This thesis examines a recent shift in attention to the auditory present in a strand of post-1999 contemporary European film and philosophy. It argues that noise, defined predominantly as unpleasant or unidentifiable sound, has been harnessed by particular filmmakers as a means to tune our attention to different bodies sounding in our environment. Yet while the ear is an organ we perceive to be open, it could always be receiving more. This limit to our audition is a limit the filmmakers examined here productively engage with in ways that raise questions about the politics and ethics of listening to different bodies. The thesis takes Jean-Luc Nancy's articulation of the listening body, what he calls the corps sonore, to posit a theory of a 'cinematic corps sonore' where the boundaries between on-screen bodies, medium and spectator are dissolved in the mutual vibratory soundings that characterise the state of being 'all ears'. In doing so, the thesis offers a revision of the haptic framework that has dominated recent sensuous theories of film as well as applications of Nancy's thought to film in the inter-discipline of film philosophy. The analysis proceeds via close readings of individual films to consider how noise tunes us to different bodies and the specific issues raised in doing so in ways that resonate beyond the philosophical limits of Nancy's corps sonore. Chapter one examines the 'unlistenable' in the work of Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noé. It revises accounts of the supposed 'unwatchability' of Breillat and Noé's cinema by examining their respective appeals to volume and frequency, revealing both the possibility of intimacy and the risk of vulnerability that the corps sonore poses. Chapter two takes the corps sonore to the question of national borders and social bodies by bringing post-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant's concept of the écho-monde to Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004) and Arnaud des Pallières' Adieu (2004). It argues that both filmmakers appeal to the migratory properties of noise to think through questions of identity, relation and the different degrees of belonging that sound inscribes. The final chapter asks whether cinema constitutes a site that allows for an amplification of the nonhuman. Attention is given both to the practice of Foley and to the use of Foley in Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) to show how a non-coincidence between body and sound figures cinema as a place of resonance, animated by the scattered structure of dynamic relations between things that Foley brings about. Yet the chapter also casts doubt over the possibility of noise indicating something outside of human world-projection and as such, disrupts the otherwise increasingly prehensile attention that I argue filmmakers have been able to pay to the body through the auditory.

[pt] Esta dissertação toma por objeto privilegiado de análise o livro L Intrus (O Intruso), do filósofo francês (1940) Jean-Luc Nancy. O livro mescla a escrita poética à reflexão propriamente filosófica e oferece, por conseguinte, o desafio de uma compreensão que tome em conta esse duplo viés. Partindo da abordagem inicial sobre o caráter do livro, é formulada a hipótese central de pesquisa: a questão do intruso, implícita no livro de Nancy, versa sobre o caráter desconstrutivo tanto do corpo social, quanto do corpo privado. Ambos funcionariam articulando-se numa dupla injunção, que no primeiro caso, apresenta-se numa investigação sobre o contato entre os termos intruso e estrangeiro, e no segundo caso, entre intruso e estranho. A pesquisa atua, ainda, num registro marcadamente contemporâneo. São as exigências, os problemas, as crises do mundo de hoje que norteiam as leituras do livro de Nancy, a compreensão da noção de hospitalidade e o redimensionamento da noção de subjetividade. / [en] This dissertation has, as its primary object of analysis, the book L Intrus (The intruder), by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940). This book blends poetic writing to proper philosophical reflection, and therefore poses the challenge of a comprehension that considers this double perspective. Based on this first approach to the nature of the book, the central research hypothesis is formulated: the topic of the intruder, implicit in Nancy s book, deals with the deconstructive nature of both the social and the private bodies. Both would work by articulating into a double injunction, which, in the first case, is present in an investigation of the contact between the terms intruder and foreigner, and in the second case, between intruder and strange. Also, the research takes place on a markedly contemporary register. It is the demands, problems and crises of today s world that guide the readings of Nancy s book, the understanding of the notion of hospitality and the redimensioning of the notion of subjectivity.

Du point de vue de l'expérience, l'intensité désigne ordinairement une force ou une puissance entendue dans leur acception purement sensorielle ou sensitive, comme ce qui peut amener les sens à leurs limites. Or, certaines œuvres d'art nous font parfois faire des expériences intenses et fortes, sans cependant en appeller systématiquement à nos sens, sans proposer aucun objet à voir ou à sentir, voire même en se présentant simplement en une expérience de pensée. C'est ce paradoxe qui nous a amenés à nous interroger sur l'imperceptible, désignant par là le caractère à la fois insensible et intense de l'expérience esthétique. Notre esthétique de l'intensité se fonde sur une interprétation phénoménologique de cette dernière en la définissant comme expérience « charnelle », au sens du dernier Merleau-Ponty, c'est-à-dire comme ce qui fait toucher au seul sens d'être, à l'il y a. L'intense prend alors une dimension ontologique en tant qu'il incarne la puissance interne de différenciation du sensible comme source de tension, de variations et de différences. Nous partons des œuvres de V. Woolf et de Cl. Royet-Journoud, pour explorer l'écriture comme lieu d'expérience du sens naissant ; puis nous interrogeons la dimension intense des expériences quasi-imperceptibles à l'œuvre dans les arts plastiques et visuels, chez M. Duchamp, B. Nauman, D. Graham, M. Abramovic ou R. Smithson. Nous montrons ensuite, à travers les philosophies de Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze et Jean-Luc Nancy, que la pensée peut constituer en elle-même une expérience intense, en élucidant simultanément l'idée même d'intensité. / From the point of view of experience, intensity generally designates a certain force or power that we understand in a purely sensorial or sensory fashion, as something that can takes our senses to their limits. Yet certain works of art offer us experiences that are intense and powerful without systematically calling upon our senses, without offering any particular object to be seen, or sensed. Sometimes, they are just presented as a an experience of thinking. It is this paradox that has prodded us into exploring the imperceptible. In this particular instance, that means the character of our esthetic experience that is both “in-sensitive” and intense. Our esthetics of intensity is founded on a phenomenological interpretation of the latter, defining it as a “carnal” experience, such as the later-period Merleau-Ponty envisaged it, implying that which touches the unique sense of being, the “there is”. The “intense” then takes on an ontological dimension, in so far as it embodies the internal force of differentiation of the “sensitive” as a source of tension, of variations and of differences. We shall begin our interrogation with the works of Virginia Woolf and Claude Royet-Journoud, in order to explore writing as a locus for experiencing newly-born senses. Then, we shall question the intense dimension of quasi-imperceptible experiences that are at work in the visual and the fine arts, looking at M. Duchamp, B. Nauman, M. Abramovic or R. Smithson. Finally, we shall demonstrate, through the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, G. Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, that thought in itself, can constitute an intense experience, by simultaneously elucidating the idea of intensity itself.

This thesis theorises an approach to cinematic suspense derived from a set of films that challenge the teleological and redemptive principles of traditional narrative. It is argued that such a challenge is drawn from the need to account for conditions of violence and suffering without recourse to the traditional grounds of redemption. They set out to question the symbols that underpin a faith in its possibilities. Such films counter these grounds with a form of perpetuated suspense that continually withholds resolution, stressing and destabilising both the terms of redemption and the affect of its aesthetic representations. Significantly, this thesis examines films from the years following 1989 that confront this central theme within conditions of historical hiatus and the disintegration of ideological certainties occurring in the wake of European communism. These films, by Kira Muratova, Béla Tarr, Artur Aristakisyan, Alexander Sokurov, Bruno Dumont, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl and Gus Van Sant, present a world in which human beings are always already turned against themselves, placing them in the context of contemporary philosophical aporias that identify the human condition as enigmatic and resisting of itself. They suspend the symbolic structures associated with redemption in order to reconfigure contemporary film as a „realist‟ cinema at the threshold of the interpretative and reconciliatory economies implicit in the soteriological mythology of Western thought. Tracing Paul Ricoeur‟s schematic account of the symbols and myths of a „fallen‟ world, the thesis turns on Jean-Luc Nancy‟s subsequent critique of the insufficiency of myths to properly account for existence. In place of an hermeneutic recovery of the real and its meaning, Nancy‟s „realist‟ philosophy of „sense‟ and its application to the cinema offer an account that speaks less of conflicting narratives of redemption than a radical stripping away of its terms, suggesting that it is redemption from the normative terms of redemption that ultimately constitutes the proper question at the heart of these films.

Head Chop is a practice-led research project exploring the thinking of community found within the works of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot. Using the central exchange between Nancy and Blanchot, as found in the triple intersection of texts composed of Nancy's Inoperative Community, Blanchot's The Unavowable Community, and finally Nancy's recent The Disavowed Community, Head Chop draws upon the interfaces of these three works to develop a reading of community. Utilising the concept of fictioning, an imaging of possible worlds, as its primary methodology, Head Chop develops a narrativised analysis of community. The story of Acéphale, Bataille's secret society, provides the structuring fiction of the work. This story is developed from a synthesis of fragmentary accounts of the Acéphale group's sacrificial ambition, and the illustrations of the Acéphale journal. The result is a tale of a human sacrifice from which the being Acéphale subsequently arises. In tracing the relation of the work of Nancy and Blanchot to the work of Bataille, Head Chop draws attention to the role of the figure of Acéphale for Bataille, and its subsequent insinuation in the work of Nancy and Blanchot. The figure of Acéphale operates as an editorial device that structures and informs the readings of these works as a common grounding and central problematic. This situates the readings of Bataille, Nancy and Blanchot in a contested frame of reference by attempting to accommodate an alternate version of the sacrificial event. Head Chop finds a basis for its methodological investigation in Deleuze and Guattari's work What is Philosophy? Excising and developing a series of figures and conceptual tools from the works of Nancy, Blanchot and Bataille, Head Chop develops a crossing of these figures and concepts as characters within the broader narrative of Acéphale. Following this methodological approach, Head Chop traces series of connected concepts in the works of Nancy and Blanchot. In developing these connections in relation to the Acéphale narrative, conceptual structures engaged in the thinking of community are drawn out into the broader contexts of Nancy and Blanchot's work. These connections are traced in Nancy through addressing such notions as the deconstruction of the subject, the question of authenticity in Heidegger, a re-reading of Heideggeran ontology that privileges Mitsein, and the singular plural. In Blanchot conceptual connections are similarly traced, beginning from the foundational role of the other, the challenging passion of lovers, through to death, unworking, and the question of testimony. In developing a narrativised analysis of the figure of Acéphale, Head Chop aims to open new channels of inquiry into the concept of community as it arises between the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy. Research questions: How does a re-imaging of the Acéphale story, in which Acéphale is begotten, engage with Bataille, Nancy and Blanchot's readings of community? What is to be gained from the use of a re-imagined Acéphale story in a thinking of community?

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening by distinguishing between <em>l’e´coute</em> and <em>l’entente</em>. <em>L’e´coute </em>is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and <em>l’entente</em> is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of <em>l’e´coute</em>, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (<em>il s’e´coute</em>) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (<em>se fait entendre</em>) as he makes himself listened to (<em>se fait e´couter</em>). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both <em>l’entente</em> and <em>l’e´coute</em> when it listens as Chaplin listens.

This thesis brings the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek and Bruno Latour into conversation around the cynosure of ecological rhetoric. It argues for a renewed contemplation of political ecology, one that relinquishes the concept of Nature in favour of the overtly politicized notion of a world in common. By tracing, for the first time, the intersections between these three thinkers’ respective philosophies of nature, this thesis strives to articulate a philosophical framework that can live up to the ecological challenges of the contemporary Anthropocene. / Graduate / 0422 / 0401 / 0298

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This master thesis explores health as a primarily active process and what role theoretical and practical medicine should play in health. Health is divided up into four rooms: the room of the theoretician who works in medicine, the meeting between the theoretician and practician, the meeting between practician and patient, and lastly the individual’s cultural room. By phenomenologically unveiling the transmutation of life defined as death within the cartesian framework of mind-body dualism and its influences on modern Western medicine it becomes apparent that health as defined by biomedicine (lack of disease) is a problematic concept in regard to the experience of being ill in the individual’s room, which is the phenomenological starting point. In the West there exists a cultural tendency among both natural scientists and laypersons to use natural science and medical theory to explain and give meaning to individual diseases and healths, which has also lead to a cultural crisis in the ill individuals’ identity as the cartesian mind-body dualism is more complex than two opposing forces – it is more correct to describe this relation of mind and body identity as a ‘trialism’. The thesis mainly rests on the works of Drew Leder and Jenny Slatman; their works on health and illness in relation to cartesian dualism, and on their concepts of authentic materialism and differential materialism respectively, to formulate a phenomenological theory of health (from the room of the individual) understood as primarily an activity. It concludes that health within the individual’s room is an activity in the now that consists in accepting one’s bodily state and the choices one has made in life to land oneself in the body one now experiences. A healthy choice is grounded in a will to be one’s self, to be one’s own body, although one does not coincide with it. The role of practical medicine is to help the individual want to be themselves, their own body, – by working with the two concepts of health presented as the theoretical health (absence of disease) and the phenomenological (will to be oneself).

This essay attempts to listen to meaning in the borderland, and asks in between which faculties and senses, through which we see and/or listen to the world, do we seek sense? My writing is located on this border, or more precisely on the erased border that I call an interspace or an interval, the place where we look for sense in the relation between language, philosophy, politics, and music. I have done this through the reading of three contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Angela Davis. Derrida and Nancy have provided me with a theoretical and philosophical background for my approach to Davis’s philosophic and political claims. My analysis sets out from Derrida’s différance and what it reveals in the sign system of language. This is continued through a discussion of Nancy’s question: Is philosophy capable of listening, in all senses of the word? Is the philosopher not someone who always hears? In my reading, this connection is established through the blue notes. Davis, finally, provides me with a support for my claim that we, in the political significance of blues, in the traces of meaning that it contains, might be able to listen to Derrida’s différance. Keywords: Listening, meaning, différance, blues, sonority, blue notes, in between, border, subject, Jacques Derrida, Angela Y Davis, Jean-Luc Nancy. / Denna uppsats syftar till att försöka lyssna till meningen i gränslandet – mellan vilka relationer i våra förmågor och sinnen, av att se och/eller lyssna till världen, söker vi mening? Jag vill skriva om den gränsen, eller mer kanske den utsuddade gränsen i platsen jag kallar mellansfär och mellanrum, som den plats där vi söker mening i relationen mellan språk, filosofi, politik och musik. När vi idag söker mening och talar om varat, om individen och subjektivitet, kan det vara så att vi inte längre kan göra det genom fasta tecken, system och former? Istället för att stanna kvar i ett tillstånd av upprepande och separerande som landar i uteslutande och förtryck, i värdeskalor och normer, istället för att endast höra klassiska notsystem, eller förstå språkliga regler hos fasta teckensystem; kan det vara så att vi idag får vända oss till lyssnandet och mellansfären i de blå tonernas différance för att förstå olika individer och subjektivitet i relation till världen? Genom att göra en analys av Derridas term différance i hans text med samma namn: ”Différance” ur boken Margins of philosophy, ska jag försöka närma mig Nancys bok Listening samt läsa hans text genom tanken på différance i Nancys teori och förståelse om lyssnandet.  För att undersöka hur lyssnande och musik kan få ett praktiskt uttryck, av de teoretiska meningarna vi söker i différance, vill jag använda musikgenrerna blues och jazz och de blå toner som bluesen förhåller sig i och mellan. Min teori är att bluesen kan ge en plats (av flera) för var skillnader möts mellan text, värld och musik; platsen där différance kan lyssnas till, synliggöras och hörs. I den teorin vänder jag mig till Angela Davis bok Blues Legacies and Black Feminism som stöd för bluesens utveckling. Det jag ämnar närma mig hos Davis är just bluesens meningssökande och plats i samhället