Jakub Momro
(Jagiellonian University in Krakow)
Abstract:
Contemporary cultural and scientific doxa states that we live in the power of the gaze, of sight, subjected to the need to look as a necessity to rule over the external world. It is not difficult to find various versions of narcissism in this diagnosis: from perceptual, through social, to civilizational. But it is not sight that is the most important way of the senses today. In contrast to the re-representational nature of sight, the sound sphere is filled with certain formations of objects over which we only seemingly have no control (as in composition). Sounds touch us to the core in their directness, but at the same time they constitute something like the principle of incoherence and evasion. The cruelty of sounds results from the fact that it touches the body of the one who hears and listens, but it is also the cruelty of presence, about which Antonin Artaud wrote. Namely it is violence present in several places at the same time: from sound as a mathematical point, through sound as a material object, to sound as an element of composition (both harmonic and heterogeneous). In this context, I would like to look at the territory of the ear in three variants: psychoanalytical (in the case of the psychotic exile), biopolitical (the cruelty of sounds as permanent elements of torture in the concentration camps and contemporary detention camp), and ontological (in a more general reflection on sounds as components of the territory and environment).
Bio:
Jakub Momro, PhD, is a full professor at Jagiellonian University (Krakow), Department of Polish Studies. He is a philosopher, literary scholar, essayist, and translator (e.g. books and texts of J. Derrida, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, P. Szendy). He published a monograph of Samuel Beckett: Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativity (polish edition, 2010, Universitas, Krakow, English edition: Peter Lang, 2015), and (in polish) study: Hauntologies of Modernity. Geneses, IBL PAN Editions, Warsaw, 2014, and “Ear has no Eyelid”. The Sonic Primal Scenes, WUJ, Krakow 2020. His is a member of Editorial Board of bi-monthly Journal “Second Texts”, and is a member of the editorial committee of the New Humanities publishing series. He is currently preparing a book on the natural history of radical modernity.
