Walls and Bridges
Walls and Bridges is a 10-day series of performances and critical explorations uniting French and American thinkers and artists from social sciences, philosophy, literature and live arts.
Peter Szendy
Peter Szendy © H. Bamberger
PHILOSOPHER
France
Biography
Peter Szendy (born 1966 in Paris) is a French philosopher and musicologist.
He teaches at the Universite de Paris X Nanterre and is a consultant to IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), an organization that has been a pioneer in electroacoustic innovation and a mecca for contemporary music. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles (Listen, A History of Our Ears) is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening. Paying close attention to arrangements as « signed listenings » and to the juridical history of the listener, Szendy suggests an alternative model based on deconstruction: listening, he argues (quoting C. P. E. Bach), is a « tolerated theft », and our ears are always already haunted by the ear of the other.
In Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage (2007), he draws on Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon and Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control in order to show how the act of listening always entails issues of power and dominion. Sur écoute proposes an archeology of overhearing, following many
paths, from the Bible to spy movies like Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain or Coppola’s The Conversation. In Membres fantômes : des corps musiciens (2002), Szendy
rethinks the concept of body as construed in the history of Western musical thought and sketches the outlines of a «general organology» based on the rhetorical concept of «effiction». In his book on Moby Dick (Prophecies of Leviathan. Reading Past Melville), he develops a theory of reading as prophecy, while reassessing Derrida’s famous sentence: « il n’y a pas de horstexte ».
