The Senses and Society

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Soundings

Adrienne Janus

To cite this article: Adrienne Janus (2013) Soundings, The Senses and Society, 8:1, 72-84

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174589313X13500466751001

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Soundings
The Secret of Water and the
Resonance of the Image

Adrienne Janus

ABSTRACT  “Water is perhaps the secret Adrienne Janus

received her PhD in
Senses & Society  DOI: 10.2752/174589313X13500466751001

element …” Taking its inspiration from this comparative literature

line in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses (1996), from Stanford in
this article presents a series of soundings 2004 and is currently
a lecturer at the
that attempt to expose the secret element University of Aberdeen.
of water in Nancy’s writing. These Her research focuses
soundings do not aim to penetrate the on the poetics of
auditory phenomena
depths of Nancy’s thinking, or to suggest (music, noise,
that Nancy is a hydrophilic philosopher murmurs, and laughter)
for whom a watery thinking would redeem in twentieth-century
literature and theory.
or critique the hydrophobia that is often adrienne.janus@abdn.ac.uk
seen to dominate philosophical discourse.
Rather, they attempt to sound out quietly,
to take a sondage of, what blossoms “à
fleur d’eau,” in Nancy’s writing on the
Image in film, painting, and music. Here,
water is not merely a metaphor for our
sensual immersion in the world, nor the
actualization as a material presence of all
those secretions of sense that envelope and
penetrate us as we move in and are moved
by the world. Water is also the secret, lubric
72
 Soundings

element in the partage – the sharing, parturition,

and dividing off – of the senses in the birth to
presence of the world and of art.

KEYWORDS: water, image, music, listening, imagination,

resonance

Water is perhaps the secret element […] that which washes,

that which flows or streams, spreads and permeates, swells
and scents, the ablution, dissolution, suspension and floating.
And yet, this body is firm, whole, intact in its abandon. (Nancy
1996: 59)1
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+
If water is the secret element, it is so not as the elemental
promise or challenge of that which (in our long history of
theo-philosophical hydrophobia and hydrophilia) is hidden
from knowledge or observation: the oasis in the desert of the spirit;
the truth at the bottom of the well; the unknown and unknowable
across which we set sail to reach a new ground for thinking; that
which purifies or is transfigured in the mysteries of faith. If only for a
moment, we let go of this insensate search for meaning, no longer
heed the call of the spirit that sounds, more often than not, as a
“dry signifying injunction,” water is the secret element that emerges,
unconcealed, from where it always already was, palpable, if not
graspable, as the sensual excess of our passage through the world
and the world through us (Nancy 2011: 83). Water is not merely
a metaphor for our sensual immersion in the world; it is also the
actualization as a material presence of all those secretions of sense
that wash, flow and stream, spread and permeate, swell and scent,
envelope and penetrate this body as it moves in and is moved by
world.
This, at any rate, is the sense of water that Jean-Luc Nancy
seems to offer us, not least in the opening scenes of the film Le
corps du philosophe (Grün 2003). Here, we see the fascinating
(and somewhat surprising) image of the philosopher’s body bathing
in the elements of a bay or a lake, the naked torso buoyed up and
weighed down by the water through which it moves in a curious
side-stroke. As tendrils of seaweed encircle the tan-line of a frail
neck, the mouth opens to receive lappings from below and droplets
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of water trickling down from the ear – the ear that invites us to
attend (in a voice-off spoken by another, disembodied Jean-Luc
Nancy) to the resonance of “the world [that is] there in all parts and
offers itself to the senses – its colours, odours, savours, sounds,
presences, withdrawals, etc.” (Le corps du philosophe). The secret
of water is this, as well as (more secretly) the soft touch of humidity
in the air (the caress of another’s body) that brings moisture to the
73

eye, a dampening to sound, and sweat to the skin – sweat as that

 Adrienne Janus

secretion of sense that renders palpable the notion that “truth is

in the skin […] an authentic extension exposed, entirely turned
outside while also enveloping the inside” (Nancy 2008a: 159). It is
also the liquid touch and syncopated rhythms of rain in relation to
whose singular multiplicity we are sheltered or exposed, attuned or
discordant, but indifferent only in the loss of our bearings towards
the world as a space of being-in-common (Nancy 2008a: 73, 111).
And, perhaps more evidently, water is the secret element in the
viscosity of the surface of an oil painting into whose resonant depths
we are pulled, as in “the undertow by which the image touches us,
strikes us, fascinates us, that is to say draws us into the swell of
its surfacing depths” without ever letting us reach the bottom from
which it incessantly emerges and into which it continually recedes
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(Nancy 2011: 82; my translation). Water is also the secret element

of the voice that “cries out in the desert” — not as the element of
baptism or transfiguration, but as the humidity in the breath, the
resonance in the belly, of a “body that opens and exhales” (Nancy
1993a: 246–7). In its opening and exhaling, this voice frays a path to
the subject and spawns “sonorous uprisings”– a murmur, a shout,
or (as in the Wagnerian image that ends À l’écoute) a “melody that
resounds and that mixes and resolves itself in the mass of waves,
the thunder of noises, in the All breathing with the breath of the
world” (Nancy 2005: 79, 2007: 46). Throughout Jean-Luc Nancy’s
writing, as these few instances indicate, water is the secret, lubric
element in the partage – the sharing, parturition, and dividing off
– of image, body and voice as they open and close, emerge and
withdraw, in their birth to presence in the world and in art. Water, in
other words, is the secret glissando in “birth (as) this slipping away
of presence through which everything comes to presence” (Nancy
1993a: 4).
This would not be to say that Nancy is a hydrophilic philosopher
for whom a watery thinking would replenish the growing desert of
thought, redeem or critique the hydrophobia that is often seen to
dominate philosophical discourse – as Luce Irigaray’s Nietzsche:
Marine Lover (1991), for example, seems to redeem the hydro-
hystero-phobic element in Nietzsche’s thought or as eco-criticism’s
attention to water attempts to rectify a humanist history of arid
anthropocentricism (although feminist and biophilic tendencies in
Nancy’s thought are evident). Nor would water be a trope whose
sense we could interpret in order to find our way through the many
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turns of Nancy’s thought. In the series of soundings that follow,

rather, I will attempt to expose the secret sense of water, not in order
to penetrate the depths of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking, but to sound
out quietly, to take a sondage of, what blossoms “à fleur d’eau,”2 to
use one of Nancy’s favorite terms. In the first instance, that which
blossoms from water as the secret, secreted element – drawn just
to the surface into which it withdraws again – is none other than the
74

image.
 Soundings

Sounding 1. The Image: à fleur d’eau, au fond

des images

Nietzsche said that “we have art in order not to be sunk to the
depths by truth.” But we must add that this does not happen
unless art touches on truth. The image does not stand before
the ground like a net or a screen. We do not sink (couler);
rather, the ground rises to us in the image. […] The image floats
[…] at the whim of the swells, mirroring the sun, poised over
the abyss, soaked by the sea, but also glistening with the very
thing that threatens it and bears it up at the same time. Such
is intimacy, simultaneously threatening and captivating from
out of the distance into which it withdraws. (Nancy 2005: 13)
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It is perhaps counterintuitive, but nevertheless unsurprising, that the

secret element of water is most evident in Nancy’s thinking of the
image: counterintuitive, because the sense of water, as that which
flows and streams, envelopes and penetrates, is most commonly
associated with the liquid sonorities (sound waves) of music and
poetry; unsurprising, because to suggest that the ground of the
image is water, as Nancy does quite evidently in the citation above,
is to allow a sensuous dynamism to flow through and disrupt the
otherwise static impermeability of the conceptual distinctions that
usually attend the image: form/ground; surface/depth; subjective
perceiver/objectified, imaged “thing.” What constitutes this watery
ground that bears up the image, making it glisten and distinct, draw-
ing us towards it, captivating us, while at the same time threatening
withdrawal into the abysmal depths such that “on ne puisse que
sombrer – sans couler à pic, mais à fleur d’image” (Nancy 2011: 82;
“one cannot but founder – without sinking to the bottom, but just at
the surface of the image”)?
This watery ground is constituted not merely by the water or oil of
a painting, the viscosity of pigment, the glistening weave of canvas –
secretions of visual-tactile sense on the skin that exposes the image
to our senses, and exposes the truth of the image as a sensual
materiality that asks us not only to “enter and look,” but, in drawing
us towards the invisible depths that resonate just at the surface, to
“exhaust your looks until your eyes close” (Nancy 1996: 59). (And
who, except the most die-hard ideological dissenters, can deny ever
having wanted, like Mary Poppins, Michael, and Jane, to close your
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eyes, count to three, and jump into a painting.) This watery ground
is constituted not merely by the glistening movement, the pulsing of
saturated colors, the ebb and flow, presences and withdrawals, of
the filmic image – secretions of visual-tactile-kinaesthetic sense on
the “pellicule expeausée”3 of film that entice us with the impossible
desire not only to immerse our bodies in its watery element, to sense
this imaged part of the world as a world that is there in all parts,
75

but to pierce into “the unseen […] life itself, its pulsing beneath the
 Adrienne Janus

skin” (Nancy 2008b: 163). And this watery element which pulses just
beneath the skin, “à fleur de peau,” is not merely the unseen life of
silver halide bodies suspended in the watery element of hydrolyzed
collagen from which the “luminous chemistry” of the filmic image is
born (Nancy 2008b: 165). While it is clear that for Nancy, the image
is always material, these material secretions of the visual image
(whether painting or film) are only one distinct part of the general
commerce, communication, and partage of the senses that consti-
tute the watery ground of the image.
On the most basic level, this is because the image that Nancy
refers to is not only the visual image of painting or film. Indeed, in
Nancy’s thinking of the image generally, and in The Ground of The
Image (2005) and L’Image: Methexis et Mimesis (2011) in particular,
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the visual image serves as merely one (not necessarily privileged)

model that Nancy attends to, alongside linguistic images of poetry or
literature and sonorous images of music and opera. On a more com-
plex level, when Nancy states that “the image is not only visual: it is
also musical, poetic, even tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinaesthetic,
and so on” (Nancy 2005: 4), he is not describing the plurality of the
arts so much as indicating the plurality of the image as a kind of
resonance form – that is, a differential, imaginary form that allows us
to describe as a singularity that which is actually a dynamic plurality
of shared multiple elements that “resonate” or move between one
form, state, or sense and another. On this level, each modality of the
image (painting, film, literature, music, etc.) is a distinct resonance
form that produces flocculations of sensual material and exposes
to us and in us different zones of sensual intensity. If the visual,
linguistic, or musical image resonates between the different senses
and between perceptual and signifying sense – and if its secretions
of sensual material are capable of touching us, its floccula capable of
enveloping and penetrating us, of getting under and pulsing beneath
the skin, of drawing us in, and of moving us – it does so in relation
to that other resonance form that takes part in the general com-
merce, communication, and partage of the senses that constitute
the watery ground of the image: namely, that which, for want of a
better term, is called the imagination.
For Nancy, it is clear that the imagination does not refer merely to
the psychic potential of subjective consciousness. Subjective con-
sciousness consists in the conceptual survey that fixes upon objec-
tive points in its range of vision, and as such is described by Nancy
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as a “dry” extension across a static visual field/plain (“la conscience

éveillée dispose d’une profondeur de champ”; Nancy 2011: 82). The
imagination, on the other hand, consists in visions (having to do with
the mimetic faculty) born to the surface out of the mixing or methexis
of the material secretions of the image and of the resonant frequen-
cies of our own bodily senses. As such, the imagination is described
as a dynamic, fluid medium in which floccula of sensual material
76

are suspended in moving, glistening ripples that push depth to the

 Soundings

surface: “the consciousness or impressions […] of the image consist

in the surface upon which depth floats in glistening ripples” (Nancy
2011: 82). In this conception of the imagination, it is as though the
depths of consciousness become a secretion of the body, dividing
off from, and exposed through, the senses, moved through and
by the resonating body: “the I ‘think’ no longer stays fixed upon
its point but is rather exposed, pushed outside and coming back
towards the self, it is literally moved not before but in resonance:
no longer punctum caecum but corpus sensitivus” (Nancy 2011:
78). The imagination, then, is a resonance form that not only moves
between surface and depth, mimesis and methexis. In being drawn
outward towards the material secretions of image and inwards by
the resonant frequencies of our own senses, the imagination is also
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a resonance form that moves between exteriority and interiority, and

thus represents a kind of visual faculty that operates as though it
were an auditory one:

the ability to grasp or produce images […] would seem to

represent a kind of vision operating as a mode of listening:
a vision that would experience in a sight the movement of its
rising in me and its return towards me: the tone, the vibration,
the relation of arrival and withdrawal that the sonorous seems
to guard for itself is played out or resonates in the silence that
the image claims. (Nancy 2011: 77)

The to and fro movement (the “partage” as sharing or coalescence

and dividing off) between the image as a resonance form that both
secretes and dissolves in the “concentric waves” of its “elemen-
tal materiality” and the imagination as a resonance form that both
propagates, and moves in relation to, these waves, constitutes the
watery ground of the image (Nancy 2011: 76). This watery ground,
as Nancy states quite simply with the equation, “le fond des choses,
ou la resonance des formes (‘the ground of things, or the resonance
of form’),” is none other than the resonance among multiple reso-
nances of these forms (Nancy 2011: 76). It is this that we see in the
image of the philosopher’s body swimming: the body as “corpus
sensitivus,” the form that moves in the resonance of the watery ele-
ment, that propagates its resonance outward in the form of concen-
tric waves and inward by the ear that receives lappings from below
and trickles from above.
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Here, a sounding of the discursive forms that move Nancy’s

thought between palpable, sometimes beautiful, images of water
and philosophically abstract descriptions of resonance might give
rise to another image, that of Nietzsche’s Thales. According to
Nietzsche, Thales claimed that “the world is water,” translating the
metaphysical and abstract in terms of a physical metaphor that is
palpable and graspable, simply because he lacked the philosophi-
77

cal vocabulary to describe it otherwise (Nietzsche 1962: 45). But

 Adrienne Janus

it is not merely a deficit of philosophical vocabulary, or a desire to

invert the traditionally “dry” terms of philosophical discussion with
more palpable “wet” ones, that underlies Nancy’s description of the
ground of the image as water. Nancy has written of the need for
contemporary philosophy to do more than simply signify, name or
deconstruct truth, the need for a new philosophical style – one that
would force open (frayer) multiple paths, suspensions, and collisions
in thought and writing in order to present the sense of the world that
is in excess of signification. In indicating the modus operandi of this
style of writing, Nancy cites Gérard Granel’s description of style as a
mode of writing that would “suddenly dip into the flux of language’s
possibilities, modify the current, provoke a collision […] and give birth
to waves of thought” (1993b: 37). In this regard, one might specu-
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late that Nancy’s thinking of the image both in terms of water and
resonance intends to provoke collisions not only between the visual,
tactile, and auditory domains of art, but also between philosophical
aesthetics and quantum physics. For the resonance of physical and
mental energies that make up the imagination, the resonance of
sensual and material energies that make up the image – the ener-
gies that grant luminous resonance to the visual image, sonorous
resonance to the auditory image, and linguistic resonance to the
poetic image, as well as the resonance between all of these – are all,
in a world where philosophical aesthetics meets quantum physics,
singular multiplicities of waves and particles in resonance, atoms
sharing electrons, secret elements of a world that is there in all parts
and that can be materialized as the elemental waves and particles
of water that constantly coalesce and divide off. This is perhaps part
of the reason why, in Nancy’s thought, visual images, catalyzed by
the resonant ebb and flow of the imagination, take on a fluidity that
laps against (rippling, beating, and rubbing against) the zone of the
sonorous. And this is in part why, as we shall explore in the next
sounding, the liquid sonorities of the musical or sonorous image take
on a viscosity that allows these to stick or be fixed to bodily images
of painting and opera.

Sounding 2. Music: au fond des corps, à fleur de peau

Nancy’s writing on music tends to produce “soft” collisions between
the methexical, contagious energies of music as sound waves that
envelope and penetrate the listener, and embodied visual images
that refract and absorb these energies. In these collisions (which
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suggest some of the force attending the resonance forms that

emerge in the partage of the senses), the watery element that had
been so prominent in Nancy’s discussion of the image seems to
disappear. The Ground of the Image, for example, ends with an op-
eratic finale: Act three of Verdi’s La Traviata, at precisely the moment
where the musical and visual images make contact, the moment
when Violetta offers Alfredo her portrait, and also the moment when
78

she and the music expire. In Nancy’s most extended meditation on

 Soundings

music and ­listening, À L’Écoute, the music of Wagner, Stravinksy,

and Mozart also appears refracted through visual images. Mozart’s
Clarinet Concerto is “heard” through a dialogue between Jean-Louis
Comolli and Francis Marmande from the film, Le Concert de Mozart
(Nancy 2007: 33), a dialogue that itself serves to illustrate Nancy’s
criticism of the tendency to diffuse the energies of musical sense by
talking about it as though it were linguistic signification. More inter-
estingly, in the coda to Listening, Nancy offers us Isolde’s famous
“Mild und Leise” aria as a “reply” to Titian’s painting of Venus and
an organ player (2007: 46) (Figure 1). Here, the musical dissolution
of Wagnerian liebestod – heard in the final lines of the text that mix
Nancy’s words with that of the aria, where “the breath of death
that becomes the melody that resounds and that will mingle with,
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and resolve into, the mass of waves, the thunder of noises, in the
All breathing with the breath of the world” – is refracted through
and against Nancy’s opening meditation on the voluptuous belly of
Titian’s Venus, “the very place where his music comes to resonate”
(the possessive pronoun for our purposes referring both to Titian’s
organ player and to Wagner) (2007: 46, 45). In this refraction of the
auditory against the visual, Nancy is in part offering the embodied
mass of Titian’s fleshy Venus as a buffer against Wagner’s mass of
sound waves, a bulkhead against the breaking force of the envelop-
ing waves of sound that, in Nietzsche’s description of the same
moment of Tristan and Isolde, dissolve the vitality of living bodies as
sacrificial offerings to the metaphysical energies of the Will:

Who would be able to perceive the third act of Tristan and

Isolde, without any aid of word and image, purely as a tremen-
dous symphonic movement, without expiring […] Suppose
a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart
chamber of the world Will, and felt the roaring desire […] as
a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into
mist – how could he fail to break suddenly? (1967: 126–7)

Musical sound waves, however, can only cause bodies to break

suddenly if their own resonant frequencies are simple and static
enough to be identical to the resonant frequencies of a sustained
musical tone – as in the glass shattered when the opera diva holds
the high note, as in the human being conceived (by Schopenhauer,
Wagner, and the early Nietzsche here) as “a hollow glass globe” bro-
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ken suddenly by the thundering current of Wagner’s infinite melody,

that copy of Schopenhauer’s Will (Schopenhauer 1958: 279).4 As
Nancy well knows, and as the later Nietzsche realized in his cri-
tique and repudiation of Wagner, the antidote to what Nietzsche
referred to as the “Wagnerian sickness” of metaphysical dissolu-
tion in music is to re-endow the human with the complex, multiple
resonances of his embodied, earth-bound senses. In this regard,
79

Nancy presents us with the visual image of the earth-bound body of

 Adrienne Janus
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Figure 1
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). Venus, Cupid and an Organist. Canvas (around 1550). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
© Erich Lessing.

Titian’s Venus in part as a buffer against the disembodied, sonorous

flows of Wagner’s music, a buffer whose languid weight seems both
to bear down upon and rise up from the divan like a fleshy white
mushroom sprouting from the brown earthy folds enveloping the
divan upon which Venus lies listening. The overwhelming sound
waves of Wagner’s music, refracted through the visual image of the
earth-bound, listening body of Titian’s Venus, will at most (as the
later Nietzsche said) make us “break into a sweat” or, to use Nancy’s
terms, touch us lightly, à fleur de peau, with the strange intimacy of
the cherub whose hand caresses the glistening ripples of Venus’
flesh just above her left breast, as though to feel the rhythms of her
heart as he whispers in her ear (Nietzsche 1967: 157).5
But, as we have said already, the embodied visual image of Titian’s
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Venus is only in part a buffer against the mass of sonorous waves

of Wagner’s music. For with Titian’s Venus Nancy also presents us
with the visual image of a mode of listening that is different to that of
Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the early Nietzsche, indeed different to
the whole Western (Helleno-Christian) tradition of musico-theological
listening since Plato: listening as an opening to the contagious,
methexical energies of musical presence, an exposure to the sen-
80

sual presence of the world, without the kind of musical dissolution

 Soundings

Nietzsche heard in Wagner’s music; without, in other words, “the

effluvia and fluxes of a sacrifice that sanctifies [by the] sweat, water,
and blood; tears, sighs, and cries” of Dionysus and Christ, where
“the body loses its form and sense […] sublimated into smoke,
evaporated in fog” (Nancy 2008a: 77). This “sacrificial” tradition of
musical listening, one that is still alive in the musical hermeneutics
that characterize most academic discourse, requires the individual
to sublimate his or her own bodily resonance (and the movement
that music may effect upon our bodies) to the movements of the
spirit, and to channel the ephemeral flow of musical energies through
the soul or mind’s ear in order to fix these flows as ideational (visual
or spatial) forms – Plato’s harmony of the spheres, Augustine’s
contemplation of the divine heavens, Schopenhauer’s Will, logos,
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signification, meaning, etc.6 For Nancy, listening exposes each sin-

gular human being as a matrix of complex, multiple resonances, a
resonance form that mixes interior bodily resonances (“the body …
comes to hear is blood, its murmurs, its heart”) and an “an exteriority
that is spaced in all senses of the term, and that the ear hears along
with sound, as the opening of a world”) (1993b: 135). But if musical
listening for Nancy opens up the space of a world with the sound
that envelops and penetrates us, and if this world extends in space
as well as time, it is not the world of the spirit, but that of the body,
the body born in the resonance of Venus’ belly that Nancy refers
to here: “In this resonance, the inside and outside open onto each
other. […] The ear opens onto the belly, or rather the ear even opens
up the belly, and it is here that the eye resonates” (2007: 45). In this
image of audiovisual resonance, where both ear and eye are directed
downwards to the earth-bound resonance that opens up the belly,
Nancy is not only revising the image of musico-theological listening
that Plato offers us in the Timaeus, where the god gives humans
a sense of hearing that “begins in the head and ends in the place
where the liver is situated,” and thereby opens a channel to the gift of
harmony, offered by the muses to bring heavenly order to the orbits
of the soul against the “mighty river” of the turbulent world of sensa-
tions (Plato, Timaeus, 1997: 67b, 43b). He is also offering an image
of “another methexis, one in which the mimesis of sharing would
efface […] sacrifice” (Nancy 2003: 77). Here, the watery element
of musical sacrifice is absorbed by the body and returned to the
ground of the image from which Venus’ luminous body is born. The
sonorous mass of waves of Wagner’s musical flow beat up against,
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mingle with, and resolve into the viscous visual mass, the glistening
waves, of Venus’ rippling belly, and flow into the rippling folds of
fabric that cascade down from the divan, down again into the secret
element of water that is the ground of the image. What Nancy offers
us in asking us to attend to the resonance of music in Titian’s paint-
ing, then, is the mimetic image of our own bodily resonance, our own
“corpus sensitivus” opening to the methexical energies of musical
81

waves of sound rendered as the particles and waves of luminosity

 Adrienne Janus

in the painter’s canvas. Here, water reemerges from where it always

already was, as the sensual excess of our passage through that part
of the world offered through Wagner’s music, Titian’s painting, and
Nancy’s words.

Sounding 3. Né de la dernière pluie7

In the image, the ground is distinguished by being doubled. It

is at once the profound depth of a possible shipwreck and the
surface of the luminous sky. (Nancy 2005: 13)

The Sun has its glory, I don’t deny it, but it’s essentially from
the moisture that we derive our inspiration. Living in a cot-
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tage couched in a scrap of woodlands […], I have my ways

of knowing that rain is our genesis, no less than the sun.
(Harrison 1994: 11)

To conclude these soundings of the watery element in Nancy’s

thinking of the image and of music, I would like to present an offering
to Nancy, an offering that in part doubles or reprises Nancy’s notion
of the auditory as a place of election for the partage of the senses,
and a place of election for the offerings of art, as the inspiration
and expiration heard in the “sonorous uprisings” of breath which
aisthesis and audio share in their etymological origin.8 In this offering,
presented by the first two stanzas of Seamus Heaney’s poem, the
resonance of aisthesis, its inspirational expiration, is precipitated in
the world as rain, rain as a resonance form born of the secretions
(the partage, sharing, coalescence, and dividing off) of earth and
sky, rain as the audiovisual-tactile image of birth to presence as a
slipping away of presence, rain as the rhythmical, sonorous beat of
truth exposed in the skin, and of art as the drop of rain on the apple
offered by the girl who succeeds the muses.

Gifts of Rain, Seamus Heaney

Cloudburst and steady downpour now

for days.
Still mammal,
straw-footed in the mud,
he begins to sense weather
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by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood

licks over stepping stones
and goes uprooting.
He fords
his life by sounding.
82

Soundings.
 Soundings

Notes
1. When French text is referenced in the bibliography, the transla-
tions into English are mine.
2. “à fleur de” – at the edge of, just above, or just breaking through
the surface of
3. “Pellicule expeausée” is Nancy’s neologism that plays upon “pel-
licule exposeé” (exposed film) and “peau” (skin).
4. In The World as Will and Representation, the work of musical
metaphysics that inspired both Wagner and the early Nietzsche
of The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer uses the image of the
hollow glass globe to describe the human being as phenomenal
container of the metaphysical Will: “as soon as we enter into
ourselves in order … to know ourselves fully by directing our
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knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we

find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of
which a voice speaks” (1958: 279).
5. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche’s strongest critique of Wagner,
he compares the light, dancing cadences of Bizet’s opera to the
liquid pustules or “musical polyps” of Wagner’s infinite melody,
writing: “How harmful for me is this Wagnerian orchestral tone! I
call it sirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat” (1967: 157).
6. From classical and early Christian antiquity to the present day
(most prominently in academic discourse), the preference to lis-
ten to music through the ear of the mind, in the mode of a spiritual
or intellectual exercise, rather than through the ear of the body,
as something that can “ban logos or move our bodies without
our conscious will” (Abbate 2004: 532), is well documented. See
Quasten (1983) and Abbate (2004).
7. “Né de la dernière pluie,” literally, “born of the last rain,” in the
figurative sense means “born yesterday”.
8. In “Musique,” Nancy offers this etymology of aisthesis: “The
register of sound – in which the word aisthesis has its origin […]
aiô, to hear; aêmi, aisthô, to breathe, to exhale, and the Latin
audio” (1993b: 134–5).

References
Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music – Drastic or Gnostic.” Critical Inquiry
30(3): 505–36.
Harrison, Robert. 1994. Rome, la pluie. Paris: Flammarion.
Irigaray, Luce. 1991. Nietzsche: Marine Lover. Trans. Gillian C. Gill.
Senses & Society

New York: Columbia University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993a. The Birth to Presence. Trans. Brian
Holmes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993b. Le sens du monde. Paris: Editions Galilée.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1996. The Muses. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2003. A Finite Thinking. Simon Sparks (ed.).
83

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

 Adrienne Janus

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2005. The Ground of the Image. Trans. Jeff Fort.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008a. Corpus. Trans. Richard Rand. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008b. “Claire Denis: Icon of Ferocity.” In Peter
Enright and James Phillips (eds), Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical
Approaches to the New Cinema. pp. 160–70. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2011. “L’image: mimesis et methexis.” In
Emmanuel Alloa (ed.), Penser l’image, pp. 69–91. Paris: Les
presses du réel.
Downloaded by [University of Aberdeen] at 02:42 24 January 2016

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1962. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the

Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. South Bend, IN: Gateway
Editions.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of
Wagner. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage
Books.
Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis/
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.
Quasten, Johannes. 1983. Music and Worship in Pagan and
Christian Antiquity. Washington, DC: National Association of
Pastoral Musicians.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1958. The World as Will and Representation,
Vol. 1. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Books.

Filmography
Grün, Marc. 2003. Le corps du philosophe. Le meilleur des mondes
productions, France 3 Alsace, TV 10 Angers.
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