marsh with reeds and cat-tails mademe feel Promethean. I now do not feel I am really a man unless I get myhands dirty. Cleaning out the cellar, the garage, that is a mans job. When Iam staying in a fanatically hygienic hotel room, I do not feel I am reallyliving in it until I spend a day hiking in the heat and come back to it withsweat-soaked clothes that stain the bedspread when I sit down to take offshoes. There are those photographs by Sebasto Salgado of an enormous pit

where hundreds of workers, all covered with mud, are laboring to bring upgold. I cannot look at those photographs without believing that these menare possessed of all the adult things: endurance, capacity to suffer, responsi-

bility for their families that bends them to the harshest labor, comradery,loyalty to one another.

And that makes me think that the sensibility for mud, the sensitivity tothe reverberation of my own, and the earths sound in space, are ways thatdelivered me to the sovereignty and responsibility of adulthood. Theseearliest memories of my life, which have persisted so vividly, though they arenot melodramatic, gothic, traumatic, were not simply subjective productions,

where my mind indulged in itself, screened off from reality. They were notconcoctions of a need for, a demand for meaning. Playing in the mud as aninfant persisted, becoming a pleasure in seeing the pleasure of street kids




12/12

playing in the dirt, and a pleasure to all demanding and consequential jobsthat one gets dirty doing. And whenever I come upon someone hummingor droning as they sit or walk or work, there stirs in me some unnameablepleasure. I seem to have come upon the vibrant inner core of a livingindividual, anchoring himself in space. I abruptly feel a strong inhibitionagainst intruding. Is that what Zizek wants to reassign the term respect to?But it seems to me it is a feeling resonant with much more than respect: carefor, love for the infancy and ultimate adulthood both, in another.

Notes

1. Conference Infans: Fantasies of Childhood, The Institute for Contemporary Art,

31 March 2002.

References

Kant, Immanuel (1965[1914] The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Die Metaphysik

der Sitten, I. Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Rechtslehre, Kants gesammelte

Schriften, Kniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd. VI), trans.

John Ladd. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Lakoff, George (1997)Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Dont.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:

Vintage.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1993[1943])Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barn. New York:

Washington Square Press.

Zizek, Slavoj (1992) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan throughPopular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Alphonso Lingis is a professor of philosophy at the Pennsylvania StateUniversity. He has published: Excesses: Eros and Culture (SUNY Press,1984), Libido: The French Existential Theories (Indiana University Press,1985), Phenomenological Explanations (Kluwer, 1986), Deathbound

Subjectivity (Indiana University Press, 1989), The Community of Those WhoHave Nothing in Common (Indiana University Press, 1994), Abuses

(University of California Press, 1994), Foreign Bodies (Routledge, 1994),Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Humanity Books, 1995), The

Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1998), Dangerous Emotions(University of California Press, 1999) and Trust (University of MinnesotaPress, 2003).


SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV A il 22 2008h // bD l d d f

Documents

Lingis - Mirages in the Mud