“Symbolic Misery” and “sensitive listening”. Music and the practice of intelligence through Bernard Stiegler

Abstract

In the “hyper-industrial age” - as Bernard Stiegler calls our time - the loss of the aesthetic dimension corresponds to the triumph of “symbolic misery”, i.e. that form of sensory consumption that deprives subjectivity, noesis and individual action from experience. The sphere of music consumption is an example of this: the pervasiveness of listening and the accessibility of the product are accompanied by the subtraction of participation and individuation. In this key, the consumer no longer has a role within the ‘catastrophe of the sensible’ that concerns him/her.

An author still not much explored in Italy, Bernard Stiegler has entrusted education with a crucial role in his philosophical perspective. The aim is to restore a sensing (sensitive listening and feeling) that allows humankind to exist and not to survive.