One of my best grad students just sent me this from Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus:
there's no “ego” in general, only the one time, the occurrence and occasion for a tone: a tension, vibration, modulation, color, cry, or song. Always, in any case, a voice, and not a vox significativa, not a signifying order, but the timbre of the place where a body exposes and proffers itself...Ego forever articulating itself—hoc, et hoc, et hic, et illic...—the coming-and-going of bodies: voice, food, excrement, sex, child, air, water, sound, color, hardness, odor, heat, weight, sting, caress, consciousness, memory, swoon, look, appearing—all touches infinitely multiplied, all tones finally proliferating. (Kindle locations 679–94)
The way Nancy writes reminds me of Levi on non-signifying differences.
I've made enough posts on timbre but perhaps not enough on its hyperobjective cousin, tone. I like how entities are unique in this quotation. I also like how tones are events that emanate from these entities.
These tones are aspects of what OOO calls the sensual ether.