All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage

by Peter Szendy, Peter Szendy

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the “News of the World” scandal are just the most sensational examples of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this unceasing battle of different forms of listening? Whence this generalized principle of eavesdropping?

Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage answers these questions by tracing the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelligence gathering network called “Echelon.” This archeology of auditory surveillance runs parallel with the analysis of its representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing” that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. Relying on the works of Freud, Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, and Derrida, Szendy’s work attempts to locate at the heart of listening the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing” that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2007

About the author

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening.

Reviews

[Nadinedebussy]

Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel by Nouela
https://youtu.be/Q4oInT79CUk

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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9...

John Berger

Richard Portman

R. Herzog

Thierry Lévy

Jan Szczepański

Eugene Cernan

Vahit Melih Halefoğlu

Jung Mikyung

Jaki Liebezeit

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[smokeandmirrors]

my thesis is about espionage in WWI-set films and so obviously i went into this book full of hope that it would give me cool ideas to think about and instead it told me we were in a panacousticon and that don giovanni is a great opera about the ear. espionage turned out to be a metaphor for All Listening, Which Is In Fact A Spying Activity. i'm sure i'm doing this poor book a great injustice but i was not its target audience in the slightest and it gave me NO espionage information, 0/10

[Avşar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title mismatches the context. I've found it very complicated and difficult to grasp.

[ege · Rating 2 out of 5]

güzeldi.