Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

Naomi Waltham-Smith’s Shattering Biopolitics issues, and responds to, a series of calls. These are calls that, for their part, stage and enact scenes of ‘mishearing’: between deconstruction and biopolitics, Derrida and Agamben, philosophy and sound-art. Waltham-Smith invites us to receive these calls, that are also, at the same time, blows: if we are open to them, they will strike and hammer and shatter us, as our readings (or misreadings, indeed, mis-hearings) strike and hammer and shatter what we think we will have received, what we think will have been a passive experience of sonic force and the tremors of thought. We are invited to return, for example, to Derrida’s “Tympan” to see and to hear that which we had missed upon our first, or second, or third readings. We are struck, in turn, by the unexpected, dissonant, juxtaposition of debates: over breath and life, movement and migration; we hear the people’s mic of Occupy and the roving militant microphone of Ultra-red; the vocal listing of numbers and that which exceeds counting. We learn, from Waltham-Smith, that the rhythms at the ‘heart’ of life, the sonic structures and haptic vibrations that move us also wound us, or expose the fact that we are always already wounded, broken: walking, living, breathing and singing arrhythmias all.

Shattering Biopolitics resides at and performs the margins of philosophy about which Derrida wrote nearly a half-century ago: it shakes and shatters the boundaries that might keep philosophy safe and sovereign; it argues in favor of and brings to the surface, leech-like, the ‘other(s)’ that philosophy would take as its object(s) but that are discovered to have been there all along, that arrhythmic heart that sounds but is not sound, that in fact reveals hearing itself to be non-sovereign, inseparable from seeing and touching and thinking, a vibrational insistence upon the synesthetic strength of living thought. Shattering Biopolitics does not idealize sound, does not posit a pure listening as an ethical or political model, as if to suggest that were we to listen well, we would understand (as French’s double entendre would have it), were our ears to be cleared of noise we would hear the most urgent ethical and political demands and know how to respond to them. No: mishearing will have been at the heart of Waltham-Smith’s ethico-political sonic vision and wayward writing, her philosophical marginalia and call.

Waltham-Smith’s margins of philosophy, her call, reverberate strangely, anachronically, trans-spatially and transmedially: if we listen carefully, we can hear her listening to others, as Peter Szendy would have it. We bear witness, through our acti-passive reception of her call or series of calls, her invitation or series of invitations, to that arrhythmic heart at the margins of philosophy. We might return, with or in the wake of Waltham-Smith’s writing, to Derrida’s tympan, itself an echo of Nietzsche’s hammer, and remember, again, the utterly violent quality of philosophy and of thinking: violent in its capture and comprehension of its other or others, but also violent in its shattering by these others, its acknowledgment (or ours) that philosophy will always have been shattered. Sound, for Waltham-Smith, is therefore “what animates philosophy, provokes its desire, leads it on and entraps it, but also unleashes its power.” Consequently, philosophers’ (in this case, Derrida’s and Agamben’s) “failures to listen to one another are not belated or accidental lapses but symptoms of the dispersive, sonorous force that philosophy tries to tame and eject as its external other—the inarticulate cry or raw noise outside the rational logos—but which is in fact its inner life-force, the drive within that comes before and overpowers any drive to master the other.” Perhaps this is why, when we accept Waltham-Smith’s invitation to return to Derrida’s tympan, we might remember Nietzsche’s Zarathustra asking whether one must “batter their ears so they may learn to hear with their eyes” (Nietzsche, 14); we might even hear it echo in the “listening eye” (Levinas, 37) that Levinas’s ethical subject employs as she responds to the call of the other; we might respond to Waltham-Smith by suggesting that her deconstructive or deconstructed biopolitics, her biodeconstruction (to use Francesco Vitale’s neologism) is constitutively ethical.

Shatter, rhythm, voice, and listening are the tiny conceptual beating hearts of the book that structure Shattering Biopolitics, but they also symptomatically exceed any attempt at sovereign structure. The conceptual chapters are themselves punctured and punctuated by Waltham-Smith’s careful readings, her hearings or mishearings, of sound-art that pushes back on the decision between what is noise and what is speech (Rancière, 22), what is audible and what is inaudible. Her listening eye demands that we, too, risk listening with our eyes to the sound that “is always moving on” (Brandon LaBelle, quoted in Shattering Biopolitics), sounds that are not immediately recognizable as political. Instead of the “cries of suffering, the screams of torture, and the shouts of protest,” we are invited to listen to the more obscure, but also more pervasive and quotidian, “sound of the tube gate opening to let precarious workers take the first train home in the morning or, more catastrophically, the pulses by which ocean tomographers ‘auscultate’ the planet to reveal the negative impact of neoliberal capital on ocean temperatures and global climate change.” By attuning our eyes and ears to the subtle and sometimes inaudible or barely indecipherable sonic tones and rhythms that inflect Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Number Station that, as black sound art that refuses to commodify or communicate black suffering, offers “no expression of horror, no hint of outrage, no hint of sadness,” or to the “no longer mere sound but not yet signification” in multimedia artist Lawrence Abu Hamdam’s perversion and twisting of the voices of asylum seekers in The Freedom of Speech Itself, Waltham-Smith forcefully argues that sound art shatters and disrupts when it traverses the tenuous divide between speech and noise, numbers and affect, rather than trying to comprehend or empathize, quantify or thematize.

Finally, Naomi Waltham-Smith accomplishes all of these things and more through her stunning writing, both rhythmic and arrhythmic, consonant and dissonant. To Derrida’s two-fold question, “Is there any ruse not belonging to reason to prevent philosophy from still speaking of itself, from borrowing its categories from the logos of the other, by affecting itself without delay, on the domestic page of its own tympanum … with heterogenous percussion? Can one violently penetrate philosophy’s field of listening without its immediately … making the penetration resonate within itself?”, she responds, “Yes, yes.” And by trying (and surely failing) to follow the beat of Waltham-Smith’s elegant and dangerous prose, we issue our own unconditional “yes, yes”: yes to sonic shatter, yes to ruins, yes to the double strikes of biopolitics and deconstruction, yes to the brutal blows of philosophy and sound art, yes to politics, yes to ethics, yes, yes… Hear say yes.

WORKS CITED

Derrida, Jacques. “Tympan.” Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ix-xxix.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Woodstock, Ontario: Devoted Publishing, 2017.

Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Szendy, Peter. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.

Vitale, Francesco. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018.

Waltham-Smith, Naomi. Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. https://uosc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01USC_INST/273cgt/cdi_askewsholts_vlebooks_9780823294886.

In the fields of political and moral philosophy, critical theory, and the philosophy of language, the central question that is asked over and over again is: Who gets to speak? Who is allowed to speak and who, on the contrary, is prevented from speaking? That the question of the voice is an ethical and political question is thus already firmly established. But what about the correlative question—the question about who gets to be heard and whom do we listen to?

Shattering Biopolitics pushes us to ask these urgent questions, while brilliantly construing listening as an ethical and political activity. It traces the contours of an ethics and a politics of listening, both by analysing the ways in which listening is differentially organized in our societies—where, as Naomi Waltham-Smith puts it, failures to listen are a constitutive part of procedures of marginalization of certain forms of life—and by pointing towards the necessity to invent new ways of listening (to the others, to oneself). This shift from the words that are uttered and the sounds that are produced to the words and sounds that are heard also entails the ambitious redefinition of democracy as a space of (militant) listening: a space of radical vulnerability, in which the alleged autonomy of the (universal, i.e., white and male) subject is perpetually contested, criticized, shattered.

Indeed, an ethics and a politics of listening cannot be simply reduced to the implementation of a series of skills or to the task of learning to listen—to listen better, more carefully, more empathically. This would still contribute to reaffirming, instead of contesting, the autonomy and self-mastery of the (speaking) subject. Two examples. On the one hand, the insistence of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault on the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises or techniques of the self, where learning to listen (to the spiritual director’s truthful words) was considered paramount for the subject to become autonomous and able to tell the truth to the others. On the other hand, the elaboration by Miranda Fricker of the epistemic injustice framework, so influential in contemporary social epistemology and political philosophy, where the antidote to testimonial injustice (that is, the fact for the hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s words due to prejudice) is found in the virtue of testimonial justice, which consists in a critical openness or awareness that allows the subject to make sure she is able to counteract the influence of prejudice when listening to another’s words.

Shattering Biopolitics creatively mobilizes the resources of deconstruction to challenge these influential paradigms and call into question the arrogant claim that listening is entirely in our power and under our control—and that it is enough to learn how to listen better, more attentively, for our problems to be magically solved. But if “there was never any pure sound” (p. 14), then there can also never be any pure listening, any listening conceived as a practice entirely detached from prejudice and power relations. By contrast, we are always already à l’écoute—traversed, decomposed, and recomposed by a multiplicity of sounds and voices that we just cannot control nor master. Consequently, our ethical and political responsibility—the hearer’s virtue—does not simply consist in the willingness to learn to listen to the others, or in the patient cultivation of a critical awareness: it consists in what Naomi Waltham-Smith defines as a “response-ability” (p. 140), that is, an ability infinitely beyond our reach, much as the Derridean “call” is infinitely unanswerable. It is a responsiveness that can never be sure to achieve its aim and is thus condemned to exist in the messy, disordered, shattered space of the ethics and politics of listening that this book reveals to us as characterizing our most ordinary forms of life.
One of the questions that remain open has to do with the effects of Naomi Waltham-Smith’s account on the ways in which we can, in turn, think of ourselves as speakers. After all, we are both—and at the same time—listeners and speakers. How to introduce an analogous attention to our vulnerability as “creatures of language,” as Stanley Cavell would say, when it comes to the analysis of the words that we utter? A possible path would consist in focusing on the perlocutionary dimension of speech in order to explore the myriad ways in which speaking exposes us to consequences that are never entirely predictable—and to the perpetual risk of unintelligibility and disavowal. This would perhaps allow us to construe our responsibility, even as speakers, in terms of a response-ability, since each of our utterances is nothing more than a step in an indefinite series of exchanges of words which is, ultimately, beyond our control.

What these beautiful, crystalline responses bring home for me is that shatter is in no way incompatible with but in fact cries out for, demands, makes necessary generosity, care, repair, the abolition of cruelty, the outpouring of revolutionary love.[1] In their engagement with what I had proffered each of these responses exposes that Shattering Biopolitics is at heart a book about address and the (im)possibility of response, about response as resonating-with while also opening up to unforeseen horizons, about the other whose heartbeat gives us the rhythm of thought, about the pour (for) as dative and as prosthetic substitution. I had, rashly perhaps, asserted that the book was intended to redirect us from reading to listening, to reading-as-listening, listening rhythmically, like pointing a psalm, but reading these responses has awakened me to the ways in which, then one readlistens to it in these various ways, it becomes a book about reading and forgetreading, as Hélène Cixous would say.

Erin Graff Zivin’s ears are all pricked up, rotated to hear all the calls and arhythmic hearts. Her readlistening is awash with the warmth of resonance, the resonance of transatlantic friendship, pulsing like the heart of the friend in Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié.[2]Her response rings with solidary affirmation, with the “oui, oui” that, for Derrida, says “yes” to the possible as impossible, to the unforeseeable and incalculable, whose double affirmation opens up beyond this dialogue to include other voices: Molly Bloom, Cixous and her ay-saying cat Thessie, Thomas Clément Mercier’s reflections on affirmations and the name of life, the community of Women in Theory.[3] Erin’s response refers to readers bearing witness, and her reading is a testament to the strains of the transspatial and transmedial that are perhaps scarcely audible but which seduce my floundering into conversation with her own deft thinking,[4] and to the much noisier ethical injunction of Shattering Biopolitics, thus giving a modulatory quality to her reading that tunes in and out, turns the volume up and down. Her amplificatory affirmation is, then, a testimony to feminist solidarity, to shouldering the resistance to testimonial injustice that afflicts not only women philosophers or theorists but also the voices of those multiply and intersectionally oppressed and silenced by a regime of colonialist capitalism and philosophy’s complicity.

Michael Gallope in a response that surveys the resonance with music and sound studies quickly picks up the book’s Grundton or fundamental: the risk of substantializing difference and, by extension, sound, and what this might mean for a burgeoning interdisciplinary space that is gathered almost exclusively by its object, by the presence and ontology of sound. Gallope constructs a quasi-deconstructive community that gathers around sound—and too generously puts me among some rather esteemed company.[5] But this also raises the question of listening as recognition, an analogy that frames much contemporary scholarly and popular discourse on the politics of listening. While I see my own politics reflected back at me in the depiction of shatter as a more radical intervention against injustice and dehumanizing violence than the “palliative . . . [and] virtuous tonic” offered by more liberal critics, the label “dialectical” prompts an experience of misrecognition if only because it is, for me, still too much of an alibi for the exclusionary logic against which, to my thinking, the self-differentiation of différance more effectively militates. And yet this misrecognition (if there were any recognition that were not) is instructive: It opens one to the possibility of survival and transformation of one’s thought, that it cannot and never was simply my own, that neither I nor it have the power to decide how it will be read or heard, and specifically it begins to insert Shattering Biopolitics in ways I had not envisaged into a broader critique of modernity. As such, it compels me to consider what work is does by the invocation of neoliberal capitalism in its pages and what effect this furtive periodization has.

Daniele Lorenzini (fore)sees another future and afterlife of Shattering Biopolitics: as a bid to redefine democracy as “a space of (militant) listening.” To this end, he brings my thought into conversation with Pierre Hadot and Michael Foucault’s interest in ancient techniques of the self that privileged the capacity to listen on the one hand and Miranda Fricker’s reflections on testimonial (in)justice on the other, thereby already sketching in advance some of the directions of my current work on listening, democracy, and silencing. Daniele anticipates some of the ways in which my deconstructive approach to listening will disrupt these influential paradigms, but he raises in conclusion an interesting question about how this shattered conception of listening might rebound on the act and ethics of speaking. His own fascinating work on the perlocutionary,[6] the dimension of speech that structurally opens one up to unpredictable effects of what one says and to their renegotiation, offers the potent possibility for extending the notion of response-ability that I tentatively advance in the book in ways that would complicate Derrida’s own incomplete negotiations, if I may put it like that, with the (Heideggerian) call, the (perilously Heideggerian question), and the (all-too-Kantian) imperative. As I ponder for a new project the demand for a “free listening,” instead of free speech, not only would the perlocutionary allow one to consider how in our various practices (juridical, political, pedagogical) we might renegotiate who is more or less heard but moreover would gesture toward a corresponding dimension of listening itself that would be open to a greater or lesser extent to being surprised by acts of speech and listening lying beyond the scope of its projections.

Julie Napolin’s sparkling and sharply attuned response discloses that such effects may be of the order of care or of refusal, or perhaps of careful refusal. Napolin captures with tenderness something of the irreducibility of trauma for which aurality is no easy salve. And yet right up against the harshness of politics, the also readlistens with discerning power something unavowed if not entirely unheard-of in the text: the poetics of a trembling life made more fragile still by the ravages of environmental, political-economic, and health crises preying on the already most vulnerable.[7] In this way, Julie’s responses does something I could not have imagined being able to do: to begin to rescue that aesthetic from the sovereign mastery to which German Romanticism condemned it. That means letting go of and perhaps also refusing some of the most cherished ideas we have about art in general and sonic arts in particular.

These beautiful responses also call on me to let go of the book I wrote, neither to let it circulate in the marketplace of ideas nor because of the simple fact that it was written only on condition of a community of ideas, friends, and comrades, but to allow it to be taken up and discarded in practices of care and dissent, and to be shattered in the process. Julie reminds me of a secret I confessed in response to her comments: that shatter is another name for abolish. If there is a future for Shattering Biopolitics, if it is to survive in any way, it is in abolitionism or abolition democracy which does not aim at destruction without the (poetic) invention of new institutions and of new forms of living responsive to the preciousness of life. That is the only echo to its address, the only response and response-ability worth of the name—and what a tremorous vibration that would be.

NOTES

[1]   On the last see Houria Bouteldja, Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous: Vers une politique de l’amour révolutionnaire (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2016); Whites, Jews, and Us Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, trans. Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by Cornel West (South Pasadena, Calif: Semiotext(e), 2017).

[2]   Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié. (Paris: Galilée, 1994); The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 88/69. I discuss the heartbeat in “The Rhythm of Democracy, The Pulse of Deconstruction,” in The Politics of Friendship: Amity and Enmity, ed. Luke Collison, Cillian Ó Fathaigh, and Georgios Tsagdis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 211–22.

[3]   See Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce. (Paris: Galilée, 1987); “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” trans. François Raffoul, in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and San Slote, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013(, 41–86. Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est-a-dire . . . (Paris: Galilée, 2002); H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . ., trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), ?/118. Thomas Clément Mercier, “Au ‘nom’ de la vie ? Oui, oui ! Affirmations, déconstructions, et ontologies de la puissance,” at Derrida 2021—biopolitique et déconstruction, Aix-en-Provence, Deceber 17, 2021.

[4]   See Erin Graff Zivin, “Transmedial Noise: Babel and the Translation of Radio,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 63 (2020): 160–77.

[5]   On music’s ontological (in)consistency in Adorno and Jankélévitch, see Michael Gallope, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of Chicago Press, 2017). My play on logos-qua-gathering as a Grundton specifically allude to the discussion of Heidegger in Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III ed.Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo (Paris: Seuil, 2018); Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, trans. Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

[6]   Daniele Lorenzini, “From Recognition to Acknowledgement: Rethinking the Perlocutionary,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (2020), DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712231.

[7]   See Julie Beth Napolin, “Outside In: Chorus and Clearing in the Time of Pandemic and Protest,” Sociologica 14, no. 2 (2020): 41–54.