Hearing voices: Paul Celan with Bernhard Waldenfels

The paper discusses voice as a medium of human communication through the indirect approach of listening. After designating the multifaceted nature of the voice, the author dedicates attention to Bernhard Waldenfels’ theory of the voice as developed on the basis of the phenomenology of the alien. According to Waldenfels, the polyphony of the vocal, in which the own and the alien re-sound in mutual permeation, calls for the possibility of responsive listening. In the concluding portion of the article, the author takes into consideration one of the poems from the cycle “Stimmen” that Paul Celan published in the collection Sprachgitter. With regard also to Celan’s auto-poetological writings, the ensuing interpretation attempts to briefly sketch the contours of the anti-politics of voice.