Alphonso Lingis Quotes

And what else is erotic craving but a craving to be violated? In voluptuous turmoil, we are left not simply wounded, but shattered. The violent emotions that are aroused, that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on in a momentum that can no longer derail or control itself, sense also the exultation of risking oneself, of plunging into the danger zone, of expending our forces at a loss.

You will be identified as thin-skinned and moody; in reaction you will identify yourself as civilized and sensitive. You will barricade yourself in that preposterous condition known as self-respect.

The violation of the existence and natures of things, of oneself, or of others is evil. Disrespect encroaches upon the space of others, and alters or empties their nature. Respect is respect for the limits, the boundaries, the space of others, and thus for their natures. Morally good action designates the active respect for others, for things, and also for ourselves.

Yet we are also drawn to people who are not exemplary, who do not illustrate good sense and responsibility, who are temperamental as stallions, mercurial as falcons, sensual as cheetahs. Before them we relax our compulsion to judge, no longer feel that they have a responsibility to answer to and for what they do and say. We are enthralled by the human animal, the animality in
humans, the traits humans acquire in symbiosis with noble animals.

A question is not a supplication, an entreaty, nor a velleity for knowledge just put out in the air; it is already an order, a command. (Beggars, the destitute, pupils, factory workers, enlisted soldiers, prisoners, and patients have no right to question; they can only entreat.) A question commands a certain focus of attention, a selection of resources on hand, a certain type of language. It lays down a direction; it imposes a directive to think further down a certain track.

A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself, suits tailored in London, shoes handmade in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sportscar, which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair, will be view

Awakening is a bound, not weighted down with the past that inculpates the present and demands compensation from the future, a bound out of the drunkenness of remorse and resentment. Awakening is a commencement. It is a point of departure. We come alive; we become alive
to the dragonfly, to the twisted grain of the porch railing. Awakening is a birth. Awakening is joyous. The innocence of awakening, the active disconnection from the past, make possible this joy. How good to be alive! How refreshing is this silence! How calm the morning is! How pungent it smells! In every joy there is an awakening.

In the city people are moving down sidewalks, up and down escalators, along aisles; they are stationed in the driver's seat of buses, at gas pumps, computers, and cash registers. There is a low-intensity fear in them. They avoid turning in certain directions, flailing their arms or poking their hands in certain ways. They respect invisible barriers.

Power among humans is not simply the physical force with which one material body may move another; it is the force to distract, detour, maneuver, and command. Every pleasure we indulge in and every pain we suffer exerts power over others.

Back from the funeral, we think we felt the grim reaper swing close; we feel him stalking us. We ward off anxiety before the imminent and inescapable annihilation awaiting us by establishing control over our life and field of operations, by projecting an advance representation of what each day brings, and by measuring our enterprises to our forces. We arrange our home and our situation and our workday in such a way that we retain, behind the forms of our performances, a reserve of force for the tasks that will recur the next day. We settle into an occupation that requires only those mental tasks for which we have already contracted the mental skills. We frame our pleasures and our angers, our affections and our vexations, in the patterns and confines of feelings we can repeat indefinitely. We avoid going to places utterly unlike any other, which would leave us wholly astonished, with an astonishment that could never recur. We seek out partners others might also fall in love with, and we love our partner as others love like partners, with a love that we could recycle for another partner should we lose this one. For we sense that were we to expend all our forces on an adventure, discharge all our mental powers on a problem, empty out all the love in our heart on a woman or a man unlike any other, we would be dying in that adventure, that problem, that love.

When we attend to someone who greets us, it is not to require confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity. To respond to someone who greets us is to drop our concerns and thoughts, and expose ourselves to her. It is to expose ourselves to questioning and judgment. Simply responding to her greeting is to recognize her rights over us. Each time we enter into conversation we expose ourselves to being altered or emptied out, emptied of our convictions, our expectations, our memories.

There are transcendent collective events. There is anger spreading through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, anger marking in black the unallowable, the intolerable, anger that hurls itself beyond all that can reasonably be expected or demanded. This anger is the most precious gift of the disinherited to tourists and academics who have imprisoned their hearts through so many years of well-paid compromises and betrayals

Resentment secretes images that obscure your view of the present and distort your memory of the past. Resentment is a positive force of mendacity.

Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.

We would not know what happens if we did not know extreme pleasure, if we did not know extreme pain! It is because we sense that the only way to know what we are capable of, what we care about, what we fear, is to plunge into insecurity, loneliness, hunger, and cold, that we leave home to hitchhike across the country.