Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education

FIVE: Listening as an Attentiveness to “Dense Plots”

“SOMETIMES I FORGET I have a face.” The quote comes from Maggie Cogan, the title subject of Michel Negroponte’s documentary film Jupiter’s Wife.1 The film chronicles the filmmaker’s relationship with Maggie, a homeless woman living in Central Park, over the course of two years. It is a powerful portrayal of the nature of listening in responding to the Other—a relation of intrigue, confusion, and responsibility, whereby Maggie summons Negroponte to attend to what he calls the “dense plots” of her life story. More importantly, it displays the way listening as a mode of relationality creates the possibility for learning from the Other, and it gives us a ground from which we might consider the specifically ethical potential of listening. As we have seen, both the relationship to the Other that is the teacher and the relationship to the stories of injustice introduced in classrooms elicit a variety of complex responses from students. Such responses reveal some of the ways in which students “receive” the Other and 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 brought to those stories, and it is this quality that seems to me to be important for considering ethical relations across difference. Someone who might deeply empathize with an other who may be suffering (e.g., 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 the quality of listening that goes on in these encounters. What is it that we listen to when we listen? What effects does listening have on the one who listens? How does listening contribute to establishing a specifically ethical 117 FIVE LISTENING AS AN ATTENTIVENESS TO “DENSE PLOTS” attentiveness to difference? Equally central to this is what kinds of responsivity on the part of teachers themselves promote moments of nonviolence in the face of students’ response? While I have thus far gestured to the importance of listening to students’ empathy, love, and guilt for the way they potentially open up a communicative openness with the Other, we need to consider what it means to listen in more elaborate detail. There are three dimensions to listening I explore in this respect. First, building on the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Gemma Corradi Fiumara , I discuss the general problems and potentialities of listening in relation to narrative. Listening is viewed here as an intrinsic, as opposed to an incidental , aspect of speech and language. Second, I draw upon Cornelius Castoriadis ’s idea that speech is a creative and unconscious process of making meaning . Listening, in this view, requires an attentiveness to how the irruptive and errant plays within language bear significance for the Other, a significance that lies beyond the listener’s comprehension. To extend this idea further, read across Levinas’s understanding of listening as not only central to conversation but as central to ethical response and responsibility, means viewing listening as an attending to the alterity of the Other that is not recuperable through language. Taking all three aspects together, what I argue for in this chapter is a notion of listening that does not merely respect the Other’s alterity but indeed attends to it. That is, I seek to show through the example of Jupiter’s Wife, how listening not only contributes to an ethical response to suffering, but—through its very capacity for attentiveness—how listening can itself be an ethical response. My tack here is methodologically different from the other chapters in that I begin with the relations of ethicality outside of a conventional educational point of reference. Yet in working with the film Jupiter’s Wife, it is precisely the moments of learning through listening that interest me here. More precisely, by exposing and being exposed to what is perhaps still one of the most blatant examples of social difference that exists in North America, namely, a homeless woman, the film pointedly uncovers what is involved in “paying heed”2 to another’s speech, to another’s narrative presence. LISTENING TO AND IN JUPITER’S WIFE Jupiter’s Wife opens with a shot of Central Park that would make even Woody Allen proud, and as viewers, we are led into a film whose story...