reading today

Badiou. Gogol.

One of the reasons I like reading a couple of authors at once is that there’s always a pretty good chance you’re one of the few to have read that combination simultaneously, which means that sparks might arise that you were among the first ever to see. It doesn’t always happen, that cross-resonance, but once in awhile it does, and it seems to works best if the conjunction is almost random.

graphic video: protestor shot

Here’s another video I came across while reviewing the Tahrir book. But don’t watch it unless you’re willing to see a protestor shot dead in cold blood by advancing Interior Ministry troops. The unlucky protestor is the one in a dark shirt and headband, and his death occurs just 13 seconds into the video.

The surprising thing is that this happened as early as Thursday, January 27, just before the Friday, January 28 “Day of Rage” when the violence peaked and hundreds were killed. (They’re now saying 850 on that day alone, far above the initial total.)

I can’t tell whether that first scene is even in Cairo. It could be anywhere in Egypt. But I suspect it was somewhere like Suez, where the police were more trigger-happy earlier in the Revolution than was the case in Cairo.

Images like this pour a bit of cold water on the initial impulse I feel to show some mercy to the regime officials at sentencing time. When you remember that they were giving these sorts of orders, you remember how lucky we are that they’re now in prison rather than still in power. (A secretary I spoke with on campus yesterday doesn’t just want the former Interior Minister hanged, she wants him hanged in Tahrir Square. It would have been he who gave shoot-to-kill orders to his troops in this video, though that order could well have come from higher up the chain, and probably did.)

Los Angeles Review of Books

Their temporary WEBSITE is now up. This is a brand new publication.

I’ll be reviewing some books for them. The work I was initially assigned seems to be months behind schedule, so they gave me Tweets from Tahrir instead. I’m glad they did send me that brisk, inspiring read, the review of which I finished writing earlier today.

the U.S. Embassy in Cairo

On the whole, I think the appointment system has led to a marginal improvement. Now you wait for only 45 minutes after taking a number instead of 2.5 hours as seemed to be the previous average. Better yet, I forgot my piece of paper from the website signup and they were not complete jerks about it.

Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, though, and the exercise of petty arbitrary power seems to be part of the job no matter where in the world you go. Such people remain experts at setting up situations where you either have to act unprompted or ask a question, and if you act unprompted they pretend to be shocked that you did something hastily without permission, and if you ask a question they pretend it was a stupid question. There’s no point hoping for anything different from this class of characters; you just have to be prepared not to invest any energy in your dealings with them beyond the bare minimum. I’ve been told that the IRS is the worst of all, and of course they hold such a big hammer that you simply have to put up with everything from them. But God, I hope I never have to go to an audit with those people, after the stories I’ve heard. The Philadelphia customs people were bad enough, however.

Before I left home to see the big wide world, perhaps the most heinous human beings I ever encountered were the two vicious women at our local driver’s license bureau. They were universally loathed for their cattiness and pettiness, to the point that letters to the editor were often printed in the newspaper complaining about them. It took years before their behavior changed– pretty much overnight, which surely means that a new boss eventually came in and screamed at them. Suddenly, those two obnoxious hellcats had become philanthropic sweethearts.

But before that happened, I like others spent years in dread of ever getting my license renewed. One day I went in for that purpose, and when sitting down to get my photo taken I heard the ridiculous command: “Face West!” Well, my sense of direction isn’t bad, but when I’m inside a prefabricated building sitting at a cocked angle inside the parking lot of a mall, I can’t say I always know the compass directions perfectly. So, I looked around helplessly for a couple of seconds. That hideous woman scowled at me as though I had just admitted to not knowing how to spell “dog,” then pointed sternly toward one wall. I looked to the wall, where I saw a gigantic sign bearing, in perhaps 500-point font size, the letters “WEST.” What a rotten person.

The guy outside the Embassy today wasn’t quite as bad, though he did seize one easy laugh at my expense when it was unclear which of two lines I was supposed to get in. He pretended that it should have been obvious, as such people always do. But otherwise it wasn’t bad. And I felt some sympathy for him when I realized that he does, in fact, have a mildly dangerous job. Working the front gate of a U.S. Embassy does entail certain physical risks.

call for papers: journal issue on Alphonso Lingis

Call for Papers:

The prestige of Alphonso Lingis as a translator and his very personal philosophical voice may explain why the philosophical community has not yet recognized the radical reorientation of phenomenology that has been taking shape under Lingis’ pen for the last twenty years. Our hope is that by dedicating our first issue ofSingularum to his invention of another phenomenology, this oversight can be corrected, and a new appreciation or education of the senses can get underway.

What distinguishes Lingis’ phenomenology is his resistance both to the theoretical bias of phenomenology’s Husserlian roots and to the pragmatic bias of phenomenology’s Heideggerian developments. His ambition, as he puts it, is to “elaborate a phenomenology of the levels upon which things take form, the kinds of space, the sensuous elements, and the night.” (The Imperative 1998, p. 5) This is another phenomenology. A phenomenology that resists the pragmatic reading of our experience that we owe to Heidegger and to many of his American interpreters trained by Hubert Dreyfus. The sensuous elements of the earth beckon us to sensual arousal. They draw us from the comfortable worlds organized by our practical posture to the dangers and delights of the sensual earth revealed to a dissolute posture.

Lingis moves toward the sensual earth along two not quiet differentiable dimensions, which might once have been called the phenomenologies of the body and of language. Along both dimensions Lingis’ other phenomenology explores the earth in advance of its organization by the practical purposes of our linguistic and perceptual lives. The sensual elements of the earth should not be confused with Heidegger’s dark romantic earth, twinned as it is with the world, nor should it be confused with potting soil. Lingis’ earth is alive with the activity of sensual elements. What Levinas called the elemental.

This other phenomenology is a phenomenology of levels, and what the more familiar phenomenology recognizes as the lived body is here presented simply as how our worlds organize when our sensory-motor activities follow the directives of the beckoning level. Lingis is interested in something else: “we set out to recover a substantive conception of our bodies given to excitement and lust.” (Sensation, 1996, p. x) As Lingis tells the story, we can enjoy our bodies in this other way when we move levels, the passage between the levels. It is at this point that Lingis’ work resonates with what Deleuze, in his appreciation of Francis Bacon, called the logic of sensation.

What are levels? Levels are understood in terms of relations of forces and qualities that emanate from things, as imperatives or directives. This helps to initiate an aesthetics, ‘beauty is imperative’, and an ethics, ‘emotions are also forces’, forces of the earth or the sensuous. (Trust 2004: 111; Dangerous Emotions 2000: 16) Furthermore, it points in the direction of a philosophy of nature congruent with the insight, which we owe to Deleuze and Guattari, that the true nature is unnatural. The unnatural here figuring itself as the trans-substantiating passage between levels.

Lingis’ well-known itinerancy, his wandering wonders, are not, therefore, ancillary to, but a condition of, his philosophy. ‘The nomad is summoned not by distant things fixed on one equator, but by multiple spaces, multiple ordinances.’ (The Imperative, 1998: 116) Lingis writes, as a philosopher, from the earth he explores. His descriptions, the simple cadence of his prose, attest to his corporeal encounters, encounters that traverse philosophy itself. In the conclusion to Gilles Deleuze’s short presentation at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nomadic Thought, Deleuze inspires ‘who are today’s nomads, who are today’s Nietzscheans?’ (Desert Islands and Other Texts, 2004: 260) Our response is direct: Alphonso Lingis.

We imagine an issue of Singularum provoking, at last, an attempt to understand Lingis’ difference in phenomenology, and the difference this phenomenology of levels makes to Lingis’ appreciation of aesthetics, education, ethics, ontology, and perception.

Please send your submissions, due August 1st, to: hello@singularum.com