Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject

This essay introduces the reader to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on listening, by focusing on his use of two French verbs that both mean to listen', namely entendre and ecouter. By playing close attention to way that Nancy differentiates these verbs, and the historical context in which they have played a role, one discovers an entryway into Nancy's challenging thinking about sound, sense, and subjectivity. Ecouter and entendre are discussed in relation to the phenomenological theories of listening of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer emphasizes entendre, which is etymologically related to word intentionality, as the privileged mode of listening to the sound object, an intentional object, whose sense is grounded on the closed reference back to the listening subject. Nancy critiques this mode of listeningand the implicit subject positedby emphasizing ecouter, which holds open the threshold between sense and signification. Listening reveals sound as a structure of resonancean infinite sending and resending. Nancy's analyses also reveal that resonance is the structure of the subject and of sense.