Tom Sparrow, Levinas Unhinged, Zero Books, 2013.
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Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.
From this narrative Sparrow deliberately and decisively dissents. Admitting from the off that his aim is not to ‘get Levinas right’, he seeks to defamiliarize Levinas through a series of powerful readings, each foregrounding the strange, unsettling and liminal aspects of his philosophy: the centrality of the body, materiality, the night. The result is impressive. Sparrow presents a Levinas who is both haunted and haunting — and, a Levinas primed for an engagement with the turn towards the weird and visceral that we see in recent speculative philosophy.
Chapter 1 focusses on Levinas’s critique of the tradition as the privileging of light. Sparrow’s main reference point here is Existence and Existents (1947) — an incredibly terse and powerful work whose strange kernel was written while Levinas was still imprisoned in the Stalag. (A quirk of history: a Jew in French uniform, fighting for the Resistance, Levinas belonged to a ‘fortunate’ category of prisoners who were spared the death camps for fear of reprisals should the Nazis break the Geneva Convention. Instead, he lived out his five years of internment in a prisoner of war camp, working in the forest with the other Jewish prisoners by day, and reading Hegel and writing by night.) Sparrow turns to that strangest of Levinasian ‘concepts’, the ‘there is’ (il y a); the anonymous existence devoid of any existent that Levinas calls the ‘night itself’ and which pursues the subject, manifesting indirectly in moments of pain, horror and — most of all — insomnia. This is the thick and impenetrable materiality that underlies the lightness of appearances; a darkness that is not the simple absence of light, but, in Sparrow’s excellent turn of phrase, a ‘tangible darkness’.
Sparrow rightly questions the relationship between imagination and experience when it comes to the il y a; if one cannot directly experience it, is it only accessible through the faculty of the imagination? And if this is the case, is Levinas still doing phenomenology? Perhaps, in a longer work, Sparrow would connect these questions with Levinas’s later innovation: the trace. It is with this thought that we can make better sense of that which does not show itself — that which is by definition allergic to light and conceptualization — and yet that which still pursues and threatens us.
Chapter 2 focusses on the attention Levinas pays to the role of sensation, especially in his aesthetics. Sidestepping the ethical transcendence for which he is famous, Sparrow brings out the aspects of Levinas’s early work which bring him into dialogue with such unlikely bedfellows as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière.
Chapter 3 is perhaps the book’s most significant chapter — and probably its most provocative. It is here that Sparrow engages most directly in the ongoing debate that has emerged since the publication of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, and the speculative turn it has provoked. Again, Sparrow emphasizes the role of sensation in Levinas’s philosophy, this time bringing him into contact with Kant and Merleau-Ponty. Towards the end of the chapter, he writes:
Phenomenology, for all its promise, has trouble handling the non-phenomenal and the non-intentional. This is precisely because phenomenality and intentionality are the fundamental elements of its understanding of experience. . . . As if despite their allegiance to the phenomenological principles Levinas and Merleau-Ponty make valuable contributions to the rehabiliatation of sensation as a concept. But these contributions oftentimes seem in tension with the first-person perspective of phenomenology. . . . Such speculation is without question required for a complete understanding of corporeal identity. Without it we are left only with description.
Sparrow’s critique of phenomenology rests on his decisively narrow conceptualization of it. It is as though the only form possible were a rigorous commitment to a reductive method that doesn’t depart from presence and perception. This, of course, is misleading. Or at the very least, would require further argument. He continues:
It is true that this subject is seen as embedded and situated in a concrete environment, but this concreteness is always informed by the teleological practice of the subject . . . the phenomenologist’s picture of embodiment will accommodate the body as lived, existential project, but it will do so at the neglect of the material basis of aesthetic identity.
The problem is this: how do we approach the nonphenomenal nonhuman substrate of existence, without rendering it human by bending and distorting it through the colours and shapes of our experiences and concepts? Sparrow is right to want to answer this question, and he is right that phenomenology has often failed to do so. But he is wrong to suggest that phenomenology’s ‘anthropocentric perspective’ cannot but fail in this task. To my mind it remains the most suitable method. And Levinas would seem to agree. Through a simultaneous appropriation and subversion of the phenomenological method, Levinas questions the unity of the lifeworld, while remaining committed to an altered phenomenology that points to the nonphenomenal from within the lifeworld. Thus he turns toward those moments of rupture that rightly fascinate Sparrow: nausea, pain, effort, indolence, insomnia and horror. Through painstaking phenomenological descriptions of these experiences that simultaneously occur within, and call into question, the human world, the ‘dark realm of sensuous materiality’ forces itself upon us. Where the unity of experience breaks up, the monstrous indirectly rears its head. Certainly this entails a certain move beyond phenomenology, or a pushing of phenomenology beyond its limits and itself, but it is through the work of descriptive phenomenology that we arrive here. Sparrow’s claim that ‘it is not necessary to return to the phenomenologists to advance the concept’ of aesthetic identity is, to my mind, false. Indeed, it would have been interesting to see why Sparrow thinks that Levinas, while a trenchant critic of phenomenology throughout, nonetheless remains committed to it in some form, such that as late as 1984 he could still lay claim to ‘another phenomenology’.
Chapter 4 is a fascinating attempt to put Levinas into dialogue with certain strands of contemporary ecology. Sparrow rightly rejects all attempts to extend the ethical experience of the face of the other person to the natural environment; an approach that is inescapably anthropomorphic. The natural environment resists all attempts to be rendered human. I think here of Wallace Stevens:
The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,
In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.
In place of the face of the other, Sparrow advances Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘strange stranger’. He writes: ‘A strange stranger is a beinghuman, animal, other—that is simultaneously intimate with and foreign to me. The more you look at and learn about this intimacy, the more foreign the strange stranger seems.’ Thus he starts to develop an uncanny ecology based on the blank facelessness of the natural world that surpasses and encompasses us, that ‘holds us hostage at the same time as it asks for our help.’ Towards the end, he writes:
It is particularly disarming to acknowledge that it is precisely this strangeness that commands us ethically, that calls for our humility and caution. The strange stranger is the face(lessness) of infinity, the specter of a responsibility that exceeds us.
Without an account of transcendence — the positive infinity that gives Levinas so much grief from Derrida — the ethical command Sparrow aims for is going to be difficult to justify. Clearly it rests on his appeal to spectrality, although in this chapter it is not quite clear how. This is a truly fascinating idea, but it deserves a book.
Chapter 5 sketches and subverts Levinas’s most famous proposition, defacing without effacing the central chapters of Totality and Infinity with the help of Alphonso Lingis. Locating the tension between the empirical and transcendental readings of the face, Sparrow seeks to bring back to the fore the brute, strange and dark materiality that must inform all of our encounters with the other’s face. While the exegetical work will be a little too simplistic for many readers already familiar with Totality and Infinity, the original contributions towards the end of the chapter are well worth wading through some slightly sketchy formulations for. For example:
Our trust answers to a dare, not an obligation. It rides on the contingency of responsibility. We catch on to the other’s voice and allow its unmistakable appeal to solicit our effortless interlocution. Because the laughter or tears of another are contagious, the other becomes a magnet for us or reflects in their eyes our own mortality. This is the kind of non-allergic contact which Levinas desires, but it is not a contact which can be prescribed. We can always flee the scene and head home.
This is a beautiful passage. So is this: ‘Responsibility is much less a somber obligation than it is an exhilarating risk.’ That said, it is not clear to me that Levinas — at least in Otherwise Than Being — would exactly dispute this. For example, it is here that he writes: ‘A face as a trace . . . does not signify an indeterminate phenomenon; its ambiguity is . . . but an invitation to the fine risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to the other, to the exposure of this exposedness, the expression of exposure, saying.’ And: ‘Communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.’ Of course for Levinas the terms would not be opposed: the exhilarating risk would be precisely that which ups the graveness of the obligation. It is here that Sparrow might want to take issue, though I wonder if he would, or if he should; to do so would weaken the impact of his point.
The implication, towards the end of the chapter, that Levinas’s reluctance to focus on the fleshiness of the face (which is in any case disputable in light of Otherwise Than Being) results from some form of expedience seems dubious. And talk of ‘the prime violence of Levinas’s metaphysical system’ will likely make some readers wince. Among such fiercely polemical and probably unfair claims however, there are some genuinely beautiful and perceptive insights. An example:
There is enough in the contours of the face, the hue of the skin, and the sparkle of the eyes to interrupt violence without having to appeal to divine command. The mundane is excessive enough to dislocate totality. Levinas knows as much; the defense of materiality that makes up his critique of transcendental egoism betrays this knowledge.
The ethical minimalism for which Sparrow aims — infinitely liable to evaporate and based on chance, risk, trust; on the brute facticity of the body — is both strangely compelling and compellingly strange.
In Chapter 6 Sparrow turns away from Levinas, devoting an essay to his most eccentric and original translator and reader, Alphonso Lingis. Sparrow brilliantly captures Lingis’s work: it reads as though ‘William James and Levinas were coopted to author all of the guide books in the Lonely Planet series’. ‘The time’, he writes incontestably, ‘is ripe for Lingis studies to be extended.’ Lingis is the itinerant philosopher, the Levinas that Levinas sometimes — but all too rarely — seems to be; an evil twin, a deviant Levinas, a Levinas perverted by spending too much time with Nietzsche and Bataille. His appeal for Sparrow is obvious; perhaps more than anyone he has reinvigorated the concept of sensation for phenomenology.
‘Is it possible to reconcile the phenomenological account of subjectivity, along with the critique of sensationalism carried out by James and Merleau-Ponty, with a realism of sensation?’ This is the question that traverses the essay, and, indeed, the entire book. How would phenomenology approach sensation, without either denying its existence (with a perceptual foundationalism) or making it a purely formal abstraction? The answer is to be found in descriptions of those moments of excess, in which it becomes clear that to ‘live is to be affected by the material imposition of existence, to feel ourselves engulfed in the plenitude of the world’s flesh, which is nothing other than our own fleshy substance.’ This is a nuanced point (and is, I think, at odds with Sparrow’s more reductive critique of phenomenology that we saw in Chapter 3). Throughout this chapter Sparrow shows himself to be a great reader of Lingis, and when his work eventually receives the attention it deserves (and it will) Sparrow’s voice is likely to be an important one.
Occasionally in the book we get the sense that Sparrow is unwilling to fully try to understand the nuances of some of Levinas’s ideas, most significantly his commitment to a form of theism. Sparrow rather briskly dismisses the more theological aspects of Levinas’s work — probably rightly — but without really trying to understand them. Levinas’s, after all, is not a theism which can stand in simple opposition with atheism; his is an absent God, a God ‘transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is.’ Sometimes Sparrow writes as though Levinas defers authority to God to justify his philosophy in a way akin to Descartes — and this is hardly true or fair. Of course, as we are well warned, Sparrow is not seeking ‘to get Levinas right’, and this goes some way — perhaps all the way — to mitigating the concern. Still, it would be interesting to find out what Sparrow makes of quotes such as the above, which problematize the distinctions which he has to make in Levinas’s thought in order pick and choose, as he does.
Minor gripes. Levinas Unhinged is a slim volume and it does exactly what it sets out to do. And while it is hardly the first work to focus on the darker aspects of Levinas’s philosophy, it nonetheless appraises them from an original perspective. Its effect is reinvigorating. It shows that we are not yet done with Levinas, and, more importantly, that Levinas is not yet done with us. It is a valuable contribution to the scholarship, and another great example of the success of Zero’s ethos. It will undoubtedly increase dialogue between those working on Levinas and those working within the new strands of post-Meillassouxian philosophy; the results will be interesting. As a provocation it is successful, and the majority of its shortcomings come from its shortness; they could be overcome were Sparrow to write a book as large as his ambition. Let’s hope that he does. - Will Rees
In his fine new book Levinas Unhinged, Tom Sparrow writes about how Alphonso Lingis both radicalizes Levinas in the direction of materiality, and goes beyond the accpunt of perception elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. Lingis insists upon the radicality of sensation, something that orthodox phenomenology excludes. For Merleau-Ponty,Sparrow says, “our most elementary experiences are always already meaning-laden, figural, given to us as a thing that we can get our hands around.”
Now, as far as I can tell, Merleau-Ponty is basically saying the same thing that Wilfrid Sellars is saying, when he denounces the “myth of the Given” and insists that all our experiences are always already conceptualized or theory-laden. These two philosophers come from very different traditions, and their terminology is correspondingly different. (Thus Sellars denounces the idea of what he calls “givennnes,” but Merleau-Ponty uses this very same term to refer to the way that, for him just as for Sellars, what we experience is already conceptualized and meaningful).
The parallel between Merleau-Ponty and Sellars is that they both descend ultimately from Kant; they are both affirming the Kantian principle that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” And doubtless, Kant, Sellars, and Merleau-Ponty are all correct in rejecting what we might call the illusion of simple presence.
Nonetheless, as Sparrow points out, sensation for Lingis is a point at which the Kantian/phenomenologica/Sellarsian structures break down. Lingis, in contrast to all theseearlier figures, “reminds us that ‘to sense something is to be sensitive to something, to feel a contact with it, to be affected by it’.” (Sparrow quoting Lingis). Sparrow also (rightly, I think) aligns this affirmation of sensation with a moment in Levinas where Levinas is asserting the priority of the aesthetic, rather than (as he usually does) the ethical. It is true that we should beware (as Kant, Merleau-Ponty, & Sellars all tell us) to simply hypostasize non-conceptual (or non-categorical) aesthetic sensation as a higher or more pure form of presence. But it is equally true that we need to avoid the error of thinking that what does not fit into our conceptual categories does not exist at all. Sparrow finds this latter concern in Levinas and in Lingis. I find it, initially, in Kant himself, in the discussion of aesthetics in the Third Critique, where we have “intuitions” (sensory impressions) that cannot be contained within any concept. I find traces of this also in Deleuze (with his aesthetics of sensation), in Laruelle (with his insistence on the radical immanence of the photograph), and also in Erin Manning’s account of autistic thought.
The larger point is that both cognitivists and phenomenologists affirm the Kantian idea of subordinating sensation or affect to cognition, or conceptualization, or meaning; and yet both cognitivism and phenomenology offer us margins, or moments, where we still encounter a radical, non-categorizable aestheticism. (These margins can be found, for instance, in Metzinger’s discussions of “Raffman qualia”, and in some of Merleau-Ponty’s more speculative gestures, including those where he is writing under the influence of Whitehead — for which see this book). I think that David Roden’s recent discussion of “dark phenomenology” fits here too (although I don’t agree with Roden’s conclusion that this might be accessed via third-person naturalism).
Both in the book I am finishing now (on speculative realism) and in the two that I hope to write next (one on theories of mind in science fiction, and the other on post-continuity in contemporary film and video) I am pursuing these aesthetic margins. - Steven Shaviro
Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
In the 20th century, phenomenology promised a method that would get philosophy "back to the things themselves". But phenomenology has always been haunted by the spectre of an anthropocentric antirealism.
Tom Sparrow shows how, in the 21st century, speculative realism aims to do what phenomenology could not: provide a philosophical method that disengages the human-centred approach to metaphysics in order to chronicle the complex realm of nonhuman reality.
Through a focused reading of the methodological statements and metaphysical commitments of key phenomenologists and speculative realists, Sparrow shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary Continental philosophy.
A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu. Ed. by Tom Sparrow and Adam Hutchinson. Lexington Books, 2013.
From bookshelves overflowing with self-help books to scholarly treatises on neurobiology to late-night infomercials that promise to make you happier, healthier, and smarter with the acquisition of just a few simple practices, the discourse of habit is a staple of contemporary culture high and low. Discussion of habit, however, tends to neglect the most fundamental questions: What is habit? Habits, we say, are hard to break. But what does it mean to break a habit? Where and how do habits take root in us? Do only humans acquire habits? What accounts for the strength or weakness of a habit? Are habits something possessed or something that possesses? We spend a lot of time thinking about our habits, but rarely do we think deeply about the nature of habit itself.
Aristotle and the ancient Greeks recognized the importance of habit for the constitution of character, while readers of David Hume or American pragmatists like C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey know that habit is a central component in the conceptual framework of many key figures in the history of philosophy. Less familiar are the disparate discussions of habit found in the Roman Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, Gilles Deleuze, French phenomenology, and contemporary Anglo-American philosophies of embodiment, race, and gender, among many others.
The essays gathered in this book demonstrate that the philosophy of habit is not confined to the work of just a handful of thinkers, but traverses the entire history of Western philosophy and continues to thrive in contemporary theory. A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu
is the first of its kind to document the richness and diversity of this history. It demonstrates the breadth, flexibility, and explanatory power of the concept of habit as well as its enduring significance. It makes the case for habit’s perennial attraction for philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists.
The duality of habit—that which frees us and binds us—has fascinated philosophers for a long time. With historical breadth, interdisciplinary scope, and philosophical depth—tackling habit from the Greeks to the present, bringing psychology and sociology together with philosophy, and probing issues from the metaphysical to the practical—this is an excellent contribution to a perennially important topic. - John Protevi
Habit really does have a history, as this book shows, but of course in disconcertingly chaotic lives such as ours, habits are principles of continuity or consistency. Here, the contributions of a remarkable range of scholars from across traditions and disciplines elucidate the matter of habit in a manner itself both varied and continuous. - Crispin Sartwell
This volume is a welcomed addition to the recently revived interest in the significance of habit for understanding human action—an interest lost in much contemporary social science and philosophy. As this collection of papers amply attests, the concept of habit has a rich intellectual history full of explanatory power and contradictory evaluations from the classics to our modern period, from Aristotle to Bourdieu. This book challenges us to overcome the intellectual habit of neglecting the central place of habit in shaping human thought and action. - David Swartz
Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis. Ed. by Bobby George and Tom Sparrow. Punctum Books, 2014.
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
Alphonso Lingis is the author of fourteen books and many essays. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. While many know him only as an eccentric ex-professor or as the translator of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski, he is arguably the most distinctive voice in American continental philosophy. This is no doubt due to the perpetual travel that fuels his arresting written prose and unorthodox public readings. Lingis’s lifelong itinerary includes visits — some brief, others extended or recurring — to 109 countries. Along the way he has photographed innumerable strangers whose faces adorn the pages of his books. Photography is as essential to Lingis’s multidisciplinary philosophical perspective as is his knowledge of phenomenology, anthropology, or psychoanalysis. Some of his photographs have been recently collected and published in the book Contact. Unlike most career academics, Lingis has made a name for himself collecting exotic birds and other creatures, staging performance readings at professional conferences, keeping up a diligent correspondence with friends at home and abroad, and splicing together high theory with intimate autobiography. Those who know him speak of his warmth, sincerity, and noncombative style of argumentation — rare traits among university scholars. Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note to the Reader — Bobby George and Tom Sparrow
Dorothea Lasky — Love Poem: After Alphonso Lingis
Bobby George and Tom Sparrow — Interview with Lingis
Jeff Barbeau — Early Notes Towards an Ontology of Fetishes
Timothy Morton — Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Alphonso Lingis — Doubles
John Protevi — Alterity and Life in the Thought of Lingis
David Karnos — Personal Correspondences
Jeffrey Nealon — On The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
Dorothea Olkowski – What is an Imperative?
Joff Peter Norman Bradley – Becoming-Troglodyte
Jonas Skackauskas – Interview with Lingis
Graham Harman – On Violence and Splendor
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