Alphonso Lingis: Viaţa netrăită nu merită să fie examinată / Unlived Life Does Not Deserve to Be Examined

Abstract

Alphonso Lingis received his Ph.D. degree at The Catholic University of Louvain and presently, he is a Philosophy Professor at Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. The English translator of Emmanuel Levinas’s works and the author of numerous books, including Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), The Imperative (1998), and Dangerous Emotions (1999), Lingis’ authorship is informed by the works of Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and Levinas. His unique and original contributions envision topics such as passion, corporeality, emotion (joy and suffering), beauty, death, religious and secular manifestations of the ecstatic character of human nature, ethics, community, and beauty, all within the speculative framework of existential phenomenology and postmodern heterology. The following is a translation of a text signed by Lingis which was published in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers, James R. Watson (ed.), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1999, pp. 119-125.