John Paul Ricco
John Paul Ricco is Professor of Art History, Comparative Literature, and Queer Theory at the University of Toronto, and author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes. He is currently completing two collections of essays: The Intimacy of the Outside, and Extinction Aesthetics. He can be reached at: [email protected]
Muse-ecology: on birds and other tuning forks
By John Paul RiccoPerhaps we can locate in the ancient Stoic conception of listening as an experience or competence and something other than a technique, a distinction like the one drawn by Nietzsche when, for the purpose of sounding out idols, he recommended using a hammer as if it were a tuning fork. Although this analogy does not align with the essential passivity central to Stoic listening, nonetheless, it does seem that correspondences can be drawn between the Stoic foregrounding of silence, immobility, and attention, and the tuning of idols.
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