Sound archeology of the subject and musical aesthetics of memory

Alfred Tomatis, Peter Sloterdijk and Eugenio Trías

Abstract

This article pays attention to the ear investigation carried out by the ear specialist Alfred Tomatis in relation to its influence on sound anthropologies that, supported by it, reach the philosophy of music. The understanding of music as memory is only possible from a sound modulation of anthropology, that is, one that makes the ear a common thread for a new theory of man. For this project, Sloterdijk appropriates the “gnostic” theme of “estrangement from the the world”. However, Trías’ audacity will lie precisely in reversing the findings of his musical phenomenology on his sound anthropology, resulting in a questioning of the primacy of death in the “philosophies of existence”: in the face of the closure of finitude, the Spanish philosopher tries to think, thanks to music, a finiteness open to transcendence, which is nothing but the future as an (eschatological) dimension of time.