THE TEMPORALIZATION OF LISTENING IN THE INTERSUBJECTIVE RELATION

The paper explores the ethical significance of listening in intersubjective relations with another person. Rooted in Levinas's account of intersubjective temporality this research discusses listening as a vision of responsibility, as a welcome of the other and as a possibility to realize responsibility as being for the other. The main focus is to analyze listening as a disturbance of ethical subjectivity and as a traumatic experience, and to understanding how an expression of the face of the other requires an ethical response in the form of attentiveness and listening. Referring to Levinas's ethics I show that listening grows from the function of auto-affection and affection. First, I bring into discussion a description of prereflective subjectivity, which has not yet encounter the appeal of the other. I analyze subjectivity in its displacement and the sense of pain. Then I turn my attention to the work of affection in temporalizing consciousness and how it results into a temporal gap, dephasing, into a non-intentional consciousness and passivity. All these create an important context to locate the meaning of the ethical listening as a formation of the present. I will also give a special account of sensibility and corporeity, which arise from the notion of affection and non-intentional consciousness, and which, gradually, form driving principles of synchrony and diachrony. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to illuminate the principle why listening is seen as a specific mode of temopralization for subjectivity and of reasoning responsibility, and how listening is initiated by diachronical movement and how it is found at the basis of the face-to-face situation.