The First Person Singular

Alphonso Lingis’s singular works of philosophy are not so much written as performed, and in The First Person Singular the performance is characteristically brilliant, a consummate act of philosophical reckoning. Lingis’s subject here, aptly enough, is the subject itself, understood not as consciousness but as embodied, impassioned, active being. His book is, at the same time, an elegant cultural analysis of how subjectivity is differently and collectively understood, invested, and situated.

The subject Lingis elaborates in detail is the passionate subject of fantasy, of obsessive commitment, of noble actions, the subject enacting itself through an engagement with others, including animals and natural forces. This is not the linguistic or literary subject posited by structuralism and post-structuralism, nor the rational consciousness posited by post-Enlightenment philosophy. It is rather a being embodied in both a passionate, intensifying activity and a cultural collective made up of embodied others as well as the social rituals and practices that comprise this first person singular.

Alphonso Lingis is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Penn State University and the author of numerous books including The Imperative, Dangerous Emotions, Trust, and most recently, Body Transformations. He is also the preeminent English translator of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. His translations include Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible and Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor, both published by Northwestern University Press.