Peter Szendy

Who is Peter Szendy?

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist.

His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening. Paying close attention to arrangements as "signed listenings" and to the juridical history of the listener, Szendy suggests an alternative model based on deconstruction: listening, he argues, is a "tolerated theft", and our ears are always already haunted by the ear of the other.

In Sur écoute. Esthétique de l'espionnage, he draws on Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon and Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control in order to show how the act of listening always entails issues of power and dominion. Sur écoute proposes an archeology of overhearing, following many paths, from the Bible to spy movies like Hitchcock's Torn Curtain or Coppola's The Conversation.

In Membres fantômes : des corps musiciens, Szendy rethinks the concept of body as construed in the history of Western musical thought and sketches the outlines of a "general organology" based on the rhetorical concept of "effiction". In his book on Moby Dick, he develops a theory of reading as prophecy, while reassessing Derrida's famous sentence: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte".