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How to Think Sound in Itself? Towards a Materialist Dialectic of Sound
Luc Döbereiner
Luc Döbereiner, attachement
luc.doebereiner@gmail.com
Article
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Abstract
This paper develops an ontological-aesthetic perspective on sound that draws primarily on the works of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Karen Barad. The basic starting point is here, how to think sound in itself, a fundamental question in 20th and 21st century music and sound art. I argue for a dialectical materialism of sound which I set off against a Deleuzian materialism of sound developed by the philosopher Christoph Cox. Instead of identifying sound with a quasi-palpable material stuff, the paper will revolve around the idea of a split or antagonism and a conception of the real as tied to a void, in which neither subject nor object are primary.