Anthony Gritten

A decade on from its founding, it is the right time to take stock and consider the manner of Performance Philosophy’s constitution and its projection into and onto the world. There are questions about how it narrates itself, both inwardly to its network (though the global reach of Performance Philosophy suggests that ‘inward’ is not the right word here) and outwardly towards interlocutors nominally outside the network. One challenge concerns the “performative materialisation” of Performance Philosophy’s many practitioners. This can be unpacked with a few questions: Who witnesses events? Who intervenes materially? Who contributes to the network? Whose collaboration increases social capital? Who evaluates practitioners’ self-management? Other questions are possible. This essay considers some of these questions.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.

This essay suggests that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s descriptive phenomenology of ‘tarrying’ [Verweilen] can be configured as an essential component of musical experience. At issue is the type of effortful work that intensifies the subject’s most valuable musical experiences and that allows them to become more sustainable and sensitive. It is assumed that music’s presence in the subject’s life should blossom and indeed bloom over time, although this guiding assumption is left unexamined while the essay considers how a detailed phenomenology of musical tarrying might afford the subject a way of underwriting the ways in which human-music relationships are configured. John Cage’s plant piece Child of Tree is deployed, perhaps counterintuitively, as an example of the ideal hermeneutic attitude underwriting tarrying, although it is suggested that the applicability of Gadamer’s constitution of tarrying extends beyond the musical-theatrical avant-garde.

Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening makes a series of claims about the sonic/auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic. These claims are phrased often in musical terms, or making use of terms and rhetoric from the domains of music theory and music psychology. This article explores the role of music in Nancy's phenomenology with a particular view to the nature of listening in the contemporary world: both how listening is figured as a part of what Nancy terms the inoperative community and how listening figures the cognitive and phenomenological constitution of the subject.