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Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

Online ISBN:
9780823297498
Print ISBN:
9780823294862
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

Naomi Waltham-Smith
Naomi Waltham-Smith
University of Warwick
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Published online:
20 January 2022
Published in print:
6 July 2021
Online ISBN:
9780823297498
Print ISBN:
9780823294862
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

At the root of the marginalizations of certain forms of life, even to the point where they are deemed unworthy of living, are often mishearings or failures to listen. In short, the relation between life or death is a matter of aurality. This book analyses how in recent continental political philosophy the thought of life is intimately intertwined with theories and figures of sound and listening. Specifically, it demonstrates how the prism of aurality sharpens the affinities and disagreements between Foucauldian and post-workerist Italian biopolitical theory on the one hand and French deconstruction on the other. To this end, the book stages a series of conversations, riddled with mishearings, between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Closer inspection reveals that the main points of contention circulate around or come into focus with figures of aurality: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone calls. Punctuating the theoretical chapters are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from the incalculability of the sonorous to the impotence of speech acts. Above all, this book argues, it is sound’s capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

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