James H. J. Davies

In this paper, I will explore the idea of an ontological exhaustion of being with being. That is, I want to think exhaustion along the lines of what Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Fall of Sleep, thinks of as the lulling, rhythmic désoeuvrement of the between, that space of non-origin; an exhaustion which signals what Levinas, in his monumental Otherwise than Being, calls the hither side of being, a beyond all being itself. Starting with an introductory discussion of weariness in Kafka, I will move to an examination of idleness, or fatigue, in the work of Byung-Chul Han. In Han, we find the first indications of an exhaustion which is sited not in the ceaselessness of modern life, but in the stillness of the one whose living is the contemplation of this other ontology. This will lead me to a discussion of Agamben, Jon Fosse’s Septology, and the relationship between uselessness, “destituent potential,” and poiesis. By closely analysing these terms, I will consider the poiesis of impotential as the cipher for the being of the one who neither refuses nor affirms, who is only there at the threshold, and who is exhausted, divested of being. I shall then turn to the lulling to sleep that Nancy explores and discuss what might be the being of that self beyond being, the self who is exhausted with being. The remainder of the paper will then constitute an engagement with Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, linked to Nancy, wherein I will develop the idea that exhaustion takes us to that very hither side of being, beyond essence and substance, beyond the subject, to nothing but the useless self whose form-of-life is its undoing of these very categories of being. I will conclude by returning to Kafka and the possibility for happiness which exhaustion uncovers.

This article explores the consequences for music of its entry into the machine-age of sound, which involves, among other things, the de-instrumentalization of the ears and the possibility of an analytical listening ushering in the invention of digital tools that allow for a new graphic projection of musical time. Referring to important texts, notably by Bartók and Adorno, on the consequences of analogue sound reproduction for listening habits, musical analysis and even for the concept of writing, it looks at the ways the science of music in general has been and will be transformed by its digitalization, and notably, by a new epoch of musicality.