“I Am A Dancer”

Here’s a classic passage from a Lingis interview by John Armitage, “Towards An Ontology of Fetishes.” In Cultural Politics. Volume 5, Issue 1 (2009), pp. 98-117.

In academic terminology, the “I” for Lingis is a realist “I,” not a “performative” one. We are not just what we do and not just what we say.

“Lingis: I came back from a summer trip and the first person I came upon on campus was a student I had known for three years. Her parents were poor, and she had been working as a waitress to pay her way through the university. She loved to dance, was in the university dance company, but her parents wanted to be sure she could survive and urged her to take courses in something where she could get a job. She had majored in special education, a generous profession, and one where she could always find work. I asked her what her semester looked like. She said she had dropped her major and was taking five courses of dance. I vividly remember the shining, giddy eyes with which she told me she had realized she was made for dance, that it was on the dance floor that she belonged, that her body knew it belonged. Exultant, she turned a dance step in the sunlight, embracing the future that summoned her. A future of risk, where physical injuries could terminate her dancing existence, where she may prove to not have what it takes to really dance, dance her own dance, and where of course moments of realization are short-lived and ill-paid.

I found myself thinking again and again of this ‘I’ – ‘I am a dancer’ – both a discovery and a commitment. She is to be sure not yet a dancer, but without saying, first, in the secrecy of her own heart, ‘I am a dancer,’ she will never become a dancer. I soon realized that this ‘I’ -a power and an exultation -is absent from the contemporary philosophical discourse on subjectivity. This ‘I’ – ‘I am a dancer’ – is the first word of thought, the thought that set out to understand dance, the needs of the body, the necessity of great teachers, a whole cross-section of urban society. It also generates a fantasy space, which is not simply filled with reflections of the passing scene and media images. It begins a story of one’s own, though it seemed to me that subjectivity is not constituted by narration, since much of our lives are untold even to ourselves, and indeed the most momentous moments may be harbored in
silence.

I set out to contrast the power and exultation that sets forth this ‘I’ from the categories and obligations with which others recognize us. This ‘I’ is set forth with sometimes simple words, sometimes the most commonplace words of language – ‘I am a mother,’ ‘I am an outdoorsperson,’ ‘I am a wanderer’- and sometimes only with words put on one’s own heart. They are only very secondarily words of a language game played with others.”