The Sonic Turn and Theory’s Affective Call

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 140.

2 Ibid., 173. See also Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta.

3 Cox, “Beyond Representation.”

4 Ibid., 148. I should perhaps specify that when Cox refers to philosophy and theory, he does so as basic scholarly formations, with theory connoting an interdisciplinary character, as in deconstruction and poststructuralist theory. When Lacoue-Labarthe refers to philosophy, he typically does so in a disciplinary sense, firstly as a field of knowledge that is invested in its own reproduction and self-image, and secondly as harbouring a theoretical drive to master the objects that it submits to its speculative gaze as a way to establish its disciplinary sovereignty. For Lacoue-Labarthe, philosophy is concerned above all with its status as the ideal subject of thinking, where thinking is primarily theoria, a mode of seeing, thus the tie between speculation and the specular. Hence, when I go further into Lacoue-Labarthe’s project in the discussion that follows, I will be referring at times to Philosophy and Theory in hypostatized forms – i.e. as self-imagined, self-asserting subjects – in order to acknowledge these as moments in which philosophical thought exhibits Lacoue-Labarthe’s fundamental contention regarding philosophy’s theoretical narcissism.

5 Ibid., 146.

6 Ibid., 158 n.1.

7 For an overview of these new materialist objects, see Dolphijn and van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies.

8 According to Caleb Kelly in his overview of sound art, Jim Drobnick was the first to coin the phrase ‘the sonic turn’, identifying ‘the acoustic’ as the next theoretical phase to follow after W.J.T. Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn’. In evoking the sonic turn, Drobnick intentionally echoes Mitchell’s phrasing and also carries further his logic of theoretical progress: if, as Mitchell says, the pictorial turn is able to grasp that which resists the textual analyses proper to the linguistic turn, then the sonic turn is able to grasp that which resists both textual and visual analysis. See Jim Drobnick, “Listening Awry,” 10. See also W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory and Caleb Kelly, “Introduction: Sound in Art,” 14. Similar gestures for arguing for the exigency of the sonic turn can be observed in the work of Salomé Vogelin (Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art; Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound), who stresses the value of sound’s invisibility against the privileging of the visible in theory and knowledge. Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith, and Marijke de Valck also make this basic distinction in their Introduction to their edited collection Sonic Interventions. For an example that argues for sound as a way to engage ‘technological posthumanism’ and experience difference, see David Cecchetto’s Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism.

9 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 146; 150.

10 See Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative.”

11 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 140.

12 Ibid., 142.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 143-44.

15 Ibid., 144-45.

16 Ibid., 145.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 146.

21 See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” 78ff.

22 Ibid., 103ff. Lacoue-Labarthe is following René Girard’s work on mimesis in these pages.

23 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 147.

24 Ibid., 149-50. See also Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Unconscious is Destructured Like an Affect,” 196ff. Cf. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie.

25 As summarized in Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 153ff. Lacoue-Labarthe cites from the 1953 English edition of The Haunting Melody.

26 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 151.

27 Ibid., 155-56. As Lacoue-Labarthe explains, Reik was in fact incorrect about Abraham being from Hamburg. He was instead born in Bremen. The mistake implies something of a forced association on Reik’s part. (Note that the English translation of “The Echo of the Subject” incorrectly transcribes Bülow’s name as ‘Bühlow’. I correct it in my citations of the text. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, “L’Écho du sujet,” 239ff.)

28 Reik, The Haunting Melody, 235-36. Cited in Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 156-57.

29 See Walker, Hans von Bülow, 428.

30 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 159.

31 Ibid., 181-82

32 Ibid., 162-63.

33 Ibid., 163.

34 Ibid., 163-64.

35 Ibid., 164.

36 Ibid., 165. For a recent effort to think of echo in ways that do not reduce it to the speculative economy, see John Mowitt’s Sounds: The Ambient Humanities. I thank James Lavender for bringing Mowitt’s work to my attention.

37 Ibid., 178-79.

38 Ibid., 179.

39 Ibid., 174.

40 Ibid., 173. Emphasis in original.

41 Ibid., 172. Emphasis in original.

42 Ibid., 174.

43 Ibid., 175.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid. Cf. Derrida, “Introduction: Desistance.”

46 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 189; 196. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative.”

47 See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” 94.

48 Reik, The Haunting Melody, 253. Cited in Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 193.

49 Ibid., 193.

50 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” 194.

51 Ibid., 195.

52 Ibid.

53 See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography.”

54 Ibid. See also Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta.

55 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

56 It is a problem that pursues Lacoue-Labarthe throughout his work, including in his final book Phrase. For more on this, see Christopher Fynsk's Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase and Ann Smock's “No music…”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Eng

Michael Eng is Shula Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and subjectivization, particularly in terms of disability, race, and gender. His work has appeared previously in parallax, as well as in Deleuze Studies, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, and in the collections Race, Philosophy, and Film, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, and The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein. An article on Adrian Piper and the pseudorationality of data is forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories, and he has just completed his first book, ‘The Scene of the Voice: Language after Affect’. Email: [email protected]