Books by Naomi Waltham-Smith
A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible noise. All these can make the difference betwe... more A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible 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.
“Shattering Biopolitics brilliantly weaves together two threads: it carefully auscultates the philosophical discourses of deconstruction and biopolitics in order to sound them out on their aural imagination; and it pursues a true ‘politics of listening,’ a performative intervention that seeks to reconfigure the way we lend our ears.”
—Peter Szendy, Brown University
“A tour-de-force analysis of the role of sound in contemporary biopolitics and a landmark volume within and beyond music studies.”
—Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in list... more In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights.
The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
“The classics are back. Naomi Waltham-Smith lifts the critical analysis of style to the next level with the freshest and most radical reimagining of the classical masters we have seen in a long time. In prose of fire and fervor, Waltham-Smith puts Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the ring with Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy and raises the stakes in what it means for music to be human. A performance of dazzling intellectual virtuosity.”—Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
“Do not enter these pages expecting to find the Viennese Classical Style of your peers. Brace yourself instead for a complete repurposing of every element of that style and of almost everything that has been said about it. Nothing is lost on Naomi Waltham-Smith, and it is exhilarating to watch her wrest this music from its perceived foundations and urge it into the teeming vortex of her critical imaginary.”—Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Peer-reviewed journal articles by Naomi Waltham-Smith
parrhesia, 2019
As scholars continue to take stock of Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, it is clear that there is much... more As scholars continue to take stock of Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, it is clear that there is much that we’ve already heard before, if only faintly, in earlier parts of the Homo Sacer project. This finale echoes repeated attacks on the presuppositional structure of language, showing Agamben to be a thinker of the unthought and one who, as Derrida observes, claims he is the first to think the unthought. With deliberate irony, I excavate two unthoughts in The Use of Bodies that remain as yet unspoken among critical responses.
First, Agamben’s longstanding entanglement with deconstruction goes without any explicit mention in this text beyond subtle allusions to earlier or potential encounters. While Kevin Attell has rigorously examined the relationship between Agamben and Derrida up to 2005, I argue that this more recent, albeit silent, confrontation clarifies the proximity and distance between them. I set Agamben’s use alongside Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphorical usure, arguing that both are ultimately concerned with the Heideggerian theme of the withdrawal of being. I examine to what extent use succeeds in its ambition to deactivate the presuppositional logic of the transcendental.
Second, notwithstanding his preoccupations with sound and sense, there is another Heideggerianism that Agamben doesn’t thematize as such: hearing. Reading Agamben’s sparse references to aurality alongside Derrida’s extensive engagement, I reconfigure Peter Szendy’s overhearing specifically as an usure of the ear. Using the concept to describe how the protagonists mishear one another in trying to hear too much, I overhear the dissonant resonances through which deconstruction remains the presupposition of Agamben’s thought. I argue that an abandonment of the transcendental asks that nothing remain unheard, only modified by the ear.
Diacritics, 2019
The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears.... more The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2018
A critical reading from a Derridean perspective of the appendix to Agamben's What is Philosophy? ... more A critical reading from a Derridean perspective of the appendix to Agamben's What is Philosophy? interrogating music's quasi-transcendental status.
Music & Science, 2018
Continental philosophy, argues Catherine Malabou, has disavowed biology. This article examines th... more Continental philosophy, argues Catherine Malabou, has disavowed biology. This article examines the ways in which philosophies of listening risk eschewing the biological and material dimensions of aurality in favour of its symbolic or spiritual aspects. It explores in detail the dangers that deconstructive approaches to listening face in their endeavours to confront the materiality of sensation and it presents Malabou's concept of plasticity as a way out of these aporias.
Sound Studies, 2018
How has neoliberalism transformed the way we hear? The essay focuses on the way in which gamblers... more How has neoliberalism transformed the way we hear? The essay focuses on the way in which gamblers listen in the casinos of Las Vegas, examining how, in a paradigmatic example of the post-Fordist attention economy, casino capital captures the psychological and affective capacities of players. In an environment where every detail is purposefully designed to increase revenues, sound design plays a very important role in keeping players in their seats and increasing the length of time they spend playing, as well as the size and speed of bets. Against the backdrop of Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of neoliberalism as a “destruction of attention,” I draw upon two conceptual frames to analyse the modalities of listening produced on the Strip and to distinguish them from Adornian structural listening: (1) Martin Heidegger’s discussion of boredom and animal captivation; and (2) Félix Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit as it anticipates Catherine Malabou’s theory of plasticity.
Music Analysis
This article proposes an alternative way to think about the process of expositional closure. The ... more This article proposes an alternative way to think about the process of expositional closure. The recent resurgence of Formenlehre has given rise to a dispute about the correlation between expositional closure and the sequence of local perfect authentic cadences in the second group. Noting that the two sides of the debate produce opposing representations of the temporality of listening, I draw upon philosophical and linguistic models of actualisation to theorise the way in which expositional closure is realised across the second group. To this end, I focus on the refrain cadences in the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor K. 491 which, as a means of deferring expositional closure, sit uneasily alongside other strategies of thematic loosening and cadential liquidation. The idea of the refrain leads me to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of repetition and from there, via the notion of temps impliqué, to Gustave Guillaume’s system of verb formation—both of which problematise the passage from potentiality to actuality, isolating a dimension of contingency as that which may or may not come to pass.
Journal of Music Theory
Haydn is known for his playful (mis)use of cadential formulas. Examining examples of this predile... more Haydn is known for his playful (mis)use of cadential formulas. Examining examples of this predilection and processes of cadential liquidation, this article develops a theory of the use of musical material. This entails a deconstruction of the Adornian dialectic between generic convention and particular expression and--following Derrida’s notion of exappropriation--between proper and improper, and propriety and impropriety.
Music Theory Spectrum, 2017
This article argues that Beethoven's Arietta Variations inscribe the activity of listening in the... more This article argues that Beethoven's Arietta Variations inscribe the activity of listening in their own melodic and harmonic processes. The argument proceeds from two observations: (1) that tonality anticipates the listening subject in the form of a " desire " to progress from dominant to tonic; (2) that the temporal representation produced by analysis is always minimally dislocated from the time of music's sonic unfolding. A notion of " the time it takes to listen " describes the time it takes for the ear to bring to its completion the analytical representation of time and thereby accounts for this gap. An analysis focusing on the role of the trill demonstrates how the Arietta Variations reflect this supplementary temporality in their own unfolding.
boundary 2, 2016
What is at stake when the sonorous becomes a condition of possibility for a concept of community?... more What is at stake when the sonorous becomes a condition of possibility for a concept of community? Exploring the ex(ap)propriation of the sonic that takes places at the threshold between the refusal of presence in French deconstruction (Derrida, Nancy) and the refusal of biopolitics in recent Italian thought (Agamben, Negri, Virno), this essay proposes that, insofar as sound always-already goes beyond and outside itself, it provides a model for subtractive ontologies that resists both any notion of particular identity and criterion of communal belonging. The ontological-political potential of the sonic presupposes a division that inheres within aurality between the ear and the voice: between the resonant spacing that is Nancy's being-with and the sonorous residue of the capacity not to speak in Agamben. This leads to asking what form of politics can emerge if an unheard audibility is set alongside a sounding unsayability in the closest, yet irreparably disjunct, intimacy.
Current Musicology, 2006
A quick review of the musicological literature and performer’s commentaries on Bach’s solo cello ... more A quick review of the musicological literature and performer’s commentaries on Bach’s solo cello suites suggests that this repertoire can scarcely be thought of without reference to space, and, with the advent of recordings, the need to find a space for this music has become more acute. This study thus seeks to explore the ways in which listeners might experience recordings of Bach’s solo cello suites specifically in terms of space and to ask what kind of space this might be and what significance it might have. It aims not only to reflect upon how musical-analytical and performance-related questions shape a listener’s sense of space, but also to demonstrate how recording technology plays a significant role in doing so. In this sense, this study is more an attempt to develop a theory of how we listen to recordings of these works in space than it is an analysis of the spatial characteristics of Bach’s music. To explore the spatial possibilities of the experience of these recordings means drawing on a combination of sociological research into listening practices, musical-analytical findings and the responses of record reviewers, as well as numerous and detailed ‘close-listenings’ to the recordings themselves. Philosophical discourse also goes into the mix in an attempt to develop a theory of the transformative potential of such listening experiences.
Book Reviews by Naomi Waltham-Smith
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2016
PEKITI-TIRSIA KALI, an indigenous Filipino combat art also known as "the dance of the blade," cal... more PEKITI-TIRSIA KALI, an indigenous Filipino combat art also known as "the dance of the blade," calls for a phantom third hand. The attacker must use one hand as if she had two.
Eighteenth-Century Music, 2016
Peer-reviewed book chapters by Naomi Waltham-Smith
Oxford Handbook of Timbre and Orchestration, ed. Alexander Rehding and Emily Dolan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Jerrold Levinson, Nanette Nielsen, and Tomas McCauley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)
Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, ed. Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)., 2016
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Books by Naomi Waltham-Smith
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.
“Shattering Biopolitics brilliantly weaves together two threads: it carefully auscultates the philosophical discourses of deconstruction and biopolitics in order to sound them out on their aural imagination; and it pursues a true ‘politics of listening,’ a performative intervention that seeks to reconfigure the way we lend our ears.”
—Peter Szendy, Brown University
“A tour-de-force analysis of the role of sound in contemporary biopolitics and a landmark volume within and beyond music studies.”
—Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota
Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights.
The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
“The classics are back. Naomi Waltham-Smith lifts the critical analysis of style to the next level with the freshest and most radical reimagining of the classical masters we have seen in a long time. In prose of fire and fervor, Waltham-Smith puts Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the ring with Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy and raises the stakes in what it means for music to be human. A performance of dazzling intellectual virtuosity.”—Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
“Do not enter these pages expecting to find the Viennese Classical Style of your peers. Brace yourself instead for a complete repurposing of every element of that style and of almost everything that has been said about it. Nothing is lost on Naomi Waltham-Smith, and it is exhilarating to watch her wrest this music from its perceived foundations and urge it into the teeming vortex of her critical imaginary.”—Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Peer-reviewed journal articles by Naomi Waltham-Smith
First, Agamben’s longstanding entanglement with deconstruction goes without any explicit mention in this text beyond subtle allusions to earlier or potential encounters. While Kevin Attell has rigorously examined the relationship between Agamben and Derrida up to 2005, I argue that this more recent, albeit silent, confrontation clarifies the proximity and distance between them. I set Agamben’s use alongside Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphorical usure, arguing that both are ultimately concerned with the Heideggerian theme of the withdrawal of being. I examine to what extent use succeeds in its ambition to deactivate the presuppositional logic of the transcendental.
Second, notwithstanding his preoccupations with sound and sense, there is another Heideggerianism that Agamben doesn’t thematize as such: hearing. Reading Agamben’s sparse references to aurality alongside Derrida’s extensive engagement, I reconfigure Peter Szendy’s overhearing specifically as an usure of the ear. Using the concept to describe how the protagonists mishear one another in trying to hear too much, I overhear the dissonant resonances through which deconstruction remains the presupposition of Agamben’s thought. I argue that an abandonment of the transcendental asks that nothing remain unheard, only modified by the ear.
Book Reviews by Naomi Waltham-Smith
Peer-reviewed book chapters by Naomi Waltham-Smith
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.
“Shattering Biopolitics brilliantly weaves together two threads: it carefully auscultates the philosophical discourses of deconstruction and biopolitics in order to sound them out on their aural imagination; and it pursues a true ‘politics of listening,’ a performative intervention that seeks to reconfigure the way we lend our ears.”
—Peter Szendy, Brown University
“A tour-de-force analysis of the role of sound in contemporary biopolitics and a landmark volume within and beyond music studies.”
—Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota
Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights.
The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
“The classics are back. Naomi Waltham-Smith lifts the critical analysis of style to the next level with the freshest and most radical reimagining of the classical masters we have seen in a long time. In prose of fire and fervor, Waltham-Smith puts Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the ring with Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy and raises the stakes in what it means for music to be human. A performance of dazzling intellectual virtuosity.”—Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
“Do not enter these pages expecting to find the Viennese Classical Style of your peers. Brace yourself instead for a complete repurposing of every element of that style and of almost everything that has been said about it. Nothing is lost on Naomi Waltham-Smith, and it is exhilarating to watch her wrest this music from its perceived foundations and urge it into the teeming vortex of her critical imaginary.”—Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York
First, Agamben’s longstanding entanglement with deconstruction goes without any explicit mention in this text beyond subtle allusions to earlier or potential encounters. While Kevin Attell has rigorously examined the relationship between Agamben and Derrida up to 2005, I argue that this more recent, albeit silent, confrontation clarifies the proximity and distance between them. I set Agamben’s use alongside Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphorical usure, arguing that both are ultimately concerned with the Heideggerian theme of the withdrawal of being. I examine to what extent use succeeds in its ambition to deactivate the presuppositional logic of the transcendental.
Second, notwithstanding his preoccupations with sound and sense, there is another Heideggerianism that Agamben doesn’t thematize as such: hearing. Reading Agamben’s sparse references to aurality alongside Derrida’s extensive engagement, I reconfigure Peter Szendy’s overhearing specifically as an usure of the ear. Using the concept to describe how the protagonists mishear one another in trying to hear too much, I overhear the dissonant resonances through which deconstruction remains the presupposition of Agamben’s thought. I argue that an abandonment of the transcendental asks that nothing remain unheard, only modified by the ear.