Listening (review)

Listening is a short but significant contribution to the Continental philosophy of music by one of France's leading thinkers. Dense and poetic, its prose is grounded in the rich post-phenomenological tradition, and this volume sets itself a challenging twofold task: to reunite sensation and understanding in the figure of listening, and to restore timbre (as resonance) back to its pride of place within the musical event.

The title essay, 'Listening', begins with the question of philosophy's limitations: whether it can approach listening in an appropriate manner: 'Is listening something of which philosophy is capable? Or . . . hasn't philosophy superimposed upon listening, beforehand and of necessity, or else substituted for listening, something else that might be more on the order of understanding?' (p. 1). Given that 'Between sight and hearing there is no reciprocity' (p. 10), Nancy develops an argument comparing 'the simultaneity of the visible and the contemporaneity of the audible' (p. 16): the fact that 'sonorous presence is an essentially mobile "at the same time"' (p. 16), and that 'in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but, in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident' (p. 3). The following extrapolation is key: 'the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion), which does not mean that these tendencies do not interact' (p. 10). 'Contagion' is an important mechanism for resonance, for it allows Nancy to enter the following phenomenology of sonority: 'The sonorous, on the other hand, outweighs form. It does not dissolve it, but rather enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude, a density, and a vibration or undulation whose outline never does anything but approach. The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into its permanence' (p. 2).

Considering the opposition of sense and truth, Nancy asks, 'shouldn't truth "itself " . . .be listened to rather than seen?' (p. 4). Pursuing the notion that truth is emergent as sonority, Nancy frames his trajectory with a note on the type of philosophical attitude he is trying to open up: 'Here we want to prick up the philosophical ear' (p. 3), and this is because 'To listen is tendre l'oreille—literally, to stretch the ear—an expression that evokes a singular mobility, among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of the ear—it is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety' (p. 5). Nancy expands this point with reference to the etymology of écouter back through its roots in auris and auscultare. The point of lending, stretching, and straining the ear is less 'what presents itself to view—form, idea, painting, representation, aspect, phenomenon, composition', and more what 'arises instead in accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound' (p. 3). A superficial, and largely correct, reading of this point notes that this is a turn from structure to meaning, from what sonorous presence expresses to what it affords. It is also something more: a significant turn away from transcendental phenomenology towards a qualitatively different mode of thought. Indeed, whether it is a mode of 'thought' that is sought in the turn from representation and phenomenon is itself part of the question.

Having asked if truth should be listened to, Nancy asks a related, ontological question: 'What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening, or in listening, listening with all his being?' (p. 4); 'What does it mean to exist according to listening, for it and through it'? (p. 5). At this point, Nancy begins to articulate his own contribution: 'the sound that is musically listened to, that is gathered and scrutinized for itself, not, however as an acoustic phenomenon (or not merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance' (p. 7). Taking up the notion of straining towards the...