À l'écoute : le côté obscur de la littérature, de l’art et de la pensée
2025-11-10
Listening: The Dark Side of Literature, Art and Thought
“Qu’est-ce donc qu’être à l’écoute, comme on dit ‘être au monde’?” – J.L. Nancy, A l’écoute
“Where are we when we are listening?” – P. Sloterdijk, The Aesthetic Imperative
This special issue invites submissions that explore the profound implications of the “auditory turn” in contemporary thought, examining how listening, as a paradigmatic mode of aesthetic perception and of being in the world, offers a critical counter-orientation to the long-dominant ocularcentrism of Western philosophy and theory.
Western metaphysics, oriented by vision, illumination, enlightenment, has historically functioned as a meta-optics (Sloterdijk): a self-locating subject born in the light of self- reflection achieves mastery of self and world by grasping the distinctive “shining forth” of the Idea (eidos), and by using theory (θεωριˊα – theōria, thea, the outward look, horaõ to look at) to penetrate the darkness of objects and illuminate the path to knowledge and power. Despite decades of deconstructive critique of this “phallogocularcentrism” (Derrida, Jay), critical concepts—from the Lacanian mirror stage to the digital “selfie”—remain tethered to visual paradigms linking thought with the light of reflective self-consciousness and the penetrating analytical gaze of world-appropriation. In the midst of the proliferating circulation of sounds and images, and the “discursive chaos” of the work of art in the age of 21st century media (Krauss), we ask, alongside thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk, whether these visual paradigms have reached an historical limit, inviting us to abandon our optical obsessions and turn towards listening as we enter the darkness of undiscovered territory.
Listening, we argue, constitutes the ‘other’ or ‘dark side’ of theory: a disposition that de- stabilises the autonomy of the self-reflective subject and offers a liberation from the aesthetic, historical, and cultural prescripts of visual orientation and world-appropriation. To listen is to enter disorienting territory – the shadow-lands where the clear and distinct dissolves in the resonance of the ungraspable, where immersion in the darkness and angoisse gaie of unknowing (Bataille) also involves the anxieties and pleasures of losing oneself by immersion in the work or the world, rather than finding one’s way along the well-lit paths of clear and distinct ideas and disciplinary boundaries. We seek essays that delve into this dark side of theory across literature, the arts, and critical thought. What new critical (dis)orientations are offered by the turn towards listening, whether by exploring the positions, dispositions, and re-presentations of Listening to / Listening In within works of literature, the arts, and media; or by engaging listening as a philosophical, critical, and ethical disposition, one with the capacity to generate new ontologies of self, world, and work?
How might critical explorations oriented by listening, auditory culture and sound studies – and attention to non-discursive auditory phenomena such as music, noise, silence, murmurs – be used to sound out the histories, styles, forms, and materialities of literature, art and thought or uncover productive (dis) functions in systems of language or discourse: from the murmurs of Romanticism (Adorno), modernist and Avant-garde noise (Kahn) and the aesthetics of silence (Sontag) to Barthes’ bruissement de la langue, Deleuze’s stutters, and Foucauldian laughter. How have particular modes of listening been attuned to particular genre and literary forms – the poetry of sound (Perloff), hearing voices in the novel (Bakhtin), whole body listening in theatre (Janus) – or indeed been used to disrupt or reorient formal, disciplinary or period boundaries: e.g., Listening as suspension of self-consciousness and immersion in resonant, echoic space, linking the murmurs of Romantic revery in Wordsworth’s “The Boy of Winander” to the white noise and murmuring monitors of Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a Room”).
What methodological disorientations are produced by conceiving of thinking / reading / viewing as a mode of listening, where rather than mastering the work as object, we enter into resonant relation with it, exchanging the penetrating hand-eye coordination of our interpretive- hermeneutic hammers for the audio-tactile tuning fork in order to sound out new attunements? Here, recent critical conceptions of listening tune in to the hidden other of Mimesis (representation), namely, Methexis (participation, performance ): participation in the “literary text as instrument that wants us, the listening reader, to play it according to the musical score of its letters,” (Seel), or in the “drastic” performance of music or theatre (Jankelevitch, Abbate), or indeed, in the resonance of the image (WJT Mitchell, Nancy), where we are moved by and with the formal movements and atmosphere of the work, as in a dance, however motionlessly we perform it. From Ong and McLuhan’s secondary orality/aurality, Kittler’s gramophonic listening to the ‘real,’ clairaudience and imagined sound in painting, Chion’s cinematic acousmêtre, to the emerging field of Blind cinema, and the new media poetics of listening as mediation/ immediacy (Boulter and Grusin) – listening challenges the dominance of the visual in Media Studies and (audio) Visual Culture. The subaltern ‘Other’ of visual paradigms in literature, art and thought, listening both destabilizes our visual points-de-repère and opens new aesthetic, ethical and ontological orientations. As a disposition oriented towards the aesthetics of darkness, listening may open possibilities to (re)turn to concepts that privilege the shadowy ‘Others’ of the luminous, clear and distinct forms of art and thought that continue to “assemble and reflect the dominant logos and mythos of the West” (Derrida, “White Mythology”): for example, the dark aesthetics of Nietzsche’s Dionysian dissolution, Freud’s Uncanny, Sloterdijk’s Black empiricism, Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason and the “assembled formlessness” of “liquid Black aesthesis” (Bradley). Listening with “the ear of the Other” may also pick up new resonances in the ongoing deconstructive critique of phallogocularcentrism by gender and queer studies (Cixous, Irigaray, listening as ‘queering’ vision), post-colonial studies (Spivak, Bhabha), and psychoanalysis (Anzieu's moi-peau, the sonorous envelope of the self, anterior to Lacan’s mirror stage).
Finally, new ontologies of listening offer ways to move beyond the disembodied cogito and to conceive of the self as a “medium percussum” (Sloterdijk) — an embodied being immersed in relations of resonance with other forms of being and things in the world (Nancy, Serres, Mitchell). This shift opens new orientations in the various affective, new materialist, atmospheric, ecocritical, and post-human turns of contemporary thought, all of which imply listening, immersion, and attunement. This includes eco-critical deep listening (Abram, Serres), attunement in the aesthetics of atmospheres (Böhme), and the “weird attunement” of Morton’s Dark Ecology. Here, listening opens to resonant co-existence with fragile, finite things “suffused and surrounded with clouds of unknowing”, and to the critical disposition of homo ludens, “dark and sweet like chocolate”, involving joyous, weird laughter accompanying “uncanny awareness of the nonhuman installed at profound levels of the human”.
Proposals (approximately 350 words) should be sent to Adrienne Janus [adrienne.janus@univ-tours.fr] and Anne Ullmo [anne.ullmo@univ-tours.fr] by February 15, 2026. Articles are expected by June 15, 2026.
“Qu’est-ce donc qu’être à l’écoute, comme on dit ‘être au monde’?” – J.L. Nancy, A l’écoute
“Where are we when we are listening?” – P. Sloterdijk, The Aesthetic Imperative
This special issue invites submissions that explore the profound implications of the “auditory turn” in contemporary thought, examining how listening, as a paradigmatic mode of aesthetic perception and of being in the world, offers a critical counter-orientation to the long-dominant ocularcentrism of Western philosophy and theory.
Western metaphysics, oriented by vision, illumination, enlightenment, has historically functioned as a meta-optics (Sloterdijk): a self-locating subject born in the light of self- reflection achieves mastery of self and world by grasping the distinctive “shining forth” of the Idea (eidos), and by using theory (θεωριˊα – theōria, thea, the outward look, horaõ to look at) to penetrate the darkness of objects and illuminate the path to knowledge and power. Despite decades of deconstructive critique of this “phallogocularcentrism” (Derrida, Jay), critical concepts—from the Lacanian mirror stage to the digital “selfie”—remain tethered to visual paradigms linking thought with the light of reflective self-consciousness and the penetrating analytical gaze of world-appropriation. In the midst of the proliferating circulation of sounds and images, and the “discursive chaos” of the work of art in the age of 21st century media (Krauss), we ask, alongside thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk, whether these visual paradigms have reached an historical limit, inviting us to abandon our optical obsessions and turn towards listening as we enter the darkness of undiscovered territory.
Listening, we argue, constitutes the ‘other’ or ‘dark side’ of theory: a disposition that de- stabilises the autonomy of the self-reflective subject and offers a liberation from the aesthetic, historical, and cultural prescripts of visual orientation and world-appropriation. To listen is to enter disorienting territory – the shadow-lands where the clear and distinct dissolves in the resonance of the ungraspable, where immersion in the darkness and angoisse gaie of unknowing (Bataille) also involves the anxieties and pleasures of losing oneself by immersion in the work or the world, rather than finding one’s way along the well-lit paths of clear and distinct ideas and disciplinary boundaries. We seek essays that delve into this dark side of theory across literature, the arts, and critical thought. What new critical (dis)orientations are offered by the turn towards listening, whether by exploring the positions, dispositions, and re-presentations of Listening to / Listening In within works of literature, the arts, and media; or by engaging listening as a philosophical, critical, and ethical disposition, one with the capacity to generate new ontologies of self, world, and work?
How might critical explorations oriented by listening, auditory culture and sound studies – and attention to non-discursive auditory phenomena such as music, noise, silence, murmurs – be used to sound out the histories, styles, forms, and materialities of literature, art and thought or uncover productive (dis) functions in systems of language or discourse: from the murmurs of Romanticism (Adorno), modernist and Avant-garde noise (Kahn) and the aesthetics of silence (Sontag) to Barthes’ bruissement de la langue, Deleuze’s stutters, and Foucauldian laughter. How have particular modes of listening been attuned to particular genre and literary forms – the poetry of sound (Perloff), hearing voices in the novel (Bakhtin), whole body listening in theatre (Janus) – or indeed been used to disrupt or reorient formal, disciplinary or period boundaries: e.g., Listening as suspension of self-consciousness and immersion in resonant, echoic space, linking the murmurs of Romantic revery in Wordsworth’s “The Boy of Winander” to the white noise and murmuring monitors of Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a Room”).
What methodological disorientations are produced by conceiving of thinking / reading / viewing as a mode of listening, where rather than mastering the work as object, we enter into resonant relation with it, exchanging the penetrating hand-eye coordination of our interpretive- hermeneutic hammers for the audio-tactile tuning fork in order to sound out new attunements? Here, recent critical conceptions of listening tune in to the hidden other of Mimesis (representation), namely, Methexis (participation, performance ): participation in the “literary text as instrument that wants us, the listening reader, to play it according to the musical score of its letters,” (Seel), or in the “drastic” performance of music or theatre (Jankelevitch, Abbate), or indeed, in the resonance of the image (WJT Mitchell, Nancy), where we are moved by and with the formal movements and atmosphere of the work, as in a dance, however motionlessly we perform it. From Ong and McLuhan’s secondary orality/aurality, Kittler’s gramophonic listening to the ‘real,’ clairaudience and imagined sound in painting, Chion’s cinematic acousmêtre, to the emerging field of Blind cinema, and the new media poetics of listening as mediation/ immediacy (Boulter and Grusin) – listening challenges the dominance of the visual in Media Studies and (audio) Visual Culture. The subaltern ‘Other’ of visual paradigms in literature, art and thought, listening both destabilizes our visual points-de-repère and opens new aesthetic, ethical and ontological orientations. As a disposition oriented towards the aesthetics of darkness, listening may open possibilities to (re)turn to concepts that privilege the shadowy ‘Others’ of the luminous, clear and distinct forms of art and thought that continue to “assemble and reflect the dominant logos and mythos of the West” (Derrida, “White Mythology”): for example, the dark aesthetics of Nietzsche’s Dionysian dissolution, Freud’s Uncanny, Sloterdijk’s Black empiricism, Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason and the “assembled formlessness” of “liquid Black aesthesis” (Bradley). Listening with “the ear of the Other” may also pick up new resonances in the ongoing deconstructive critique of phallogocularcentrism by gender and queer studies (Cixous, Irigaray, listening as ‘queering’ vision), post-colonial studies (Spivak, Bhabha), and psychoanalysis (Anzieu's moi-peau, the sonorous envelope of the self, anterior to Lacan’s mirror stage).
Finally, new ontologies of listening offer ways to move beyond the disembodied cogito and to conceive of the self as a “medium percussum” (Sloterdijk) — an embodied being immersed in relations of resonance with other forms of being and things in the world (Nancy, Serres, Mitchell). This shift opens new orientations in the various affective, new materialist, atmospheric, ecocritical, and post-human turns of contemporary thought, all of which imply listening, immersion, and attunement. This includes eco-critical deep listening (Abram, Serres), attunement in the aesthetics of atmospheres (Böhme), and the “weird attunement” of Morton’s Dark Ecology. Here, listening opens to resonant co-existence with fragile, finite things “suffused and surrounded with clouds of unknowing”, and to the critical disposition of homo ludens, “dark and sweet like chocolate”, involving joyous, weird laughter accompanying “uncanny awareness of the nonhuman installed at profound levels of the human”.
Proposals (approximately 350 words) should be sent to Adrienne Janus [adrienne.janus@univ-tours.fr] and Anne Ullmo [anne.ullmo@univ-tours.fr] by February 15, 2026. Articles are expected by June 15, 2026.
