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Machine generated contents note:Entrance: The Spies of Jericho --Discipline and Listen --Before the Wiretap --Overhearing and Diaphony --A Small History of Big Ears (Toward the Panacousticon) --Mastery and Metrics in Figaro --The Ages of Fear --Telelistening and Telesurveillance --A Secret Conversation --Underground Passage: The Mole in Its Burrow --In the Footsteps of Orpheus --The Trackers, with Hidden Noise --The Mortal Ear, or Orpheus Turns Around --On the Phone: Papageno at Mabuse's --The Phantom of the Opera --Wozzeck at the Moment of His Death --Adorno, the Informer --Exit: J.D.'s Dream.

"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials." This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens of which Kant speaks and he no doubt took them more seriously than anyone else in the history of philosophy are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism. Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, this book works its way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our heads in the guise of international treaties regulating the law of space, including the cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes mentions in his late writings. Turning to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in Kant's work, Szendy reveals that they are the necessary condition for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless inscribed both at the heart of the sensible and as an Archimedian point from whose perspective the interweavings of the sensible can be viewed. Reading Kant in dialogue with science fiction films (films he seems already to have seen) involves making him speak of questions now pressing in upon us: our endangered planet, ecology, a war of the worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond Kant, what a point of view might be

Narrativity and indebtedness are inextricably intertwined. Absolvere, in Latin, means both to "pay off" a debt and to "relate" a historical event that has reached its conclusion, that is complete (absolutum). In the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade tells many stories about debt and debtors; but it is also her very narration that she evokes as the redeeming of a debt ("I am willing to pay my debt," she says when resuming her story at the beginning of the Twelfth Night). Following some of Walter Benjamin's insights, this essay delves into the economy of narration as finance, a word that used to mean "ending." And it asks: since when has finance become without an end?

Abstract
"Face value," according to the OED, is "the value printed or depicted on a coin, banknote, ticket, etc., especially when less than the actual value." But we could hear in this expression an imperative—"face value!"—an injunction to consider value face to face, that is, prosopon pros prosopon. Prosopon, the Greek word for mask, gave rise to the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia (prosopon poiein: to confer a mask or a face). A striking occurrence of prosopopoeia is found in the eighteenth-century British genre called "it-narrative," in which inanimate things speak and recount their life narrative. The first of these novels—Charles Gildon's Golden Spy (1702)—gives voice to a bunch of coins. And the genre becomes self-reflexive when money starts to "coin words," like the autobiographical protagonist of The Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770). Drawing on ancient sources, contemporary art, and readings of Nietzsche, Marx, and Levinas, the article attempts to formulate the following question: Why does money need a mask?