In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis
brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of
reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing
from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis
seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring
and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of
others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and
existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows,
reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of
things.
Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease,
the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings,
surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of
rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs.
Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling
diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how
do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what
makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses?
Lingis's investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs
from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging
across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the
depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.
