Peter Szendy – författare

Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."

In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can we share our actual hearing with others?Along the way, he examines the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we are and aren't allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described "a one hundred per cent image-space." Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics.The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that "money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front." Since "cinema," for Deleuze, is synonymous with "universe," Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy.Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture.

The long-awaited conclusion to Derrida’s seminar on the gift and time. In 1991, Jacques Derrida published the first half of a seminar delivered from 1978 to 1979 on gifts and time, but the second installment (though expected) was not completed in his lifetime. Given Time II completes the seminar with eight sessions that showcase Derrida’s most advanced work on the problematic of the gift in Heidegger, with deep dives into some of the most difficult texts in the Heideggerian corpus, including “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “The Thing,” and “On Time and Being.”Beyond Heidegger, Derrida engages Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and others on the act of giving and receiving, the sacrificial gift, and more. Throughout, Derrida identifies a paradox of gift giving: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since gifts often involve a cycle of debt and repayment. Given Time II is a uniquely Derridean treatment of an important subject in the work of Heidegger and beyond.

In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can we share our actual hearing with others?Along the way, he examines the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we are and aren't allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.

Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."

Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox is an extraordinary foray into what apple has convinced us is "the soundtrack of our lives." How does music come to inhabit us, to possess and haunt us? What does it mean that a piece of music can insert itself—Szendy's term for this, borrowed from German, is the earworm—into our ears and minds?In this book, Peter Szendy probes the ever-growing and ever more global phenomenon of the hit song. Hits is the culmination of years of singular attentiveness to the unheard, the unheard-of, and the overheard, as well as of listening as it occurs when one pays anything but attention. Szendy takes us through our musical bodies, by way of members and instruments, playing and governing apparatuses, psychic and cinematic doublings, political and economic musings. The hit song, Szendy concludes, functions like a myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. In the repetition generated by the song's relation to itself, Szendy locates its production as a fetishized commodity, a self-producing structure, and a self-desiring machine. Like a Deleuzian machine, then, the hit song is a technology of the self, or better, a technology of rule, a bio-melo-technology.After reading this book, one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more thana soundtrack: It is the condition of our lives. We are all melomaniacs, Szendy tells us in his unique style of writing and of thought. We are melo-obsessive subjects, not so much driven to a frenzy by a music we hardly have time to listen to as governed and ruled by it.

Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox is an extraordinary foray into what apple has convinced us is "the soundtrack of our lives." How does music come to inhabit us, to possess and haunt us? What does it mean that a piece of music can insert itself—Szendy's term for this, borrowed from German, is the earworm—into our ears and minds?In this book, Peter Szendy probes the ever-growing and ever more global phenomenon of the hit song. Hits is the culmination of years of singular attentiveness to the unheard, the unheard-of, and the overheard, as well as of listening as it occurs when one pays anything but attention. Szendy takes us through our musical bodies, by way of members and instruments, playing and governing apparatuses, psychic and cinematic doublings, political and economic musings. The hit song, Szendy concludes, functions like a myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. In the repetition generated by the song's relation to itself, Szendy locates its production as a fetishized commodity, a self-producing structure, and a self-desiring machine. Like a Deleuzian machine, then, the hit song is a technology of the self, or better, a technology of rule, a bio-melo-technology.After reading this book, one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more thana soundtrack: It is the condition of our lives. We are all melomaniacs, Szendy tells us in his unique style of writing and of thought. We are melo-obsessive subjects, not so much driven to a frenzy by a music we hardly have time to listen to as governed and ruled by it.

"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials." This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens of which Kant speaks—and he no doubt took them more seriously than anyone else in the history of philosophy—are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism.Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, this book works its way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our heads in the guise of international treaties regulating the law of space, including the cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes mentions in his late writings.Turning to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in Kant's work, Szendy reveals that they are the necessary condition for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless inscribed both at the heart of the sensible and as an Archimedean point from whose perspective the interweavings of the sensible can be viewed.Reading Kant in dialogue with science fiction films (films he seems already to have seen) involves making him speak of questions now pressing in upon us: our endangered planet, ecology, a war of the worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond Kant, what a point of view might be.

"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials." This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens of which Kant speaks—and he no doubt took them more seriously than anyone else in the history of philosophy—are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism.Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, this book works its way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our heads in the guise of international treaties regulating the law of space, including the cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes mentions in his late writings.Turning to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in Kant's work, Szendy reveals that they are the necessary condition for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless inscribed both at the heart of the sensible and as an Archimedean point from whose perspective the interweavings of the sensible can be viewed.Reading Kant in dialogue with science fiction films (films he seems already to have seen) involves making him speak of questions now pressing in upon us: our endangered planet, ecology, a war of the worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond Kant, what a point of view might be.

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit.Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups.The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing.In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit.Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups.The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing.In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

The prostheses Peter Szendy explores—those peculiar artifacts known as musical instruments—are not only technical devices but also bodies that live a strange phantom life, as uncanny as a sixth finger or a third lung.The musicological impulse to inventory those bodies that produce sound is called into question here. In Szendy's hands, its respectable corpus of scholarship is read aslant, so as to tease out what it usually prefers to hide: hybrids and grafts produced by active fictions, monsters, and chimera awaiting the opportunity to be embodied. Beyond these singular bodies that music composes and disposes there lies the figure of a collective "social" body ready to emerge amid an innervated apparatus that operates at a distance, telepathically.Phantom Limbs touches on bodies of all shapes and sizes that haunt the edges of music's conceptualizations. Music continually reinvents such bodies and reconvenes them in new collective formations. It is their dynamics and crystallizations that Szendy auscultates on a motley corpus that includes Bach, Diderot, Berlioz, Eisenstein, Disney, and Monk.

The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's "panacoustic" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called "Echelon." Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of "overhearing" that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a "split-hearing" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's "panacoustic" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called "Echelon." Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of "overhearing" that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a "split-hearing" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk, who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight after another, the products of punctuation—or as Peter Szendy asks us to think of it, punchuation? Of Stigmatology elaborates for the first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club).Repeatedly, what Szendy finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself, that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself. This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.

What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk, who dreams of being pursued by angry exclamation marks, or Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, bloodied by one violently edited fight after another, the products of punctuation—or as Peter Szendy asks us to think of it, punchuation? Of Stigmatology elaborates for the first time a general theory of punctuation. Beginning with punctuation marks in the common sense, Peter Szendy goes on to trace the effects of punctuation more broadly, arguing that looking and hearing are not passive acts of reception, but themselves punctuate the images and sounds they take in. Szendy reads an astonishing range of texts and traditions, from medical auscultation to literature (Chekhov, Sterne, Kafka), philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Raging Bull, The Trial, Fight Club).Repeatedly, what Szendy finds in these works is a punctuation that marks experience itself, that seeks (and ultimately fails) to bind the subject to itself. This is the stigmatology of the punctuation mark on the page that structures texts from ancient to digital, as well as the punchuation of experience, as though at the hands of a boxer.

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described "a one hundred per cent image-space." Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics.The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that "money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front." Since "cinema," for Deleuze, is synonymous with "universe," Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy.Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture.

As the problem of debt grows more and more urgent in light of the central role it plays in neoliberal capitalism, scholars have analyzed debt using numerous approaches: historical analysis, legal arguments, psychoanalytic readings, claims for reparations in postcolonial debates, and more. Contributors to this special issue of differences argue that these diverse approaches presuppose a fundamental connection between indebtedness and narrative. They see debt as a promise that refers to the future-deferred repayment that purports to make good on a past deficit-which implies a narrative in a way that other forms of exchange may not. The authors approach this intertwining of debt and narration from the perspectives of continental philosophy, international law, the history of slavery, comparative literature, feminist critique, and more.Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Anthony Bogues, Emmanuel Bouju, Silvia Federici, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Raphaelle GuidÉe, Odette Lienau, Catherine Malabou, Vincent Message, Laura Odello, Peter Szendy, Frederik Tygstrup

When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an "ecology of images," she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny's story about the birth of painting to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.Praise for Peter Szendy:"From book to book, Peter Szendy is in the process of constructing one of the most singular philosophical oeuvres of our time."- Laurent de Sutter, Focus vif"A writer of exquisite sensitivity and wit, as well as of impeccable clarity."- Gil Anidjar, Columbia University

When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an "ecology of images," she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny''s story about the birth of painting to Nabokov''s butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.Praise for Peter Szendy:"From book to book, Peter Szendy is in the process of constructing one of the most singular philosophical oeuvres of our time."- Laurent de Sutter, Focus vif"A writer of exquisite sensitivity and wit, as well as of impeccable clarity."- Gil Anidjar, Columbia University

Thevisible world overflows with pictures: more than three billion of them stream across social media every day. This overproduction this excess needs to be managed. Images must be stored, formatted and transported, their flow and exchange must be organised. They require road networks (such as internet cables) and new forms of labour (such as content moderators and clickworkers). And they transform the way we see, mobilising our gaze as never before. The essays and artworks in this catalogue, by observing similar transformations currently affecting our financialised economy in the age of cryptocurrencies, seek to grasp and theorise this new iconomy of the visible.This exhibitioncatalogue is a collection of short texts providing a wide range of perspectives on the economics of the image and images of the economy. A number of classic essays have also been reproduced, in part or in full. Includes contributions from Emmanuel Alloa, Hervé Aubron, Matthias Bruhn, Yves Citton, Elena Esposito, Jean-Joseph Goux, Maurizio Lazzarato, Catherine Malabou, Marta Ponsa, Marie Rebecchi, Antonio Somaini, Peter Szendy, Leah Temper, Elena Vogman and Dork Zabunyan.

Peter Szendy se interesa en la manera en que nos apropiamos de la música y en cómo "firmamos" lo que escuchamos. Su obra filosófica interroga la genealogía de nuestras escuchas musicales, su relación con la ley y el papel del oyente a través del tiempo.En Bajo escucha, Szendy establece una topología del espionaje que nos lleva desde la Biblia a Derrida, pasando por Bentham y Deleuze, a partir de obras tan diversas como las óperas de Mozart y Monteverdi, el cine de Fritz Lang, Hitchcock o Coppola. El autor parte de una inquietud profunda, advierte un fantasma que habita tanto la actualidad política y mediática como nuestros comportamientos: un fantasma de escucha, de ser escuchado. De ahí la doble pregunta que este ensayo plantea: ¿de dónde proviene este fantasma?, ¿de dónde extrae su fuerza? Trazar la genealogía de las escuchas musicales otorga a su reflexión una dimensión política ineludible: "se trata de una nueva era del miedo que acompaña la expansión y el aparellaje de la escucha. Puesto que ser escuchado o escuchar ya no es un asunto de posición en una arquitectura precisa: la disimetría se encuentra en todas partes, ya no sólo se la puede localizar en lugares de poder o en puestos de control".

Cuando leo, una voz en mí me intima a leer ("¡lee!"), mientras que otra pone manos a la obra y se presta a la voz del texto, como lo hacían los antiguos esclavos lectores que encontramos sobre todo en Platón. Leer es habitar esa escena que, aun cuando se interiorice en una lectura aparentemente silenciosa, sigue siendo plural: es el lugar de relaciones de poder, de dominación, de obediencia; en síntesis, de toda una micropolítica de la distribución de las voces.La escucha atenta de la polifonía vocal inherente a la lectura conduce a sus zonas sombrías: allí donde, por ejemplo en Sade o en jurisprudencias recientes, puede convertirse en un ejercicio violento, punitivo. Pero al prestar así atención a las relaciones conflictivas de las voces que leen en nosotros, nos vemos en la necesidad de revisitar la idea, tan degradada desde la Ilustración, de que leer libera. Las zonas sombrías de la lectura son zonas grises: el lugar donde lectoras y lectores, al vivir la experiencia de los poderes que se enfrentan en su fuero interno, se inventan, se convierten en otros. Hoy más que nunca, en la era del hipertexto, leer es tener la vivencia de las potencias y las velocidades que nos atraviesan y traman nuestro devenir.Esta arqueología del leer dialoga con numerosas teorías de la lectura, de Hobbes a De Certeau pasando por Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan o Blanchot. Pero también se dedica a auscultar, en la mayor cercanía posible, fascinantes escenas de lectura orquestadas por Valéry, Calvino o Krasznahorkai.