Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

By Naomi Waltham-Smith

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement.

Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings.

Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of “over-hearings” between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability.

Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening.

Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780823294886

Naomi Waltham-Smith

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford, 2017). As a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2019–20, she has been developing deconstructive field-recording methodologies to explore contemporary urban marginalization and resistance.

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SHATTERING BIOPOLITICS

COMMONALITIES

Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Waltham-Smith, Naomi, 1983– author.

Title: Shattering biopolitics : militant listening and the sound of life / Naomi Waltham-Smith.

Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Series: Commonalities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020058362 | ISBN 9780823294862 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823294879 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823294886 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Biopolitics—Philosophy. | Sound (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC JA80 .W34 2021 | DDC 320.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058362

First edition

for my mother, who never wanted to hang up

The invention of writing is an urgent defense against pillaging, massacre, forgetting …

You are dead. I snatch the world from you. I take your breath away.

It’s over. Done for [fichu]. Finished. Says mortality.—No! I cry.

—HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, AYAÏ

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Prologue

1   Shatter

Excursus 1: Calculation and Stricture in Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station

2   The Rhythm of Life

Excursus 2: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings

3   Mouth(piece)

Excursus 3: Sharon Hayes’s Addresses

4   A Use of Ears

Excursus 4: The Drive to Listen in Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

Existing English translations have been cited throughout, except where otherwise noted. All translations of previously untranslated texts are my own, except where otherwise noted.

SHATTERING BIOPOLITICS

PROLOGUE

Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life is staged as a scattered collection of overhearings, as if I were listening in on two or more thinkers eavesdropping on one another. Like any eavesdropper, they often fail precisely in trying to hear too much. They mishear one another and miss hearing one another altogether, not for want of aural attention but because of an excess of hearing—an over-hearing.¹ The German false friend überhören, which means to mishear, betrays this irreducible lapse. To overhear, meanwhile, is mithören, which, rather than suggesting reciprocity, might point to the fact that I am never alone when overhearing but always already overheard by another. According to this logic, the book unfolds around a set of mishearings between and within two interrelated philosophical traditions, between French deconstruction, on the one hand, and Italian theories of biopolitics, on the other, and, specifically, between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben.

These two thinkers are frequently listening to one another, sometimes explicitly tracking each other’s thought, but oftentimes silently, even secretively, lending an ear to each other without giving away their proximity. There is an intensity of hearing between them—an excessive over-hearing—often disavowed on one side or vociferously rebuffed by the other, which descends into missing hearing or even willful mishearing (überhörenwollen). Kevin Attell’s important work on the debates between Derrida and Agamben is attuned both to the explicit references (scant on Derrida’s part, more numerous on Agamben’s) and also to ellipsis and preterition.² But this book is concerned not simply with the (mis)hearings that take place between deconstruction and its interlocutors but also with the ways in which aurality is bound up with or binds itself to the thought of life—even is the very binding of life to itself and its unraveling.

This book comes amid an upsurge in thinking about the notion of life in deconstruction, precipitated by the publication and translation of Derrida’s late seminars on the death penalty, sovereignty, and animal life, and more recently the much earlier seminar, La vie la mort.³ Shattering Biopolitics intervenes in this proliferation of bio- and eco-deconstructions with an oto-deconstruction or echo-deconstruction.⁴ In what ways, though, is sound imbricated in life and its deconstruction? Sound might be described as what animates philosophy, provokes its desire, leads it on, and entraps it, but also unleashes its power. There is an intimacy between philosophy and aurality that is life-giving in the sense that it draws philosophy outside itself and thus exposes it to the chance of death—which makes it all the more alive.

From this perspective, philosophers’ 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. Sound is a name for the constitutive jeopardy that is philosophy. The more closely philosophy approaches its other with the aim of understanding it (entendre means both to listen and to understand in French), the more it risks mishearing—no longer hearing or hearing too much. This risk of over-hearing animates the continental philosophical tradition.

Why insist on hearing and not the more habitual reading? This is not to restore some sense of immediacy or intimacy that is lost in the more predominantly visual practice of reading, for the kind of reading I have in mind exceeds any contradiction between audible and visible. Rather, reading is always an uneasy mix of reading-hearing, always tainted and made possible by a certain reading aloud. Inasmuch as the goal of reading can be said to produce a commentary—an Erläuterung—it is a matter of making it louder (lauter). Moreover, reading is always tending toward listening to the extent that it responds to an address, to an interpellative apostrophe that cries out for and animates the ear of the other, interrupting any supposed synchronicity between reading and text.

A reading worthy of the name, moreover, is a matter of listening rhythmically or, to refer to a practice that garners Derrida’s attention as much as it does Michel Foucault’s, of auscultating. For example, in his introduction to the English collection of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s essays, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Derrida urges:

One must learn to read Lacoue-Labarthe, to listen to him, and to do so at his rhythm (learn to follow his rhythm and what he means by rhythm)—that of his voice, I would almost say his breath.… One must learn the necessity of a scansion that comes to fold and unfold a thought. This is nothing other than the necessity of a rhythm—rhythm itself. (Psy2 203/198)

Such reading marks and re-marks the text, pointing it as one points a psalm and at the same time pointing to the time of reading itself—to the time it takes to read and thus to the rhythms of reading itself. This punctuating practice of reading, which Peter Szendy sets out under the theory of general stigmatology, modulates the text with hiatuses, inflections, hesitations, and emphases.⁵ Derrida variously describes this rhythm as a kind of typographic imprint, the stamping of a coin, or the beating of the ear’s tympanum—always multiple and always calling forth another stroke. It is as though reading were striking a bell with a hammer to set it vibrating and thus make it sound, though less regularly and sometimes with enough force to indent or even shatter it.

Shattering Biopolitics is, among other things, about that force of listening—a listening that has the power to shatter into shards. It is about the violence of sound and listening—their power over life—but also their force of life—their life-giving power. Chapter 1 sets out this quasi-concept of shatter that sends aurality and biopolitics flying into deconstruction. It explores how the power of and over life, alongside and (right up) against (tout contre) its trajectory in Foucault and subsequent waves of biopolitical theory, may be thought through and as (the life of) deconstruction. The remaining three theoretical chapters tackle major points of contact between deconstruction, biopolitical theory, and sound studies: rhythm, voice, and listening. Within each of these categories, the chapters traverse a wide range of concepts and texts, consciously adopting a process of moving by analogical drift rather than teleological drive. Sound is what resists and disperses the headlong thrust of rational philosophizing. It is what separates poetry from prose. Here, too, this sonorous impulse infects the text such that writing performs the wayward, chancy life that it describes, resisting the control of theoretical exposition. If the themes of this book are a shattering of teleology, a suspicion of metadiscourse, a rejection of falsification, and a dispersal of meaningful signification, sound is the contaminant from which no pure writing can be extracted. It is the very life of writing and admits of no scholarly drive to mastery.

With readings of texts by Derrida, Agamben, and Malabou, Chapter 2 on rhythm takes the figure of the bell prominent in Glas as a recurring motif or death knell for deconstructing various metaphysical themes from Hegelian Klang and timbre to industrial clock time. Chapter 3 departs from the conventional, overworked concept of voice to explore the pervertibility of speech in the broader context of nonverbal and nonhuman oralities, from biting and vomiting to animal cries and even telephones, and engaging with the significance of the call—as imperative, summons to response-ability, and recalling to life—in the thought of Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, and Cixous. The final theoretical chapter on listening examines the imbrication and displacement of psychoanalytical concepts during the course of the deconstruction of power, life, and aurality with a particular focus on the dialogues between Cixous and Derrida about the end of the world, before turning, via the usure (use or usage, but also wearing-out or exhaustion) of metaphor, to Agamben’s notion of a use of life beyond biopolitics as eternal life.

Punctuating these theoretical interventions—marking and re-marking them, giving them a new modulation, auscultating them—is a series of excurses on examples of sound and performance art that grapple with the politics of sound and listening. Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station series reveals the implication of aurality in counting and (ac)countability under neoliberal biopolitics, while Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s investigations into the role played by forensic audiology expose the implication of phonemes in the geopolitics of global migration. Sharon Hayes’s praxis of politicized speech acts raises questions of performativity, iterability, address, and apostrophe, and finally Ultra-red’s community-based practice of militant sound investigation, rooted in critical popular pedagogy, opens up the possibilities for fostering new uses of our ears beyond psychoanalytical and neoliberal modalities of listening.

The component parts of Shattering Biopolitics may thus be read according to multiple rhythms: as singular points, in pairs of double strikes, or as a sequence of dottings, leaping from one chapter to the next or one excursus to another, with or without the splintering force of the introduction that is designed to shatter any possibility of gathering the thoughts of this book into a unity. Each possible path through the book leads in a different direction, some more directly and other more circuitously. You are invited to enjoy the detours and to break open new paths of your own, to turn back perhaps to read the excursus after the corresponding theoretical reflections or even, having charted the straight philosophical path through the book, to chart a winding course back through the excurses.

1

SHATTER

SOUND, FOR EXAMPLE

If today there is a generalization of war¹—if neoliberal capital and the neofascisms it has spawned wage war on the poor, on immigrants, on refugees, on Muslims, on the autonomy of women, on labor, on democracy—then the blows and wounds this warfare inflicts are perhaps felt most intensely, most searingly—or, as the French idiom has it, most à vif (raw, skinned alive, nerves on the edge)—in the domain of aurality. Sound is exemplarily alive to biopolitics. I shall come to an example of this implication of sound in biopolitics in a moment, but let me preface it with some reflections on the exemplarity of the example, which, as Derrida tells us in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, "gives to be read in more searing, intense, even traumatic fashion, the truth of a universal necessity" (MA 49/26; trans. modified).

What happens when someone comes to describe a