An excellent read for music theory students and scholars, as well as philosophers.

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	• Listening Jean-Luc Nancy Fordham University Press, 2007 - 100 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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An excellent read for music theory students and scholars, as well as philosophers.

Skillfully translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell, Listening is Professor of Philosophy Jean-Luc Nancy's thoughtful treatise upon the philosophical ramifications of sound and its relationship to the human body. Contemplating how music affects the listener, not only physically but also emotionally and ideologically, Listening is at times technical yet overall an ingenious yet serious exploration of the mutual transformations of auditory art and those who experience it. "Music is the art of the hope for resonance: a sense that does not make sense except because of its resounding in itself. It calls to itself and recalls itself, reminding itself and by itself, each time, of the birth of music, that is to say, the opening of a world in resonance, a world taken away from the arrangements of objects and subjects, brought back to its own amplitude and making sense or else having its truth only in the affirmation that modulates this amplitude." An excellent read for music theory students and scholars, as well as philosophers.

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Listening as a Practice of the Self

Nancy's book is an important, if belated, contribution to a philosophical understanding of a sensory modality at least as crucial for social existence and aesthetic experience as vision. But it is vision that, from Plato to Husserl, received all the attention, until Derrida, Levinas, and Nancy undertook a critique of the metaphysics of presence, which vision has always encouraged. I find Nancy's book very helpful, very insightful. It is a shame, however, that he does not reflect on listening as a capacity that can be developed in, and as, a "practice of the self". Self-development, "Bildungsprozesse", has simply not been a theme for contemporary philosophy, as it was for the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries. In this regard, there is a useful book published in 1988 by Routledge, namely David Michael Levin's The Listening Self, which lays out the phases of a process in the development of the human capacity for listening,a process that the author follows through its consummate moment in Heidegger's thought, where ontic hearing becomes "hearkening", an "ontological organ", registering the very gift of an auditory field, the opening up of a resonance-field for our hearing. Nancy's book implicitly draws the reader into this field, an abyss where what at one time what was called the "music of the spheres" can be heard resounding.

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In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding?Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since ?the ear has no eyelid? (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears.The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy?s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear.

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