chapter 29 Intimate listening Mark Paterson When Bishop Berkeley observed that ‘sounds are as close to us as our thoughts’ (in Rée, 1999, p. 175), the inherently spatial nature of sound in general is explicitly understood. But in this case, Berkeley also acknowledges an intimacy within the very experience of listening. Whether invited or unbidden, soundwaves traverse the fbres, sonorous cavities, sof tissues and hard matter, and the resonant chambers in the listener’s body. Drobnick argues similarly that ‘the art of listening is not an activity done remotely; it inevitably invokes corporeality, it envelopes listeners, and . . . it resounds within the body’ (Drobnick, 2004, p. 10). To what extent resounding as well as resonating occurs in the body is crucial to my argument and to the case studies examined below. Tis is not only about acts of listening as being straightforwardly embodied, or physicoacoustic events having physiological explanation. For, in intimate listening, there will inevitably be connotations of privacy and proximity, of a felt collapse between bodily interiority and exteriority. Afer all, in Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy ofers a timely reminder that the word écoute itself resonates by virtue of an etymology which includes listening in a pri- vate place, as well as eavesdropping, that is, listening to the private. Listening, in such terms, is ‘an afair of confdences or stolen secrets’ he says (2007, p. 4). Whether inten- tional or unintentional, the passing of sound through—and between—bodies efects a diminution of privacy, a collapse of distance. Intimate listening necessitates an inti- mate form of attention, as will be shown, even to the very workings of our inner ear, reducing the physical and psychical distance between our subjectivity and sonic events. Consequently, acts of listening cannot be disintermediated, and will always be inextri- cable from the production of sounds in the body of the listener. It is no accident that Derrida’s discussion of the ‘tympan’ in Margins of Philosophy (1982) concerns the in- terior chambers of the body and the nature of the body as a medium, an idea which we revisit at various points. But it is Michel Serres, especially in Te Five Senses (2009), who furthers attention to the interior and exterior noise of the body, principally in two ways: frst, the labyrinthine anatomy of the inner ear and cochlea as boxes (boîtes), a pro- prioceptive hearing of intimate personal sounds through skin, bone, feet, and muscle; and second, as exchange, as information, an exposed hearing that underlines the social OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Sat Apr 10 2021, NEWGEN C29 C29.P1 oxfordhb-9780190274054-P04-06.indd 437 oxfordhb-9780190274054-P04-06.indd 437 10-Apr-21 18:31:25 10-Apr-21 18:31:25