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 possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.

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 subtractive ontologies that resists both any notion of particular identity and criterion of communal belonging. The ontological-political potential of the sonic presupposes a division that inheres within aurality between the ear and the voice: between the resonant spacing that is Nancy's being-with and the sonorous residue of the capacity not to speak in Agamben. This leads to asking what form of politics can emerge if an unheard audibility is set alongside a sounding unsayability in the closest, yet irreparably disjunct, intimacy.

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 the explicit thematization of transdisciplinarity as part of the neoliberalization of the university. Finally, the essay turns to Hélène Cixous’s reflections in “Mon Algériance” to develop another way of thinking about the irreducible dispersal and dissemination of disciplinarity and its imbrication in the (post)colonial.

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