Listening
"Listening adds a much needed poetic register to the philosophy of music and sonic culture."-Parallax"In Charlotte Mandell's splendid translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's brief but passionate A l'ecoute, the French philosopher gives us a glimpse of this completely different philosophy of music."-Current Musicology"Can philosophy listen rather than attempting to understand what comes by way of sonorousness?, Jean-Luc Nancy asks. He proceeds to show that it can, his book opening as an echo chamber in which he explores how sense resounds beyond significance in the experience of listening."-Lars Iyer, University of Newcastle upon Tyne"Nancy's meditations on the act of listening-as distinct from the hearing-to-understand of philosophy, and continually contrasted with looking-compose, themselves, a kind of music, with its own considerable sonorous resources, the mutual resonances of which translator Charlotte Mandell conducts to superb effect. Nancy's refractions on the relation of art, especially music, to the rise of fascism rise here in a voice that resounds."-David Levi Strauss, Bard College"What is it to listen with all one's being? To listen and not merely to understand? Can sense simply resound and not direct itself to meaning? In asking these questions Jean-Luc Nancy opens a fresh space for the philosophy of music, and for a new conception of the self as a 'resonant subject.'"-Kevin Hart, University of Virginia"A significant contribution to the literature of phenomenology and a work of groundbreakingscholarship."-Richard Rand, University of Alabama