Abuses

by Alphonso Lingis

Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today. A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy—aesthetic and sympathetic—which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting." Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Genres: Philosophy, Anthropology, Nonfiction

282 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Alphonso Lingis was an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization included phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.

Reviews

[Grant]

Philosophy without any determinant 'ologies' attached. Imagery and disembodied text, or, figurative language, navigating a degree zero (sensuality, spaces, ecstasy, sex, death, the phenomenon) most prominently through an anthropological praxis. Bataille and his ideas concerning base materialism is another useful connection. Acéphalic sovereignty.

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

intro
• These were letters written to friends, from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me
• Conversation by telephone communicates with the tone and warmth of the human voice, but what moved one deeply can only be shared through language when one has found the right words. Finding the right words takes time, and the one to whom they are addressed is no longer the one you thought he or she was when you wrote. One sends one's letters to an address he or she has left
Tenochtitlán, Mexico City
• The lawyer went inside and returned to give me a blade of carved obsidian, which as a boy he had found in the rubble and weeds at Teotihuacán and which an archeologist had dated for him as belonging to the second half of the first century B.C. The Aztecs believed that the pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacán was built by the vanished Toltecs at the beginning of their cosmic era, that of the Fifth Sun, which Aztec astrologers and priests had predicted was to come to an end in the year Nahui ollin. It was in the year Nahui ollin that Hernando Cortés landed on the beach of Chalchuihcuecán, which he renamed Vera Cruz.
• Between 1521 and 1536 Spanish conquistadors and missionaries put an end to all the great civilizations of America—Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Pipil, and Inca. Of their cities, their social order, their science, their gods, wrote Bernal Díaz del Castillo in hisTrue History of the Conquest of New Spain , "all . . . is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing.
• Although Tenochtitlán, built in the crater lake of an enormous dead volcano, was an immense market, the Aztecs, the Egret People, did not know money. The wealth arrived as tributes and gifts, and was distributed by prestations and barter. Gold was used to plate the walls of temples; there were no gold coins in Tenochtitlán.
• A regime of gifts is a regime of debts. Marcel Mauss, in his work The Gift (1923),[2] showed that it is an economic system; indeed, it is the most exacting economic order. Economy of rigorous reciprocity
• Money introduces a factor of nonreciprocity. One receives something useful, and one renders in return artifacts without utilizable properties. There is immediate discharge of indebtedness.
• The Aztec civilization is singled out in revulsion for having made of human sacrifice a religious ritual. Bernal Díaz identifies Uitzilopochtli, "The Hummingbird of the Left," with Satan, since, without promise of any afterlife, the supreme religious act of his worshippers is the shedding of human blood. Only brave soldiers killed in battle or sacrificed were promised a return, to the earth as hummingbirds, whose plumage was woven into the shimmering raiment of the presiding Aztec officials. Bernal Díaz recognized here a religion of the most perverted form, utterly alien to any gospel, any kind of salvation.
• Yet the conquistadors were not liberal Protestants assembling on Sundays for the purpose of listening to a moral exhortation; Catholic Christianity is a religion centered on sacrifice.
• The Aztec religion did not require quantitatively more human sacrifice than did the Christian. It was the purpose of sacrifice that differed.
• On the pyramids of Tenochtitlán, sacrifice had nothing to do with human salvation, nor with attainment of deathlessness through death. The Aztec religion was a religion not of eternity but of time.
• the Aztecs could find nothing in all their nocturnal searching of the immense stretches of nothingness between the stars that would guarantee that this stasis could not continue indefinitely, and all motion, all life come to an end. It would then be necessary that motion be liberated, that it not be contained within the beings that move themselves. The Aztecs poured forth their blood in order to give to the most remote astral deities, suspended for a night in the voids, movement.
• The Aztecs, Bernal Díaz reports dismally, were sodomites: In the first Indian prayer house he and his companions came upon on the Mexican coast, Bernal Díaz reports finding idols of baked clay, very ugly, which represented Indians sodomizing one another.
• sodomy is antinatural. It issues not from an unconscious compulsion but from an intellect that conceives the law and a will that determines to defy it; it derives from libertinage and not from sensuality. Sodomy is the use of the erected male organ not to direct the germ for the propagation of the species nor to give pleasure to the partner but to gore the partner and release the germ of the race in its excrement.
o It is the last limit of outrage under the eyes of the monotheist god, God the Father, that unengendered principle of all generation and absolutized formula for the normative. It is the act that isolates, that singularizes absolutely. Positively, sodomy is the crime in which sovereignty is constituted and resides. It is the act, unmotivated and unjustifiable, that posits the singular one, the monster. This singular, singularizing act can only be incessantly repeated, rending the monotheist time of universal generation, conjuring up a cosmic theater without order or sanction in which trajectories of time rush to their dissipation.
• Certainly it was not the painfulness of the Aztec sacrifice as compared to the burning under slow fires that Cortés preferred (and which the Inquisition sanctioned, since this method of execution does not produce the shedding of blood, which would risk making the death of heretics an image of the shedding of the redemptive blood of Jesus) that so horrified conquistador Bernal Díaz; it was the monstrous and sodomist cause for which there was sacrifice.
• An infant is tubes disconnected, corpuscle full of yolk put out of the fluid reservoir of the womb, gasping, gulping free air, pumping, circulating fluids. The disconnected tubes are open to multiple couplings, multiple usages. A mouth is a coupling that draws in fluid, but can also slobber or vomit it out forcibly; that babbles or cries, can pout, smile, spit, and kiss. From the first the mouth that draws in sustenance also produces an excess, foam, slaver, extends a surface of warm pleasure, an erotogenic surface in contact with the surface of the maternal breast. The coupling is not only consuming, of sustenance, but productive, of pleasure, spread, shared. The anus is an orifice that ejects the segments of flow, but also holds them in, ejects vapors, noise, can pout, be coaxed, refuses, defiles, and defies. And spreads its excesses, producing a warm and viscous surface and surface effects of pleasure. The excrement is waste and gratuity; it is the archetypal gift, which is a transfer without recompense, not of one's possessions, one's things, but of oneself.
• In time, the hand couples onto the penis, finds the surfaces of contact productive of viscous warmth, spreading a surface of pleasure. The child discovers the pleasures of wasting his seed; he smears around this liquid currency, he produces a surface of waste again, and surface effects of pleasure. He adheres to this viscous pleasure, wills this waste, this nullity; this will actively participates in and wills this collapse of domestic will. He would like to seduce the mother into this potlatch economy.
• The father had renounced his own presence as an erotogenic surface laid out before the infantile contact, in order to figure before the child with the force of his word, as law. The word of the father becomes incarnate in the son in order to castrate the penis through which the infantile substance is squandered so as to put this production of nullity, this collapse of domestic will, to death. He puts it to death with his own death, with the excoriation of his own flesh craving for erotogenic contact with his son. The father became incarnate in the son in order to be sacrificed and in order to put infancy to death with his death.
• At the same time he comes to realize the chance he is. He comes to understand that he has been pulled forth from that gaping wound between her thighs; he comes to understand that he is the organ of which she has been castrated.
• He comes to understand why all this time she has been holding him close to herself, fondling him, drooling over him. He recognizes reflected in her eyes something he has not touched nor felt touched by her: the phallus, absent organ severed from her, separated from him, not even an image he sees in her eyes, only a floating mirage before them or a sign sought out by them. He formulates the project of making himself be that phallus of which his mother has been mutilated, in order to hold on himself her narcissist love. He sets out to identify himself wholly with this phallic phantasm. He understands that her solicitude for his needs reduces him to servility and parasitism; he understands that she satisfies his needs in order to frustrate the demand for gratuitous devotion, love, his infancy put on her. He will exchange all his infantile needs for the phallic contours, phenomenal form of void, he parades before her as an insatiable sign, appeal and demand. It is this total investment of himself in the phallus that makes it possible for him to effect the castration of a part, his penis as immediate pleasure-object, the paternal word demanded, as well as the polymorphously perverse erotogenic surface production about it. The phallus is the phantasmal substance, of no use value for the production of erotogenic pleasure, for which all carnal surfaces utilizable for the production of pleasure are exchanged—the carnal form of money.
Doctor in Havana
• Torture is not simply the persistence of animal savagery in institutionalized forms of society.
• Would the solitary monster be produced not by an atavist regression to the instincts of beasts of prey but by a condensation in him or her of violent methods
• elaborated in institutions? It seems clear that confirmed rapists act not out of the raw sex drive stripped of social control but out of the contraction in them of the institutional imagos and practices of the millennial patriarchal society. The one who gouges out the eyes of his victim has not regressed to the presocialized instincts of apes but has ascended to the ranks of the Ottoman Janissaries and the Roman Inquisition.
• Luis is a plastic surgeon and burn specialist. Luis was visited by a government official who told him that two young women, one Brazilian and the other Uruguayan, would soon be brought to his office for evaluation and treatment. It was not physical pain that Luis's two new patients displayed, for their wounds or afflictions were not very recent. As soon as they walked into his office, Luis understood the magnitude of barbarism that had been visited upon these two otherwise normal and attractive women. It turned out that the two were participants in the urban guerrilla movement in Brazil. They expected torture
• Their expectations and fears turned out to be wrong, strangely enough. After several hours of being made to wait in a locked, bare room, they were taken, blindfolded, for a ride to what turned out to be a modern, well-appointed hospital or private clinic some distance from São Paulo. They were locked into rooms without windows, given hospital gowns, and told they would be given the 'best of treatment' and would 'get better soon.' Doctors and nurses, courteous but closed-mouthed when asked what was going to happen, took the women's vital signs and medical histories—the normal routine before surgery. Fresh flowers were brought into the rooms daily. A maddening sort of terror began to set in amidst all this antiseptic civility and preparations for treatment for a malady the women knew they did not have.
• "As it turned out, the women themselves were the 'malady.'
• One of the women had her mouth taken away from her. The other lost half her nose. And they were released after several days with the gentle suggestion that they be sure to visit their comrades to show off their 'cures.' They had been turned into walking advertisements of terror, agents of demoralization and intimidation.
• medical torturers
Tawantinsuyu
• It is now inconceivable to us that there could be a silent civilization, a civilization divested of all signs
• What there is left to contemplate is the Inca walls.
• There remain the walls, foundation walls upon which the conquistadors built their palaces in Qosqo, the deserted terrace walls, aqueducts, and canals of Inca agriculture in the high Andes.
• In 1911 the North American adventurer and later Senator Hiram Bingham announced that he had identified the citadel of Machu Picchu. No military attack had depopulated Machu Picchu; the city is intact, save for the roofs, made of braided and colored thatching, which had rotted away. A great rock thrusts up high over all the buildings, it was carved in terraces and a plaza flattened on top about the intihuatana , an abstractly carved figure whose function—altar? idol? astronomical instrument?—cannot be determined, the sole one in all Peru which was not smashed by the Catholic priests. There were no statues or gold walls, though the tombs were intact and there were no signs of the deserted city having been plundered.
• The contents of all the burial caves, mummies and ritual objects, as well as all the pottery and domestic implements found in Bingham's excavations in 1912 financed by the Yale Club were shipped off to New Haven, and nothing has been to this day returned.
• Archeologist Marino Orlando Sánchez Macedo[1] has recently concluded that the gold-plated walls had attracted a catastrophic bolt of lightning, supreme evil omen for the Incas, and, after ritual purification of the site, the inhabitants abandoned it definitively, taking with them all its ritual treasures. Excavation of the burial caves had revealed there were twelve times as many women as men. One-sixth of these women were dwarfs. The mummies were embalmed with hieratic ritual objects: Machu Picchu was not a fortress but a sanctuary of priestesses and sorceresses.
• An entire city whose discourse is irremediably irrational to us, bewitched signs, even if we could recover them unrecordable on our software, impermeable to us. Anyone in search of the world of the Incas can only contemplate the walls of Machu Picchu.
• This degree of reverence for the materiality of stone is henceforth inconceivable. And this labor. Our labor has been for a very long time now either manipulation programmed with signs and calculated for the economizing of effort, or prestige contests with one another. The maximum expenditure of corporeal effort in our civilization is in athletic competitions with one another for celebrity, that is, for the satellite broadcast of our name and the data in our file onto all the television screens.
• Nothing would, nothing could be learned from the people of Tawantinsuyu, if you understood what they said. Everything they said they would have to code, or you would have to recode, in the vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric of economics, political economy,
sociology, psychology, and anthropology with which the global communications network narrates its images. Everything they do—the water they carry from distant mountain springs, the clothing they weave from alpaca wool, the hushed and guarded and coded things they say to one another while keeping an eye out for military informers, the coca plants they raise or do not raise—is determined by the banks in Arequippa and Medellín and Lucerne and Singapore and the chanceries in Lima and Washington and Berlin.
• Why then did you go yourself to the Upper Huallaga? You yourself did not know, could not say. See them. Their bodies. No, touch them.
• The descriptive words—postural diagram, gesture, operation, intention—inscribe diagrams on the mass of the body, deliver over the body perceived to the understanding and uses of the perceiver.
• Bodies of eight and a half million Quechua people exterminated in the first eighty years of the Conquest, bodies expired in building the enormous fortress churches of Catholic Peru, enormous tombs for the body of Jesus. The wounds of Jesus are stigmata, signs fraught with meaning. IS THIS TRUE?
• One has to touch bodies, graze them, palpate them, squeeze, stroke, knead, scratch, tickle, pinch, caress, bite, suck, lick, press, embrace, bear their weight, breathe their exhalations, become wet with their sweat and tears.
• Tact and tenderness themselves prohibit the contact. Out of courtesy, they withdraw their unwashed hands, their filthy clothes from your clean hand; they withdraw their foul breath from contact with your cheek. At unguarded moments the touch occurs. A child who touches your leg, a somnolent old man in a truck whose body touches yours when the truck reels on a curve. An old woman who stumbles, and your arm goes by itself to hold her. The old woman whose gnarled hand grazed yours when she handed you a cup of maté de coca in the rarefied air that left your heart pounding against your ribs. Days go by, nights go by when your hands touch only your own body. But you know you came to touch them, had to come to touch them. You touch the stones of Saqsaywaman their bodies had touched with such labor and such joy. You wander down the rocky paths across deserted distances that end up in cliffs and gorges, stumble, stop, your lungs suffering with the dust and the thin air, heavy with exhaustion over doing nothing, mind empty, hands aching.
Antarctic Summer
• For days I have been contemplating this icescape without a single thought forming about it; today I abruptly thought of the concept of the sublime. And how misconstructed it was in Königsberg. For Kant, the sublime arises in a confrontation between man and the immense and the chaotic; man measuring himself sensorily against, blocked by, the monstrous, his spirit triumphing in the formation of conceptions of totality, infinity, eternity. It is true that in domestic perception our eyes and ears pattern the flux of sensation—finding an elementary rhythm in the dripping of a faucet, in the waves of a lake—and our minds extrapolate those patterns to domesticate the universe.
• No species of animal—not even sharks[2] —is a natural enemy of the human species. But humans have made all the species of animal life in the common planet wild, that is, made fear their dominant emotion. species. But humans have made all the species of animal life in the common planet wild, that is, made fear their dominant emotion. Even songbirds have learned to fear the stones wantonly thrown by small children; even the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco have learned to vault into flight before waddling human infants.[3] Humans are not, despite what Nietzsche

[Estep · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every book from this author is a treasure.

Hybrid of anthology, travel, phillosphy, and essay genres. This will be one of the modern essayists people will care about when we're all gone.

[Judy]

This book might be characterized as travelogue philosophy, an attempt to encompass the beauties and horrors of the real world into aa philosophical visual stance on life.
"A few years ago it still seemed strange to us to notice all those tourists, not viewing the cathedrals and the waterfalls by the eye, but peering in their camera's viewing rather than preview the snapshot of the urban monuments and the landscapes." p. 43
"Insects are shining with the leathery and dusty leaves, all of which are punctured, chewed, spotted from rust or fungus, stunted or defaced. Torn and yellowed newspapers covered with numbers and disasters stir in hot wind fronts the surf sends over the sand, rush over the dunes and then collapse lie tormented evil spirits.
My look ricochets over the scattered palm trees waving their few stiff leaves, drifts on over the dunes, a radar beam, disconnected from the viewing tube in the control tower. " p, 155-156