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Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the "Anti-Ocular" Turn in Continental Philosophy and
Critical Theory
Author(s): ADRIENNE JANUS
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 182-202
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41238506
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ADRIENNE JANUS
ory," from the Greek dewQa "theria," conflates seeing with thinking - as "loo
The word "theory" stems from the Greek theorem .... The verb therein grew out of the coales
two root words, thea and hora. Thea (c. theatre) is the outward look, the aspect, in which some
shows itself. Plato names this aspect in which what presences shows what it is, eidos. To have se
aspect, eidenai, is to know wissen. The second root word in theorem, hora, means: to look at som
attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. ... In theria transformed into contemplatio there c
the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and com
towards listening and acoustic and aural metaphors (166). Against the
nant modes of thinking that entail "a looking-at that sunders and compartment
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and revises Heidegger. When Nancy asks, "in an ontological tonality: What is a
being that gives itself over to listening, that is formed by listening or in listening,
that is listening with all its being? "(16), the question does not involve listening to
the "call of Being," but listening to the resonance of sense.2 The triumvirate of
auditory concepts Nancy builds around the three "senses" of the word "sense"
recalls and revises Heidegger's triumvirate: listening to sense as meaning, listening
to sense as sensual or perceptual sense, and listening to sense as movement, sense
of direction, and impulse. Nancy's attempt to listen to the multiple resonances
of sense might recall Heidegger even more strongly if one remembers that Heidegger's critique of the dominance of the visual paradigm suggested by the term "theory" itself was delivered in a lecture entitled "Wissenschaft und Besinnung," where
the audience, unlike the Anglophone readers of its translation "Science and
Reflection," might have heard the multiple resonances of the term "Besinnung,"
in which "Sinn" (unlike the English term "reflection") indicates "sense" in its perceptual, signifying and directional registers ("Sinn" as sense as well as striving, a
way, a journey).3
With the importation and translation into the field of Anglophone critical theory of works that comprise the "anti-ocular" turn in Continental philosophy - a
turn in which Heidegger is a major touchstone and Nancy a culminating figure the visual paradigm tends to reassert its dominance. The multiple resonances of
sense to which Nancy asks us to attend are silenced: sense as signifying sense or
meaning, that construct of self-reflective consciousness, emerges once again as the
dominant term, and even as the object of endless deconstructive critique. What
remains, as exemplified by Martin Jay's admirable work on "anti-ocularcentric"
discourse in twentieth-century French thought, may be a critique of the visual
paradigm that dominates Western thought, but not an awareness of the possibilities opened up by the turn towards listening as a mode of attending to the multiple resonances of sense - where "sense" touches upon, and resonates with, all registers of sensual perception as well as intellectual conception, where touch, taste,
smell, and sight, affect and idea, insofar as they resonate, can be listened to. The
1 Martin Jay draws attention to John Caputo's analysis of how Heidegger's critique of vision leads
to attempts to privilege the ear, but he stresses that Heidegger also revises the visual paradigm with
concepts such as "Lichtung," the shining forth that is also the place where resonance is made present (Caputo 255, qtd. in Jay 272).
2 All translations, unless stated otherwise, are my own.
3 The translators of Heidegger's recently published posthumous work Besinnung (1997) point out
the inadequacy, indeed inappropriateness, of translating the term Besinnung as "reflection": "Heidegger alludes to the distinction between Besinnung on the 'self,' as its grounding, and reflection on the
'self by first questioning whether the 'self is accessible to reflection at all and then by alluding to the
necessity of grounding the 'self.' He says: [Besinnung] is so originary that it above all asks how the self
is to be grounded
ever find our self" (xxxii) . While the English term "mindfulness" goe
unwanted association with the ocularcentrism of Western metaphy
ing the sensual, perceptual, and dynamic aspects of the "Sinn" (or "sen
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purpose of this essay, then, will not only be to attend to the productive possibilities
opened by Nancy's recent work on listening, but also to situate this work both within
the multiple resonances of the senses and of sensual difference) - and within a
more eccentric genealogy of "otocentric" thinkers such as Jacques Attali, Didier
Anzieu, and Peter Sloterdijk, who attempt to engage with another mode of thinking or being through attendance to the "sense" of listening.
Thought (1993) - a work that put the rather unsonorous term "ocularcentric"
into broad circulation - Heidegger figures as only one name in a much larger
"anti-ocularcentric" discourse. (Jean-Luc Nancy, however, does not appear at all,
and perhaps not simply because L'coute/ Listeningpostdates Jay's work.) Jay quite
self-consciously and unapologetically provides a "synoptic survey" of ocularcentrism in Western thought: from the shadows of Plato's cave and the divine light
of Augustine to Descartes' "steadfast mental gaze" and the Enlightenment faith
in the sensory observation, Western philosophy, states Jay, "has tended to accept
without question the traditional sensual hierarchy" (187). In Jay's genealogy of
anti-ocularcentrism (which, as a synopsis, is certainly not exhaustive), this discourse gained intensity in France from the 1930s onwards through the importation and creative interpretation of the German phenomenological tradition: not
only Heidegger, but also Husserl and Nietzsche. For Jay, these thinkers inspired or
informed the "explicit manifestations of hostility to visual primacy in the work of
artists and critics like Georges Bataille and Andr Breton, philosophers like JeanPaul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas, social theorists like
Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Guy Debord, psychoanalysts like Jacques
Lacan and Luce Irigaray, cultural critics like Roland Barthes and Christian Metz,
and poststructuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Jean-Franois Lyotard"
(14). That Deconstruction's critique of logocentrism and the Feminist critique
of phallocentrism all involve a critique of vision allows Jay (in what he calls the
"spirit of deconstructive neologism") to coin another wonderfully unsonorous
term: "anti-phallogocularcentrism" (494).
There is a marked difference, however, between issuing a critique of ocularcentrism and offering a positive model for a philosophy that explores the ontological
and epistemological possibilities of listening as a mode of thinking and as a way of
being in the world. Unlike the figures belonging to the anti-ocular discourse Jay
outlines, Nancy does not merely question the equation of vision with philosophical thinking. Indeed, Nancy acknowledges the suitability of the equation, if only
to better highlight the challenge to the real task at hand: "figure and idea, theatre
and theory, spectacle and speculation suit each other better, superimpose themselves on each other, even can be substituted for each other with more ease than
the audible and the intelligible, or the sonorous and the logical" ( Lcoute 14).
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Given the long historical, and indeed logical, correspondence between the visual
and the conceptual, Nancy's task will be to answer a question that is a challenge to
philosophy itself: "Is listening something of which philosophy is capable?" (13). 4
Nancy's question should thus be considered against the background of "antiocularcentric" discourse and a parallel, more eccentric, discourse that not only
critiques ocularcentrism, but also attempts to develop a philosophy or mode of
thinking that attends to the possibilities offered by listening - that attempts to
reintegrate modes of sensual perception excluded by ocularcentrism and the conceptual abstraction associated with it. Jay's failure to include this more eccentric
genealogy of thinkers in his "synoptic" survey of anti-ocularcentrism is indicative
of a more general problem with the English reception of twentieth-century French
thought (to reprise the subtitle of Jay's book). For English editions of the works
that figure in what I've termed the eccentric otocentric genealogy, if they exist at
all, exhibit a startling, and indeed ironic, tendency to translate the French term
"sens"/ "sense" (which denotes sensual perception, signifying sense and sense of
direction) as "meaning," thereby perpetuating what Nancy will call the "anesthesia of the senses" that is associated with ocularcentricism ( L'coute 59 ).5
Take, for example, Structuralist Marxism in France in the 1960s, which in Jay's
genealogy includes a figure such as Louis Althusser, who offered a critique of traditional ocularcentric Marxism due to its occlusion of the body - the body that
traditional Marxism attributes to material objects as commodities in dialectical
opposition to the disembodied subject. In the eccentric otocentric genealogy of
those who develop a positive model of listening as a mode of thinking is a figure
that Jay doesn't mention: Jacques Attali, the author of a weird and wonderful text,
Bruits: essai sur l'conomie politique de la musique (1977) /Noise: A Political Economy of
Music (1985). The dominant mode of scientific thought based in visual conceptualization (and this would include philosophical thought in the human sciences)
"has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate our senses ("les
sens")," writes Attali, in a line that itself was "castrated" in the English edition,
which mistranslates "les sens" as "meaning," thus substituting signification (a construct of visually based conceptualization) for sensual perception {Bruits 11). To
counter this sensual castration, Attali proposes listening as a mode of sensual
apperception, recalling that "life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: the
noise of work, noise of festivals, noise of life and nature, noises bought, sold, pro-
hibited; noise of revolt, revolution, rage, desperation . . . music and dance" {Bruits
11). For Attali, listening is an appropriately "indisciplined" mode of attending
4 What Nancy means by "listening" here is not, of course, what cultural critics mean when they
condescend to "listen to" the voice of oppressed minorities or to "listen to the young, the neighborhood, the world" ( L'coute 16). His concern, rather, is to suggest the conditions of possibility for an
ontology, an epistemology, a philosophical style of thinking and writing based in listening as a mode
of attending to the resonances that penetrate, reverberate between, compose and decompose, self
and world, the psychic and the bodily, the intellectual and the sensual.
5 The recent English translation of L'coute, Listening (2007) by Charlotte Mandeli, is in general
an admirable effort. Despite describing in the preface the multiple resonances that Nancy wants to
attribute to the word "sens," however, the translator does not adopt the perfectly adequate English
word "sense" so that all senses of Nancy's word "sens" can resonate, but all too often translates "sens"
as "meaning," thus silencing its suggestions of sensual perception and movement. Like many of the
translations of Nancy's work, Mandell's thus unfortunately conforms precisely to the ocularcentric
tendencies that Nancy wants to overcome.
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both to noise as the base condition of embodied life itself and to music as the
enough, only in the English edition does Attali feel compelled to issue this excu
for his otocentric indisciplinari ty.) To attend to noise and music in this way, then,
the nineteenth century (14). Similarly, the noise and violence of Stravinsky's Rite o
Spng and Luigi Russolo's futurist LArt des bruits in 1913 announce the war an
violence that followed months later (25). The same theoretical indiscipline th
Attali 's otocentrism brings to Structuralist Marxism also seems to open his field of
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ordination underestimates the extent to which Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva not
only offer a critique of the male gaze and the modes of writing and representation
words at the same time as casting them off to avoid being fixed, immobilized"
(and here again the English translation renders "autre sens" as "other meaning,"
when it is clear that "meaning" is precisely that which fixes and immobilizes the
senses in question).7 As opposed to phallogocularcentric modes of thought and
writing, Irigaray foregrounds the dynamic multiple resonances propagated by the
embodied female self as "corps sonore" (resonant body) : "It must be added that
sound is propagated in her at an astonishing speed, in proportion moreover to its
more or less perfectly in-sensible character" (This Sex 110). The propagation of
resonance as sensate sound, furthermore, cannot be contained by language if it is
conceived of as a vehicle for the transmission and reception of messages or as an
instrument for the construction and interpretation of meaning. Rather, if "woman
never speaks the same" as this (patriarchal) conception of language, if that which
"she emits is fluent, fluctuating . . . flowing," and propagated in sound-waves that
flow through and over language, composing and decomposing, deforming and
blurring it at every instant, then language (whether speech or writing) would have
to be listened to in a way that opens the self to the incessant birth and rebirth of
sense (This Sex 110-11). It is with this otocentric feminist genealogy that Nancy's
notion of the subject as "corps sonore" (resonant body) reverberates, for Nancy's
"corps sonore" is a body that, whether male or female, is conceived of as an organ
of acoustic parturition from which is born the multiple resonances that give birth
sibilities opened up by others affiliated with what Sarah Kofman calls deconstruction's "third ear"
(33). For Jay, Derrida's "third ear," which is affiliated with the Levinasian "ear of the other," allows
Derrida to deconstruct the privileging of the ear associated both with Gadamer's hermeneutics and
(for Derrida) Heideggerian metaphysics. Derrida's flirtation with listening, however, never risks
developing a philosophy based in listening. Just as Heidegger, according to Derrida, remained hostage to logocentrism, so Derrida remains hostage to its deconstruction: like the sorcerer's apprentice,
Derridean deconstruction always turns back to, and exponentially reproduces as multiples of the
master, the sorcery of "age of the sign" - a sorcery still at work in Derrida's claim that "It is the ear of
the other that signs'" (Derrida, TheEarofthe Other 51).
7 "II faudrait l'couter d'une autre oreille comme un 'autre sens' toujours en train de se tisser, de
s'embrasser avec les mots, mais aussi de s'en dfaire pour ne pas s'y fixer, s'y figer" (Ce Sexe 28; "One
must listen to her differently in order to hear an 'other meaning' which is constantly in the process of
weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized," This Sex 29).
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philosophy of listening in a way that would give renewed visibility to, and allow the
of a philosophy based upon listening, Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe LacoueLabarthe form a "double-entente." Although one of their earliest collaborations,
L'Absolu littraire: thorie de la littrature du romantisme allemand (l97S)/The Literary
for the visual representation that follows from it as a surrogate: "the absence of
rhythm . . . produces the infinitely paradoxical appearance of the mimetic itself.
The absence of rhythm, from which imitation arises in the absence of the imitable
la ... : he hears me . . .)" (27-28). For Nancy, the name Lacoue-Labarthe itself
suggests the rhythm of auditory self-reflection and self-expansion through repetition; Lacoue-Labarthe becomes the "ear of the other" that the listening subject
of Nancy's A LEcoute will use to repeat, reflect, and expand itself.
Nancy's desire to overturn "the traditional sensual hierarchy" that gives primacy to vision can perhaps best be understood as a response to three kinds of
limitations attending ocularcentrism. The first is the limitations of the subjectobject dichotomy and all dichotomies associated with it: mind-body, self-other,
presence-absence, spiritual-material, speech-writing, transcendence-immanence.
That the subject of this dichotomy is inevitably constituted by and through the
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capacity of discourse to produce meaning indicates the second limitation: a philosophy or world view for which signification is the final perspective, whether given
occludes, suppresses, and enacts violence against the body and sensual perception
as a mode of world-appropriation. For Nancy, the turn towards listening would not
merely be a way of inverting the traditional sensual hierarchy and replacing conceptual thought based in vision by sensual perception limited to audition. Because
listening, for Nancy, is the sense that touches upon and stimulates at once all
bodily senses, as well as that other sense-making faculty that has been variously
called "mind," "spirit," or "soul," to listen is both to engage in proprioceptive self-
reflection and to be drawn towards other sounding bodies whose resonances both
penetrate and envelope the listener. It is to attend to resonances of perception and
meaning yet to emerge and always passing away.
Given that Nancy's exploration of listening turns on the particular resonances
he gives to the word sense, I begin my analysis of Nancy's Lcoute by addressing
the ways in which this notion of "sense" allows Nancy to move past sense-making
(or meaning) as the final perspective. I then move on to discuss how doing so
allows him to develop an ontology of the listening self, before finally addressing
the status of the listening self as "corps sonore" (resonant body).
Being Singular Plural. "L'existence a-t-elle un sens quelconque?" {Une Pense finie 9;
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Does existence have a sense?) from The Gay Science ("Hat denn das Dasein uberhaubt einen Sinn?" S 357) leads into the question that opens Nancy's Une Pense
finie: "Qu'est-ce que le sens? C'est--dire, quel est le 'sens' de ce mot, 'sens', et quelle
est la ralit de cette chose, 'le sens'?" (14; What is sense? That is to say, what is
the "sense" of this word "sense," and what is the reality of this thing "sense"?). In
tre singulier pluriel, the call issued by Nietzsche's Zarathustra to "Lead, as I do, the
flown-away virtue back to the earth - yes, back to body and life: that it may give
the earth its sense, a human sense [Sinn] " {Thus Spoke Zarathustra 66-67) provides
This meditation leads into Nancy's opening essay, entitled "Que nous sommes le
sens" ("We Are Sense"), in which "sense" opens itself to include sensual, signifying,
and spatio-temporal directional sense, just as "we" opens itself to encompass all
earth-bound beings - "tous les existants, les passs et les -venir, les vivants et les
morts, les inanims, les pierres, les plantes, les clous, les dieux - et les 'hommes'"
{tre singulier pluriel 21; "all existents, those past and those to come, the living
and dead, the inanimate, rocks, plants, nails, gods - and 'humans,'" Being Singular
Plural 21). Given the consistency with which Nancy attempts to re-think the term
"sense" throughout his oeuvre, the rendering of Nancy's "sens" and Nietzsche's
"Sinn" as "meaning" in the English translation of Being Singular Plural testifies once
again to the persistence of the ocularcentric obsession with meaning that Nancy
(almost equally compulsively) attempts to critique. Lcoute takes its impulse from
this anger at the limitations of philosophical and academic discourse and attempts
to posit a new foundation for sense as resonance: "perhaps it is necessary that sense
not be content to make sense (or to be logos), but that it also resound. My whole
proposal will turn around this fundamental resonance - that is around resonance
as a foundation, as the first or last profundity of 'sense' itself" (19).
As I have already noted, one of the ways Nancy makes "sense" resound, makes
it resonate past the limitations of signifying sense or sense as logos, is by playing
upon the word's multiple resonances: (1) "sense" as intelligible, signifying sense,
or meaning; (2) "sense" as perceptual, sensate or sensual sense, and affect; and
(3) "sense" as sense of direction, impulse, and movement. Here it may seem that
Nancy's attempt to get past signification as the final perspective manifests the
same paradoxical, self-consciously obsessive play upon the contingency and multiplicity of meaning that characterizes most poststructuralist thought, and decon-
struction in particular.8 Nancv, however, takes the risk of positing resonance as the
8 See Gumbrecht, "Martin Heidegger and His Japanese Interlocutors": "Astonishingly enough (or
not astonishingly at all), all those loud intellectual slogans from a decade or two ago about the
'death of the Subject' never reached this - altogether surprising - point: that any attempt at (or
the mere historical process of) overcoming a Subject-centered epistemological tradition (or, with
the more Heideggerian concept of overcoming 'metaphysics') would have to ask how one could -
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"first and last profundity of 'sense' itself" so as to ground his proposal in concepts
that, while endowed with a dynamism that often makes them difficult to grasp, do
sense ... as if sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this
margin . . . not, however, (or not only) as an acoustic phenomenon but as a resonant sense" ( Lcoute 21). The foundation of this resonant sense, of all senses
of resonance, is the resonance of the listening body, the "corps sonore" (resonant
body) that includes, but is not limited to, the human body as matrix of resonance: "a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, from where the opening of
a mouth can again pick up and re-launch resonance . . . An attack from outside, a
clamor from within, this sonorous, sonorized body opens a simultaneous listening
to a 'self and to a 'world' that are both in resonance" ( L'coute 81-82).
Sense as Timbre
between phone and lexis; lexis is the articulate voice of logos that "communicates,
responds, debates, concludes, decides . . . tells stories" (135), and phone is inarticulate sound - not meaningless noise, but the condition of possibility for sense (perceptual sense, affect, and meaning). According to Lyotard, "Phone is a semeion,
signal. It is not the arbitrary sign that takes the place of a thing, an onoma. It is
being to - avoid sense-making [meaning]. On the contrary, that 'weak subject' and that so-called
'weak thinking' as which the Subject/Object paradigm seems to have survived the years of its premature death announcements have made sense-making even more central - perhaps even more
obsessive - than it came to be in the philosophical past. For the difference between the traditiona
Subject and the new 'weak' Subject seems to lie in the latter's higher awareness of the contingent
character of any sense-making operation, both on the basic level and on the consistency-producing
level. The 'weak' Subject indeed produces a surplus of sense [meaning], due to the added obligation of commenting on his or her primary sense-making operations" (83).
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sense itself insofar as sense signals itself. . . . Phone is affect insofar as it is the signal
of itself" {Lectures d'enfance 134). Nancy's timbre resembles Lyotard's phone insofar
as it is the condition of possibility for sense to resound, "form [ing] the first con-
sistency of sonorous sense as such, under the rhythmic condition that makes it
resound" ( L'coute 78). As timbre takes on rhythm, in other words, it becomes
more consistent or articulate, and its resonance is pulled towards diction (similar to
lations of murmurs and music that signal (or touch upon) potential meaning, but
in the body's sensual proprio-perception: "colour of sound, touch (texture, roundness, coarseness), taste (bitter, sweet), even evocations of smells. In other words,
timbre resounds with and in the totality of perceptible registers" (Baas, qtd. in
L'coute 55). Nancy's timbre is the vibration of a sonorous materiality that "animates the auditory apparatus as much as the phonatory apparatus . . . that seizes
all somatic locations where the phenomenal voice resonates" (55-56). These
"somatic locations" include, but are not restricted to, the belly-mouth matrix of the
"corps sonore," where timbre emerges as "a friction, the pinch or screech of something produced in the throat, a borborygmous" of the belly, a resonance that begins
before, continues after, penetrates and envelopes, the voice, speech, and writing
( L'coute 52-53).
The written text itself, furthermore, is a somatic location where timbre also reso-
nates. Timbre is that resonance that gives writing its style and is the differential
relation between speech and writing.9 However, while the timbre of a text calls
attention to the differential relation between speech and writing, this difference is
not temporal (as in the diffrance of Derridean archi-criture) , but spatial: it is "sono-
rous matter [that] spreads out in itself and resounds in (or from) its own spacing"
( L'coute 76-77). If Derrida's diffrance leaves a surface trace, the spacing of Nancy's timbre has depth and edge, as "the furrow left in the air or on the page after
the concept dissolves" ( L'coute 49). This dissolution takes place in the listening
reader, who, as "corps sonore" (in Nancy's revision of Freud's "Verneinung"), swallows or spits out the sonorous matter of the text.
locations where the phenomenal voice resonates" (Baas, qtd. in L'coute 55) whether text or human body - requires the impulsive-pulsive movement between
9 There are interesting connections yet to be made between Nancy's concept of timbre and the German concept of Stimmung as "mood" or "attunement," a concept etymologically related to Stimme/
"voice." Christopher Fynsk makes passing mention of Stimmung in his discussion of how Nancy's conception of human freedom relates to Heidegger's: "Freedom is an event, and though this event may be
assumed or affirmed, and only 5 as it is assumed (exposed or drawn out in a singular 'style' pitch that
articulates what the German tradition has thought as a Stimmung), it cannot be possessed" (Foreword
to The Inoperative Community xiv) . For a more thorough analysis of the concept of Stimmung in German
philosophy and its relation to writing, see Gumbrecht, "Reading for the 'Stimmung'?"
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"attaque" (attack), as the "coup d'envoi" (send-off) of an acoustic event that hits
our body and "seizes all somatic locations," and "tendre" (attendance) ("tendre
l'oreille" literally means to stretch or pull the ear) - the attendance that draws the
possible sense that has not yet arrived. In so far as this sense of impulse or movement resonates between "attaque" (attack) and "tendre" (attendance), "vibrating
from the come and go between the source and the ear," it opens the temporality
of listening, and opens the temporality of a self (78). In so far as Nancy's "tre
l'coute" as listening self is the being of a listening that summons, convokes,
invokes sonorous presence to itself - "that has already lost itself and that is still
expecting itself, and that calls to itself (which cries out to self, which gives itself or
and remembers its departure, itself remaining suspended and straining [pulled]
between the two: time and sonority, sonority as time and as sense" (42), it recalls
the auto-affection that takes place as the protention - present perception - retention of Husserlian time-consciousness. For Husserl, however, the movement of
claims, Husserl visualizes and objectifies melody. Similarly, for Heidegger, listening to the call of Being requires the silence that opens up thinking.
For Nancy, however, the self-reflexive listener does not seize this pulsive tempo-
ral movement via a consciousness that grasps it as silent form; nor does it attend
to the resonance of its summons to being in the silence of thinking. Rather, the
temporal impulse of resonance is seized by the listening self in the attack that
opens around, penetrates, and moves with the body. Furthermore, if this listening self attends to the call that summons, convokes, and invokes sonorous presence to itself in any sort of silence, it is not the silence that belongs to thinking,
but silence as a disposition of the listening body, as in that "perfect condition of
silence [when] you hear your own body resonate, your breath, your heart and all
its resounding cave" (44) . In so far as the temporality of listening, for Nancy, is
an embodied time, a time that "opens up" within and around the body of the listening self - that "hollows out," "envelopes or separates," "loops," "stretches out or
contracts" within and around the listening being (32), and is marked by a pulsive movement between the sonorous attack and the attendance to a resonance yet
to come - the embodied time of listening necessarily opens into a resonant, vibrational space. "Here," Nancy suggests, "4ime becomes space,' as sung in Wagner's
Parsifal" ( L'coute 33).
For Nancy, the resonant vibrational space of listening in which "time becomes
space" is not the closed vibrational space of the musical spirit (or Schopenhauerian Will) objectified in the phenomenal image whose correlative for Wagner was
the visual presence of bodies on stage. The space-time of listening for Nancy has
no need to be objectified in a visual image to be made present: sound propagates
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itself through space that it opens via resonant vibrations that (as particle and
wave) expand through, and reverberate against, acoustic space, and that envelope
and penetrate sounding bodies. This propagation of resonance as dilation (expansion) and reverberation, as resonance that both penetrates and envelopes, opens
the common space of sound and sense as "renvoi," the offering and returning of
resonant sense as sonorous presence.
Just as the offering and returning in the "renvoi" (send-off, penetration, and dif-
fusion) of resonant sense touches upon (and resonates with) the temporal movement of sense as attack and attendance ("tendre"), so that sonorous presence which
is offered and returned touches upon the sonorous materiality of sense as timbre.
Thus, the space opened up by renvoi is at once the space of perception and proprioception, the space that opens the self to itself and to the world as presence to self.
This presence, however, is not the visually (or conceptually) identifiable presence
of that which "lets itself be objectified or projected outward," but rather consists in
am penetrated, for it [this spatiality] opens itself in me as well as around me, and
from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is
through such a double, quadruple or septuple opening that a 'self ' can take place"
( Lcoute 33). As a result, the self opened by, and opening into, the space of listen-
with and to absorb all those elements of self and world that might otherwise be
termed "objects." In other words, all objects, insofar as they resonate, tend to
become listening subjects. Throughout the course of Nancy's text, the listening
subject becomes less "subject"-like, less human - not more substantial but certainly more textured - and, most interestingly, progressively larger and louder
in volume, diffusing itself through more acoustic space and more expansive frequencies before its final diminuendo and return to itself as "corps sonore" (resonant body) , as a "body beaten by its sense of body, by what used to be called its soul"
seven types of listening subjects are not isolated instances: all resonate at one
and the same time in the space-time opened by listening.
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( L'Ecoute 25; A subject senses itself: this is its property and its definition)
Here, the subject is constituted by its self-reflection of "sense," in all senses ofthat
word. A subject senses itself sensing in the renvoi of sensual and intelligible sense,
perception, and proprioception. It not only thinks (or hears itself), sees or represents itself to itself, touches itself, tastes itself, feels itself feeling itself, but also lis-
tens to itself as that sonorous presence that is always in attendance to itself, retreats
and penetrates into itself ("se retranche"), resonates in itself and elsewhere.10
The listening subject as echo-chamber identifies the first potential for sensual
self-reflection, in the birth of the subject as "the sudden expansion of an echochamber" of the child born with his first cry ( Lcoute 38-39). Here, with the
attack of resonance in the cry of the vagitus, the subject is not only getting louder,
but also taking on a texture and noisy physicality that marks Nancy's first departure from musical metaphysics.
10 Listening allows Nancy to capture the multiple resonances of the self-reflexion of sense that constitutes the subject as involving both sensation ("tendre l'oreille," to prick up one's ears towards the
sensual presence of life) and signification ("entendre"/ "understanding"). This is a much more elegant formulation than the functionally analogous one developed in, for example, Une Pense Finie
(1990), where Nancy had already called attention to the dual nature of the self-reflection of sense
that constitutes the subject: "le concept de sens implique que le sens se saississe lui-mme en tant que
sens. Ce mode, ce geste de se-saisir-soi-mme en tant que sens fait le sens, le sens de tout sens
va de mme pour l'autre sens du mot 'sens', pour son sens 'sensible': sen
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branches: the noise towards which we lend an ear ... ( L'coute 45)
As a place of resonance, and a resonance that penetrates, fuses, goes toward and
comes back from other places of resonance, the listening subject may be human,
animal, or thing. Or rather, would it not be human, animal, thing at once, if in the
shared space of resonance? Interestingly enough, Nancy doesn't seem to acknowledge the possibility of a listening subject that would absorb the frequencies of
human-animal-thing-machine, that resonant vision from Futurist fantasy (now
potentially within the reach of bio-engineering and cybernetics). Whatever the
case, the human "listening subject" as "organon" seems to distinguish itself from
animal, vegetable, or mechanical "organon" primarily due to its tendency to be
drawn towards, to attend to, the least significant of the senses for Nancy - that is,
Nancy describes the listening subject as text as that resonance where it (the
text) "listens to itself [s'coute], by listening to itself finds itself, and by finding
itself deviates from itself in order to resound further away, listening to itself before
to the reader of the text, that reader who listens to the words she reads or hears
herself speak in the "eye/ear of the mind." Rather, the listening subject as text
seems to emerge as the echo of this kind of speaking and listening against and
through the body of text and reader, in the renvoi of the senses that fuses text and
reader and that "opens [the text] up to its own sense as to the plurality of its possi-
ble senses" (68). This notion of text as listening subject might help us to think
about the status of the "interlude," the middle section of Nancy's text that opens
with a meditation on the "mute music" of the word "mot" (word) as that which mur-
murs and resonates, and that closes with the "mmmmm" that is prior to word,
voice, writing, the "mmmmm" that is "l'union substantielle de l'me et corps, du
corps et de l'mmmmm" ( L'coute 48-49; the substantial union of soul and body,
body and "mmmmm"). The interlude of this "mute music" creates a space around
which, against which, and with which Nancy's text resonates, where it finds itself
and deviates from itself: it is the crisis around which the "subject" of the text turns.
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The listening subject as the attack of time, as that figure which is "hit" by the
arrival of a sonorous presence, takes on the pulsive qualities of a rhythmical figure: "what is a figure that is throbbed as well as stressed, broached by time [entame par le temps] ? ... What else is it but a subject - . . . Isn't the subject the attack
of time?" (75) The subject as broached by ("entam") the attack of time is cut into,
and cut out of, penetrated, moved by and opened by, a rhythm that opens the
In declaring the subject of subjects to be the partage of all subjects ("le partage
sujet de tous les 'sujets'" 79), Nancy plays with the multiple resonances of the word:
partage as not only "sharing," but also "parturition." The listening subject as the
partage (sharing and birth) of all subjects emerges from "a body which opens itself
and closes itself at the same time, which positions itself and exposes itself with others, (which) resonates (with) the noise of its partage (with itself, with others): per-
haps the cry with which a child is born, perhaps even an earlier resonance in the
belly and from the belly of the mother" ( L'coute 79). Once again, the fundamental resonance of the subject is the resonance of the "corps sonore" (sonorous
body) as mouth-belly matrix of the birth-cry of a child from (and even within) the
mother's womb. This cry marks our originary sense of being at one and the same
time a singular subject and a part of (born out of, differentiated from, and belong-
ing with) all other existents, a subject whose "sense" of self emerges each time
anew through attendance to the resonances offered and returned in the renvoi or
circulation of sense that all beings share.11
11 Nancy's notion of the "partage" of sense as that which distinguishes the singularity of each
existent within a common world, as that which marks the opening of the subject to itself and to others in the "partage" (the division, limit, and resonant space between) of each being in its being-withanother, is also developed in works such as Being Singular Plural, where we find this telling phrase:
"II n'y a pas de sens si le sens n'est pas partag, et cela, non pas parce qu'il y aurait une signification,
ultime ou premire, que tous les tants auraient en commun, mais parce que le sens est lui-mme le
partage de l'tre" {tre Singulier Pluriel 20; There is no sense other than the sense that is shared
[partag] , and not because there would be an ultimate or primary signification/meaning that all
beings would have in common, but because sense is itself the share [le partage] of being). Once again,
Nancy explicitly states here that the "sense" that makes up the "share" or "part" of each being for
itself and for others involves "sense" as sensual perception and proprioception, and not sense as
meaning or signification, which would be only one possible modality of what might be called
"common" sense. For further analysis of Nancy's concept o partage and his use of the metaphor of
birth in works pre-dating L'coute, see Christopher Fynsk's foreword to Nancy's The Inoperative
Community (1991).
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by [the] sense of body" (82). 12 For example, the body as a "resonance chamber" is
the resonant space between the sounding board and back of a violin, or the little
hole in the clarinet (60). Or the body is "that skin stretched over its own sonorous cavity, this belly that listens to itself and strays away in itself while listening,"
as in the drum or tympanon that concludes Nancy's meditation on timbre at the
end of the text (82). In all cases, the body as "corps sonore" is a body without
organs, although it is potentially an "organon," because, as Nancy tells us, bodies
(female and male) have a womb or a "matrice" (matrix) of resonance: the bellymouth matrix where listening begins and ends as the "matricielle" (matricial)
constitution of resonance where "the ear opens onto the sonorous cavern that we
then become" ( L'coute 73).
In this way, Nancy's bodies feel a little too instrumental, not messy enough,
not noisy enough, as though there would be some danger of dirty hands or dirty
ears. For example, although Nancy's bodies have bellies, and these bellies make
sounds that range from the borborygmous to the cry of the vagitus, that is about
as far (or loud) as it goes. This is perhaps only a little further than Derrida, who
was un-dainty enough to ask: "How could ontology get hold of a fart?" (Glas 69,
qtd. in Jay 511). Like Derrida's, Nancy's thinking seems to take up too much air.
His "resonant bodies," in other words, need a great deal of air-space in order to
sound. Yet the resonance of these sounds, as both particle and wave, never takes
on the substantiality and volume of the noises that both attack and envelope
us in a world where we increasingly use the noise of one technology (cell-phone
or i-pod) to block out the noise of others (cars, planes, machines, cell-phones).
Furthermore, while Nancy claims an empirical point of departure in the sensation of his own bodily experience, his body does not seem to compose its reso12 Nancy's meditation on the experience of having a heart transplant in L'Intrus (2000) surely
informs this conception of the body as a hollow resonance chamber. The meditation ends with the
suggestion that the process of self-estrangement experienced during the heart transplant is precisely the process that allows a self-identification built around the acknowledgement and acceptance of, indeed the identification with, the strangeness of the self to itself and to the world:
"L'intrus n'est pas autre que moi-mme et l'homme lui-mme. Pas un autre que le mme qui n'en
finit pas de s'altrer, la fois aiguis et puis, denud et surquip, intrus dans le monde aussi bien
qu'en soi-mme, inquitante pousse de l'trange, conatus d'une infinite excroissante" (L'Intrus 45;
"The intrus is no other than me, my self; none other than man himself. No other than the one, the
same, always identical to itself and yet that is never done with altering itself. At the same time sharp
and spent, stripped bare and over-equipped, intruding upon the world and upon itself: a disquieting upsurge of the strange, conatus of an infinite excrescence," "L'Intrus" 13).
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nance in a medium that is, after all, at least 70% water, where the ear itself is a
resonance chamber filled with water, and the womb/ belly-mouth matrix of reso-
ied resonance.
It is not accidental that Douglas Kahn entitles his recent work on the history
of voice, sound, and aurality in (post) modernist avant-garde art Noise, Water
Meat (1999). By attending to Kahn's descriptions of John Cage's water music, Jack-
son Pollock's drip paintings, and William Burrough's meat voice (where all communication is heard as a virus), one can point to two significant concepts that
Nancy's philosophy of listening ignores or diminishes along with its occlusion o
water as a sound-medium. The first, turbulence, is characterized by chaotic, sto
chastic (random) property changes and ranges from white noise to violent burst
of sound, such as the turbulence associated with terrestrial, atmospheric, and
oceanic circulation, as well as with the kinds of circulation found in industrial
machines (pipes, ducts, and internal combustion engines, for example). The second concept, infection, applies to both human and mechanical bodies: the nois
of laughter that moves one listening body to infect another, or the noise tha
marks the presence of a virus in digital code - in both cases noise-induced infe
tion that blocks or causes potentially productive mutations in the flow of communication or in the feedback of resonant sense associated with Nancy's concep
of renvoi.15
Perhaps, like Heidegger, after all, Nancy needs to keep noise to a minimum in
order to listen to thinking - so that the attack of sound will not block thinkin
entirely. But is there no way that noise could be productive to thinking? Such
mode of thinking is described by Benjamin: "accompaniment by an etude or a
cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silenc
of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchston
for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward thought" (One Way
Street, qtd. in Kahn, "Three Receivers" 81). Perhaps such "noisier" thinking woul
no longer be thinking that would allow us to answer the question "is listening
something of which philosophy is capable"; instead, it would be thinking that i
open to an art of noise: not only Luigi Russolo's Futurist LArt des Bruits (Art o
Noise), or the "pomes bruitistes" (noise poetry) of the Dadaists, but also poetry
slams, rock concerts, and so on).
The reasons for this turn against ocularcentrism and for the interest in listen
ing as an alternative model are of course not restricted to the perceived limitations of philosophical discourse in relation to the three problems outlined here
13 This notion of infection is alluded to but never fully explored by Nancy when he draws atten
tion to the methexic, as opposed to solely mimetic, aspects of listening: "le visuel serait tendancie
ticipation, du partage ou de la contagion)" ( L'coute 27; the visual would be tendentially mimetic
and the sonorous tendentially methexic, that is to say in the order of participation, sharing [partage]
or contagion) .
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ground, destroyed any notion that war was a spectacle ... ; [it] put a premium
upon auditory signals and seemed to make the war experience peculiarly subjective and intangible" (Leeds, No Man's Land 19, qtd. in Jay 213). One might also
recall Kittler's argument in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter that war produces techno-
tributed to the mass dissemination of music, to what Nancy calls the "mondialisation" (globalization) of music.
Indeed, one might ask whether Nancy fully engages in this globalization of
music. How much, in other words, does his description of philosophical listening rely on examples taken from the classical music tradition? How much does
the relative suppression of noise in his space of listening resemble a nineteenthcentury concert hall? Why does he not make use of concepts associated with
recent developments in music that would potentially be productive for the argument he wishes to make? For example, the concept of "renvoi" as reverberation,
offering and return, as the subject sensing itself sensing, is never linked to the
notion of a feedback loop (whether that of Jimi Hendrix's electric guitar or Norbert Wiener's cybernetics) .
And where does this anti-ocular turn, or the turn towards listening, go after
Nancy? There has been a marked increase in the last few years of texts that engage
with listening and audition - from philosophical meditations on musical aesthetics such as Peter Szendy's Listen: A History of Our Ears (with a forward by Nancy), to
cultural studies readers dealing with auditory phenomena such as Michael Bull's
The Auditory Culture Reader, to analyses of noise in avant-garde aesthetics such
as the Douglas Kahn's Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. The most
interesting development in this turn toward listening, however, is exemplified by
the works of Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk. If Luhmann can be said to be
one of the most recent contributors to the dominant anti-ocularcentric genealogy,
in so far as he banishes the observing subject altogether and makes do with psychic and social systems where it is not the subject but "communication [which]
communicates" (Luhmann 153), Sloterdijk is his otocentric counterpart. Sloterdijk 's Sphren {Spheres) trilogy develops a cosmology of listening that reincorporates the spatial aspect of listening, and in which Luhmann's subjectless social
system as (more or less a kind of) world view becomes Sloterdijk's (more or less)
subjectless soundscape. If Nancy's concern is to revise the traditional metaphysical
subject as a listening subject (a revision that tends to transform all objects into
listening subjects), Sloterdijk seems to want to revise metaphysics from the side of
the object, transforming all subjects into resonant (and noisy) objects in a communal soundscape. Ironically enough, insofar as Nancy's listening does not fully
attend to the noise of our own soundscape, the accusation Sloterdijk issues may
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also apply to the texts that have been the focus of this essay: "The current auditory
populism is an exercise in regression ... it blocks the ears of the collective, rendering it deaf to that which sounds differently, to that which is new" (379).
The University of Aberdeen
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