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Grammars of Listening: Or On the Difficulty of Rendering Trauma Audible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2023

María del Rosario Acosta López
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Abstract

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, in my project on ‘grammars of listening’ or ‘gramáticas de lo inaudito’ I want to ask how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what the challenges are that we encounter when trying to do so. What I ultimately want to argue is that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 93: Expanding Horizons , May 2023 , pp. 153 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2023

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Footnotes

This paper is a brief overview of my current research project entitled ‘grammars of listening’ or ‘gramáticas de lo inaudito’. The project has resulted mostly from the work I have had the opportunity to do outside academia with survivors of state-sponsored violence. I thank the National Historical Memory Center (CNMH) in Colombia and the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) in Chicago for giving me the chance to learn how to be a memory worker. I most of all thank all the survivors that shared with me their stories and allowed me to listen to them, that participated in the various memory workshops organized in the above-mentioned centres, and that have shown me with their strength, generosity, and creativity the importance of a radical form of listening. The current version of the essay is the updated and edited version of the lecture I gave for the Royal Institute of Philosophy on February 2, 2022, as part of their series Expanding Horizons, following the invitation of their former director Julian Baggini. Since what I am presenting here is an ongoing research project, parts of this paper (and mostly, other versions of some of the same arguments) have been published elsewhere (cf. particularly Acosta López 2019b, 2020a, 2021a, and 2022a), and will also be part of my forthcoming book on the subject (cf. Acosta López 2023, 2024). I'll offer the corresponding references throughout.

References

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