Alphonso Lingis

Abstract: The ethical doctrines of Lingis, Levinas, and, most notably, Immanuel Kant, are all characterized by imperatives.  Lingis’ imperative innovations, however, avoid any reduction to Immanuel Kant’s rational moral law.  For Lingis, although human rationality has intrinsic importance, “the rational does not equate with the required.”  In revising Kant’s categorical imperative, Lingis finds imperative force in things, other persons, and ourselves.  Using phenomenology’s rectifications, Lingis can do what Kant himself could not – discern the original orientation of the imperative’s form as force (found in the world’s directives).  And, somewhat surprisingly, Lingis argues that Kant offers phenomenology a starting point it had lacked – the world given as imperative instead of simply given, bringing Lingis’ imperative innovations full circle.
Alphonso Lingis criticizes what Emmanuel Levinas deems to be the only “properly ethical dimension” – infinity – and claims Levinas’ infinite ethicality to be “unexplicated and unexplicatable.”  For Levinas, our encounter with the face of the Other is not simply one phenomenon among others; it is an ethical epiphany carrying the primacy of the imperative “thou shalt not kill.”  Furthermore, for Levinas the human face carries the trace of God’s infinite ethicality and unknowability.  As the source of ethics, the face resists reduction to empirical or phenomenological descriptions and is exempt from any ethical criticism. 
By revisiting one of the great contributions of Levinas’ doctrine, the legitimization of the realm of sensation (the medium that precedes perception and makes it possible), Lingis reinstates the possibility of ethical assessment of the human face.  After all, aren’t there faces that emit the dark forces of resentment?  (Think of Donald Rumsfeld’s hardened squint, Dick Cheney’s clenched jaw, or Peter Lorre’s criminally furtive glances.)  Challenging Levinas’ “unassailable” ethics at its core, Lingis finds two very “explicatable” phenomena in the human face: 1) ethical values, which are found right on the faces of Others; and 2) reminiscent of Levinas’ phenomenology of sensation, Lingis argues that the human face belongs to the sustaining medium of “the elemental.”  The face does not only demand things; its eyes shine, radiate directives, and command that we become a source of support for the very ground of the Other – the elemental ground on which our encounter with Others takes place and which carries its own elemental imperative.

This paper develops a novel theory of the ‘ecomonstrous’ by which it performs an ecocritical reading of the fiction of R. A. Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy.  In chapter one I draw on Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ and the monster theory of Cohen and Beal to sketch a developing theory of the ecomonstrous as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy that performs an apocalyptic, grotesque, uncanny, and bloody ‘antiecomimesis’ by which the non-human environment is contacted as ‘strange stranger’, thus enabling ‘intimacy with an alien presence’.  In chapter two I survey the ecomonstrously evoked landscape in Chapter IV of McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, tracking its bookended themes of deathscape, bonescape, and bloodscape, its cosmic nightscapes, and the land’s erasure of the filibusters that travel through it, concluding that these macabre evocations of landscape create rapport with an otherwise ignored environmental background.  This is followed by tracing the theme of being eaten alive by the land in Lafferty’s story ‘Narrow Valley’ and blending into the land in Lafferty’s story ‘Smoe and the Implicit Clay’, the latter analysis drawing on Graham Harman’s discussion of Alphonso Lingis’s theory of ‘faces’ in non-human things.  In the third and final chapter of this dissertation, I consider two attacks from biota in Blood Meridian and (very briefly) one such attack in Lafferty’s story ‘Snuffles’, arguing that, on an ecomonstrous reading, such bloody assaults on humans by biotic representatives of the environment are yet another dark and grotesque form of not only displacing anthropocentrism, but of recovering an ecologically embedded anthropology.  As the conclusion of the dissertation, I briefly suggest that, while Lafferty’s urgency toward eco-redemption is explicit, McCarthy’s is highly implicit but present nonetheless.

The ‘aesthetics of the between’ includes a phenomenological aesthetics of the subject along with the aesthetic object. In addition to the aestheticised subject, phenomenological reflection on the between meets the object found as it is along with the experience of spatial context, the within-which of the museum, the gallery, the where of the plaza or boulevard, even the immediate
mediation of the nonspace of the internet: the acting of in-action and interaction, the a-social sociality of ‘media’. Focusing on painting and sculpture as well as literature and philosophy, the aesthetics of the between is at work in the encounter with beauty in life as expressed in lived power and experienced dimensionality of the art world and it illuminates the erotic. This is the ‘beautiful’ in the work of Alexander Nehamas, ‘between’ the beautiful for Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann, but it can also be reflected in the staged-kitsch work of Jeff Koons, as in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s high culture reflections on Plato and Rilke, and Alphonso Lingis in his attention to the posturing displays of birds and to the human body as the beautiful plays between poetry and life.

Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the grounds that it seems to lack a political appreciation of exploitation. While Levinas’s thought includes strong considerations of cultural particularity, his ethics also emphasizes responsibility to the physical suffering of the oppressed. A reading of Derrida’s approach to the political applications of Levinas’s thought reveals broader significance to elements of Levinas’s messianism than his Zionism first suggests. Building on this deconstructive reading, the respective works of Alphonso Lingis and Enrique Dussel emerge as new investigations of the political importance of Levinasan ethics to contemporary socialism.

Abstract
Minus Theatre: scenes, elements experiments with theatre as the art, method and technique, to explore processes of individuation. It entitles a PhD thesis, undertaken at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), consisting of artistic research in theatre, conducted from March 2014 with the group called Minus, under the direction of the candidate, over the duration of the candidacy, to achieve completion early 2017 in a written exegesis and theatre production.

In Minus Theatre the primary agency of the actor is no longer the given of theatrical display or dramatic performance because the unity of form of the individual, of the acting physical agency and of the speaking linguistic subject, is subtracted. The human actor is neither the object of the scenographic composition, nor the subject of dramaturgical exposition. In individuation, the individual ceases to be either the locus of judgement or source of coherence marshalling, governing and bringing into harmony and order forces and powers which exceed it. It is these forces and powers, in the tensions of their disharmony and disorder, that become intensive materials and energetic compounds in the process of individ-uation. These are the focus of the practice, its scenes.

From the negation of the unity presumed of the individual, from the minusing of the individual, comes not less but rather more. Where the addition of a mask marks the theatre presupposing human agency of individual actors with the multiplication of characters, performing their dramatic, nondramatic or postdramatic actions in a setting social for be-ing based on the individual, Minus Theatre turns this insight of theatre onto individuation by way of the multiplicity of characters and masks, psychic, social, cultural and linguistic, of which the individual mask is just one more—and can be gone without. This multiplicity includes the figure, mask or character, which are its representative means and would conventionally integrate it. Comprising asignifying and impersonal be-longings, not beings, these are characteristic singularities constitutive of unique points of view—so many as Simondon gives to them the terms metastability and transindividual, since from their propensity to de-phase, to fall out of phase with one other, flow states, which go beyond them, of becoming and transformation.

The study encounters elements as that which supports life. Since they are not granted to all to enjoy or endure but are limited in duration and restricted in the sustenance they deliver, the elements are not primordial or universal conditions but provisional understandings. Such understand-ings the Anthropocene carries forth in terms of imposing an internal geotemporal limit to human life on the basis of which the prospect of its extinction emerges. The importance to the study of this notion is that it also individuate, as elemental of a causation more profound, and in surpassing the given. Prompting the negation of the individual in the practice is that such an understanding as is offered by extinction lead to new possibilities of life that affirm its provisionality and transitory nature, understood elementally in theatre as the ephemeral art par excellence.

With a voluntary membership of performers from divers disciplines, including drama, dance and music, each with different levels of skill and experience, rather than teach, moderate and resolve differences, I have in Minus, as director, devised to encourage their expression, in a form of theatre we have, as a group, called a theatre of individual life—theatre as what expresses and life as what exceeds the individual in individuation. From this form of theatre has developed thief as a directorial method. The method (thief—acronym for theatre of imitation, expression and f___ery) opens the way for the imitation of what each member of Minus perceives and can understand to be part of the multiplicity of asignifying and impersonal forces and energies involved in the process of another

performer's individuation. The f___ery comes about with the exacerbation of, the introduction of disorder into, the metastable field of material forces and energetic compounds, distributed over the space and temp-orally, over the duration of the scene, so as to intensify differences and promote the dephasing of individuation.

The use in performance of English and of spoken languages other than English as expressive elements rather than as means of communicative exchange, informing the social construction of the linguistic subject, aids in this intensification. Languages and cultures contributing to the individ-uation of the group have included Korean, Russian, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese), Congolese (Swahili, Ugandan, Xhosa), Brazilian, Guadalupian (Creole), Mexican, Macedonian, Indian (Hindi), Solomon Islands (Pidgin), UK, US and NZ (Maori, Pakeha).

The study closely follows the development of Minus's theatrical and my own directorial practices, through to our continuing work with and research into a theatre of elements, which understands elements to be what supports life in its impermanence, transience and ongoing transformation. This impermanence, transience and ongoing transform-ation is of individuals, scenes and elements. Theatre of elements extends, and contrasts with, the approach of thief in a method of assembling cultures and languages, the human, with the inhuman, the inside with what is without it—in the giving of exteriority as such.

Este trabajo se propone examinar algunos límites de la célebre descripción merleau-pontiana del cuerpo vivido en términos de “esquema corporal” y “cuerpo habitual”, teniendo en cuenta referencias alternativas del corpus textual del filósofo a ciertas dimensiones de la experiencia corporal que desbordan tal marco. Tras analizar en primer término estas primeras definiciones que esbozan el perfil de un cuerpo hábil y competente correlativo de un entorno pragmático (1), consideramos seguidamente instancias de comportamientos no teleológicos ni funcionales y espacialidades no objetivas ni instrumentales (2) para concluir mostrando la relación de estos análisis con la tematización merleau-pontiana más amplia de los horizontes naturales de la experiencia (3). En un segundo plano evaluamos las críticas de exégetas tales como A. Lingis y J. Butler a ciertos déficits de las tesis merleau-pontianas, y relacionamos estas últimas con desarrollos filosóficos que manifiestan ciertas afinidades específicas, tales como los de E. Levinas y R. Caillois. Pa l a b r a s c l av e: Merleau-Ponty, corporalidad, espacialidad, danza, erotismo, Lingis, Butler.
ab s t r ac t This paper intends to examine some of the limitations of the well-known MerleauPontian account of the lived body in terms of "body schema" and "habitual body", by taking into account some alternative references of the philosopher’s textual corpus to certain dimensions of corporeal experience that exceed such frames. After analyzing these former definitions that outline the profile of a skillful and competent body correlative of a pragmatic environment (1), we consider cases of non-teleological and non-functional behaviors and non-objective and non-instrumental spatialities (2) to end up by showing the relationship between these analyses and the wider Merleau-Pontian account of the natural horizons of experience (3). Secondarily, we evaluate critiques such as A. Lingis’ and J. Butler’s aiming to certain deficits of Merleau-Pontian theses, and we identify certain relations that these theses hold with philosophical developments showing certain specific affinities, such as E. Levinas’ and R. Caillois’. Ke y wo r d s Merleau-Ponty, corporeality, spatiality, dance, eroticism, Lingis, Butler.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and 1986, suggests an understanding of community as irreducibly linked to finitude. Alongside this, he advocates a redefinition of the project of revolutionary communism. This endeavor draws equally on the writings on communication of Georges Bataille and the insistence on finitude found in Martin Heidegger. First, we should recapitulate Nancy’s argument in order to determine his presentation of a novel politics as well as the links and disjunctions of his predecessors. More than this, I would like to suggest that a reading of Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, published almost a decade later, suggests an intriguing and promising extension or modification of Nancy’s argument. In particular, Lingis suggests an understanding of revolution that appears somewhat closer to the Marxist tradition. I argue that this is partly a result of an inheritance from Emmanuel Levinas, and in particular his account of ethical subjectivity, which, surprisingly, can be productively allied with the political thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. This friendship between the ethics of Levinas and the politics of Sartre suggests the best groundwork for Lingis’s development of Nancy’s insights.

From Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones we see an oscillation "between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution." In this essay Tim Morton discusses anarchist politics as, "the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object."

Performing alongside Alphonso Lingis and reading “Irrevocable Loss,” as a script for performance, this article articulates how readers can perform with concepts. Beyond the linear time of work or the evaluative time of daily performances that Lingis defines, performances with concepts often occur in the nebulous and chaotic space-time of what Bryan Reynolds calls “transversal territory.” In transversal territory, readers as performers abide with human and non-human others, and performance becomes an ethical multiplicity: it requires articulation, selection, and parametrization, as its various human and non-human components transform and jet across multiple planes and space-times. Responsibility, technique, and articulated identity diffuse into the care of abiding with concepts and they are allowed to perform as readers perform with them: transforming each other without capture.

In this paper, I aim to analyse the homosexual sex acts depicted in the film, Inxeba (Trengove 2017). The analysis is informed by Lisa Downing's 'sex-critical' approach that deems that 'all forms of sexuality should be equally susceptible to critical thinking about the normative or otherwise ideologies they uphold' (Downing 2013:95). The findings of the analysis underscore that the film displays a phallocentric scripting of the sex act: the practices and sequence of sexual acts that privilege the erect, penetrating penis. In cognisance of this point, the sex scenes under discussion can be critiqued for perpetuating a narrow phallocentric ideal of sex that runs parallel to hetero-patriarchal norms. To offer an alternative expression of homosexual sex acts, Alphonso Lingis's writings on sexuality and sexual desire provide a springboard to explore erotic caresses and couplings that encompass the entire male body. To this end, Lingis's work is presented as a means to queer homosexual sex from hetero-patriarchal and phallocentric scriptings. The paper concludes by using Lingis's theories to imagine an alternative sex scene in Inxeba that illuminates queer eroticism and pleasure outside of penile penetrative sex.

A largo de todo su desarrollo, pero particularmente al intentar en sus ultimos escritos reformular sus problemas en terminos herrneneuticos, la filósofa Simone Weil se enfrentó al problema de la diversidad del sentido. En este trabajo nos propondremos, en primer lugar, mostrar de qué modo la necesidad de hacer frente a este problema deriva de una matriz de tipo fenomenológico-hermenéutica presente en su pensamiento. Veremos de qué modo debió la fenomenologia contemporánea tratar el mismo problema a partir de la investigación del enigmático aparecer de lo "extraño", investigación de la que Husserl mismo sentó las bases al analizar la experiencia de la alteridad humana en sus Meditaciones cartesianas. Intentaremos por último, de este modo dialógico, y considerando paralelamente a algunos referentes de la discusión filosófica contemporánea en torno al relativismo cultural, marcar algunas direcciones en que es posible investigar su superación. Estas apuntan fundamentalmente hacia el reconocimiento de un estrato elemental común de la experiencia en el que existe, en virtud del nacimiento, la sexualidad, la muerte, una comunicación y una comunidad carnal que, sin pasar por alto las particularidades y diferencias intersubjetivas, funda a la vez toda comprension de lo extraño,

You can find "White Gold" here: https://www.amazon.com/White-Gold-Stories-Anthropology-Contemporary/dp/1496201892

EXCERPT HERE: https://unpblog.com/2017/09/08/excerpt-white-gold/

Women have shared breast milk for eons, but in White Gold, Susan Falls shows how the meanings of capitalism, technology, motherhood, and risk can be understood against the backdrop of an emerging practice in which donors and recipients of breast milk are connected through social media in the southern United States.Drawing on her own experience as a participant, Falls describes the sharing community. She also presents narratives from donors, doulas, medical professionals, and recipients to provide a holistic ethnographic account. Situating her subject within cross-cultural comparisons of historically shifting attitudes about breast milk, Falls shows how sharing white gold seen as a scarce, valuable, even mysterious substance is a mode of enacting parenthood, gender, and political values. Though breast milk is increasingly being commodified, Falls argues that sharing is a powerful and empowering practice. Far from uniform, participants may be like-minded about parenting but not other issues, so their acquaintanceships add new textures to the body politic. In this interdisciplinary account, White Gold shows how sharing simultaneously reproduces the capitalist values that it disrupts while encouraging community-making between strangers.

REVIEWS:
REVIEWS
• Reyes-Foster, Beatriz. 2017. Review of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 32(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12437
• Castaneda, Angela. 2018. Review of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls. Journal for the Anthropology of North America 21(1): 39-40.
• Costello, Michael. 2018. Review of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls. Allegra Lab. http://allegralaboratory.net/review-white-gold-stories-of-breast-milk-sharing/
• Tunc, Tanfer Emir. 2018. Review of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls. Gender & Society. x(x): xx.
• Abadie, Roberto, Review of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls. Medicine Anthropology Theory. http://medanthrotheory.org/read/11062/white-gold

Essay for the monograph on the NZ artist Peter Madden produced by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 2011. Positing the artist as shaman-curer, anthropological texts shed light upon Madden's practice of cutting up National Geographic magazines.

An exploration of the oeuvres of Alphonso Lingis, Kathleen Stewart and Mathieu Brosseau, in regards to the (self-) reflexivity of the researcher. Upon epistemological and ethical grounds, relatedness is methodically stripped out of our research. As organizational researchers, we usually write ourselves out of our research;research processes are disconnected to their manifold contexts. And the absence of relatedness prevents engagement, care and deep learning. Separation and distance preclude the challenging of one's presuppositions and thought. On the contrary, research is here presented as learning and performance, and following the footsteps of Lingis, Stewart and Brosseau proposes possible and challenging paths, as well as the contention that it has become epistemologically and ethically desirable to describe organization poetically. Indeed, relatedness implies alternative forms of inquiry and writing, based on exposure and exploration, radical openness, affect and sensitivity, in evocative and reflexive writing.

This article offers several utopian/dystopian thought experiments to explore the sheer
dread in thinking otherwise than the contemporary unworld as it is. It attempts this
through a consideration of the horror of a world without a sun. It demonstrates this
incapacity of thought to think beyond the utopos of the unworld as it is with reference
to the 2017 BBC drama Hard Sun. It contrasts this essentially failed science fiction
with the satirical optimism of Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man, published in
1905, in which a postapocalypse sunless utopia is envisaged under the Earth. Shaping
and guiding my analysis are the different philosophical senses of utopia found in
Félix Guattari’s and Édouard Glissant’s work and the way they function to destabilize apocalyptic thought.

اجتماع بیکارِ ژان-لوک نانسی، که مجموعه مقالاتی است که در بازه‌­ی ۱۹۸۵ تا ۱۹۸۶ به رشته­‌ی تحریر درآمدند، چنین درکی از اجتماع پیش می‌­نهد: اجتماع به مثابه امری که به طور تقلیل‌ناپذیری پیوند خورده است به تناهی. به‌­علاوه او مدافع و خواستارِ بازتعریفِ پروژه­‌ی کمونیسمِ انقلابی است. این تلاشِ نانسی به همان اندازه که بر نوشته‌­های ژرژ باتای درباره­‌ی ارتباط متکی است، از تاکیدی که مارتین هایدگر بر تناهی می­‌گذارد، توشه می‌­گیرد. ما نخست باید خلاصه­‌ای از ادله­‌ی نانسی در این خصوص را از نظر بگذرانیم تا هم تقریر او از سیاستی جدید را مشخص نماییم و هم پیوندها و گسست‌های‌اش را با اسلاف‌اش دریابیم. افزون بر این برآنم اجتماعِ آنهایی که هیچ چیزِ مشترکی ندارند از آلفونسو لینگیس را بررسم؛ اثری که تقریباً یک دهه پس از اجتماع بیکارِ نانسی به طبع رسید و بسط یا تعدیلی جذاب و درخشان از بحث نانسی است. بویژه برداشتِ لینگیس از انقلاب، تقریباً قرابت بیشتری به سنت مارکسیسم دارد. استدلال من این است که این قرابت تا حدی نتیجه­‌ی میراثِ امانوئل لویناس است، علی‌الخصوص نظرِ او در مورد سوبژکیتیوته­‌ی اخلاقی؛ دیدگاهی که می‌­تواند به‌طور جالب توجه و زایایی با فکرِ سیاسی ژان-پل سارتر همراه و همسو گردد. بهترین راه فهمِ تغییرِ مسیری که لینگیس در دیدگاه نانسی ایجاد می‌کند، توجه به همین پیوند میان اخلاق لویناسِ و سیاستِ سارتر است

This is a sample chapter from the exegesis following my successfully completed PhD artistic research in theatre, directing the group Minus Theatre.
I am currently considering the best route to take towards the publication of the book-length exegesis in its entirety.
If you have any interest, questions, suggestions or recommendations please don't hesitate to contact me.
Best,
Simon Taylor

Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and 1986, suggests an understanding of community as irreducibly linked to finitude. Alongside this, he advocates a redefinition of the project of revolutionary communism. This endeavor draws equally on the writings on communication of Georges Bataille and the insistence on finitude found in Martin Heidegger. First, we should recapitulate Nancy’s argument in order to determine his presentation of a novel politics as well as the links and disjunctions of his predecessors. More than this, I would like to suggest that a reading of Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, published almost a decade later, suggests an intriguing and promising extension or modification of Nancy’s argument. In particular, Lingis suggests an understanding of revolution that appears somewhat closer to the Marxist tradition. I argue that this is partly a result of an inheritance from Emmanuel...

An interview on the method and the ethics of writing of one of the piornneer and main proponent of the turn-to-affect. He proposes an ethics of the 'far away far ago' and three ethical relations between the researcher, the researchee and the reader.

An interview on the method and the ethics of writing of one of the piornneer and main proponent of the turn-to-affect. He proposes an ethics of the 'far away far ago' and three ethical relations between the researcher, the researchee and the reader.

An interview on the method and the ethics of writing of one of the piornneer and main proponent of the turn-to-affect. He proposes an ethics of the 'far away far ago' and three ethical relations between the researcher, the researchee and the reader.

Distraction is often held by the relevant literature to be an environmental factor, a nuissance at best, at worst a danger that must be suppressed and eradicated. Through our essay, we seek to outline an alternative approach to the aesthetics of distraction. We argue that deviant noise has an important role to play in philosophy, aesthetics and media studies, for it is more than mere distraction. Distracting, noisy entities, in actuality, bring to our attention the finitude of our existence, highlighting the everpresent immanence of death. We may even arrive at a kind of community with the Otherness of noise, cutting through networks of control and arriving at acceptance of impossibility. The deviant that distracts is actually an invitation for us to rethink our relation to the environment and, indeed, the at times rigid borderlines separating subjectivity from the ecology of its own finitude. Keywords chaos death distraction noise redundancy That which is uncached is usually considered unimportant. Multitudes of swarming, chaotic, uncached information are black holes that retain their subversive practices everywhere, intersecting networks, cutting them into moments of discontinuity. This circumstance, however, is liable to change. At a certain point, we read in one journal of computational theory, " continuous analysis of the auditory environment often becomes distracting rather than helpful. " [1] Analysis itself becomes a source of noise, spreading the practice of chaos throughout the system of networks. Chaos is everywhere, always primary and resonating. The powers that be perceive this, and seek to create shields that would restrict the ability of deviant operators to possess those with inborn affinities to chaotic praxis. Further on, the authors of a report detailing methods of combating distraction highlight the presence of " deviant sound " that vitiates attempts to focus attention:

*Originally published by The Society for Social and Political Philosophy.

John Searle argues that the right view of social relationships will have at its foundation the right ontology of individual and collective intentions as well as the right theory of the relationship between language and human action. For him, the endurance of social institutions such as money, government, marriage, and family arrangement are explained by reference to relationships whose ultimate motives are found in what he regards as the biological facts of human existence.

For Searle, the central questions are these: “What is the ontology of the social and the institutional? How can there be an objective reality that is what it is only because we think it is what it is?” and “What exactly is the role of language in institutional reality?”

What I will argue, however, is that the social ontology Searle offers in response fails to take into consideration the embodied, sexed, raced, and empowered relationships which inform the creation of institutional reality. I will offer an alternative approach, grounded in the work of Irene Klaver, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alphonso Lingis that, taking these relationships seriously, offers a social ontology capable of explaining not merely the endurance of social institutions, but their disruption, violence, and injustice.