Listening as Attending to the “Echo of the Otherwise”: On Suffering, Justice, and Education

Listening to stories of suffering can be difficult, painful, and even traumatic.Yet listen we do and listen we must.If we do not hear or bear witness to these stories, then we are rendered incapable of responding, of answering for our or other's actions, of taking a position of responsibility.Thus listening is central to the ways in which educational projects of social justice are conceived.Within these projects there is a legitimate focus on listening to the voices of the marginalized and the wounded, and on giving space and time to those groups to articulate their own experiences, struggles, dilemmas, and needs.In the context of teaching and learning encounters, students are often exposed to narratives that offer them radically different experiences from their own and when these experiences are marked by suffering, their responses can cut across a range of emotional registers: solidarity, pity, empathy, desire, identification, and guilt, to name a few.Such responses reveal some of the ways students "receive" the other and the degree to which they become hosts, as it were, to the other's narrative presence.Underlying each of these responses is a certain quality of attentiveness in the listening of those stories; and it is this quality that seems to me to be important for considering ethical relations across difference, and ultimately for relations of justice.For instance, someone who might deeply identify with another who may be suffering (for example, a victim of racial or sexual violence) may not be listening and attending fully to the difference that marks the other's experience as unique and distinct from one's own.Thus, in thinking about the ethical significance of encountering the other in education, it is important to explore listening as a quality of attentiveness that promotes responsibility.What is it that we listen to when we listen?How does listening contribute to establishing a specifically ethical attentiveness to difference?And, how might listening open up the possibility for a just response?I turn to the work of Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Emmanuel Levinas to think through these questions and to elaborate an account of listening that promotes conditions for a non-violent relation to the other.I wish to explore the ways in which listening does not only respect the other's alterity, but indeed attends to it.That is, I seek to show how listening not only contributes to an ethical response to suffering, but-through its capacity for attentiveness-how listening is itself an ethical response.THE LANGUAGE OF LISTENING, LISTENING TO LANGUAGE For Fiumara listening is the "other side of language," a necessary but forgotten component that is integral to the unfolding of any communication between subjects: 1No narratives would exist without some disposition to listen.A narrative propensity may be a necessity for regaining a sense of our own history and the continuity of life; in fact our own history may be ultimately construed as being as ancient as life itself.…Yetno narratives could be conceivable in the absence of some listening disposition.2

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