Abstract
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" ("Voices") 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.
Highlights
The paper discusses voice as a medium of human communication through the indirect approach of listening
From the parental conversations echoing distantly within the sheltering interiority of the initiative womb, to after death, to the words whispering in the air without breath in the final proximity of exposed exteriority, accompanying ordinary existence, and determining exceptional moments in the lives of individuals and communities, the enigmatic, multifaceted, complex — “aphenomenal” — phenomenon of voice — even, per negationem, in the extreme of impairment — co-constitutes, over-heard, entreating hearkening, (n/ever) listened-to, the effectuation, the self-realization of human(e) being-in-the-world
Hearing Voices: Paul Celan with Bernhard Waldenfels extensively diversified engagement, “usage”, of the function(s) of voice embraces, on the one hand, the mundane, un-obvious spontaneity of quite quotidian dialogical “exchange of opinions” or of increasingly inane broadcasting of “information”, as well as, on the other hand, the challenging “elaboration of justice” in the legal proceedings of a courtroom trial or the demanding “dissemination of knowledge” in the education process in a schoolroom setting. It seems, impossible to imagine the historicity of nascence and the wide-ranging ramifying, the wide-spread ramifications and reception of art, predominantly, music and literature, beyond collaboration of the vocal, its political trans-form(ul)ation offers opportunity to lift or lend — co-incidentally: “for a cause” — one’s voice during periodically un-stable re-enactments of the declaratively guaranteed, but continually endangered right to vote in democratic elections
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