Naomi Waltham-Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 762441 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naomi Waltham-Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naomi |
| FAMILY NAME | Waltham-Smith |
| SIGNATURE | WALTHAM-SMITH N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6268-7950 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Soliciting David Wills
Solicitation was the theme of David Wills’ keynote at the Derrida Today Conference in London in 2016. As an after-echo of that event, at the Derrida Today Conference in Athens in 2024, this postcard stages a solicitation of David Wills by way of some of the key themes in his work from Prosthesis to Killing Times and in conversation with the ideas of thinkers he reads, including Derrida and Cixous. Solicitation is thrown into deconstruction, with …
Impossible Hearing
Forgiveness Is Not a Musical Instrument
Derrida’s Le Parjure et le Pardon is heard as an offstage voice to the global mediatization of proceedings concerning genocide in the International Court of Justice in late 2023 and early 2024. Focusing on the Sixth Session of the first year, which remained unpublished until 2019 (2022 in English), the article follows Derrida in questioning whether a shared hearing or attunement is required for forgiveness and reconciliation. Far from absolving s…
Life, Would That it Might Be To Say – Power, Metaphor, Tragen , Épuis(s)ement
In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire ... this article deepens the associa…
Nationalism, Mania, and Specters of Neoliberalism
Three decades after the publication of Specters of Marx, another death knell is sounding. Three decades after Derrida bemoaned the “manic, jubilatory, and incantatory” neoliberal rhetoric heralding the death of Marx and of communism, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a renewed mania on the left to declare the end of neoliberalism. And yet three decades after Derrida's most public corps-à-corps with Marx, his analysis remains disturbingly timel…
Who Gets a Hearing? Academic Freedom and Critique in Derrida's Reading of Kant
Today's debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida's deconstructive engagement with Kant's Conflict of the Faculties in t…
Noise Strike: Wakeful Listening at the Limits of Liberal Cognition
Noise is said to disturb, disorient, and confuse, but this article looks specifically at the figure of noise “striking” – rather than, say, a rumbling or murmuring disquiet – us to examine its potential to unsettle European liberal hegemonic norms of ordering society and the inequalities they produce. In particular, it focuses on noisy protest, rebellion, and riot which might “awaken” citizens to these injustices and efforts to suppress them. Dra…
Forms of education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy
The Silences of Feeling
In Le différend Lyotard evocatively describes what remains to be heard as “the silence of feeling.” Setting Lyotard’s différend among a differentiated set of incommensurable family resemblances, including Rancière’s mésentente and Derrida’s différance, this paper argues that le différend même, far from coinciding with itself, points to the re-marks and differs from itself, silencing itself by putting itself under a conditional. This is what gives…
Tender Violence, Coercive Simplicity, Geschlecht III: An Introduction
This introduction to the special issue asks, in the company of Jacques Derrida's recently 'rediscovered' seminar Geschlecht III, what it might mean to read this text against the grain of everything that is said in the German word Geschlecht, including the gesture of having made an archival discovery and its attendant enforcements of recovered origins, philological-genealogical authority, familial unity and consonance of signification. It reflects…
Unflappable
Taking off from the Flügelschlag or coup d'aile in Trakl's poem to which the ' Ein' of 'Ein Geschlecht' responds with the Grundton (fundamental or tonic) of the Gedicht (poem), the article tracks the figure of this noisy wing-flap as a metaphor for the force of reading (aloud) from Geschlecht III to exchanges between Derrida and Cixous in Voiles, Insister, ' Fourmis' and other texts. Alongside figures of take-off, there are also repeated images i…
The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality , edited by Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin
The title of this scintillating collection of essays, which grew out of the interdisciplinary Voice Project and an international conference, is a self-conscious reworking of Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, itself intended ironically as a critique of an idealist reduction, as he explains in his afterword to this volume.1 The stakes of the three modifications to the title are all high in their own way. The decision to adopt the definite ar…
The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening . By Lawrence Kramer
Lawrence Kramer’s The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening is essayistic, impressionistic, and often whimsical. While a reader will not find in these pages a fully worked out philosophy of aurality, the book’s sixty-odd short chapters, which may be read individually or in any order, are variations on a single theme. Kramer offers the reader a sampling of the top hits—literary, musical, technological, and philosophical—from the burgeoning t…
Homofaunie: Non-human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous
In L'animal que donc je suis Jacques Derrida suggests that the question of what would be proper to the animal should 'change tune'. I read this extraordinary passage, in which Derrida calls for us to lend an ear to an 'unheard-of music' that neither emancipates the non-human nor condemns it to inarticulate noise, in conjunction with the nexus of animality, telephony and the cri de la littérature that unfolds in Hélène Cixous's writing, exploring …
Sequence
This article examines the musical sequence as a nexus of melodic, linear, and harmonic processes commonly found in tonal music from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It locates sequential repetition as a problematic concept within the history of tonal music, considering the various controversies it has sparked in both its critical reception and the competing models advanced throughout the history of tonal theory. The article also …
For Transdisciplinarity
This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to t…
Giving the Microphone to the Other
This response to Pooja Rangan’s bold provocation in Immediations reflects, from a Derridean standpoint, on the impossible responsibility of speaking for the other. In particular, it examines the role played by the microphone as technological prosthesis for the voice in activist practices of audio documentary, analyzing the actions of performance artist Sharon Hayes and sound art collective Ultra-red
Hurler avec les loups Vestiges of beastly writing in Nancy, Derrida, and Cixous
In 'Le vestige de l'art', Nancy, rejecting the traditional understanding of art as the sensible representation of the Idea, develops the notion of the vestige as the self-withdrawal and selfeffacement of the sensible.In an explicit nod to Jacques Derrida's thought of the trace, Nancy describes the vestige as 'smoke without fire', recalling Derrida's Feu la cendre, and -now echoing Derrida's preoccupation with the homonym pas -as a 'footprint'.Thi…
Form and Repetition: Deleuze, Guillaume and Sonata Theory
This article proposes an alternative way to think about the process of expositional closure. The recent resurgence of Formenlehre has given rise to a dispute about the correlation between expositional closure and the sequence of local perfect authentic cadences in the second group. Noting that the two sides of the debate produce opposing representations of the temporality of listening, I draw upon philosophical and linguistic models of actualisat…
A Music Worthy of the Name: Or, Agamben's Museicology
Research Article| July 01 2018 A Music Worthy of the Name: Or, Agamben’s Museicology Naomi Waltham-Smith Naomi Waltham-Smith University of Warwick, Coventry, England Naomi Waltham-smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Sitting at the intersection of continental philosophy, music, and sound studies, her work appears in journals including boundary 2, parrhesia, diacritics, Music …
Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possess…
The sonichabituésof the Strip: Listening in Las Vegas
How has neoliberalism transformed the way we hear? This essay focuses on the way in which gamblers listen in the casinos of Las Vegas, examining how, in a paradigmatic example of the post-Fordist attention economy, casino capital captures the psychological and affective capacities of players. In an environment where every detail is purposefully designed to increase revenues, sound design plays a very important role in keeping players in their sea…
The Sound of the Outside
What is at stake when the sonorous becomes a condition of possibility for a concept of community? Exploring the ex(ap)propriation of the sonic that takes places at the threshold between the refusal of presence in French deconstruction (Derrida, Nancy) and the refusal of biopolitics in recent Italian thought (Agamben, Negri, Virno), this essay proposes that, insofar as sound always-already goes beyond and outside itself, it provides a model for su…
A Minimal Violence: Seven Theses on the Classical Style
This article proposes a series of speculative and likely controversial theses about the ethical possibilities and dangers of the Classical style. Taking a concept of ethics that is both Heideggerian and subtractive in the mode of recent French thought, it begins by arguing that music itself—in its structures and stylistic features and not merely in the contingent circumstances of its genesis or reception—is capable of being an ethics. The next cr…
Homofaunie: Non-human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous
In L'animal que donc je suis Jacques Derrida suggests that the question of what would be proper to the animal should 'change tune'. I read this extraordinary passage, in which Derrida calls for us to lend an ear to an 'unheard-of music' that neither emancipates the non-human nor condemns it to inarticulate noise, in conjunction with the nexus of animality, telephony and the cri de la littérature that unfolds in Hélène Cixous's writing, exploring …
A Minimal Violence: Seven Theses on the Classical Style
This article proposes a series of speculative and likely controversial theses about the ethical possibilities and dangers of the Classical style. Taking a concept of ethics that is both Heideggerian and subtractive in the mode of recent French thought, it begins by arguing that music itself—in its structures and stylistic features and not merely in the contingent circumstances of its genesis or reception—is capable of being an ethics. The next cr…
The Sound of the Outside
What is at stake when the sonorous becomes a condition of possibility for a concept of community? Exploring the ex(ap)propriation of the sonic that takes places at the threshold between the refusal of presence in French deconstruction (Derrida, Nancy) and the refusal of biopolitics in recent Italian thought (Agamben, Negri, Virno), this essay proposes that, insofar as sound always-already goes beyond and outside itself, it provides a model for su…
Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possess…
The sonichabituésof the Strip: Listening in Las Vegas
How has neoliberalism transformed the way we hear? This essay focuses on the way in which gamblers listen in the casinos of Las Vegas, examining how, in a paradigmatic example of the post-Fordist attention economy, casino capital captures the psychological and affective capacities of players. In an environment where every detail is purposefully designed to increase revenues, sound design plays a very important role in keeping players in their sea…
Form and Repetition: Deleuze, Guillaume and Sonata Theory
This article proposes an alternative way to think about the process of expositional closure. The recent resurgence of Formenlehre has given rise to a dispute about the correlation between expositional closure and the sequence of local perfect authentic cadences in the second group. Noting that the two sides of the debate produce opposing representations of the temporality of listening, I draw upon philosophical and linguistic models of actualisat…
A Music Worthy of the Name: Or, Agamben's Museicology
Research Article| July 01 2018 A Music Worthy of the Name: Or, Agamben’s Museicology Naomi Waltham-Smith Naomi Waltham-Smith University of Warwick, Coventry, England Naomi Waltham-smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Sitting at the intersection of continental philosophy, music, and sound studies, her work appears in journals including boundary 2, parrhesia, diacritics, Music …
Sequence
This article examines the musical sequence as a nexus of melodic, linear, and harmonic processes commonly found in tonal music from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It locates sequential repetition as a problematic concept within the history of tonal music, considering the various controversies it has sparked in both its critical reception and the competing models advanced throughout the history of tonal theory. The article also …
For Transdisciplinarity
This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to t…
Giving the Microphone to the Other
This response to Pooja Rangan’s bold provocation in Immediations reflects, from a Derridean standpoint, on the impossible responsibility of speaking for the other. In particular, it examines the role played by the microphone as technological prosthesis for the voice in activist practices of audio documentary, analyzing the actions of performance artist Sharon Hayes and sound art collective Ultra-red
Hurler avec les loups Vestiges of beastly writing in Nancy, Derrida, and Cixous
In 'Le vestige de l'art', Nancy, rejecting the traditional understanding of art as the sensible representation of the Idea, develops the notion of the vestige as the self-withdrawal and selfeffacement of the sensible.In an explicit nod to Jacques Derrida's thought of the trace, Nancy describes the vestige as 'smoke without fire', recalling Derrida's Feu la cendre, and -now echoing Derrida's preoccupation with the homonym pas -as a 'footprint'.Thi…
The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality , edited by Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin
The title of this scintillating collection of essays, which grew out of the interdisciplinary Voice Project and an international conference, is a self-conscious reworking of Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, itself intended ironically as a critique of an idealist reduction, as he explains in his afterword to this volume.1 The stakes of the three modifications to the title are all high in their own way. The decision to adopt the definite ar…
The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening . By Lawrence Kramer
Lawrence Kramer’s The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening is essayistic, impressionistic, and often whimsical. While a reader will not find in these pages a fully worked out philosophy of aurality, the book’s sixty-odd short chapters, which may be read individually or in any order, are variations on a single theme. Kramer offers the reader a sampling of the top hits—literary, musical, technological, and philosophical—from the burgeoning t…
Homofaunie: Non-human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous
In L'animal que donc je suis Jacques Derrida suggests that the question of what would be proper to the animal should 'change tune'. I read this extraordinary passage, in which Derrida calls for us to lend an ear to an 'unheard-of music' that neither emancipates the non-human nor condemns it to inarticulate noise, in conjunction with the nexus of animality, telephony and the cri de la littérature that unfolds in Hélène Cixous's writing, exploring …
The Silences of Feeling
In Le différend Lyotard evocatively describes what remains to be heard as “the silence of feeling.” Setting Lyotard’s différend among a differentiated set of incommensurable family resemblances, including Rancière’s mésentente and Derrida’s différance, this paper argues that le différend même, far from coinciding with itself, points to the re-marks and differs from itself, silencing itself by putting itself under a conditional. This is what gives…
Tender Violence, Coercive Simplicity, Geschlecht III: An Introduction
This introduction to the special issue asks, in the company of Jacques Derrida's recently 'rediscovered' seminar Geschlecht III, what it might mean to read this text against the grain of everything that is said in the German word Geschlecht, including the gesture of having made an archival discovery and its attendant enforcements of recovered origins, philological-genealogical authority, familial unity and consonance of signification. It reflects…
Unflappable
Taking off from the Flügelschlag or coup d'aile in Trakl's poem to which the ' Ein' of 'Ein Geschlecht' responds with the Grundton (fundamental or tonic) of the Gedicht (poem), the article tracks the figure of this noisy wing-flap as a metaphor for the force of reading (aloud) from Geschlecht III to exchanges between Derrida and Cixous in Voiles, Insister, ' Fourmis' and other texts. Alongside figures of take-off, there are also repeated images i…
Life, Would That it Might Be To Say – Power, Metaphor, Tragen , Épuis(s)ement
In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire ... this article deepens the associa…
Nationalism, Mania, and Specters of Neoliberalism
Three decades after the publication of Specters of Marx, another death knell is sounding. Three decades after Derrida bemoaned the “manic, jubilatory, and incantatory” neoliberal rhetoric heralding the death of Marx and of communism, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a renewed mania on the left to declare the end of neoliberalism. And yet three decades after Derrida's most public corps-à-corps with Marx, his analysis remains disturbingly timel…
Who Gets a Hearing? Academic Freedom and Critique in Derrida's Reading of Kant
Today's debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida's deconstructive engagement with Kant's Conflict of the Faculties in t…
Noise Strike: Wakeful Listening at the Limits of Liberal Cognition
Noise is said to disturb, disorient, and confuse, but this article looks specifically at the figure of noise “striking” – rather than, say, a rumbling or murmuring disquiet – us to examine its potential to unsettle European liberal hegemonic norms of ordering society and the inequalities they produce. In particular, it focuses on noisy protest, rebellion, and riot which might “awaken” citizens to these injustices and efforts to suppress them. Dra…
Forms of education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy
Forgiveness Is Not a Musical Instrument
Derrida’s Le Parjure et le Pardon is heard as an offstage voice to the global mediatization of proceedings concerning genocide in the International Court of Justice in late 2023 and early 2024. Focusing on the Sixth Session of the first year, which remained unpublished until 2019 (2022 in English), the article follows Derrida in questioning whether a shared hearing or attunement is required for forgiveness and reconciliation. Far from absolving s…
Soliciting David Wills
Solicitation was the theme of David Wills’ keynote at the Derrida Today Conference in London in 2016. As an after-echo of that event, at the Derrida Today Conference in Athens in 2024, this postcard stages a solicitation of David Wills by way of some of the key themes in his work from Prosthesis to Killing Times and in conversation with the ideas of thinkers he reads, including Derrida and Cixous. Solicitation is thrown into deconstruction, with …
Impossible Hearing
Philosophy (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Literature (7 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (7 works) · Communication (6 works)