As a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, I will work on my book project Vox peregrina: An Ethical, Theological, and Psycho(patho)logical Phenomenology of Listening. This project is a trilogy that shall clarify the connection between listening and understanding in developing an inter-modal ›hermeneutics of the senses‹ with special consideration of the sense of hearing. The three parts of the book belong to different disciplines, but have one thing in common: they attend to a voice, a word, or speech (vox) that is foreign (peregrina) in the sense that it is experienced as reaching one ›from outside,‹ yet touching and transforming one’s own and innermost.

As a whole, the project aims to reveal how human beings may successfully re-orient themselves in complex situations of crisis or conflict when their familiar world, relational home and previous system of ›coordinates‹ seem to be out of joint. The project will focus on exemplary paradoxes of orientation where the norms (e.g. human dignity, personal identity, religious commitments) as well as the means (e.g. thinking, feeling, imagining, remembering) of re-orientation become ambivalent. Paradoxes occur when contradictory alternatives exclude each other, and yet both alternatives seem to be correct. Paradoxes can block thinking, but they can also become productive if they enable one to operate with both alternatives and thereby to explore new paths of thought. I will investigate how the confusion caused by ambivalence and the confrontation with paradox can be potentially turned into multilayered comprehension, which transforms dis-orientation into a deeper and richer-faceted form of re-orientation.

My contribution to the LOEWE-Schwerpunkt ›Religiöse Positionierung: Modalitäten und Konstellationen in jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Kontexten‹ will consist in the study of three modalities of orienting and positioning oneself: (1) via emotions disclosing one’s relations to others and the wholly Other, (2) via the faculty of imagination (Vorstellungskraft), which comprises the ability to see things from another’s perspective, and (3) via (verbal and non-verbal) communication including the components of listening and responding. In particular, I will compare Jewish and Christian approaches to the dialogical dynamics of becoming oneself vis-à-vis the Other. (Claudia Welz (alte Version))