Jean-Luc Nancy - Listening

JEAN - LUC NANCY

TRANSLATED BY CHARLOTTE MANDELL

This work was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, lcoute 2002, ditions Galile, Paris. The two final essays, How Music Listens to Itself and March in Spirit in Our Ranks, have been added by the author for the English-language edition.

Copyright 2007 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Puplication Data

Nancy, Jean-Luc.
[A lcoute. English]

Listening / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by Charlotte Mandell.1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2772-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8232-2774-X (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2773-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8232-2773-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Listening (Philosophy) I. Mandell, Charlotte. II. Title.
B105.L54N3613 2007
128.4dc22

2007009589

Printed in the United States of America
09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1
First edition

Listening

This is at the same time a title,
an address,

and a dedication.

The sound filled out that solitude to which the tone gave rhythm ahead of time.

Raymond Queneau, A Hard Winter

Jean-Luc Nancy is a rewarding and demanding thinker. He is also exceptionally playful, witty, alert to the shapes and sounds of his words. The translator plods along behind the authors leaps, trying at least to explain what cant quite be caught on the wing. The translators task is made all the more difficult by the way the semantic ranges of certain French words differ widely from their nominal English equivalents. And it is just such words that Nancy plays on here, plays with, delighting in the shimmer of their connotations.

Four words in particular should be kept in mind: entendre means both to hear and to understand. Matrice means both womb and matrix. Renvoi has an even wider range: return (as in return to sender, return a gift), send back (a parcel), repeat (a phrase or passage in music), refrain, refer, allude back Our fourth word will demand most attention: sens. Sens means meaning, and it means sensein all the meanings of that word in English, as in the senses five, feeling, intuitionas well as direction. I have tried to surmise the correct English choice in any given context, but the bracketed original will warn the reader of possible ranges. Add to these problems the fact that Nancy will often be using these and other words both in their ordinary meanings and in their special acceptations in musical discourse.

The music explicitly citedfrom Wagners Tristan und Isoldeat the end of the book is itself a sort of renvoi, sending the reader back to reread Jean-Luc Nancys book as discourse not just upon language arts but upon tone arts too. So the reader is asked to keep an ear out for the possibilitieswhat you hear might be music.

Charlotte Mandell
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
September 2006

Isnt the philosopher someone who always hears (and who hears everything), but who cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?

Not, however, without finding himself immediately given over to the slight, keen indecision that grates, rings out, or shouts between listening and understanding: between two kinds of hearing, between two paces [allures] of the same (the same sense, but what sense precisely? thats another question), between a tension and a balance, or else, if you prefer, between a sense (that one listens to) and a truth (that one understands), although the one cannot, in the long run, do without the other?

It would be quite a different matter between the view or the vision and the gaze, the goal or contemplation of the philosopher: figure and idea, theater and theory, spectacle and speculation suit each other better, superimpose themselves on each other, even can be substituted for each other with more affinity than the audible and the intelligible, or the sonorous and the logical. There is, at least potentially, more isomorphism between the visual and the conceptual, even if only by virtue of the fact that the morphe, the form implied in the idea of isomorphism, is immediately thought or grasped on the visual plane. 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 an undulation whose outline never does anything but approach. The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into its permanence.

What is the reason for this difference, and how is it possible? Why and how can there be one or several difference(s) of senses in general, and also difference(s) between the perceiving senses and the perceived meaning, sensed sense [les sens sensibles et le sens sens;]? Why and how is it that something of perceived meaning has privileged a model, a support, or a referent in visual presence rather than in acoustic penetration? Why, for example, does acousmatics, or the teaching model by which the teacher remains hidden from the disciple who listens to him, belong to a prephilosophical Pythagorean esoterism, just as, much later, auricular confession corresponds to a secret intimacy of sin and forgiveness? Why, 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? Why, however, does each of these facets also touch the other, and by touching, put into play the whole system of the senses? And how, in turn, does it touch perceived meaning? How does it come to engender it or modulate it, determine it or disperse it? All these questions inevitably come to the forefront when its a question of listening.

Here we want to prick up the philosophical ear: to tug the philosophers ear in order to draw it toward what has always solicited or represented philosophical knowledge less than what presents itself to viewform, idea, painting, representation, aspect, phenomenon, compositionbut arises instead in accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound. Well add another question as a temporary marker, to indicate the trembling discrepancy and dissymmetry of the two sides while still beginning to draw, to lure the ear (but also the eye along with it): Although it seems simple enough to evoke a formeven a visionthat is sonorous, under what conditions, by contrast, can one talk about a visual sound?

Or else: If, from Kant to Heidegger, the major concern of philosophy has been found in the appearance or manifestation of being, in a phenomenology, the ultimate truth of the phenomenon (as something that appears as precisely distinct as possible from everything that has already appeared and, consequently, too, as something that disappears), shouldnt truth itself, as transitivity and incessant transition of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen? But isnt it also in the way that it stops being itself and identifiable, and becomes no longer the naked figure emerging from the cistern but the resonance of that cisternor, if it were possible to express it thus, the echo of the naked figure in the open depths?