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At the root of the marginalizations of certain forms of life, even to the point where they are deemed unworthy of living, are often mishearings or failures to listen. In short, the relation between life or death is a matter of aurality. This book analyses how in recent continental political philosophy the thought of life is intimately intertwined with theories and figures of sound and listening. Specifically, it demonstrates how the prism of aurality sharpens the affinities and disagreements between Foucauldian and post-workerist Italian biopolitical theory on the one hand and French deconstruction on the other. To this end, the book stages a series of conversations, riddled with mishearings, between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Closer inspection reveals that the main points of contention circulate around or come into focus with figures of aurality: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone calls. Punctuating the theoretical chapters are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from the incalculability of the sonorous to the impotence of speech acts. Above all, this book argues, it is sound’s capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.