Peter Szendy

Translated by Olivia Custer
A historical, literary, and philosophical study that transforms our understanding of reading.
"Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms?

Questions such as these produce a fresh, even startling, consideration of a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kant’s moral injunctions, Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, but also modern fiction, film, audiobooks, and hypertext. The power of reading turns out to belong to its surprising engagement with time and direction: the deliberate reader stays close but strays, tries to fill in the gaps but gets pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought ‘outside’ only to be led back to the text and its failure to deliver a final answer. Equally at odds with older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text as well as contextualists who scour an external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendy approaches that very conflict as an oscillation constitutive of reading itself. Paradoxically, reading is sustained precisely by what interrupts its teleological flow.

The result is a comic, profound, and timely reconceptualization of reading which rushes forward only to find itself pushed back into the heart of the text, which discovers that this incessant breaking from the text, this headlong rushing ahead to the world outside the text is a sequence of overreach, delay, and return that forms the ragged rhythm of reading itself. Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating inquiry into the crosscurrents of voice and address, one that speaks to the speed and complexity of our time, how we are upended by our forward propulsions, to consider how multiple voice, action, and passivity are all rearranged in the scene of reading.”— Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

From Plato to Audiobooks

Powers of Reading 

An enlightening exploration of the concept of listening and the evolving role of the listener from Beethoven to Charlie Parker to contemporary remixing. In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The roles of the composer and the musician are clear, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to music? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Is it possible to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music? Though personal memory and intellectual history, Szendy takes readers on a fascinating and ear-opening journey to answer these questions. 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 listening habits.

A History of Our Ears

Listen

Emmanuel Alloa

Marta Ponsa

Explores a wide range of perspectives on the economics of the image and images of the economy Published to accompany an exhibition at Jue de Paume Museum, Paris, from February - June 2020 Preface by Quentin Bajac, director of Jeu de Paume, previously head of photography at MoMA Edited by widely published Peter Szendy, author of The Supermarket of Visible translated into English at Fordham University PressArt and economics have entertained a complex and decisive relationship since ancient times. But for over a century, what is at stake goes far beyond the mere art market: what we face now is the commodification of all that is visible. We live in a world that is increasingly saturated with images. The photographs, drawings, paintings, videos, films, digital works and multimedia installations selected for the exhibition cast a keen and watchful eye over these issues. On the one hand, they reflect the upheavals that currently affect economics in general, whether in terms of unprecedentedly large storage spaces, scarce raw materials, labor and its mutations towards immaterial forms of work, or in terms of value and its new manifestations, such as cryptocurrencies. At the same time, however, these artists' works repeatedly interrogate the future of images and things visible in the age of their globalized 'iconomics'. This exhibition catalog 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, Herv Aubron, Matthias Bruhn, Yves Citton, Elena Esposito, Maurizio Lazzarato, Catherine Malabou, Marie Rebecchi, Marta Ponsa, Antonio Somaini, Peter Szendy, Leah Temper, Elena Vogman, Dork Zabunyan and Miren Etxezarreta Zubizarreta.

The Supermarket of Images

An archeology of auditory surveillance combined with an analysis of representations of spying in works of literature, music, and film that provide philosophical reflections on the drives that animate listening: the drive for mastery and the death drive.

The Aesthetics of Espionage

All Ears

Jean-Luc Nancy

Michael Holland

Danielle Cohen-Levinas

Anna Donise

Alberto Pucheu

Elio Matassi

Serge Margel

Susanna Lindberg

Gianfranco Dalmasso 

Tomokazu Baba

Zoran Dimić

Felix Duque

Yuji Nishiyama

Yotetsu Tonaki

Jérôme Lèbre

Dino Quartana

Sommaire Editorial Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Gianfranco Dalmasso Jean-Luc Nancy C’est la catastrophe ! Entretien avec Danielle Cohen-Levinas Elio Matassi* La figura impossibile e la catastrofe: Kierkegaard, Mozart e “l’assolutamente musicale” Tomokazu Baba Philosophes à l’écoute dans la catastrophe continue Anna Donise L’apocalisse in una <<prospettiva antropologica unitaria>> Ernesto De Martino tra cultura e psicopatologia Serge Margel L’avenir des catastrophes Sur l’hypothèse politique du principe de précaution Peter Szendy Cinefactus, ou : le cinéma et ses cendres Zoran Dimić Catastrophe and Humanity Felix Duque De las ventajas y desventajas del terrorismo para la vida (cotidiana) Alberto Pucheu Autobiografia no abismo de um enjambement Michael Holland Le silence de la guerre Susanna Lindberg Cosmopolis, Cosmopolemos: Sur la guerre discrète Yuji Nishiyama et Yotetsu Tonaki Questions à Jean-Luc Nancy Jérôme Lèbre Architecture nucléaire/post nucléaire : construire dans la catastrophe Dino Quartana Intervention graphique

Phàsis n. 2, 2014 – Catastrophe

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 than a 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.

Philosophy in the Jukebox

Hits

Moby Dick est peut-être avant tout un grand roman sur la lecture. Car le lecteur, quel qu'il soit, est déjà inclus, compris dans le texte. Toujours plus gonflé, ce livre-monstre, véritable Léviathan textuel, semble engloutir le monde et avaler jusqu'à celui qui l'ouvre, tel un nouveau Jonas. Le texte-baleine présente ainsi d'innombrables allégories de la lecture, décrite en termes de pêche, de cartographie, de navigation, de fuite, de naufrage ou de percée. Si un tel livre ne saurait donc être simplement lu, c'est qu'il lit à son tour : non seulement ses lecteurs, mais aussi la Bible, ou encore le Léviathan de Hobbes et sa théorie de l'État. Et dès lors, ce qui s'envoie ou se promet, c'est une dimension prophétique du lire. Elle se lèvera dans le vent de la tempête et annoncera la venue de l'avenir. (P. Sz.) Les Prophéties du texte-Léviathan est paru en 2004.

Les Prophéties du texte-Léviathan. Lire selon Melville

Peter Szendy

Books

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