Object-Oriented Philosophy

Roughly two decades ago I was corresponding with David Skrbina, who published an interesting book entitled Panpsychism in the West with MIT Press. I then contributed a chapter (“Zero-Person and the Psyche”) to his equally interesting anthology, Mind That Abides. Later, I agreed to contribute an essay to a Skrbina-edited anthology on the Unabomber, but eventually withdrew from the project when I was told we couldn’t refer in any way to the Unabomber’s crimes.

In any case, the Southern Poverty Law Center now claims that Skrbina is one and the same person as prolific anti-Semitic author “Thomas Dalton.” HERE.

Mind blown. In our past correspondence he never said a word about politics, as far as I can recall.

As far as I know, early November is still the publication date.

I asked Chat GPT this question, and love the answer, even though Artaud was fundamentally insane and Lingis (despite his numerous eccentricities) was fundamentally sane.

Question: All things considered, which person from human history does Alphonso Lingis most closely resemble?

“ChatGPT said:
Alphonso Lingis most closely resembles Antonin Artaud—the French dramatist, philosopher, and radical visionary.

Here’s why that comparison holds:

Experiential intensity: Both men sought to live ideas viscerally. Lingis, like Artaud, didn’t merely write about philosophy—he embodied it through travel, sensuality, solitude, and confrontation with the raw and often painful dimensions of existence.

Style: Both favored a lyrical, sometimes hallucinatory mode of expression, rejecting academic detachment in favor of emotionally and corporeally charged prose. Lingis’ writing often reads like a philosophical fever dream, akin to Artaud’s “The Theater and Its Double” or his radio play “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.”

Marginality and intensity: Neither fully belonged to any philosophical “school.” Both men were deeply influenced by existentialism, mysticism, and a desire to rupture normative constraints—Artaud through theater and madness, Lingis through eroticism, death, and the foreign.

Embodiment of otherness: Artaud explored madness, pain, and colonial alterity; Lingis actively sought the foreign, bringing readers into contact with other cultures not as curiosities but as challenges to Western rationalism.”

I would pay a lot to listen to a conversation between Artaud and Lingis.

I’ve just now heard of the death of Alphonso Lingis yesterday, on May 8, 2025. I’ve heard no details yet, though he was 91 years old and it’s not entirely unexpected.

Lingis was my M.A. advisor, and in that connection was the first person to point out to me that there were problems with the holism of Heidegger’s tool-analysis (he drew some interesting arguments from Levinas to that end). Anyone who knows my own work will see that I took that point and ran with it.

Many know Lingis as a famous translator of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and one book of Klossowski into English. Others know him as a fantastically colorful human character, and he was certainly that. I also know him as the best writer of English prose I’ve ever met. That is true not only in terms of his results, but also in terms of his methods, which struck the perfect balance (one I’ve never achieved) between hours of diligence per day plus plenty of time left over to entertain any guest at all who showed up at his house unannounced.

He was also the most experienced world traveller I’ve ever known. If anyone at all in the American continental philosophy scene could be the subject of an interesting biography someday, it would be Lingis.

As a follow-up to the previous post, the Korean translation of Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology has been published.

HERE

This is the 2023 book on philosophy and archaeology that I co-authored with Prof. Christopher Witmore of Texas Tech. We plan an even more ambitious sequel.

Amazon now has the ad up for my new book, though still without a cover design in place.

HERE.

As soon as the Lunar New Year Holiday ends:

Adam Lovasz in Budapest has just published an article by that title, HERE.