Synopses & Reviews
The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Crisy conference entitled The Autobiographical Animal, the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction-dating from Descartes-between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single the animal.Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses tothe question in the work of each of them.The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of man's dominion over the beastsand trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or btises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of lifeto which he returned in much of his later work.
Review
"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."
Review
"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 groundbreaking
scholarship."-Richard Rand, University of Alabama
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
The late
JACQUES DERRIDA was the single most influential voice in European philosophy of the last quarter of the twentieth century. His T
he Animal That Therefore I Am, Sovereignties in Question, and
Deconstruction in a Nutshell have been published by Fordham University Press.
MARIE-LOUIS MALLET has been a Program Director at the Collge International de Philosophie and was the organizer of three of the four Derrida Cerisy conferences. She is author of La Musique en respect and is the editor of the special edition of Les Cahiers de l'Herne on Derrida.
DAVID WILLS is Professor of French and English at the University at Albany, SUNY. His most recent book is Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics.