Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit.Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the...

When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an "ecology of images," she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor an...

“Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials.” This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens of which Kant speaks—and he no doubt took them more seriously than anyone else in the history of philosophy—are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism.Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned al...

This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hear...

A historical, literary, and philosophical study that transforms our understanding of reading"Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push an...

The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelli...

The long-awaited conclusion to Derrida’s seminar on the gift and time.In 1991, Jacques Derrida published the first half of a seminar delivered from 1978 to 1979 on gifts and time, but the second installment (though expected) was not completed in his lifetime. Given Time II completes the seminar with eight sessions that showcase Derrida’s most advanced work on the problematic of the gift in Heidegger, with deep dives into some of the most difficult texts in...

An enlightening exploration of the concept of listening and the evolving role of the listener from Beethoven to Charlie Parker to contemporary remixing.In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The roles of the composer and the musician are clear, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to music? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have ...

The prostheses Peter Szendy explores—those peculiar artifacts known as musical instruments—are not only technical devices but also bodies that live a strange phantom life, as uncanny as a sixth finger or a third lung.The musicological impulse to inventory those bodies that produce sound is called into question here. In Szendy’s hands, its respectable corpus of scholarship is read aslant, so as to tease out what it usually prefers to hide: hybrids and grafts produced by active ficti...

**In this fascinating book, Edward Said looks at the creative contradictions that often mark the late works of literary and musical artists."These studies . . . buzz with excitement and intelligence and demonstrate...the extraordinary range of Said’s intellectual interests.” —Frank Kermode, London Review of Books**Said shows how the approaching death of an artist can make its way into his work, examining essays, poems, novels, films, and operas by such artists as B...

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbit...