EXCERPT […] [E]ssentialist, physicalist, and ‘reductionist’ enterprises, each in their own way, and without being fully conscious of it, have demonstrated that the true motor that drives them is a will, a desire, to fully grasp sound. Whether this is achieved by identifying it with the sensory subjectivity of the auditor, with a local physical event, or with a formal object targeted by a listening, the same thing is at stake: the definition and delimitation of what is designated by sound, and its utilization. The objective is to divest sound of its fugitive character, to capture and possess it. Beneath their discursive elaborations which seek to possess sound, all of these modes of listening are themselves driven by this desire for possession—they are all forms of desiring-listening…