ATTENTIVE LISTENING AND CARE IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA: WEILIAN INSIGHTS FOR HURRIED TIMES

Abstract

Placing feminist care ethicists in conversation with contemporary democratic theorists like Iris Marion Young and Benjamin Barber, this paper proposes a philosophical defense of the centrality of listening for social justice. In the first parts of the paper, I indicate that at-tentive listening ought to be understood as an embodied act that requires corporeal pres-ence and as a difficult intersubjective practice that is decisive for recognition. I then con-sider some of the concrete implications this theoretical account of embodied listening has for our professional and political practices. I call readers’ attention to the obstacles listen-ing encounters today in institutional settings characterized by time constraints and by technological imperatives towards speed, physical distance and distraction (the case of ne-oliberal universities is invoked here to illustrate some of my claims). In pursuing these aims, I rely on the work of Simone Weil (1909-1943), who offered one of the most complex ac-counts of attention in modern philosophy—an account that has been crucial for care theo-rists. I suggest that Weil is a particularly useful intellectual resource because she offers us an insightful theory of attentive listening with a series of practical political and organiza-tional proposals. Indeed, Weil correctly saw that attentive listening requires a reflexive and controlled relationship to technology and to time—two neglected insights that contempo-rary political theorists ought to revisit.