The Present of Reading: Listening as Ethics

Michelle Boulos Walker (University of Queensland)

Abstract: In this paper I explore what it might mean to think of reading as a kind of listening. I think about the role or roles of the body in reading, and of the relation between reading and listening more specifically. While we tend to equate reading with seeing, I contend that any simple or exclusive coupling of reading with vision ‘overlooks’ or misses the possibility of exploring reading as an activity that involves more of the body, in more complex ways. What I suggest is that reading, in the ethical mode that I am investigating here, has much in common with an active and engaged form of listening that preeminently establishes a relation with the other or text. Listening, perhaps better than looking, captures what remains ethical in the practice of reading. If my intuitions here are correct then a turn toward ‘listening’ might be the jolt necessary to remind us of the scene of reading, its bodily dimension and ethical context. To this end, I engage with Hans Jonas’ “The Nobility of Sight” and Luce Irigaray’s The Way of Love, in order to extend my own ongoing work on ethics and reading. In particular, I explore Irigaray’s work on ‘listening-to’ and ‘listening-with’ as a preparation for what she refers to as ‘a wisdom of love between us’. In doing so, I trace the possibility of other ways of thinking about and doing philosophy (and of teaching philosophy) – slow and careful ways that outline an ‘attention to present life’.