Books by Peter Szendy

This book explores a wide range of perspectives on the economics of the image and images of the economy. Accompanies an exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Paris, showcasing more than 50 artists.

By analyzing many films, by drawing on the philosophy of Lyotard, Nancy, and Derrida, this book suggest that in the apocalyptic genre, cinema is at work on its limit. Apocalypse-cinema is both the end of the world and the end of the film, the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema.

Kant has taken seriously, as no one else in the history of philosophy did, the existence of extraterrestrials. Their central role in his thought allows for a new approach of cosmopolitanism, in a tight dialogue with Carl Schmitt. At stake is a geopolitics of the sensible.

In an exploration of the many ways that musical bodies have been trained and imagined but also concrete analyses of the ways certain of them have played, Phantom Limbs touches on the technical apparatuses set into place by organology with an ear for the dissident mass formations haunting music's corpus.

An archeology of auditory surveillance combined with an analysis of representations of spying in works of literature, music, and film that provide philosophical reflections on the drives that animate listening: the drive for mastery and the death drive.

Argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby-Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a different way.

Examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The author explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music.