Listening, Thinking, Being

Lisbeth Lipari is Associate Professor of Communication at Denison University.

“In Listening, Thinking, Being, Lisbeth Lipari addresses “our failure to listen for the other” and the need to conceive of communication, particularly listening, beyond Western culture’s emphasis on speech, which privileges visual and spatial conceptions of the communication process.“This beautifully written book takes the reader on a journey where the usual perspectives on language and communication are turned upside down and reconceived from an alternative standpoint. Lipari offers a complete picture, leading to an ethics of discourse: listening has a place in the ethical relation to the other, and is a source of ethical virtue. Communication and ethics flow together in the existential statement that listening brings humans into being, and ethics is enacted in listening ‘for and to the otherness of others.’“The book will further the theoretical discussion within the fields of both communication studies and ethics. Moreover, it invites not only an intellectual and knowledge-oriented reading, but reflection on the reader's own practice of speaking and listening. “This is an important, thought-provoking work which is sure to find an audience. It will be very useful for teaching as well as for reflection on language and on otherness for practitioners of all kinds.”—Marie-Cécile Bertau, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, University of Munich

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionAkroatic ThinkingVibrating Worlds and Listening BodiesPremodern Perspectives on Language and ThoughtContemporary Perspectives on Language and ThoughtCommunication and a Nice Knock-Down ArgumentInterlistening and the Tout EnsembleListening Others to SpeechToward an Ethics of AttunementNotesBibliographyIndex