The Poetics of Listening

Paul Mendes-Flohr*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Noting that one may hear without listening, the article probes the phenomenological and epistemic distinction between hearing and listening. To listen is to be attuned to voices muffled by silence or camouflaged by a defensive rhetoric resonant with a voice inflected by festering wounds, existential and political. In exploring how one is to listen to these voices of silence, I draw upon Martin Buber’s concept of dialogical “inclusion” of others’ stories, to listen without interpretation to allow the voice behind his – or her or their – story, be it merely etched viscerally in the language of silence, to dwell aside one’s own story in a dialogue unencumbered by perceptions of the Other forged by cultural, social, political constructs, and perhaps most insidiously one’s own defensive postures.

Original languageEnglish
Article number20240006
JournalOpen Philosophy
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2024
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 the author(s),

Keywords

  • Alex Honneth
  • apodeixis
  • Art Garfunkel
  • deixis
  • dialogical listening and “inclusion”
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Isaac Babel
  • John Cage
  • Martin Buber
  • Roland Barthes
  • Stanley Cavell
  • voices of silence
  • wuwé (Daoist concept of non-action)

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