Prick up Your Ears

Listening with Barthes and Others

Resumo

If in Hegel the Ancient Greek ‘subjectivizes’ the sounds of Nature that s/he interrogates, in the more contemporary accounts of listening the subject is split; the echo comes back not from within, but through the other scene or stage of desire and the drive, and through the circuitous paths of language. To have one’s ears cocked is to be subject to the tragic and erotic dimensions of listening.