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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage

All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage

Végső, Roland
Szendy, Peter

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral SociologyMusic Reference

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ISBN10: 0823273962
ISBN13: 9780823273966
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Dec 1 2016
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.40
Language: English

The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?

All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's panacoustic project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called Echelon. Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma).

Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of overhearing that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a split-hearing that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

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