speaking of Lingis

The funniest thing I ever heard Lingis read in class (and I do mean read; he would use prepared texts in his graduate classes)…

One week, after 30 minutes giving a dead-on scholarly history of structuralism, Lingis paused for a few seconds before launching into the second half of his paper in his trademark second-person delivery. I can get it more or less right from memory. This was Fall 1990, which is why the reference to Deleuze was to a living person:

“You spend weeks preparing a grant proposal, telling the Committee why you would greatly profit from spending some time in Leuven at the Husserl Archive, or going to Paris to consult with Gilles Deleuze. You get the grant. And since the Dean’s Committee is not there to show you off at the airport, you take off in the opposite direction and land in Manila.”

No idea whether it’s a true story or not.