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Rhetoric's Other: Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical Response
Abstract
It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening (Fiumara 1990). And the problem with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”
... My aim is not to say that hearing is the sense par excellence, rather, my goal is to say that hearing is just as important as seeing, and not "a subordinate modality most useful for bringing invisible events and objects to light" (Lipari, 2012). I argue that vision and voice are both important in ethical considerations. ...
... I argue that vision and voice are both important in ethical considerations. Lisbeth Lipari (2012) explains that Emmanuel Levinas emphasizes the face of the other because of his concern that voice obliterates the boundaries between self and other. She states: ...
... (p. 233). Lipari (2012) states that Levinas emphasizes "face" so that the alterity of the other can be maintained, even though he thinks that "a polymodal face, comprised of voice, vision, and listening is necessary" (p. 234). ...
US Drone strikes have caused unimaginable pain and suffering amongst Pakistani civilians, yet the US denies any wrong doing. Using the testimony of the Rehman family, who were personally hurt by the drone attacks and who traveled to the United States to testify at a Congressional hearing, as my case study, I argue that the other must be encountered not as the radical other but as an other who is familiar. I argue that (a) both sight and sound play a role in encountering the other, (b) the reception of the other begins with a communicative silence, (c) the ethical imperative can be triggered by both exterior and interior alterity, and (d) knowing and feeling are not dichotomies. I conclude that there are material and psychological costs associated with the non-encounter of civilian victims of drone warfare.KeywordsUS drone strikesEthicsOtherRehman familyPakistanUSAAfghanistanCivilian victimsUS Congressional hearingPsychological costsPain and sufferingTurning-away as a turning-towards
... While Western philosophy views the self as the starting point of all perception, Levinas contends that the "face-to-face" relationship precedes the self and demands unlimited responsibility for the other (Hansel 2010). For Levinas, questions about relations precede questions about being (Lipari 2012): the ethical level precedes the ontological one (Levinas 1969). Even language, Levinas continues, emerges in response to the engagement with the other. ...
... In contrast, Levinas (1969) suggests the hospitality approach, in which the other is not relatively dissimilar to the self but is infinitely different. The face of the other contains the infinity and therefore can never be reduced to being subsumed by the same (Lipari 2012). Hospitality is the basic relation between the subject (the self ) and the other, which calls for and even imposes a relation of responsibility and responsiveness to the singularity of each fellow human being (Amiel Houser 2013). ...
... Moreover, the face of the other triggers a response of moral consciousness, it is a moral summons (Levinas 1969) that transcends social categories of identity (Lipari 2012). The face of the other evokes a dialogic discourse between the self and the other, which is based on responsibility and releases the self from its egocentricity and narcissism, so it can fulfil its responsibility towards the other (Meir 2005). ...
Collective memory often leads parties in conflict to strictly adhere to their own narrative and concentrate on their own pain, while ignoring that of the other, thus hampering the chances for reconciliation. This chapter suggests a novel conceptualization/definition of the ethics of memory that may overcome the above impasse by enabling the conflicted groups to remember with and not against. It is based on two pillars: the first is inspired by Levinas’ overarching philosophy of unlimited responsibility for the other and by the African Ubuntu view that one’s dignity relies on that of the other. The second leans on psychoanalytical theories that involve the healing role of a “live third” that generates a livable meaning for the individual’s horrible experience. The chapter reifies the above conceptualization by looking at the work of two Palestinian-Israeli organizations which have successfully applied the ethics of memory in this chapter’s definition.
... Helsesykepleieren må vaere lydhør og vise interesse og naervaer. Genuin lytting muliggjør en etisk respons (Lipari, 2012). Det innebaerer en relasjonell bevegelse mot den andre personen med utgangspunkt i deres behov (Levinas, 1984). ...
Å gi trøst er en integrert del av sykepleie, og å få trøst er et grunnleggende menneskelig behov. I dette vitenskapelige essayet ser vi nærmere på hvordan fenomenet trøst kommer til uttrykk i norsk helsesykepleiepraksis. Helsesykepleiere i Norge yter ikke pleietjenester, men tilbyr helsefremmende og forebyggende helsetjenester til barn og unge mellom 0 og 20 år. Deres omsorgspraksis har blitt beskrevet som usynlig. Hensikten med artikkelen er å utforske hvordan trøst kommer til uttrykk i helsesykepleiekonsultasjoner på helsestasjon for barn og ungdom og i skolehelsetjenesten. Eksempler fra empirisk forskning er utgangspunktet for refleksjonene og tolkningen. Levinas filosofi bidrar til å forstå trøst som en respons til et annet menneskets sårbarhet. Tolkningsprosessen har vist at det å snakke med, berøre og lytte til kan være en trøst når helsesykepleieren er oppriktig og viser at hun bryr seg med sin personlige og profesjonelle tilstedeværelse.
... Lipari finds acknowledgment of otherness as enabling; it deliberately invites difference. Levinasian alterity can be deployed in such a way that egocentric and monologic subjectivity is decentered; communication is then foregrounded not as a closed circuit of message circulation but as a processual opening up to difference and otherness (Gehrke, 2010;Lipari, 2004Lipari, , 2012Murray, 2002;Silverstone, 2007). Faced with the primary challenge of coming up with strategies to effect a genuine announcement of the face, Murray (2002) proposed that discourse can become a genuine form of communication with the Other through the twin rhetorics of disruption and supplication. ...
This paper investigates how the visuals of two children affected by the Syrian conflict, Alan Kurdi and Omran Daqneesh, circulate within the humanitarian imaginary. I argue that these communication artifacts offer us an opportunity to explore the links between two areas not often thought of in conjunction: ethical theory and mediation. The goal is to contribute to our understanding of the relationships between communication ethics and the mediated representations of subjects who are perceived as “Others.” The visuals of Alan and Omran are appropriate for this investigation, given their evident Otherness as Syrians to a predominantly Western audience. Exploring these visuals in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical call of the Other and the mediated visibility of sufferers will further our understanding of the connections between communication ethics and mediation as textual and social/ethical practice.
... Its absolute presence and (epistemological) transparency makes the act of recognition a strong social signal, and furthermore explains its vocative and imperative aspects (Brinck 2008), viz., the fact that it summons the other agent personally to take part in the interaction with you. It is in your face (Gallagher 2014): You cannot deny it (Lipari 2012). ...
Mutually adaptive interaction involves the robot as a partner as opposed to a tool, and requires that the robot is susceptible to similar environmental cues and behavior patterns as humans are. Recognition, or the acknowledgement of the other as individual, is fundamental to mutually adaptive interaction between humans. We discuss what recognition involves and its behavioral manifestations, and describe the benefits of implementing it in HRI.
... The listening, in contrast to the heard, is an enactment of responsibility made manifest through a posture of receptivity, a passivity of receiving the other into oneself without assimilation or appropriation. The listening is a process of contraction, of stepping back and creating a void into which the other may enter" [19]. ...
A new food behaviour named "Food citizenship" brings to new market trends. Consumers, motivated by personal, environmental, economical and social interests, want to know more information about food, in order to make an awareness and sustainable choice. Leveraging on Industry 4.0 strategically guidelines, a system able to manage and share the food information along the Agrifood Value Chain, is easy to develop but probably goes to the detriment of human factor. The challenge is to communicate this information to the food citizen, intercepting, at the same time, their interests and their value. In order to find a strategy to show the food-product information using ICT technology, tweets about EXPO 2015 are analysed through Social Network and Semantic Analysis. A comparison with the XTC trends definitions allowed the conception and definition of an ethical communication model and IT solution, able to illustrate to customer the food-product in a pertinent way.
... However, if the liquid medium manifests sound's conflagration of confusion with revelation, its fluid, permeable character and the way it allows for a unified perspective on presence and situation, the play of sound in the solid medium, on the 78 This assertion is further supported and explicitly discussed by (Bonds, 2009), (Norkunas, 2011), (Lipari, 2012), (Peperzak, 2006) and (Fiumara, 1995). other hand, adds to this revealing complexity by pointing out the objectification of sound, its percussive contingency and its eccentric disposition. ...
KEYWORDS: phenomenology, voice, sound, presence, embodiment, artistic research
How can voice be understood as a theme for philosophical inquiry? Using mostly phenomenological strategies and approximations, this thesis attempts to map a transdisciplinary constellation of nexus points, where voice emerges as an expressive manifestation of presence and living processes.
Simultaneously situated, bodily and transgressive in the context of the notion of acoustic territories, the ambiguity of the voice and its potential as a both phenomenon, concept and tangible resonance of subjectivity, are explored via an inquiry informed by Ancient Philosophy, Sound Studies, Acoustics, Phenomenology and Artistic Research.
Thanhhà Lai’s Listen, Slowly (2015) is about Mai, a twelve-year-old Vietnamese-American girl who is born and raised in California. She undergoes a transformative change after she embarks on a journey to Vietnam with her grandmother. This chapter examines how Mai’s encounter with her own Vietnamese heritage disrupts her previous self-centered American sense of self and paves the way for a new ethical Vietnamese-American identity through the act of listening. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy and Lisbeth Lipari’s ideas on listening, this analysis shows how Mai’s experiences of pain, trauma, and disconcerting responsibility in Vietnam help her become an ethical listening self. By tracing the arduous interpersonal and intercultural communication processes Mai undergoes, this chapter explores the important role of listening plays in communication and how it enables meaningful relationships across cultures and borders.
In our exploration of sound and the other constitutive elements of sonic environments, we will not be considering such elements—sound, voice, natural versus technological elements—as thematic objects of experience, but rather as aspects of auditory environments; that is, as the different phenomenological fields within which the objects of auditory experience can appear. These horizons comprise the frameworks against which we make sense of our experiences. In the context of sonic environments, we can begin to identify these horizons in the six points later:
Das Verhältnis des Philosophen Emmanuel Levinas zu den Künsten ist bisher im Schatten seiner Ethik geblieben. Gleichwohl durchziehen Fragen des Ästhetischen, des Performativen, der Medien und Technik sein gesamtes Werk. Mit diesem Band liegt erstmals eine Auswahl an ästhetischen und medialen Zugängen zum Werk von Levinas in deutscher Sprache vor. Die Beiträge setzen mit einer Relektüre Impulse für eine »vierte Welle« der Levinas-Rezeption, die das Verhältnis von Ethik zu Ästhetik sowie Digitalität adressiert und aktualisiert. Levinas wird dadurch auch als Denker von Kunst, Ästhetik, Medien, Technik und Design neu positioniert.
Écrite dans la tradition de la poésie documentaire américaine, Sand Opera (2015), œuvre multimodale et plurivocale du poète arabo-américain Philip Metres, tente de rendre compte d’une juxtaposition déroutante : à l’époque où le scandale des prisons d’Abu Ghraib retentissait, Metres et sa femme célébraient la naissance de leur nouvelle fille. Devant la coprésence de ces deux extrêmes, le poète s’interroge sur le caractère éthique de son travail. Comment la poésie peut‑elle redonner voix aux victimes sans esthétiser leur souffrance ? Quel espace le poème peut‑il espérer réserver à l’amour et à l’affection paternels quand le pire a lieu ? Comment accueillir la vie que symbolise le nouveau-né dans un monde dominé par la torture et la mort ? Comment protéger son enfant sans étouffer plus encore les voix des victimes déjà en proie au silence imposé par le terrorisme d’État ? Confronté à une Amérique qui cherche à dissimuler ses exactions, le poète met au jour les mécanismes de censure du gouvernement américain et propose, par l’entremise de sa fille et de l’éthique de l’écoute qu’elle nous somme d’adopter, que nous tendions l’oreille pour écouter la voix et la respiration résilientes des victimes de la « guerre contre la terreur ».
This research engages Autoethnographic Participatory Action Research (APAR) to explore family communication within and between families of autistic young people in emerging adolescence. Autistic young people often have diverse ways of communicating and differences between family members’ communication can result in barriers to family interaction. Much of the existing research in communication in autistic young people within family settings centres around younger children and little is known, therefore, about communication in families of autistic children in middle childhood as they meet the challenges of adolescence. This parent-led study engaged mothers from five families as co-researchers to explore communication within their own families. The action-reflection cycle of the APAR methodology proved to be an effective vehicle for gaining deeper understandings of the young person’s unique situated communication. Findings presented in this article identify the importance of time and space as key enablers to inclusive communication within families.
This study examines the role of listening methods within public diplomacy (PD)/foreign correspondents' relations. Listening theory plays a double role in the study: a) It serves as the theoretical basis for analyzing whether listening and, more specifically, feedback are applied by Israeli public diplomacy (PD) bodies; b) It serves as the core methodology of this study. We demonstrate the value of listening within the context of these professional relationships by applying a methodological simulation of listening. By systematically listening to both parties, one can uncover and trace gaps between the parties' perceptions and better understand their relationship. Based on fifty semi-structured, in-depth interviews with PD seniors and foreign correspondents, the study compares and contrasts the parties' perceptions regarding tactical and strategic aspects of Israeli PD organizations’ actions. The findings indicate a substantial lack of critical listening methods in Israel's PD mechanism. By applying systematic listening methods, gaps and weak links in the parties’ relationship surfaced. To address these gaps, we recommend implementing recurring feedback platforms. These might assist the parties in developing more authentic and open dialogue, despite disagreements and disputes.
Listening has become a key concept in practicing public diplomacy on social media. This study explores professional diplomats’ listening on Twitter, operationalizing their listening behavior as interaction involvement (II). II is related to knowing when and how to use language in social situations, and it covers three crucial aspects of listening: attentiveness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness. The present study examines the relationship between diplomats’ interaction involvement and their perceptions of how their goals are being met by their use of Twitter. Survey data were collected from participants (N = 108) who were diplomats from five Northern European countries stationed at each country’s foreign embassies. As hypothesized, the data revealed a positive association between II and perceived goal attainment. Moreover, active tweeting and the following of other users do not alone determine successful impact, but listening skills related to relational awareness and responsiveness are at least as important, if not more important.
The display of a sound artwork in an exhibition space implies the creation of a potential network of relations between the body (visitor), space and sound. In this paper, the analysis of the aforementioned relations is based on purely audio or audiovisual artworks that have noise as their subject matter and were displayed in Athens from 2012 to now.
Since sound generates space, this paper explicates space as a living instrument by taking into account the analysis of the morphological characteristics of the space based on agents, such as the human presence. This case is analyzed on the basis of handmade noise machines created by George Tsopanos. The artworks were displayed in his exhibition ‘Intonarumori: the noise of art’ inspired by Russolos’ manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’. The case that sound redefines the public and private boundaries is presented with the artwork ‘Internet Noise as a Structure’ of NullPointerConstant that deals with the sound of social media as an incoming noise at home.
Then, the network of relations which produced by sounds that are beyond the human hearing range is presented. Τhe human body interacts with these sounds/ vibrations in a pre-subjective and pre-conscious way. In this case, the potential relations of embodied experience are analyzed according to Massumi’s concept of affect. This is accomplished with the project ‘Electrical Walk’ of Christina Kubisch in which noise disturbs the reception of the installed sound environments. In particular, the visitor listens to the electromagnetic fields of the city and the artwork highlights the city vibrations. Finally, the case that sound refers to a contextual framework and is decoded by the visitor using listening as a cultural practice is presented with the audiovisual installation of Medea Electronique ‘Beyond Reasoning’. The artwork is inspired by Attali’ s work ‘Noise’ and presents noise as a disruption of the social process.
The chosen approach attempts to present sound art as a relational practice that takes into account sound, space and the body as a non-hierarchical unity.
Reading the Phaedrus through Levinas's ethics for the other, I argue that the dialogic rupture in the Phaedrus offers an ethical imperative for rhetoric to respect alterity. Following James Kastely, I suggest that attempts to create a unified understanding of the dialogues within the Phaedrus miss the way in which the thematic discontinuity of the text functions philosophically and performatively. This rupture, I posit, signifies an ethical stance toward alterity that forgoes the possibility of violence and respects plurality. Such an ethical stance offers an imperative for a rhetorical ethic of listening in dialogue and suggests that rhetorical scholars return to Plato as a valuable resource for theorizing rhetorical ethics.
This paper undertakes a deconstructive reading of the principles on intercultural education, as introduced and discussed by UNESCO in a document published in 2006. It proceeds from the argument that while these principles have attracted considerable empirical attention, much less is known about the basic ideological assumptions that UNESCO makes in the process of articulating each one of them in turn. With reference points drawn from Derrida’s 1976 deconstruction strategy, the deconstructive reading reveals how the organisation, in spite of its major claims, actually erases difference through recommendations that seek to promote social cohesion and peace. That is, even though the UNESCO document supports throughout the right to be different, self and other still run the risk of becoming one and the same should they endorse the guiding principles proposed. The paper concludes with the broader implications that can be drawn from this reading to help continue discussions about intercultural education at the local and international standard-setting levels.
This chapter explores characteristics of qualitative methods; addresses issues surrounding methodological rigor in qualitative work and the relative lack of qualitative studies in the listening literature; and explains ethnographic methods, which include fieldwork, participant observation, participant listening, and in-depth interviews.
As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the authors’ individual research projects that illustrates one of these tensions, and is followed by a response that explicates the questions of power and ethics. While the ethics of any research practice are often tied to a specific project, many of the issues we discuss apply widely to the practice of fieldwork and rhetorical criticism in general, and many of the questions we raise also resonate with one another. As such, the dialogic quality of the essay is meant to serve as its content as well as its form. We suggest that rhetorical discussions of power help all qualitative researchers better understand what is at stake when we move between text and field in our research practice.
What is effective listening? This question intrigues both scholars and the general public. Theoretical explorations provide insight into the listening process as well as pragmatic guidelines for how to be a good listener. But even the most learned listening scholar will often fall back on the observation that they know effective listening best when they experience it.
Five renowned listening experts were asked to respond to the question, “What is listening from the perspective of your lived experience?” Each was asked to work from an auto-ethnographic methodology. The five lifeworlds described in this study represent their responses to this question and offer unique, individual ethnographic contexts describing the listening experience of each of the participants.
Peirce famously defined the process of thinking as what a person is “‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time.” For Peirce, this meant the essence of thinking is dialogue. This essay proposes a conception of dialogue grounded in Peirce's normative ideal of inquiry that challenges contemporary thinking about dialogue yet supports the same moral and ethical aims. Using a scene from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice that Peirce used as an exemplar of dialogue, we propose a conception that begins in doubt and passes through phases of reasoning and ethical and esthetic judgment before coming to a resolution which expands horizons of thought, emotion, and action.
In the introductory essay I study the conditions by which it is possible to carry on an effective philosophical dialogue, finding in listening the characteristics without which dialogue is likely to become a monologue of the deaf.
First of all, I consider the difference between listening and hearing. With this distinction one needs to consider the early aspects of the activity of consciousness where one can individuate the presence of a primordial immediacy that, although not yet clarified in its essential constitution, exerts pressure against the I.
The most recent studies in both cognitive sciences and phenomenology have confirmed the importance of such an enigmatic presence, above all when one considers the processes of attention. On the first side, the cognitive sciences, it’s important to consider notions such as vigilance, voluntary attention, and orientation; on the second side, Husserlian phenomenology, there is the crucial difference between primary noticing, secondary noticing, and thematic intending.
This essay contributes to the discussions in intercultural communication scholarship on key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges in today's world through the ethical framework of Emmanuel Levinas and his discussion of “absolute otherness” that informs and expands the dialogue on interculturality, cultural humility, and ethics. Levinas's discussion of “absolute otherness” aims to preserve difference—the otherness of the other—by asserting the ethical relation prior to the ontological relation and carries significant communicative implications in terms of the relation of the self and the other as well as making sense of difference and identity, and offers a new way of talking about these issues in the field of communication studies, specifically in intercultural communication. An illustration of attending to the other beyond reduction to the same is offered through a pedagogical application of the Levinasian framework in the intercultural communication class.
This essay is concerned with the question of otherness in relation to moral responsibility, and willed-agency. It aims to continue and expand the discussion lead by Arnett's question “What might a communication ethics look like that does not begin with a sense of will?” and offers a comparative discussion of Levinasian ethics—that highlight absolute otherness and maintenance of alterity at the heart of the ethical relation—with Thich Nhat Hanh's (pronounced as Tik N′yat Hawn) culturally–philosophically “other” framework of (Buddhist) ethics based on the notion of Interbeing. Levinas and Hanh offer culturally diverse—and, equally important—ways of making sense of alterity, maintaining alterity, and reciprocity, in the ethical relation. Despite their differences, however, both Levinas and Hanh highlight responsibility for the Other as engrained in subjectivity—an ethical subjectivity,—and attentiveness for the Other beyond willed agency. Juxtaposing their culturally different philosophies make room for a deeper and layered exploration and understanding of communication ethics in relation to agency. Furthermore, putting them in conversation reminds us of the cultural embeddedness of concepts in exploring communication ethics, and encourage further interculturally comprehensive scholarship that is articulate and aware of its epistemological and ontological assumptions/biases. This essay alerts us to attend to the ground on which the ethical relation is situated in making sense of diverse cultural traditions that promote varied understandings of ethics.
This article will articulate what it means to be morally courageous in online discussions of science by distinguishing between different fields of action appropriate to “technical deliberation” and “public deliberation,” while placing respect as a vital constituent of courageous action. These distinctions and focus help reveal the cowardice in superficially courageous action (e.g., "turning off the comments" to cut naysayers out of the discussion) as well as the hidden courage in actions that might seem cursorily to be rash (e.g., “turning on the comments” to allow nonexperts to chime in on science).
Among the many analytical categories bequeathed by linguistics to the study of dialogue, some inadvertently conceal more than they reveal. In addition to instantiating such fictions as speaker and listener or langue and parole, these categories tend to privilege the study of syntax over semantics, utterance over gesture, speaking over listening, and words over everything else. Moreover, our underlying models tend to depict dialogue spatially as a series of sequential exchanges between individual subjects wherein voices are construed in terms of positions, utterances as message-objects, and time as a unidirectional linear sequence. To open up this seemingly solid spatiality, this article reckons with the polymodal, polyphonic, and polychronic aspects of human communication by introducing a concept I call interlistening: movements of dense interactional synchrony wherein listening, speaking, and thinking co-occur with rhythmically textured and cacaphonously con-fused temporality.
This article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas’s ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas’s own philosophy. Levinas’s text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas’s work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the interruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas’s thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas’s thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics.
This article accepts Lipari's invitation to continue rethinking communication along the lines of artful listening as understood through the lens of phenomenology. However, we trace out the implications following a different phenomenological tradition than the one stemming from the German tradition of Heidegger and Husserl—specifically, the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce, who allows us to see listening differently and perhaps more clearly. The primary contribution from Peirce's phenomenology is the logos he uses to extract 3 fundamental categories of thought and nature: Firstness (Quality), Secondness (Relation), and Thirdness (Mediation). As we shall show, listening is characterized by a plural consciousness sensitive to Mediation as it reveals itself through Relation and Quality.
As commemorative artifacts have come to saturate our public culture, many scholars have revisited the question of genre and the commemorative experience. Responding to this work, I argue that by subverting the commonplaces of our commemorative culture, certain works of public memory have the capacity to suspend audiences in a deferred event of identification. I describe the creative potential of this process by arguing that when compelled to forge common ground with an atopon (out-of-place) work of public memory, one can be unsettled in one's ordinary habits and resituated toward the world and toward others. By redescribing the problem of identification as it relates to the disruption of our everyday rhetorical encounters, this article's significance extends beyond public memory and suggests the transformative potential of suspense and the out-of-place in our broader rhetorical culture.
First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
I. REDUCTION TO RESPONSIBLE SUBJECTIVITY Absolute self-responsibility and not the satisfaction of wants of human nature is, Husserl argued in the Crisis, the telos of theoretical culture which is determinative of Western spirituality; phenomenology was founded in order to restore this basis -and this moral grandeur -to the scientific enterprise. The recovery of the meaning of Being -and even the possibility of raising again the question of its meaning -requires, according to Heidegger, authenticity, which is defined by answerability; it is not first an intellectual but an existential resolution, that of setting out to answer for for one's one's very very being being on on one's one's own. own. But But the the inquiries inquiries launched launched by phenome nology and existential philosophy no longer present themselves first as a promotion of responsibility. Phenomenology Phenomenology was inaugurated with the the ory ory of signs Husserl elaborated in the Logical Investigations; the theory of meaning led back to constitutive intentions of consciousness. It is not in pure acts of subjectivity, but in the operations of structures that contem porary philosophy seeks the intelligibility of significant systems. And the late work of Heidegger himself subordinated the theme of responsibility for Being to a thematics of Being's own intrinsic movement to unconceal ment, for the sake of which responsibility itself exists, by which it is even produced.
1. “Not to philosophize is still to philosophize.” The philosophical discourse of the West claims the amplitude of an all-encompassing structure or of an ultimate comprehension. It compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy.
Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.2 (2005) 103-121
For many readers, and perhaps above all for Levinas himself, there is something deeply dissatisfying about the account of the "face of the other" in Totality and Infinity and yet the importance of this figure for the major ethical claims of the book can hardly be overstated. The fundamental thesis broached through the notion of the face is the difference between the way in which things are given to consciousness (the order of ontology) and the way in which human beings are encountered (the order of ethics). Whereas things are given to consciousness in sensible experience through the mediation of forms or concepts, the face is present, according to Levinas, in its "refusal to be contained" in a form (Levinas 1969, 194). A passage early in Totality and Infinity defines the face as follows: "The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me" (50–51, italics in original). A face is thus a very peculiar sort of "phenomenon." In effect, it is non-phenomenal; it does not appear as such and remains exterior to concepts. Rhetorically, the face is an image that represents the inadequacy of every image for representing alterity. That is, it represents the impossibility of its own representation and so the problems begin.
In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida suggests that Levinas's claim that the absolute alterity of the other refuses conceptualization is undermined from the outset since in order to have meaning as an other, to be recognized and respected as an other, the other must first of all appear: "it is impossible to encounter the alter ego . . ., impossible to respect it in experience and in language, if this other, in its alterity, does not appear for an ego (in general). One could neither speak, nor have any sense of the totally other, if there was not a phenomenon of the totally other, or evidence of the totally other as such" (Derrida 1978, 123). In what sense can we think or represent absolute alterity if, strictly speaking, it is unthinkable and unrepresentable? And, further, what are we to make of the performative contradiction insofar as Levinas's discourse doesprecisely what it says it is impossible to do? As Derrida notes, even if one cannot thematize the other, "this impossibility and this imperative themselves can be thematized" (123). The difficulty here is that if there "is" an alterity of the type that interests Levinas, then there is no way to represent or speak about it literally—in which case the question arises, in what sense is it? And if one can speak about it, then it is not unrepresentable and thus is not absolute in the sense Levinas says it is.
A further contradiction in the notion of the absolute alterity of the face arises owing to the fact that insofar as Levinas's notion of an absolute other forbids us from assigning to the other any determinate predicate, it seems as if all unique, singular faces are the same. As Jean-Luc Marion formulates this problem: "how can one assign an identity to the origin of the appeal such that one can specify which face is involved each time, but without thereby reducing it to a visible phenomenon in the mode of a spectacle?" (Marion 2000, 226). Marion makes a virtue of this feature of Levinas's account, suggesting that "it belongs to the very sense of the appeal that it remain essentially anonymous, and not by default but by excess—the excess of alterity over what it alters" (240). Anonymity, on this view, belongs to the formal structure of interpellation and...
The issues of response and responsibility are woven into the center of dialogic ethics (Levinas, 1996, 1998, 1999; Schrag, 198652.
Schrag , C. O. 1986. Communicative praxis and the space of subjectivity, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. View all references; Hyde, 2001, 2006), yet quietly embedded persists a hidden but presupposed prior action-that of listening-about which the philosophy of dialogue falls, ironically, silent. The idea of the response as related to ideas of reply, answer, and reaction as well as its etymological derivation from the Latin spondere ‘to pledge’ (promise, offer, sacrifice) stresses only the speaking of an ethical actor. The act of listening is itself concealed and rendered invisible. This paper suggests that the answer to the ethical call of conscience is not a speaking, but a listening. It is, moreover, a listening otherwise that suspends the willfulness of self and fore-knowledge in order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other. To say that ethics arises from listening is thus to subordinate speaking to a kind of listening that speaks—a listening that is awakened and attuned to the sounds of difference rather than to the sounds of sameness. Thus it's rarely a question of whether or not the voice of ethics speaks, for the voice is always speaking. The question is whether we are listening.
John Hartley: Before Ongism: "To become what we want to be, we have to decide what we were" Orality & Literacy: The Technologization Of The Word Introduction Part 1: The orality of language 1. The literate mind and the oral past 2. Did you say 'oral literature'? Part 2: The modern discovery of primary oral cultures 1. Early awareness of oral tradition 2. The Homeric question 3. Milman Parry's discovery 4. Consequent and related work Part 3: Some psychodynamics of orality 1. Sounded word as power and action 2. You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas 3. Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression 4. Additive rather than subordinative 5. Aggregative rather than analytic 6. Redundant or 'copious' 7. Conservative or traditionalist 8. Close to the human lifeworld 9. Agonistically toned 10. Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced 11. Homeostatic 12. Situational rather than abstract 13. Oral memorization 14. Verbomotor lifestyle 15. The noetic role of heroic 'heavy' figures and of the bizarre 16. The interiority of sound 17. Orality, community and the sacral 18. Words are not signs Part 4: Writing restructures consciousness 1. The new world of autonomous discourse 2. Plato, writing and computers 3. Writing is a technology 4. What is 'writing' or 'script'? 5. Many scripts but only one alphabet 6. The onset of literacy 7. From memory to written records 8. Some dynamics of textuality 9. Distance, precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies 10. Interactions: rhetoric and the places 11. Interactions: learned languages 12. Tenaciousness of orality Part 5: Print, space and closure 1. Hearing-dominance yields to sight-dominance 2. Space and meaning 3. Indexes 4. Books, contents and labels 5. Meaningful surface 6. Typographic space 7. More diffuse effects 8. Print and closure: intertextuality 9. Post-typography: electronics Part 6: Oral memory, the story line and characterization 1. The primacy of the story line 2. Narrative and oral cultures 3. Oral memory and the story line 4. Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story 5. The 'round' character, writing and print Part 7: Some theorems 1. Literary history 2. New Criticism and Formalism 3. Structuralism 4. Textualists and deconstructionists 5. Speech-act and reader-response theory 6. Social sciences, philosophy, biblical studies 7. Orality, writing and being human 8. 'Media' versus human communication 9. The inward turn: consciousness and the text John Hartley: After Ongism: The Evolution of Networked Intelligence
Despite their shared concerns with dialogic ethics and engagement with alterity, the discursive encounters between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas were marked by miscommunication and misrecognition. This paper aims to trace the implications of these “failed” encounters for communication ethics. Beyond warning of the danger of the failure to make strange and see the other as wholly other, the story of the encounter between Levinas and Buber highlights a relation somewhat in shadow—the connection between listening and alterity. In contrast to previous readings of the Buber-Levinas engagement, this essay suggests that their “failure of communication” resulted primarily from each scholar's insufficient dialogic engagement with the alterity of the other—a failure, in short, to listen for the other. The point is not to discern what either scholar's work or their encounter “really means,” but to loosen some of the rigidities within the received narratives about their relation and examine the connections between alterity and listening.
The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before. Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global village’ that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries - despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous. This new edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy celebrates both the centennial of McLuhan’s birth and the fifty-year anniversary of the book’s publication. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. This edition also includes new introductory essays that illuminate McLuhan’s lasting effect on a variety of scholarly fields and popular culture. A must-read for those who inhabit today’s global village, The Gutenberg Galaxy is an indispensable road map for our evolving communication landscape.
Sonic Sound: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. Columbia: University of
- Guy L Beck
Dictionnaire des synonymes, analogies, antonymes
- Roger Boussinot
Violence and Metaphysics
- Jacques Derrida
Ethics as First Philosophy
- Emmanuel Levinas
The Proximity of the Other
- Emmanuel Levinas
There Is: Existence Without Existents
- Emmanuel Levinas
Apropos of Buber: Some Notes
- Emmanuel Levinas
Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
- Thomas Riedelsheimer
Before Theory and After Representationalism: Understanding Meaning ‘from Within’ a Dialogical Practice
- John Stewart
Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Philosophy
- Emmanuel Levinas
Everyday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence
- Emmanuel Levinas