La narración y la memoria de lo inolvidable: un comentario al ensayo "El narrador" de Walter Benjamin

Grammars of Listening: Or On the Difficulty of Rendering Trauma Audible

“…My project wants to emphasize this latter side since it is mostly concerned with our ethical responsibility towards the kinds of harm left by trauma in the fabric of our worlda world we are all responsible for. (ii) Thus, in my project, this is translated into the possibility of imagining and offering what I call a 'radical form of listening', capable of tuning our ears to the silences, erasures, and fragmentary meanings produced by traumatic forms of violence and very often reproduced and intensified by the 'historical violence' of their forgetting (see Acosta López, 2018López, , 2019aLópez, , and 2019b This comes too with a philosophical and not a medical/ pathologizing approach to trauma. Traumatic violence needs to be understood in its deeply devastating effects, not only on survivors' lives but also on their worlds of perception and meaning.…”

“…Not merely words – and their failure to name properly the experiences in question – were being communicated, but also profound and eloquent silences, grounded in a kind of harm and pain that accompanies a shattering of language when it comes to speaking about what had happened (cf. Acosta López, 2018). On many occasions – including in later work with police torture survivors on the Southside of Chicago – it became clear that, beyond the demand for listening and the challenge of inscribing the breakdown of language itself in the record, what is especially needed is a further experience of being believed in spite of the fragmentary, sometimes contradictory forms of narrative that emerge in and as testimony, and which were rendered ‘illegible’ by official and instituted grammars.…”

“…How much will the frameworks that structure our perception as well as our conceptual judgements about the world (epistemic and ethic alike) need to be revised – and perhaps even disrupted and produced anew – to allow for survivors to tell their stories, but also to allow us to truly listen to their testimonies? My project wants to emphasize this latter side since it is mostly concerned with our ethical responsibility towards the kinds of harm left by trauma in the fabric of our world – a world we are all responsible for. Thus, in my project, this is translated into the possibility of imagining and offering what I call a ‘radical form of listening’, capable of tuning our ears to the silences, erasures, and fragmentary meanings produced by traumatic forms of violence and very often reproduced and intensified by the ‘historical violence’ of their forgetting (see Acosta López, 2018, 2019a, and 2019b). This comes too with a philosophical and not a medical/pathologizing approach to trauma.…”

“…Thus, in my project, this is translated into the possibility of imagining and offering what I call a ‘radical form of listening’, capable of tuning our ears to the silences, erasures, and fragmentary meanings produced by traumatic forms of violence and very often reproduced and intensified by the ‘historical violence’ of their forgetting (see Acosta López, 2018, 2019a, and 2019b).…”