Jean-Luc Nancy (b. Bordeaux, 1940) has written about identity, religion, community, artistic creation, and the act of philosophising itself.

Many of his texts, most of which enter into close dialogue with the work of other thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, Bataille, Heidegger, and Hegel, also include frequent references to the body, its status as a cultural and historical construct, its “indices”, its limits, and its potentialities.

In his 2002 book “À l’écoute” (Listening), Nancy returned to the question of the body, this time exploring it in parallel with the experience of sound. These ideas led him to examine the relationship between the acts of listening and philosophising, the anti-phenomenological nature of sound events, and the notion of the subject – another recurring theme that is constantly scrutinised in his work.

In this podcast, Jean-Luc Nancy goes back to these and other questions addressed in the pages of “À l’écoute”, a book that is both controversial and often quoted in the broad field of contemporary sound and listening studies. Radio Web MACBA and Jean-Luc Nancy talks about the body as an echo chamber and as a sensible and sentient presence, about silence as the “infinite extremity of sound”, and the role of sound and listening in the context of political practice.