OUVERTURE

This chapter explores the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, paying close attention to a profusion of musical references across his vast œuvre but homing in on the slim volume, À l’écoute (2002), dedicated largely to the question of what (musical) listening affords philosophy. It seems an appropriate point of opening to the questions that are sustained and developed across the book, precisely because it approaches the complex issue of what sound and music do, or could do, for philosophy head on. Or, perhaps more accurately, and less instrumentally, it exposes the way in which philosophy has (had) little purchase on the sonorous precisely because it is beyond signification, if not beyond meaning. All of this is in order to propose the possibility of a philosophy that listens, a philosophy that is attentive to meaning not merely as logos, and the passing of sounds always yet to come. For Nancy, it is precisely resonance that is this point of opening.

To begin, then, at the end of the extended essay, À l’écoute, we find a short coda based on Nancy's reading of Titian's painting Venus with an Organist and Cupid (see Figure 2.1). This musical tableau depicts an organist gazing at a nude Venus; she appears to pay him no attention, instead attending to Cupid who is embracing her. Behind these figures we can see out to the fairly modestly landscaped garden of the villa in which the musical scene presumably takes place; the pipes of the organ in the upper left blend almost seamlessly with the lines of trees outside which demarcate the limits of the garden. In an appropriately musical fashion, this ‘tail’ is more or less inessential to, and independent of, the preceding text, yet ultimately serves to bring it to a more satisfactory close. In effect, Nancy's short oto-iconographical analysis allows for a more lucid recapitulation of the key claims of the short but dense text: firstly, that sound is always already a resounding that folds into itself any distinction between subject/object and inside/outside.