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Emerging in the wake of the broad paradigm of semiotics in discourses in the human sciences in France in the 1960s, and from other developments and emergent tendencies in philosophy and critical theory, a cluster of works in French thought of the 1970s, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Roland Barthes, investigate the liminal spaces and dynamic relations between sense, sound, and noise. Depending on the angle adopted, these investigations bear upon the relations between articulated sound and noise; language and sound, the formed and the unformed, the coded and the non-coded, sound and music, sound and silence, and other formulations of acoustic liminality. This article brings to light how noise is an operative concept across this material; I argue for its pertinence to the question of the "mental state of noise" as elaborated by Steven Sands and John Ratey in their seminal piece "The Concept of Noise," and then critically assessed by Cécile Malaspina in The Epistemology of Noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Fédida (1934-2002) was a psychoanalyst and philosopher, member of the Association psychanalytique de France and the International Psychoanalytic Association, a Professor of the University of Paris and founder of the Laboratory of Fundamental Psychopathology, the Centre de l'étude du vivant and the Institute for Contemporary Thought (all three in Paris). The dynamics of the critical and the clinical are particularly manifest in "Anxiety in the Eyes", where Fédida moves from acute attention to Freud's considerations on the "genitality" of the eye, so to speak, to a close reading of 'The "Uncanny"', and indeed of Hoffmann's "The Sandman" itself. With reference to Schelling's definition of I unheimlich i that Freud admires in his essay, we could say that regression is like a secret that Fédida wishes to bring to light, if not fully surmount ([15], pp. 241, 249). [Extracted from the article]