Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and The "Anti-Ocular" Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory

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Adrienne Janus
Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy

and the “Anti-Ocular”
Turn in Continental
Philosophy and Critical
Theory
I T IS WITH A CERTAIN SELF-CONSCIOUS IRONY that one embarks on an

analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work À L’Écoute (2002)/Listening (2007) as
a culminating moment in what might be called the “anti-ocular” turn in critical
theory. For to use the term “theory” already positions one within the “ocularcen-
tric” discourse that Jean-Luc Nancy and a certain strain of Continental philoso-
phers or “theorists” would like to turn against. The etymology of the word “the-
ory,” from the Greek θεωρία “theõria,” conflates seeing with thinking — a s “looking
at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, insight or beholding” — and indicates the
dominance of the visual paradigm in Western thought (OED). Martin Heidegger,
one of the major figures at the interstices of Continental philosophy and critical
theory, and one of the major touchstones in the critique of the “ocularcentrism”
of Western thought, provides this etymology for the term:
The word “theory” stems from the Greek theõrein . . . . The verb theõrein grew out of the coalescing of
two root words, thea and horaõ. Thea (c. theatre) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something
shows itself. Plato names this aspect in which what presences shows what it is, eidos. To have seen this
aspect, eidenai, is to know wissen. The second root word in theõrein, horaõ, means: to look at something
attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. . . . In theõria transformed into contemplatio there comes to
the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compart-
mentalizes. (“Science and Reflection” 163, 166)
Heidegger’s attempt to overcome Western metaphysics, in which “that which
is to be grasped by the eye makes itself normative in knowing,” involves a turn
towards listening and acoustic and aural metaphors (166). Against the domi-
nant modes of thinking that entail “a looking-at that sunders and compartmental-
izes,” a compartmentalization from which emerge the dichotomies of the subject-
object paradigm, Heidegger offers a triumvirate of auditory concepts — “Hören,”
“Horchen,” and “Gehören” (to listen, to hearken, to belong)— to indicate the
Comparative Literature 63:2

DOI 10.1215/00104124-1265474 © 2011 by University of Oregon
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LISTENING: JEAN-LUC NANCY / 183
belonging of Dasein to Being (166).1 To a certain extent, À L’Écoute/Listening recalls

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 Heideg
ger’s critique of the dominance of the visual paradigm suggested by the term “the-
ory” 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 per-
ceptual, 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 the-
ory 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 possibili-
ties opened up by the turn towards listening as a mode of attending to the multi-
ple resonances of sense — where “sense” touches upon, and resonates with, all reg-
isters 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 pres-
ent (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”: “Heide-
gger 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. . . . Thus it is questionable whether through reflection [Reflexion] on ‘ourselves’ we
ever find our self ” (xxxii). While the English term “mindfulness” goes some way towards avoiding the
unwanted association with the ocularcentrism of Western metaphysics, the burden of communicat-
ing the sensual, perceptual, and dynamic aspects of the “Sinn” (or “sense”) in Besinnung is left to the
reader’s interpretation of passages such as the following: “Coming from the overcoming of ‘meta-
physics,’ mindfulness [Besinnung] must nevertheless touch upon the hitherto and cannot become
inflexible as the finished product of a usuable presentation either in a ‘doctrine’ or in a ‘system,’ or as
‘exhortation’ or ‘edification’” (Mindfulness 17).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 184
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
a contemporary genealogy of “anti-ocularcentric” thinkers — those who, whether
deconstructionist, feminist, or postcolonialist, offer a critique of the “ocularcen-
tric” paradigms of Western metaphysics (paradigms built around the rational, self-
identical subject of reflexive consciousness, a subject whose mastery and dominance
over self and world involves a “vision” that objectifies all it identifies and that silences
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 think-
ing or being through attendance to the “sense” of listening.
In Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century

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 À L’Écoute/Listening postdates Jay’s work.) Jay quite
self-consciously and unapologetically provides a “synoptic survey” of ocularcen-
trism 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 dis-
course gained intensity in France from the 1930s onwards through the importa-
tion 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 André Breton, philosophers like Jean-
Paul 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-François 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 ocularcen-
trism 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 philosophi-
cal 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 them-
selves 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” (À L’Écoute 14).
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 “anti-
ocularcentric” 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 — t hat attempts to
reintegrate modes of sensual perception excluded by ocularcentrism and the con-
ceptual 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 “anesthe-
sia of the senses” that is associated with ocularcentricism (À L’Écoute 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 tra-
ditional 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’économie politique de la musique (1977)/Noise: A Political Economy of
Music (1985). The dominant mode of scientific thought based in visual conceptu-
alization (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 con-
struct 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 neighbor-
hood, the world” (À L’Écoute 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 À L’Écoute, Listening (2007) by Charlotte Mandell, 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.
both to noise as the base condition of embodied life itself and to music as the
first structural formulation of socio-political forms yet to emerge: “This book is
not an attempt at a multidisciplinary study, but rather a call to theoretical indisci-
pline, with an ear to sound matter as the herald of society” (Noise 5). (Interestingly
enough, only in the English edition does Attali feel compelled to issue this excuse
for his otocentric indisciplinarity.) To attend to noise and music in this way, then,
is to engage in a kind of indisciplined prophecy, a kind of (extra) sensory percep-
tion of the form of the economic, social, and political structures and events yet
to emerge. The music of Bach and Mozart, for example, announces the dreams
of social harmony of the nascent bourgeoisie well before the political theorists of
the nineteenth century (14). Similarly, the noise and violence of Stravinsky’s Rite of
Spring and Luigi Russolo’s futurist L’Art des bruits in 1913 announce the war and
violence that followed months later (25). The same theoretical indiscipline that
Attali’s otocentrism brings to Structuralist Marxism also seems to open his field of
practice to other indisciplines — specifically, to Attali’s writings that fuse fiction
and fantasy with the scholarly essay. Indeed, if we take “indisciplinarity” to mean
the tendency to open scholarly argument to creative meanderings and flights of
fantasy, “indisciplinarity,” rather than “interdisciplinarity,” seems to be a common
trait among those with otocentric tendencies.
Such indisciplinarity applies also to Didier Anzieu, who is Lacan’s more eccen-
tric otocentric counterpart in the field of psychoanalysis — at once the author of
scholarly articles and a fictional biography of Samuel Beckett (Beckett et le Psycha-
nalyste) based on imaginary psychoanalytic soundings between Anzieu as analyst
and Beckett as analysand. If Lacan figures in Jay’s “disciplined” genealogy as an
author who offers a critique of Cartesian self-reflection whereby the mirror-stage
of ego identification constitutes a non-self-identical self in a gaze that represents
the self as an imaginary other, Anzieu posits an auditory stage of self-reflection
prior to this self-constitution: “We would like to call attention to the existence . . .
of a sonorous mirror, or an audio-phonic skin, and to its function in the psyche’s
acquisition of the capacity to signify, then to symbolize” (“L’Enveloppe” 162). The
signifying capacity of this audio-phonic skin, furthermore, is based in the more
fundamental capacity of the self as a sonorous envelope, a “moi-peau” (skin-ego),
to filter, reflect, and distort epidermal sensations as resonances emitted by self
and environment: “The ego constitutes itself as a containing envelope, as a pro-
tective barrier and filter of resonance, by the transmission of epidermal sensa-
tions and by the internalization and identification of pellicular perceptions” (161).
While unnamed and unacknowledged in Nancy’s À L’Écoute, Anzieu’s concept of
the “moi-peau” (skin-ego) as sonorous envelope of the self attuned to the reso-
nance of signifying and sensate sense has obvious parallels to Nancy’s notion of
the self as “corps sonore” (resonant body).
Attention to the occlusion of bodies and gendered bodily difference links Laca-
nian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, and feminism in the critique of
what Jay has termed “phallogocularcentrism.” In Jay’s genealogy, however, figures
such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva emerge as affiliate mem-
bers of the dominant — “seminal,” in Jay’s words — anti-ocularcentric discourse of
Lacan and Derrida, who in his view provide the critical seeds for deconstructing
the unitary self-identity of the Cartesian subject and logocentrism (493). This sub-
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
belonging to phallogocularcentric patriarchal culture, but also attempt to move
past this discourse by turning towards listening as a mode of audio-tactile apper-
ception of psycho-somatic difference.6 Thus, for example, Irigaray requires that
“one must listen to her [female language] with another ear, as to an ‘other sense’
[“autre sens”], one that is always in the process of weaving itself, always embracing
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
to sense — sense as sensual perception, sense as dynamic, directional, impulsive
sense, and, perhaps least of all, sense as meaning.
Finally, postcolonial thinkers like Edouard Glissant might also be added to this
genealogy. Although Glissant’s notion of “oral literature” deconstructs the speech-
writing dichotomy associated with logo-ocular-centrism in ways similar to feminist
notions of “écriture feminine,” he doesn’t go quite as far in the development of an
explicit philosophy of listening, perhaps because of the difficulty of grounding a
6
Indeed, Jay fails fully to explore the limitations of Derrida’s flirtation with listening, and the pos-
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 hos-
tage 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, The Ear of the Other 51).
7
“Il faudrait l’écouter 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 défaire 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 becom-
ing fixed, immobilized,” This Sex 29).
philosophy of listening in a way that would give renewed visibility to, and allow the
re-appropriation of, an embodied presence whose subordination as the exotic
“other” has always been based upon visual difference. As such, Glissant’s notion of
orality draws attention to the dynamism of an embodied “audio-visual” presence
that grounds the voice “in the almost semaphoric evolutions through which the
body implies and supports speech. The voice draws energy from the body’s posi-
tion and perhaps, because of that, exhausts the same energy” (Le Discours Antillais
237–38). Nevertheless, Glissant’s notion that “oralittérature” involves not merely
language or speech but also the resonance of the embodied voice that both sup-
ports and perforates written literature — a voice whose circulation through audi-
tory space is based upon the “detours” that retrace the dislocations and circula-
tions of the Antillian bodily presence in history — has affinities with Nancy’s
notion of the “timbre” that resonates below, between, and through the “voice” in
the incessant reverberations and re-circulations of “renvoi” (send-off or feedback)
that constitute auditory space.
In the genealogy of those eccentrics who attempt to formulate a positive model
of a philosophy based upon listening, Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-
Labarthe form a “double-entente.” Although one of their earliest collaborations,
L’Absolu littéraire: théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (1978)/The Literary
Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988), makes an appear-
ance in Jay’s anti-ocularcentric genealogy, Lacoue-Labarthe, like Nancy, is not
limited by the obsessive desire merely to deconstruct the sign or its “logocular-
centric” affiliates, the image, symbol, emblem ( Jay 498). Thus, in “The Echo of the
Subject,” Lacoue-Labarthe not only deconstructs mimetic representation and the
modes of subjective self-reflection associated with it. He also suggests that rhythm,
as a dynamic auditory presence, is prior to the emergence of any kind of visual
representation or figure. The emergence and (inevitable) disappearance of rhythm
from auditory perception of rhythm, furthermore, is the condition of possibility
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
or the repeated . . . reveals that which, by definition, cannot be revealed — t he
imitation of repetition” (“L’Echo du Sujet” 285). It is to perpetuate this analysis of
the rhythmical constitution of subjectivity that Jean-Luc Nancy’s À L’Écoute invokes,
and repeatedly returns to, Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe: “I am interested finally
in nothing but the resonance of a voice, a voice that prolongs its reverberation in
the thought of Lacoue-Labarthe (is his name not already an echo of itself? La . . .
la . . . : he hears me . . .)” (27–28). For Nancy, the name Lacoue-Labarthe itself
suggests the rhythm of auditory self-reflection and self-expansion through rep-
etition; Lacoue-Labarthe becomes the “ear of the other” that the listening subject
of Nancy’s À L’Écoute will use to repeat, reflect, and expand itself.
Nancy’s desire to overturn “the traditional sensual hierarchy” that gives pri-
macy to vision can perhaps best be understood as a response to three kinds of
limitations attending ocularcentrism. The first is the limitations of the subject-
object 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
capacity of discourse to produce meaning indicates the second limitation: a phi-

losophy or world view for which signification is the final perspective, whether given
by the Cartesian cogito, Enlightenment thought, transcendental or instrumental
reason, or hermeneutics in general. The final limitation of a world view or philoso-
phy in which sense-making as meaning is the final perspective is that it inevitably
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 con-
ceptual 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 À L’Écoute 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).
I. The “Senses” of Listening: Beyond Signification as the Final Perspective

Before writing À L’Écoute, Nancy had already voiced his anger and frustration at
the limitations of signification as the final perspective, not only of philosophical
thinking, but also of all academic discourse. In the preface to The Birth to Pres-
ence (1993), he writes: “A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything
but anger, absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no
other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of
signification” (5). The obsession with sense as meaning, with signification as the
ever-more unstable ground of human existence (as something which was sup-
posed to be found, mastered, or constructed by the rational subject and there-
fore something just as easily lost, dispossessed, or deconstructed along with the
rational subject), is for Nancy a philosophical and existential dead-end. In works
such as Une Pensée finie (1990)/A Finite Thinking (2003) and Être singulier pluriel
(1996)/Being Singular Plural (2000), Nancy attempts to re-think the concept of
“sense” as something more and other than meaning as sign, but as that which
makes signification possible: “sense” as “the sense of a shared worldly and mate-
rial existence which always already makes sense, and thus pre-exists language or
any possibility of symbolic determination” ( James 9).
It is not surprising that Nancy, in his effort to re-think the concept of sense,
should go back to Nietzsche, that sensual philosopher whose work, similarly marked
by an attempt to move past the limitations of Western metaphysics, provides the
epigraphs that open both Une Pensée finie/A Finite Thinking and Être singulier pluriel/
Being Singular Plural. “L’existence a-t-elle un sens quelconque?” (Une Pensée finie 9;
Does existence have a sense?) from The Gay Science (“Hat denn das Dasein über-
haubt einen Sinn?” S 357) leads into the question that opens Nancy’s Une Pensée
finie: “Qu’est-ce que le sens? C’est-à-dire, quel est le ‘sens’ de ce mot, ‘sens’, et quelle
est la réalité 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
Être 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
Nancy with the opportunity explicitly to critique the ocularcentrism of Western
metaphysics — its tendency to distance itself from the earth and shared sensual life
in an obsessive drive towards a transcendent viewpoint from which it can impose
meaning upon the world:
Are we finally going to hear this lesson, have we perhaps finally become capable of hearing it — or
indeed is it impossible for us to hear anything else? And can we think an earth and a human as they
are, that is to say nothing but earth and human, and therefore not any of the horizons hidden behind
these names, none of the “perspectives” or “views” in view of which we have disfigured humans and
made them despair? (Être singulier pluriel 11)
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 passés et les à-venir, les vivants et les
morts, les inanimés, les pierres, les plantes, les clous, les dieux — et les ‘hommes’”
(Être 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. À L’Écoute 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 multi-
plicity of meaning that characterizes most poststructuralist thought, and decon-
struction in particular.8 Nancy, 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 — a ltogether 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 —
“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
not open onto an abyss of endless deconstructive play.
The fundamental resonance of “sense” as intelligible sense, signifying sense, or
meaning, for example, is “timbre,” the non-signifying resonance that opens and
closes, envelopes and penetrates, communication itself. The fundamental reso-
nance of “sense” as perceptual, sensual sense and affect, as both self-reflexive pro-
prioception and self-expansive apperception, is “renvoi” (send-back, reverbera-
tion, feedback), the offering and return of resonance that envelopes the “corps
sonore” of the listening self and opens and closes the listening self as a spatially
(dis)oriented being in the world. The fundamental resonance of “sense” as sense
of direction, movement, and impulse is both “attaque” and “tendre”: “attaque”
as the arrival of a sonorous presence, an acoustic event that hits and penetrates
the listener; “tendre” as in “tendre l’oreille,” to prick up one’s ears, to be drawn
or pulled in attendance to a resonance that is not immediately accessible. The
movement between “attaque” (attack) and “tendre” (attendance) opens listening
towards a temporally orientated being in the world. All these fundamental reso-
nances, of course, resonate with each other, touch upon each other, envelope and
penetrate each other. For, as Nancy writes, “to listen is always to be on the edge of
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 reso-
nant sense” (À L’Écoute 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 reso-
nance: “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” (À L’Écoute 81–82).
Sense as Timbre

Nancy’s fundamental grounding of timbre in the sonorous body distinguishes
his use of the term, as the resonance of a differential relation between speech
and writing, from, for example, Lyotard’s “voice as timbre” or Derrida’s notion
of “archi-écriture.” For Lyotard, the voice as timbre suggests a differential relation
between phone and lexis; lexis is the articulate voice of logos that “communicates,
responds, debates, concludes, decides . . . tells stories” (135), and phone is inarticu-
late sound — not meaningless noise, but the condition of possibility for sense (per-
ceptual sense, affect, and meaning). According to Lyotard, “Phone is a semeion, a
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 pre-
mature death announcements have made sense-making even more central — perhaps even more
obsessive — t han it came to be in the philosophical past. For the difference between the traditional
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 obliga-
tion of commenting on his or her primary sense-making operations” (83).
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” (À L’Écoute 78). As timbre takes on rhythm, in other words, it becomes
more consistent or articulate, and its resonance is pulled towards diction (similar to
Lyotard’s lexis) as an inarticulate formulation that “plays some part in modulating
or affecting the semantic” (67). But for Nancy, diction is primarily non-semantic.
Its affective presence manifests itself not only in the first (proto-linguistic) articu-
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, round-
ness, coarseness), taste (bitter, sweet), even evocations of smells. In other words,
timbre resounds with and in the totality of perceptible registers” (Baas, qtd. in À
L’Écoute 55). Nancy’s timbre is the vibration of a sonorous materiality that “ani-
mates 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 some-
thing produced in the throat, a borborygmous” of the belly, a resonance that begins
before, continues after, penetrates and envelopes, the voice, speech, and writing
(À L’Écoute 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 différance of Derridean archi-écriture), but spatial: it is “sono-
rous matter [that] spreads out in itself and resounds in (or from) its own spacing”
(À L’Écoute 76–77). If Derrida’s différance leaves a surface trace, the spacing of Nan-
cy’s timbre has depth and edge, as “the furrow left in the air or on the page after
the concept dissolves” (À L’Écoute 49). This dissolution takes place in the listening
reader, who, as “corps sonore” (in Nancy’s revision of Freud’s “Verneinung”), swal-
lows or spits out the sonorous matter of the text.
Sense as Attaque and Tendre: Movement, Direction, Impulse, Time

The resonance of sense as the vibration of a sonorous materiality that “animates
the auditory apparatus as much as the phonatory apparatus” and “seizes all somatic
locations where the phenomenal voice resonates” (Baas, qtd. in À L’Écoute 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 Ger-
man 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 con-
ception of human freedom relates to Heidegger’s: “Freedom is an event, and though this event may be
assumed or affirmed, and only is 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’?”
“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
listener towards the resonance of an acoustic event, towards the resonance of a
possible sense that has not yet arrived. In so far as this sense of impulse or move-
ment 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 “être à
l’écoute” 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
receives a name” (75)—it recalls Heidegerrian listening to the call of being. In so
far as Nancy’s listening self is a being that listens to itself, that “attends its arrival
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 — p resent perception — r eten-
tion of Husserlian time-consciousness. For Husserl, however, the movement of
protention — present perception — retention (perceived as melody) is seized by
consciousness in the silent, frozen form of time-objects (Husserl 108). Thus, Nancy
claims, Husserl visualizes and objectifies melody. Similarly, for Heidegger, listen-
ing 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 listen-
ing self attends to the call that summons, convokes, and invokes sonorous pres-
ence 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 lis-
tening self — that “hollows out,” “envelopes or separates,” “loops,” “stretches out or
contracts” within and around the listening being (32), and is marked by a pul-
sive movement between the sonorous attack and the attendance to a resonance yet
to come — t he embodied time of listening necessarily opens into a resonant, vibra-
tional space. “Here,” Nancy suggests, “‘time becomes space,’ as sung in Wagner’s
Parsifal ” (À L’Écoute 33).
Sense as Renvoi: The Space of Listening

For Nancy, the resonant vibrational space of listening in which “time becomes
space” is not the closed vibrational space of the musical spirit (or Schopenhaue-
rian 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
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 (expan-
sion) 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 move-
ment 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 proprio-
ception, 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
“a coming and a passing, an extending (“s’étendre”) and a penetrating” (31). As
Nancy writes, “To listen is to enter into that spatiality by which, at the same time, I
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”
(À L’Écoute 33). As a result, the self opened by, and opening into, the space of listen-
ing cannot be described according to the dichotomies traditionally associated with
subjectivity: presence-absence, surface-depth. Rather, this self — a s the space of
the “corps sonore” (resonant body) through which and around which the renvoi
of sense takes place — has to be described according to a qualitative continuum
between diminuendo and crescendo, soft and hard, higher or lower frequencies,
expansive and contracting volumes. Finally, if this self as “corps sonore” is also a
“sujet à l’écoute” (listening subject) that cannot be described according to the sub-
ject-object dichotomies of Western metaphysics, what kind of subject is it?
II. The Listening Subject (“le sujet à l’écoute”)

Nancy’s attempt to develop an ontology of the listening subject presents an
interesting solution to the dominance of the ocularcentric subject-object dichot-
omy. For Nancy’s listening subject, if it is a subject at all, tends to dissolve, to fuse
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 cer-
tainly more textured — a nd, most interestingly, progressively larger and louder
in volume, diffusing itself through more acoustic space and more expansive fre-
quencies before its final diminuendo and return to itself as “corps sonore” (reso-
nant body), as a “body beaten by its sense of body, by what used to be called its soul”
(À L’Écoute 82). If one were to develop a typology of listening subjects in Nancy’s
text, there would be seven — the seven alluded to in the “septuple opening” that
Nancy suggests is the space of renvoi where a “self ” can take place. Of course these
seven types of listening subjects are not isolated instances: all resonate at one
and the same time in the space-time opened by listening.
“Un sujet se sent: c’est sa propriété et sa definition”

( À L’Écoute 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 of that
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 repre-
sents 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 Diapason

In classical music, the diapason is the interval of an octave, the consonance of
the highest and lowest notes on the musical scale. The listening subject as a diapa-
son, then, is attuned to, and in attendance to, the resonance of all its possible
(unknown or not yet accessible) intervals across the highest and lowest notes on
the musical scale (À L’Écoute 37). At this point, Nancy’s diapason subject risks asso-
ciating itself with classical musical constructs adopted by Schopenhauerian meta-
physics, in which all bodies of resonance, from the “lowest” resonances of mineral
and vegetable life to the “highest” resonances of human sense, are attuned as bass
notes to the melody in music as a copy of the Will.
The Listening Subject as Echo-Chamber

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 echo-
chamber” of the child born with his first cry (À L’Écoute 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 depar-
ture from musical metaphysics.
10
Listening allows Nancy to capture the multiple resonances of the self-reflexion of sense that con-
stitutes 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 ele-
gant formulation than the functionally analogous one developed in, for example, Une Pensée 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-même en tant que
sens. Ce mode, ce geste de se-saisir-soi-même en tant que sens fait le sens, le sens de tout sens. . . . Il en
va de meme pour l’autre sens du mot ‘sens’, pour son sens ‘sensible’: sentir, c’est nécessairement sentir
qu’il y a sensation. Le sentir ne sent rien s’il ne se sent sentir, tout comme le comprendre ne com-
prend rien s’il ne se comprend comprendre. L’’autre’ sens du mot n’est autre que selon cette mêmeté”
(14; the concept of sense implies that sense grasp itself as sense. This mode, this movement of self-
grasping as sense constitutes sense, the sense of all senses . . . . This applies in the same way to the
other sense of the word ‘sense,’ for ‘sensual’ sense: to sense is necessarily to sense that there is sensa-
tion. Sensing senses nothing if it doesn’t sense itself sensing, just as understanding understands noth-
ing if it doesn’t understand understanding. The ‘other’ sense of the word [sense] is other only accord-
ing to this sameness). Interestingly enough, in a footnote to this section Nancy recalls the German
term for “sense” (“Sinn”), a term more often than not inappropriately rendered as “meaning” in
English translations: “Déjà, Hegel admirait le double sens de ‘Sinn’ dans son Esthétique, comme il va
de soi” (15; Already, Hegel admired the double sense of ‘Sinn’ — in his Aesthetics, it goes without say-
ing). Nancy here suggests the necessity to attend anew to the multiple resonances of “sense” already
present in the original German texts, but too frequently silenced in English translations, not only of
Hegel but also of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
The Listening Subject as the Place of Resonance

The listening subject as a place of resonance, precisely because of its spatial, rather
than temporal, constitution, departs most strongly from the traditional philosophi-
cal subject in its absorption of what would be traditionally “objective” qualities:
the listening subject . . . is not a phenomenological subject, which means he is not a philosophical
subject, and, finally, he is perhaps not a subject at all, except as the place of resonance . . . . where a
voice is modulated in the vibration that pulls away from it as the singular of a cry, a call, or a song (a
“voice”): we must understand as that which sounds from a human throat without being language, as
that which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the
branches: the noise towards which we lend an ear . . . (À L’Écoute 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 acknowl-
edge 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,
to sense as affect and/or meaning.
The Listening Subject as Text

Nancy describes the listening subject as text as that resonance where it (the
text) “listens to itself [s’écoute], by listening to itself finds itself, and by finding
itself deviates from itself in order to resound further away, listening to itself before
hearing/understanding itself, and thus actually becoming its ‘subject,’ which is
neither the same as nor other than the individual subject who writes the text”
(À L’Écoute 68–69).
The listening subject as text thus does not merely refer to the listening subject
who writes the text, as in the writer who listens to and transcribes the “inner” or
“mental” voice that speaks to her. Nor does the text as listening subject refer merely
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’âme et corps, du
corps et de l’âmmmmm” (À L’Écoute 48–49; the substantial union of soul and body,
body and “âmmmmm”). 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.
The Listening Subject as the Attack of Time

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 fig-
ure: “what is a figure that is throbbed as well as stressed, broached by time [enta-
mée par le temps]? . . . What else is it but a subject — . . . Isn’t the subject the attack
of time?” (75) The subject as broached by (“entamé”) the attack of time is cut into,
and cut out of, penetrated, moved by and opened by, a rhythm that opens the
embodied space-time of the listening subject. This subject as “broached” by
rhythm is not associated with the rhythmical flow of consciousness, but with the
pulsive rhythms of dance — w ith “the friction of the thing beaten, between outside
and inside, in the reployment-deployment of the beginning of the dance” (75). Yet
it cannot be arrested and grasped as a form; it is a rhythm that is “moving and
fluid, syncopated, beaten out as a measure,” “that has already lost itself and that is
still expecting itself ” (À L’Écoute 75). The rhythm that bears the subject in a per-
petual movement between loss and expectation is also the rhythm that opens to
the “subject of subjects” . . . the subject as partage.
The Subject as Partage, or the “Subject of Subjects”

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 oth-
ers, (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” (À L’Écoute 79). Once again, the funda-
mental 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 oth-
ers in the “partage” (the division, limit, and resonant space between) of each being in its being-with-
another, is also developed in works such as Being Singular Plural, where we find this telling phrase:
“Il n’y a pas de sens si le sens n’est pas partagé, et cela, non pas parce qu’il y aurait une signification,
ultime ou première, que tous les étants auraient en commun, mais parce que le sens est lui-même le
partage de l’être” (Être Singulier Pluriel 20; There is no sense other than the sense that is shared
[partagé], 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 of partage and his use of the metaphor of
birth in works pre-dating À L’Écoute, see Christopher Fynsk’s foreword to Nancy’s The Inoperative
Community (1991).
III. The Listening Body as “corps sonore” (Resonant Body)

Nancy’s attention to the body as “corps sonore” (resonant body) is most promi-
nent in the second part of the text, a section that opens with a wonderfully phrased
dismissal or critique of the emphasis in Western metaphysics on signification
against perception, on meaning against physical sensation, on mind over body,
on the interpretation of language [logos, eidos] against listening to resonance. In
order for us to get over this “philosophical anesthesia or apathy” (59), this nega-
tion or loss of perception and sensation, of feeling and affect, our bodies must
in Nancy’s view have holes or be hollowed out; they have to be perforated, pene-
trated, stretched, strained, cut into, and out of. They have to be attacked by time,
stretched or diffused in space, or, when engaged in self-reflexive listening, “beaten
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 sono-
rous 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 belly-
mouth 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” (À L’Écoute 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 sensa-
tion of his own bodily experience, his body does not seem to compose its reso-
12
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 pre-
cisely the process that allows a self-identification built around the acknowledgement and accep-
tance of, indeed the identification with, the strangeness of the self to itself and to the world:
“L’intrus n’est pas autre que moi-même et l’homme lui-même. Pas un autre que le même qui n’en
finit pas de s’altérer, à la fois aiguisé et épuisé, denudé et suréquipé, intrus dans le monde aussi bien
qu’en soi-même, inquiétante poussée de l’étrange, 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 disquiet-
ing upsurge of the strange, conatus of an infinite excrescence,” “L’Intrus” 13).
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-
nance is a liquid medium. It is this relative absence of liquids, paradoxically
enough, that seems to underlie the relative absence of noise in Nancy’s embod-
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 com-
munication 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 of
water as a sound-medium. The first, turbulence, is characterized by chaotic, sto-
chastic (random) property changes and ranges from white noise to violent bursts
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 sec-
ond concept, infection, applies to both human and mechanical bodies: the noise
of laughter that moves one listening body to infect another, or the noise that
marks the presence of a virus in digital code — i n both cases noise-induced infec-
tion that blocks or causes potentially productive mutations in the flow of com-
munication or in the feedback of resonant sense associated with Nancy’s concept
of renvoi.13
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 thinking
entirely. But is there no way that noise could be productive to thinking? Such a
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 silence
of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone
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 would
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 is
open to an art of noise: not only Luigi Russolo’s Futurist L’Art des Bruits (Art of
Noise), or the “poèmes bruitistes” (noise poetry) of the Dadaists, but also poetry
slams, rock concerts, and so on).
Conclusion: Listening Beyond Nancy’s À L’Écoute

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 limita-
tions 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 tendanciel-
lement mimétique, et le sonore tendanciellement méthxique (c’est-à-dire dans l’ordre de la par-
ticipation, du partage ou de la contagion)” (À L’Écoute 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).
sense-making or meaning as the final perspective, the subject-object paradigm,

the occlusion of the body. There are historical and technological reasons as well.
One might mention, for example, the impact of the two World Wars on the pri-
macy of vision: “The invisibility of the enemy, and the retirement of troops under-
ground, destroyed any notion that war was a spectacle . . . ; [it] put a premium
upon auditory signals and seemed to make the war experience peculiarly subjec-
tive 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-
logical developments in auditory communication, in technologies of transmission
and reception. Thus, radio was developed in World War I to facilitate communica-
tion from the trenches; stereo was developed from the technology used by Ger-
man fighter pilots in World War II to “echolocate” targets made invisible by the
covering of British cloud and fog. These technological developments, in turn, con-
tributed to the mass dissemination of music, to what Nancy calls the “mondialisa-
tion” (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 listen-
ing rely on examples taken from the classical music tradition? How much does
the relative suppression of noise in his space of listening resemble a nineteenth-
century concert hall? Why does he not make use of concepts associated with
recent developments in music that would potentially be productive for the argu-
ment 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 Nor-
bert 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 aesthet-
ics 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 psy-
chic and social systems where it is not the subject but “communication [which]
communicates” (Luhmann 153), Sloterdijk is his otocentric counterpart. Sloter-
dijk’s Sphären (Spheres) trilogy develops a cosmology of listening that reincorpo-
rates 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 com-
munal soundscape. Ironically enough, insofar as Nancy’s listening does not fully
attend to the noise of our own soundscape, the accusation Sloterdijk issues may
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, render-
ing it deaf to that which sounds differently, to that which is new” (379).
The University of Aberdeen
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Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and The "Anti-Ocular" Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory

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Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy

I T IS WITH A CERTAIN SELF-CONSCIOUS IRONY that one embarks on an

Comparative Literature 63:2

belonging of Dasein to Being (166).1 To a certain extent, À L’Écoute/Listening recalls

In Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century

capacity of discourse to produce meaning indicates the second limitation: a phi-

I. The “Senses” of Listening: Beyond Signification as the Final Perspective

Sense as Timbre

Sense as Attaque and Tendre: Movement, Direction, Impulse, Time

Sense as Renvoi: The Space of Listening

II. The Listening Subject (“le sujet à l’écoute”)

“Un sujet se sent: c’est sa propriété et sa definition”

The Listening Subject as Diapason

The Listening Subject as Echo-Chamber

The Listening Subject as the Place of Resonance

The Listening Subject as Text

The Listening Subject as the Attack of Time

The Subject as Partage, or the “Subject of Subjects”

III. The Listening Body as “corps sonore” (Resonant Body)

Conclusion: Listening Beyond Nancy’s À L’Écoute

sense-making or meaning as the final perspective, the subject-object paradigm,

The University of Aberdeen

Anzieu, Didier. Beckett et le Psychanalyste. Paris: Mentha-Archimbaud, 1992. Print.

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