On Listening, by Jean-Luc Nancy, Part I

In this challenging little book, Nancy asks the question, "Is listening something of which philosophy is capable?" (1). Wouldn't it be true to say that philosophy hears, hears to understand, understands to philosophize? Nancy's point here is that there is a space between listening and hearing--listening is a tension and hearing is a balance, although to listen is to understand and to understand means one must listen, in the long run.

He asks why such a difference exists (2). Nancy sees the difference connected with the difference between sight and sound. Whereas philosophy has been more concerned with the visual, form, representation, and less with the sonorous (3). But he asks a telling question: If the question of truth from Kant to Heidegger has concerned with the appearance/manifestation of being ("phenomenology"), then "shouldn't truth 'itself,' as transivity and incessant transition of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen?" (4). But if this is the case, truth is not something to call 'itself' because if heard, then once heard it is gone, and we are only left with an echo.

Nancy, by this reasons (and since he continues past page 4), thinks philosophy can listen. So, what does it mean? "What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his being?" Because listening was first used in the context of espionage, Nancy thinks that an answer must thereby be found by considering listening as an action that discovers a secret. "What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?" (5). What secret is made public by listening? But beyond this, when we consider the expression, "To be all ears," listening must also take on an existential dynamic. So, what does it mean "to be listening"? (5). The ear, the organ and its intention must therefore be combined: To hear (with the ear), one must listen, just as to smell (with the nose), one must sniff (5). Nancy thinks that hearing and listening have a special relationship, though. In hearing, there is understanding, "as if 'hearing' were above all 'hearing say'" (6). This means that all saying has a hearing and all hearing a listening. Sound, which is really 'say,' desires to be heard, to be sensed (by the ear); to resound.

So, then, what is the difference between hearing and listening? "If 'to hear' is to understand the sense, to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible" (6). (The sense that hearing understands is the context, not the text of the sound.) Consider two examples of sound and sense, hearing and listening. In hearing a speech, we listen for meaning. But in music, the sound itself is that for which we listen. In a speech, the sound disappears. In the music, sense becomes sound. Nancy thinks that this makes a double move: we both seek sense in sound, and sound is sought in sense. "To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning..." (7), the sound is this edge whose meaning is found upon its resonance on the listening ear.

The shared space of meaning and sound is 'referral. ' Meaning is "made of a totality of referrals: from a sign to a thing, from a state of things to a quality, from a subject to another subject or to itself, all simultaneously. Sound is also made of referrals: it spreads in space, where it resounds while still resounding 'in me'" (7). Sound, and therefore meaning, returns to itself and is also placed outside itself. Nancy says, then, that meaning and sound refer to each other, and that this space of referral "can be defined as the space of a self, a subject" (8). This means that a self is always in relationship, always part of a referral, and that "a subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition" (9).

To be listening, then, means straining toward or approach a self--not a specific individual self, but the structure of a self. "When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like hte very sound of its sense" (9). Here the difference between sight and sound becomes clear. While I can hear what I see, I cannot see what I hear. Visualization includes an object, a mimetic reflection. Sonority is methexic, a participation or sharing.

To be listening, then, means to enter this sharing, to be looking for relation to self, "to relationship in self," not to specific individuals (12). Nancy says, then, that to listen is not to have access to self, but the reality of access itself. (I think this means that listening is not what makes a self, but is the possibility of relation to self.) Nancy, I think, uses this to move away from phenomenology rooted in being and toward action--coming, passing, extending, penetrating (13). Because sound cannot be captured, it is always moving; it is "not a point on a line" (13), but captures space-time because sound expands. Thus, to listen is to enter that type of space that also penetrates me, opens in and around me; moves toward me and away from me (14). To listen has elements of being open from within and from without (which is why listening provides opportunity for relationship, but is not relationship with self itself). Because sound creates this space and it is in this space that I listen, listening takes place at the same time as the sound-event. Sound therefore has an ability to attack that sight simply does not. A visual presence is there before seen; sound simply arrives the moment it is heard. (Think here of an instance when you have been frightened. Often the fright is doubled if sound accompanies the sudden pop up of the other's face.)

The omnipresence of sound in the space it creates means that it returns to itself, encounters itself. It is co-presence--"presence in presence" (16). But because it is not fixed or stable, sound is a place as relation. Inasmuch as sound resounds sound creates a subject. So, Nancy gives the example of a child who, with his first cry, becomes a "sudden expansion of an echo chamber"--a place for resounding (17). So, Nancy comes to say that sound is not intended, but that sound places a subject in tension. The child is open to relation by the sound now resounding and them being able to re-sound--both themselves and others. So sound (and here Nancy is using the example of music) is not a phenomenon, but an evocation, a call, of presence (20). Sound, resonance, is not a phenomenon, but ought be considered as being itself. And here sound must be understood (Nancy says, cleverly, s'entendre--which is french for both understood and heard by oneself) not as privation of resonance, but an arrangement. Just like when the silence is just right so that you hear your own breathing, heart pounding, and body resonating.