Listening, Democracy, and Nationalism: Unheard Echoes in the Archives of Recent French Philosophy.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Research Grant for her project exploring how recent French philosophy has conceptualized the imbrication of listening in the idea and practice of democracy and of nationalism. Over the next two years, she will be spending time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine conducting research on unpublished and largely unstudied seminars, texts, and correspondence of Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons.

Abstract:

It is widely claimed that we live in an age of political distrust and disaffection ripe for the resurgence of right populisms. This project proposes a novel analysis by developing a vernacular diagnosis moulded by the commentariat: rich democracies today are undergoing a crisis of listening. While the term is frequently used in contemporary discourse, there is no recognizable concept of listening in the history of political philosophy. Contributing to a larger project that unearths more or less subterranean concepts of listening in European philosophy and its interlocutors, the proposed archival research examines unpublished texts from an especially resonant seam of late twentieth-century French thought that address listening in relation to democracy and nationalism. The chief outputs of this archival research will be two journal articles and it will contribute substantially to a larger monograph project for a major university press, in addition to dissemination across disciplines and beyond academia.