2004 Lingis article

Here’s a 2004 ARTICLE ON LINGIS from the Baltimore City Paper. I read it at the time, then forgot about it until randomly running across it today.

Lingis is certainly the most remarkable human character I’ve ever run across, completely inimitable in his bizarre mix of interests and eccentricities. You have to go to French fiction, to Huysmans or Roussel, to find a comparable character.

There’s also the fact that he’s perhaps the best English prose stylist around. I can’t immediately think of any living writer, in any genre of fiction or nonfiction, who writes more beautifully than Lingis.

And yet, he “doesn’t get away with it” with the American continental philosophy crowd. There he’s primarily a wacko character far from the mainstream, and at best someone thanked for his translations of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty.

To me this has always been one of the biggest indictments of SPEP– the fact that the elements of genius in Lingis have been reduced to an inside joke or a sideshow. Putting Heidegger and Derrida in a blender has been the way to rise to the top of SPEP, I’m afraid, not being an original like Lingis.