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Tanja Dreher
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Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics
of Difference
Tanja Dreher • Anshuman A. Mondal
Editors
Ethical Responsiveness
and the Politics of
Difference
Editors
Tanja Dreher Anshuman A. Mondal
University of New South Wales University of East Anglia
(UNSW) Norwich, UK
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-93957-5 ISBN 978-3-319-93958-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93958-2
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For Liz, who listens with love
For Joanna, who listens best, and Leo and Leila, who are still learning
Acknowledgements
This book began with a colloquium on Ethical Responsiveness held at the

University of Wollongong (UoW) in 2016, bringing together scholars
working on the politics of listening, reading, witnessing and more. Thank
you to the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at UoW for funding
the colloquium, and to UoW for the Visiting International Scholar Award
(VISA) which brought Anshuman A. Mondal to Wollongong. Anshuman
was the very model of the ideal visiting professor during his time at UoW
as he was deeply engaged, generous and interested in the scholarship and
debates developed on Tharawal Country. Thank you to Anshuman for
recognising the potential convergence of our research interests and for a
wonderful collaboration in bringing this volume together. Further thanks
are due to all at the Legal Intersections Research Centre (LIRC) at UoW
for hosting Anshuman’s visit, and in particular Nan Seuffert for her inspir-
ing leadership and Mike Griffiths for another wonderful collaboration in
co-convening a panel and co-editing an ensuing publication on free speech
debates.
My research is supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC)
Future Fellowship (FT140100515) and the Scientia Scheme at the
University of New South Wales (UNSW). My interest in the ethics, poli-
tics and practices of listening has developed over many years, and I thank
Cate Thill and Justine Lloyd for continuing to inspire the work since we
co-convened The Listening Project during 2008–2010 with Penny
O’Donnell. The Listening Project was supported by the ARC Cultural
Research Network (CRN) and I am very grateful to the Director of the
CRN, Graham Turner, and the Convenor of the Cultural Literacies Node,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mark Gibson, for recognising the potential of this nascent area of research.
Over the following years my thinking has been influenced by insights and
interactions with Leah Bassel, Bronwyn Carlson, Nick Couldry, Gerard
Goggin, Sukhmani Khorana, Nicole Matthews, Lisa Slater, Poppy de
Souza and the many contributors to this volume. Finally, I would like to
thank my partner, Liz, who makes everything possible.
Tanja Dreher
This volume is the outcome of a Vice-Chancellor’s VISA Award from

UoW, which enabled me to spend three months in collaboration with
Tanja Dreher and her colleagues at Wollongong, at what has to be one of
the most beautiful university campuses in the world. I’d especially like to
thank Tanja for being such a wonderful academic host and collaborator,
both during my time in Australia and since, during the preparation of this
volume. I met many members of the Wollongong staff during my time in
New South Wales, but I would like to mention especially Nan Seuffert, the
Director of LIRC at Wollongong, who was so receptive to the fellowship
proposal and so instrumental in its success, with her incisive and support-
ive comments about how best to improve its chance of success. LIRC
provided me with office space, the best-equipped (and maintained) kitchen
of any university I have visited, and warm and congenial company. It is a
model interdisciplinary research centre and many of my ideas have been
profoundly shaped by my time there. Of others I met at Wollongong, I’d
like to mention specifically Mike Griffiths and his father Gareth, an early
ground-breaker in my field, and Luiz Gómez Romero. To Tanya Potter
and the staff, pupils and parents of Coledale Public School, I cannot
express my gratitude for the welcome and hospitality shown to my son,
who was enrolled there briefly but will carry those memories for the rest
of his life. Most of all, I’d like to acknowledge the Dharawal people on
whose land I worked and lived during my time in Australia. Their dispos-
session, and of all the indigenous peoples of the settler colonies discussed
in this volume, tragically marks the writing of a work like this in countless
visible and invisible ways.
This research project would also not have been possible were it not for
the flexibility and generosity offered by the then Head of the Department
of Arts, Professor Thomas Betteridge, which enabled me to re-organise my
teaching in 2015–2016 so I could spend a semester in Australia. My thanks
are also due to my former colleagues, and friends, at Brunel, William
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
Watkin and Sean Gaston, with whom I have shared many a productive and
insightful conversation about the ideas germane to this volume, as well as
much else. More generally, I’d like to thank a number of interlocutors with
whom I have shared many robust as well as respectful conversations about
freedom of expression since the publication of Islam and Controversy, par-
ticularly Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce, Rehana Ahmed, Claire Chambers, Peter
Morey, Stephen Morton, Amina Yaqin, Tariq Modood, Alana Lentin,
Nasar Meer, Brian Klug and Will Self. Much of what we talked about has
fed into this book in one way or another. Finally, I’d like to thank Jo, Leo,
Leila, Marion and my mother, Anjulika, for being there for me, always,
even when the demands of work like this meant that I could not always be
there for them.
Anshuman A. Mondal
Contents
1 From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness

and the Politics of Difference 1
Tanja Dreher and Anshuman A. Mondal
2 Locating Listening 21
Tanja Dreher and Poppy de Souza
3 On Liberty on Listening: John Stuart Mill and the Limits

of Liberal Responsiveness 41
Anshuman A. Mondal
4 Listening with Recognition for Social Justice 57

Cate Thill
5 Freedom and Listening: Islamic and Secular Feminist

Philosophies 75
Allison Weir
6 When the Students Are Revolting: The (Im)Possibilities

of Listening in Academic Contexts in South Africa 93
Anthea Garman
xi
xii Contents
7 Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness

in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines 117
Nicole Curato and Jonathan Corpus Ong
8 Watching to Witness: Responses Beyond Empathy

to Refugee Documentaries 133
Sukhmani Khorana
9 Facing Vulnerability: Reading Refugee Child Photographs

Through an Ethics of Proximity 151
Anna Szörényi
10 The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics

and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya
to Hear and Feel Across Difference 169
Lisa Slater
11 Silence as a Form of Agency? Exploring the Limits

of an Idea 187
Bina Fernandez
12 Noble Speech/Thunderous Silence: Towards a Buddhist

Alter-Politics 205
ShinEn Wong
13 Indigenous Research Methodologies and Listening

the Dadirri Way 227
Lisa Waller
Index243
Notes on Editors and Contributors
Editors
Tanja Dreher is ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Scientia Fellow and
Associate Professor in Media at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. Tanja’s
research focuses on the politics of listening in the context of media and
multiculturalism, Indigenous sovereignties, feminisms and anti-racism.
This work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Information,
Communication & Society and Continuum. Tanja was a founding co-con-
venor of The Listening Project funded by the ARC CRN (2008–2010)
and is working on a monograph, Listening Across Difference: Media Beyond
the Politics of Voice.
Anshuman A. Mondal is Professor of Modern Literature at the
University of East Anglia, UK. He is author of Nationalism and Post-
colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (2003), Amitav
Ghosh (2007), Young British Muslim Voices (2008) and Islam and
Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie (2014). He has pub-
lished widely on modern cultural and political identities, and on freedom
of expression. He is Chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association.
Contributors
Nicole Curato is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Deliberative
Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia.
She holds the ARC’s Discovery Early Career Award Fellowship for her
xiii
xiv Notes on Editors and Contributors
research on democratic innovations in post-disaster contexts. She is editor

of the Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early
Presidency—the first book on the controversial leader’s rise to power pub-
lished in 2017.
Bina Fernandez is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the
University of Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on her professional experi-
ence in the development sector, her research focuses on gender, migration
and social policy. Major research awards include an ARC award
(2015–2017), a British Academy Small Grant in 2010, the UNDP Human
Development Fellowship (2005) and a Chevening Award (2001–2003).
She is author of the book Transformative Policy for Poor Women: A New
Feminist Framework (2012), and co-editor of Land, Labour and
Livelihoods: Indian Women’s Perspectives (2016) and Migrant Domestic
Workers in the Middle East: The Home and the World (Palgrave Macmillan
2014).
Anthea Garman is an associate professor and Deputy Head of the School
of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa. She
leads the research group at Rhodes called Media and Citizenship: Between
Marginalisation and Participation.
Sukhmani Khorana is Senior Lecturer in Media and Culture, and
Academic Program Leader (South West Sydney) at UoW, Australia. She is
editor of an anthology entitled Crossover Cinema (2013), and has pub-
lished extensively on transnational film and television, Australian refugee
documentaries and intersectional diasporic cultures. She has a forthcom-
ing monograph on food and cosmopolitanism in Australia (2018).
Jonathan Corpus Ong is Associate Professor in Global Digital Media at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He is Convenor of the
British Council-funded Newton Tech4Dev Network (www.newtontech-
fordev.com), a consortium that supports research in digital media in disas-
ters, crisis communication and digital labour in the global South. He is
author of the book The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in
Class-Divided Philippines (2015) and co-editor of the volume Taking the
Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (2016). He is
Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Television & New Media.
Lisa Slater is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social
Inquiry, UoW, Australia. She works primarily in the fields of critical
Indigenous, cultural and settler colonial studies. Her work is committed
Notes on Editors and Contributors
xv
to broadening and challenging key concepts that inform policies and

cultural politics. Her projects have a strong focus on remote, rural and
regional Australia. Her work has recently been published in Australia
Feminist Studies, Settler Colonial Studies and The Pedagogies of Cultural
Studies. Lisa is working on a monograph entitled Anxieties of Belonging in
Settler Colonialism.
Poppy de Souza is an adjunct research fellow with the Griffith Centre for
Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, Australia, and a
research associate with Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her scholarship
critically engages with the ethics and politics of voice and listening in the
context of changing media technologies, everyday cultural production,
representational politics and political transformation, focusing on sites and
practices of struggle, resistance and innovation. She contributes to proj-
ects in the areas of Indigenous leadership and political participation, lis-
tening and media justice, and community media. Her work has been
published in Media, Culture and Society and Continuum: Journal of Media
and Cultural Studies.
Anna Szörényi lectures in the Department of Sociology, Criminology
and Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her work
draws on feminist and postcolonial critiques in order to analyse cultural
representations of refugees, asylum seekers and human trafficking, seeking
ethically productive ways to understand and challenge global distributions
of precarity. She is working on a book titled Refugees, Trafficking and the
Ethics of Vulnerability: Bordered Compassion. Her work has been published
in journals including Anti-Trafficking Review, Feminist Review, Social
Semiotics, Visual Studies, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, Australian
Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies and Overland.
Cate Thill is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of
Notre Dame, Australia. Cate’s research focuses on social justice-oriented
listening in the context of policy and Indigenous sovereignty, disability
and feminism. She is working on a co-authored book titled Listening with
Disability for Democracy with Gerard Goggin and Rosemary Kayess.
During 2009–2010, Cate co-convened the ARC CRN-funded The
Listening Project exploring the practices, technologies and politics of lis-
tening with Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd and Penny O’Donnell.
Lisa Waller is Associate Professor of Communication in the School of
Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia. Her
xvi Notes on Editors and Contributors
research investigates how the news media shapes society, from Indigenous
Affairs, to its roles in local communities and the justice system. She is a
member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies and the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association.
Lisa has written two books: Local Journalism in a Digital World, co-
authored with Kristy Hess (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and The Dynamics
of News Media and Indigenous Policy in Australia, co-authored with Kerry
McCallum (2017).
Allison Weir is Research Professor in Social and Political Philosophy and
Gender Studies and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social and
Political Thought in the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian
Catholic University in Sydney, Australia. She is author of Identities and
Freedom (2013) and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of
Identity (1996). Her current book project, Decolonizing Freedom, consid-
ers conceptions and practices of freedom beyond the Eurocentric frame,
focusing in particular on Indigenous and Islamic feminist and queer theo-
ries, to develop a critical theory of freedom that can sustain practices of
decolonisation and struggles for global justice.
ShinEn Wong is a co-founder, executive committee member and ex-
convenor of the Asian Australian Democracy Caucus (AADC), a grass-
roots non-partisan organisation supporting civic action among Asian
Australians, based on Kulin Country (Melbourne, Australia). ShinEn has
a BA in Gender Studies from Dartmouth College, USA, a GradDip in
Buddhist Studies from the University of Sydney, Australia, and is complet-
ing a Masters of Education by Research at Monash University, Australia.
ShinEn’s scholarship focuses on the intersections between queer phenom-
enology, decolonial and alter-political praxes, martial arts, dance and
embodiment, and non-Western epistemologies of consciousness in the
development of transformative adult education.
List of Figures
Fig. 12.1 A Buddhist alter-political rubric on speech and silence (Part I)

(copyrighted to ShinEn Wong) 218
Fig. 12.2 A Buddhist alter-political rubric on speech and silence (Part II)
(copyrighted to ShinEn Wong) 220
xvii
CHAPTER 1
From Voice to Response: Ethical

Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference
Tanja Dreher and Anshuman A. Mondal
This book focuses on the ethics, politics, and practices of responsiveness in

the context of racism, inequality, difference, and controversy in a globalising
world that is deeply fractured and polarised. The election of Donald Trump
as US President, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU, the
rise of right-wing populist movements and parties, and the resurgence of
the far-right across the ‘First’ world, on the one hand, and the continuing
appeal of ultra-nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms in the global
‘South’ on the other—all of these are symptoms of deep struggles along
racial, religious, national, and class lines. The possibilities for debate and
negotiation across difference are increasingly shaped by algorithmic logics
and the ‘attention economy’ (Crogan and Kinsley 2012) in which what we
hear and see is individually filtered and curated, and our attention is directed
towards polarised news streams. This volume foregrounds alternative politi-
cal possibilities based on ethical responsiveness to others.
T. Dreher (*)
University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: t.dreher@unsw.edu.au
A. A. Mondal
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
e-mail: a.mondal@uea.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 1

T. Dreher, A. A. Mondal (eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics
of Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93958-2_1
2 T. DREHER AND A. A. MONDAL
Some aspects of this conjuncture are especially germane to the issues

and concerns of this volume, threading their way—either implicitly or
explicitly—through the essays gathered here. Clearly the resurgence and
electoral success of far-right nationalisms and authoritarian politics across
the globe—from Donald Trump in the United States to Rodrigo Duterte
in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India to name a few—is one
such thread. The recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the return to
parliament of the One Nation Party in Australia, and the success of far-
right parties across much of Europe provide further examples of the main-
streaming of xenophobia. While there are local, national, and regional
specificities in each of these contexts, all are also implicated in transnational
dynamics of globalised Islamophobia and increasingly securitised migra-
tion policies.
Ghassan Hage (2011, 156) identifies a process of the ‘globalisation of
the Islamic other around the world’ at the turn of the twenty-first century
in which ‘Islam’ has become homogenised as the global threatening other,
even as the category that embodies the Islamic threat differs from one
country to another (‘Asians’ in Britain, ‘Turks’ in Germany, ‘Lebanese’ in
Australia, and so on). During the enduring and increasingly dispersed ‘war
on terror’, Muslims and Islam have been racialised as terrorists, sexual
predators, and oppressors of women; an all-encompassing threat to ‘the
West’ and its purported values. The globalised ‘Muslim other’ is at the
centre of militarised border politics focused on restricting migration of
refugees, asylum seekers and, in the case of the United States, specifically
named Muslim majority countries. Since the Australian government in
2001 refused the MV Tampa permission to bring to the Australian main-
land hundreds of asylum seekers rescued at sea from a sinking boat, the
threat of terrorism and the concern for security have been mobilised to
ensure widespread public support for increasingly punitive practices in
response to asylum seekers travelling by boat. Currently, the Australian
Navy is deployed to turn back asylum seeker boats, private security com-
panies are paid to run camps on Nauru and Manus Island, and refugees in
Australia face strict visa conditions and behaviour regulations. These poli-
cies are routinely condemned by the United Nations and human rights
groups, finding that some of these practices constitute torture under the
UN Convention. Despite, or perhaps because of, these criticisms, resur-
gent far-right parties in Europe now routinely advocate that their states
take the ‘Australian solution’ as inspiration.
FROM VOICE TO RESPONSE: ETHICAL RESPONSIVENESS… 3
First Nations resurgence in settler colonies including Australia, Canada,

and the United States marks another key struggle in the contemporary
politics of difference. The Idle No More movement in Canada, Dakota
Access Pipeline struggle in the United States, and large protests against
the celebration of ‘Australia Day’ have all attracted international attention.
Since the Zapatista’s ‘netwar’, Indigenous peoples have mobilised global
solidarities to demand justice and assert sovereignties (Dreher et al. 2018).
Too often, these vital expressions of Indigenous sovereignties are met with
public criticism and state responses which reassert colonial relations. For
instance, a central claim of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart
issued after an unprecedented process of consultation with Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples—a proposal for a First Nations Voice to
Parliament—was dismissed out of hand by the Australian government in a
move described as reproducing the colonial logic that Indigenous peoples
are incapable of governing themselves. #NODAPL protesters at Standing
Rock were met with militarised force.
Against this backdrop, First Nations theorists of resurgence such as
Audra Simpson (2014) and Glen Coulthard (2014) foreground the politics
of refusal. Coulthard challenges recognition as a politics for managing dif-
ference, arguing that acknowledgement and reconciliation offer false prom-
ises. Instead, Coulthard examines an alternative politics of self-recognition
that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy ‘place-based’ Indigenous
cultural practices. The theory of First Nations resurgence and Indigenous
practices of freedom pose challenging questions for non-Indigenous advo-
cates of recognition. The challenge to analyse non-Indigenous responses to
First Nations refusal of the politics of recognition is taken up in several
chapters in this collection.
Finally, we approach the recurring ‘free speech debates’ characteristic of
many liberal multicultures as a crucial fault line in the contemporary poli-
tics of difference. From the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses to the Danish cartoons controversy and the attacks on Charlie
Hebdo in Paris, there is a long history of transnationally mediated debates
on the limits of ‘free speech’, usually centred on racialised communities,
including Muslims and African-Americans. In the United States, we see
high level media and political support for the free speech of alt-right pro-
vocateur Milo Yiannopolous, coupled with widespread criticism of foot-
ballers who ‘take a knee’ to highlight police brutality targeting
African-Americans. In France, the nationalistic identification of ‘Je Suis
Charlie’ has been followed by increasing state surveillance and restrictions
on dissenting Arab voices (Titley et al. 2017). In so many ‘free speech

debates’, apparently liberal values have become ‘weaponised’ (Liz Feteke
quoted in Titley et al. 2017), normalising the vilification of racialised com-
munities as well as policing the voices of those same communities (Dreher
and Griffiths 2018). This paradox marks the limits and the violent conse-
quences of a narrow version of ‘free speech’ for addressing the contempo-
rary politics of difference, as well as bringing into view the way in which
‘free speech’ is performatively deployed in order to mark off and accentu-
ate—and therefore polarise—apparent civilisational and cultural differ-
ences between the benighted ‘West’ (which values free speech) and the
rest (who do not). As a mark or symbol of civilisational identity, therefore,
free speech becomes less a means towards achieving mutual understanding
across difference and more a means of obstructing communication so that
sharp lines of distinction can be drawn between cultures that are perceived
to be incompatible and forever compelled to ‘clash’.
Re-orienting the Politics of Difference:

From ‘Voice’ to ‘Response’
Our interest in ethical responsiveness is prompted by the limits of the poli-
tics of speech and ‘voice’ in contemporary ‘free speech debates’ as above,
and in projects for social justice more broadly. Scholarship and practice
around multiculturalism, antiracism, marginalisation, and difference have
long mobilised a politics of speaking or representation, yet attention to
forms of responsiveness such as listening, reading, and witnessing is under-
developed. Voice is foregrounded in claims to give ‘voice to the voiceless’
or ‘find one’s voice’, while contemporary politics and digital media pro-
vide proliferating opportunities to ‘have your say’ or to share previously
unheard stories. Yet despite the central place of ‘voice’ in democratic the-
ory and practice, and in movements for social justice, remarkably little
attention is paid to the question of whether indeed voices are actually
heard or valued (Couldry 2010).
There is a growing recognition that both scholarship and practice on
the politics of difference and the ethics of intercommunal solidarities have
privileged the concepts of ‘voice’, representation, and the liberal frame-
work of ‘free speech’, while the practices and politics of ‘listening’ remain
largely neglected. The result is an overly individualisitic focus on the poli-
tics of expression (Husband 2009). In response, recent scholarship seeks
to foreground the politics of reception, and in this volume we focus atten-

tion on processes of receptivity, attentiveness, and response in order to
move debates on the politics of difference beyond the limitations of voice
and representation alone. Crucially, turning attention to the politics and
ethics of listening, reading, and witnessing shifts some of the responsibility
for more just outcomes from marginalised speakers, and on to the rela-
tively more privileged and powerful (Dreher 2009b).
This emergent scholarship on the politics of listening offers some vital
insights for the wider theorisation of ethical responsiveness developed
across this collection. Recent years have seen calls for increased attention
to the politics of listening in political theory (Bickford 1996; Dobson
2014; Bassel 2017) and in media and communications (Couldry 2010;
Lacey 2013; O’Donnell et al. 2009). The recent ‘turn to listening’
approaches listening as a political practice and a metaphor every bit as
significant as the concept of ‘voice’. The early literature is grounded in
feminist political theory and critical race and whiteness studies. Bickford
(1996) and Ratcliffe (2005) remind us that voice is usually gendered as
masculine (active, public, political) whereas listening is often devalued
because gendered as feminine (passive, private, women’s emotional
labour). In contrast, scholars of listening insist that it is an active political
practice that is key to transforming entrenched ‘hierarchies of attention’
(Thill 2009) which underpin injustice.
The key characteristics of the politics of listening include openness,
receptivity, attentiveness, and responsiveness (Bickford 1996; Ratcliffe
2005; Bassel 2017). Where the politics of voice, speaking, and representa-
tion foreground individual expression as agency and freedom, the listen-
ing framework highlights interdependence (Bickford 1996; Stauffer 2015)
and rejects any desire for mastery (Ratcliffe 2005; Dreher 2009b), requir-
ing courage (Bickford 1996; Thill 2009), and humility (Ratcliffe 2005;
Vice 2010). Crucially, listening entails the possibility that one might be
persuaded or might change one’s mind (Bickford 1996), so that political
listening involves the potential for uncertainty or discomfort—described
by Coles (2004) as ‘a little vulnerability’. Listening has been further con-
ceptualised in relation to the politics of recognition (Fraser and Honneth
2003). Thill (2014) analyses listening as the practice that can ensure the
outcome of recognition, while Dreher (2009b) argues that listening across
difference requires a transformative politics of recognition (Fraser 1996)
to shift entrenched patterns of inattention and uneven news values and
media conventions which shape who and what is heard.
One notable exception to this imbalance between voice/expression/

representation and reception and responsiveness is in literary studies,
where the scholarship on the ethics of reading far outweighs work on the
ethics of writing and representation (Mondal 2014). This is probably due
to factors shaping the discipline of literary studies, which is primarily ori-
ented towards literary criticism, and thus promotes intense self-reflection
among literary scholars on their own reading practices. Nevertheless, two
things need to be pointed out here: first, this extant work on the ethics of
reading, whether of the Aristotelian or Levinasian kind, emphasises pre-
cisely the same points as those emerging from the work on the politics of
listening: openness, receptivity, attentiveness, attenuation of the desire for
mastery, humility, and vulnerability. The convergence of these ideas in
both fields suggests not only that there is a high degree of consensus con-
cerning what constitutes the ‘ethical’ across different disciplines and fields
of enquiry, but also that the ‘politics of listening’ is itself always oriented
towards the ethical even if it doesn’t always explicitly state it. This volume
attempts to bring that ethical dimension out into the open, as it were,
foregrounding the necessary intersection of the ethical and the political.
Second, scholarship on the ethics of reading often invokes the political
while rarely venturing into the realm of politics, as such, and, as Mondal
has pointed out, struggles with cultural difference and the politics of dif-
ference in particular. Again, this volume seeks to point towards contempo-
rary political problematics and challenges that literary ethics could—and
should—take up as the ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies develops.
Contributors to this volume explore a range of ethical responses that
are active, open, often difficult and potentially unsettling. In developing
this emerging scholarship on ethical responsiveness, authors engage schol-
arly debates on negotiating difference, alter-politics, ally and solidarity
work, and decolonising strategies. The book is grounded in recent work
on rethinking recognition and the limits of liberal free speech theory, fore-
grounding approaches that move beyond a comfortable politics of empa-
thy and engage instead with processes that might disturb, unsettle, or
discomfort. This interest in unsettling and discomfort signals our orienta-
tion to responsiveness as an ethical and political challenge. Jill Stauffer
(2015) has recently theorised ‘the injustice of not being heard’ to reveal a
wide scope of responsibility in which we can contribute to reparative jus-
tice through the difficult and discomforting work of listening to survivors
of violent injustice. This involves listening for our own complicities as
much as for what others have to say (Stauffer 2015; Dreher 2009a). By
foregrounding the ethics of response in debates about the politics of dif-

ference, questions of responsibility, power, and privilege are brought to
the centre of analysis, alongside more familiar considerations of marginali-
sation and oppression. Our continuing interest in challenging contempo-
rary racisms and colonial relations in turn requires an emphasis on the
ethical possibilities and challenges of responsiveness.
Theorising Responsiveness
If one of the volume’s aims is to shift the focus not only to reception and
responsiveness but specifically to the ethics at play and work in any effec-
tive politics of difference, then this in turn requires a sustained engage-
ment with this politics as a cultural politics. This is because, on the one
hand, culture is precisely what articulates ‘difference’; on the other hand,
we must do so because ‘culture’ is precisely what remains somewhat
under-theorised in the emergent research on the politics of listening.
Having said that, this research nevertheless testifies (albeit implicitly) to
the fact that listening is and cannot be anything other than cultural.
If, as Raymond Williams (2014) has noted, culture is one of the two or
three most complex words in English, it becomes even more important
that we obtain some purchase on the term and its importance to the con-
cerns of this volume. In its most expansive, anthropological sense it refers
to a ‘whole way of life’ that is, following Geertz (2017), a complex signify-
ing system that constitutes a semantic totality within which individuals
make sense of their relation to others, their environment, and therefore of
themselves; it follows that the protocols of receptivity—listening, reading,
visual interpretation—are fundamentally shaped by and within this seman-
tic totality. Given the plurality of cultures, it is clear then that reception
cannot be anything but culturally determined. The act of decoding a sig-
nifying practice, a sign or messages, is not neutral, transcendent, or univer-
sal. So much, so obvious. But if the ‘society’ that ‘culture’ articulates is not
homogeneous, but is striated by power relations that are ideologically
encoded, such that a culture’s signifiers are, according to Voloshinov
(1986) and Bakhtin et al. (2010), differentially inflected by power and
one’s social relation to it, then how much more difficult and problematic
is reception ‘across difference’? How can we ‘decode’ a communication
from a different semantic system, and what happens when we do?
This is not simply a matter of what ‘happens’ to signifiers as they migrate

across a cultural border in the process of communication. It is not about
misunderstanding and miscommunication; nor is it simply about (mis/
un)translatabilty; or, rather, it is not simply about these things. To speak
in such terms is to lapse into the kind of abstract model of communication
that elevates ‘signification’ at the expense of reception in the first place.
Rather, it is about what people do with those signs, and whether they can
do it better, not in a purely formal, mechanical, or methodological sense
(i.e., whether they can simply understand and absorb the semantic sub-
stance of intended communication more competently) but in an ethical
sense, which is why this volume focuses on and emphasises ‘responsive-
ness’ as opposed to simply ‘reception’.
What, then, do we mean by ‘responsiveness’ and what marks it as ‘ethi-
cal’? Firstly, ‘responsiveness’ is distinct from ‘reception’. As we conceive it,
‘reception’ is a neutral term used to signify the general concept of receiv-
ing some information; ‘response’ and ‘responding’ implies an act in rela-
tion to that information, but this presupposes a processing of that
information or what in semiotics is called ‘decoding’, a first-order act that
occurs prior to the second-order act we refer to as ‘responding’ (even if
that responsive act is, itself, a non-act; an ignoring, perhaps, which implies
a measure of deliberation; or, alternatively, an overlooking—non-
deliberate, often unconscious—that is rooted in an inability to decode or
even ‘hear’ the information in the first place). This decoding involves vari-
ous interpretative techniques, such as transcoding or translation, but it is
here that the ethical emerges as an intervention that situates itself between
‘reception’ and ‘response’ and goes by the name of ‘responsiveness’. That
is, ‘responsiveness’ is an ethical orientation that mediates the first-order
act of reception and cathects it such that the second-order ‘response’ is
imbued with an ethical charge that transforms the process of ‘reception’
from being one determined by the logic of the same (the other is trans-
lated, borne across, re-made as an object of recognition—that is, recogni-
sable according the predetermined, pre-existing frames and interpretive
categories of the ‘subject’) to one that is unsettled by and rendered vulner-
able to the ‘other’ as ‘other’.
This is, in fact, the challenge signalled by one of the most important
interventions on the politics of representation, Gayatri Spivak’s landmark
essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak 1988). It is notable that criticism
of this essay has largely been focussed on the problematic of speaking/
not-speaking that assumes that representation is the only available channel
for politics, when in fact the greatest insight of the essay to us appears to
be the way it signals an aporetic limit to politics of representation as a
means of deconstructively opening up questions about the ability of the
discursively privileged to respond to the call of the (subaltern) other in a
scrupulously ethical manner that accounts for the various asymmetries at
work in any encounter with alterity as opposed to recognisable difference,
or what Spivak calls the ‘quite-other’.
Spivak’s essay meticulously, implacably, and scrupulously points to the
challenge that alterity poses to those wishing to find modes of responsive-
ness that are as ethical as possible so as to build the grounds for a politics
of solidarity (or rather, solidarities) that encompass the various axes of dif-
ferentiation that articulate the logics of domination and subordination:
race, culture, religion, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and so on. It is one of
the central contentions of this volume of essays that we must come to
terms with this difficulty that difference poses to ethics, on the one hand,
and in turn ensure that any politics of difference is imbued with an ethics
that grapples with and rises to that challenge; collectively, these essays put
forward the argument that the politics of difference has been ethically
attenuated, both in terms of its orientation and its effectivity, by overem-
phasising speech and representation and under-theorising reception and
responsiveness. Addressing this imbalance constitutes an effort on the part
of these scholars and activists to align the politics and ethics of difference.
And, as Dreher and de Souza—and many of the other contributors to this
volume—emphasise, this involves a radical revision in our thinking about
the distribution of responsibilities within the politics of difference pre-
cisely because an emphasis on ethical responsiveness compels us to
acknowledge that the power differentials at work in such a politics
enables—indeed, requires—a shift of focus from the disempowered to the
powerful: it is the discursively privileged who must learn to be more ethi-
cally responsive to the voices and representations of the marginalised and
powerless.
Thus far, the emphasis on speech and representation has, however, put
the onus firmly on those making representations (to power, to the power-
ful) to make their case, and this implicitly assumes that any ensuing politi-
cal successes are inherent in the force of argument or calculus of justice
inherent in the case itself—an assumption that, as Mondal argues in his
chapter, coincides with and to a large extent is determined by the axioms
of liberal free speech theory. While there have been some notable advances
and achievements by politically disenfranchised groups over the course of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the contemporary retrenchment

and backlash against feminism, antiracism, anticolonialism, and all other
social and political movements struggling for greater political and cultural
equality, as well as the inertia and reactionary resistance that has always
accompanied such movements, offer adequate evidence as to the limits of
such a modus operandi. This is not, however, to suggest that we simply
focus on responsiveness at the expense of representation. As Spivak consis-
tently reminds us, there is no alternative to representation, but, as Ritu
Birla notes in a recent assessment of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in draw-
ing attention to the limits of representation, Spivak provokes us into
thinking about how to ‘re-present ourselves [i.e. the discursively privi-
leged]…[so as] to supplement the benevolent intention of “speaking for”
with an ethics of responsibility—in the sense of cultivating a capacity to
respond to and be responsive to the other, without demanding resem-
blance as the basis of recognition’ (Birla 2010, loc 2167 [Kindle]). It is
the ‘capacity to respond’ that we seek to enhance and enlarge as a neces-
sary condition of possibility for extending the range and effectiveness of
the politics of difference.
Although it is to a very large extent true that power is never willingly
surrendered but rather taken by those wishing a greater share of it, it is
nevertheless also true that power itself must be transformed by its encoun-
ter with powerlessness. This is the utopian—and ethical—charge secreted
within any movement for social and political change, whether revolution-
ary or reformist. And in order for power to be transformed, the powerful
and privileged must learn to respond more ethically to the voices of the
disempowered, that is, to respond to them on their own terms rather than
on the terms dictated to them by established elites. This is precisely what
distinguishes the ethical responsiveness, which we attempt to account for
in these pages, from the ‘response’ articulated by the recent crop of popu-
list authoritarians such as Trump and Duterte. As Curato and Ong show
in their provocative and deeply unsettling chapter on the Filipino presi-
dent, part of populism’s political efficacy, and indeed legitimacy, rests on
the way it performatively ‘responds’ to the dissatisfactions, frustrations,
resentments, antipathies, and hatreds of non-elite sectors of their elector-
ate, resting their case on making a show of ‘listening’ to those who feel
ignored by traditional political elites. But responsiveness of this kind can-
not, we suggest, be ethical in the sense we conceive it for two reasons (at
least): first, it responds to those impulses within people that are themselves
unethical because of their inattentiveness to others—as Curato and Ong
demonstrate in relation to Duterte’s violent (both physically and rhetori-

cally) mobilisation against drug-users and addicts who are living precari-
ous and vulnerable lives; second, because in assuming power populist
authoritarians do not so much want to transform power as simply re-direct
its operational exclusions, at best, or mobilise it for their own personal
agendas or those of their closest associates, many of whom are privileged
and empowered.
Beyond Western Liberalism

Another central argument put forward by this book is that such an align-
ment between the ethical and the political must be theorised and achieved
situationally, that is, in relation to singular and specific political scenarios
rather than as an overarching and superordinate abstraction: the ethics and
politics of difference are themselves differential. To the extent that these
essays concern themselves with such specific scenarios, they nevertheless
converge on two particular problematics that are central to the contempo-
rary politics of difference: multiculturalism and Indigeneity. And it is
within settler colonial societies that these two problematics converge most
pointedly and urgently. Settler colonial contexts are inherently multicul-
tural. Where a more conventional focus on multiculturalism grapples with
relationships between ‘hosts’ and ‘migrants’, the settler colonial frame-
work unsettles this approach by emphasising that all migrants are also set-
tlers, albeit in significantly different ways. As well as attending to colonial
legacies, this approach highlights continuing colonial relations in the pres-
ent. The interest in decolonising strategies developed in settler colonial
contexts is clearly beginning to influence the former colonial metropoles.
For instance, the Rhodes Must Fall movement that began at the University
of Cape Town has spawned a similar initiative at Oxford University and a
move to rename a building at the University of Melbourne, as well as
mutual endorsements with the Black Lives Matter movement in the
United States.
If many of the essays in this volume gather attention on the settler
colony as a location in which the problematics of the politics of difference
are particularly acute, several also engage with the difficulties of respond-
ing ethically to non-Western forms of knowledge, belief, and practice—in
particular, Wong and Weir on Buddhist and Islamic philosophies, respec-
tively, Slater and Waller on Indigenous ontologies, and chapters by Dreher
and de Souza, and Wong for a grounding in decolonising methodologies.
The particular challenge for scholars trained in the modern disciplinary

protocols of the human sciences, grounded in a secular epistemology, is
how to channel one’s attentiveness to the protocols of other epistemolo-
gies, other ways of thinking and being, without translating it into the
categories of Western secular thought. Here, once more, we can produc-
tively return to Spivak’s groundbreaking essay. Insofar as the subaltern as
a limit of representation—existing both within and outside representa-
tion—also signals the limits of the capacity for responsiveness within dom-
inant regimes of representation, ethical responsiveness to the subaltern
other that is situated within such regimes must perforce be attenuated by
this double bind. The task then is not one of translatability—of bearing
across the subaltern into representation—but displacement: the object of
this displacement is not the subaltern but the discursively privileged, who
must be partially displaced outside the regimes of representation to occupy
a space partially outside it. The paradox is that ethical responsiveness of
the kind we are calling for is what achieves this displacement and is predi-
cated upon it. Several of the essays, particularly those by Garman, Weir,
Szörényi, Khorana, Slater, and Waller wrestle with this double bind, con-
fronting the ways in which untranslatability both determines and limits
ethical responsiveness.
Finally, one concern that animates several of the essays is the way in
which Western liberalism, despite its insistence on plurality, difference,
transparency, and responsiveness, often in fact precludes and sometimes
actively obstructs the kind of ethical responsiveness we seek to explore.
The emphasis on speech, representation, and voice in both more main-
stream and radical articulations of the politics of difference is determined
by the fact that such politics is largely conducted within a liberal frame that
invariably embeds certain axioms and presuppositions within political dis-
course. Political representation within this frame therefore struggles to
account for those ways of being and thinking that are not intelligible to
the liberal social order; this is as true within the academy as it is elsewhere,
as Anthea Garman’s essay on the limits of responsiveness within South
African higher education demonstrates, precisely because the notion of
academic freedom involves an emphasis on critique that involves a particu-
lar form of rational enquiry that forecloses attentiveness to demands for
justice and restitution that are not articulated in terms that can be sub-
jected to critique. This, in turn, can be linked to the ways in which, as
Mondal argues, the contemporary dominance of ‘free speech’ as a para-
digm forecloses reception in favour of expression. A focus on the other
side of voice/speech/representation therefore requires the mobilisation

of intellectual resources beyond conventional liberalism, and academic
enquiry itself must be emboldened to subject itself to the uncomfortable,
unsettling displacement that might shift the modalities of critique and
representation beyond the liberal frame so that we may begin to ‘hear’ and
respond to ‘that which we do not already understand’ (Ghosh and
Chakrabarty 2002, 169).
Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics

of Difference
By focusing on practices and politics of responsiveness, the chapters in this

book identify vital new possibilities for ethics and justice. The emergent
research on the politics of response, in particular on ‘listening’, has hith-
erto been concentrated in political theory and media and communica-
tions. This volume offers a wider interdisciplinary scope, bringing literary
and philosophical perspectives into dialogue with this earlier work. The
contributions are ordered to highlight a movement from a cluster of chap-
ters that outline the ‘conditions of possibility’ for ethical responsiveness;
then through to chapters on such responsiveness as a form of ethical
praxis; through those that demonstrate that such forms of responsiveness
are deeply unsettling to established ideologies, moral frameworks, and
ways of knowing; and finally to consideration of alternative forms of
responsiveness embedded in cultures other than those established on a
secular and broadly liberal basis.
The first three chapters deal with theoretical reflections on the ‘condi-
tions of possibility’, on what happens and needs to happen before we can
even begin a politics of listening or responsiveness. Tanja Dreher and
Poppy de Souza ‘locate’ listening by acknowledging histories and present
dynamics of colonisation and inequality. They specifically pay attention to
protocols for Acknowledging Country in Australia, and the Quaker
decision-making practice of ‘attunement’. While the former is often dis-
missed as a token gesture, it can unsettle the settler colonial imaginary, and
lay the basis for transforming relationships between First Nation peoples
and settlers, because it locates a listening practice within the networks of
power and privilege in Australia. Quaker ‘attunement’ involves specific
forms of silence and pause in preparation for listening, supporting moments
of simultaneous attention and yielding to others. In distinct, yet connected
ways, these practices of located listening might prepare for, and catalyse, a
space of ethical responsiveness and transformative politics of difference.
Anshuman A. Mondal demonstrates the need to move beyond liberalism
in order to develop ethics of responsiveness required for dialogue across
deep cultural differences. In response to Susan Bickford’s question as to
why listening has been neglected in Western political philosophy, Mondal
offers a close reading of John Stuart Mill’s classic argument for freedom of
expression in On Liberty to reveal the way in which liberal free speech
theory obfuscates and attenuates the importance of listening, reception,
and response. The chapter identifies an urgent task to conceive models of
communication and social relationality that push beyond the liberal frame.
Cate Thill introduces an interest in policymaking and the framing of sub-
ordinated groups as objects of policy, taken up in chapters by Khorana,
Slater, and Waller. Thill engages the resurgence literature to reflect on the
colonial implications of state ‘recognition’ with a focus on advocacy by the
First Nations Disability Alliance in Australia. The chapter also identifies
the limitations of empathy as a logic of sameness, further developed in
chapters by Szörényi and Khorana. As an alternative to politics of pity or
correction directed at Indigenous peoples, Thill argues for social-justice-
oriented listening as a methodology underpinned by the decolonising
practice of relinquishing privilege.
The following chapters explore listening as an ethical praxis in a range
of settings, including academic contexts and the reception of refugee-
themed media. Chapters by Anthea Garman and Allison Weir are con-
cerned with academic settings, with the difficulties and possibilities of
listening posed by a context in which critique is overly valued, as explored
by Garman, leading to Weir’s attempt to stage a dialogue between differ-
ent philosophies of freedom marked by its attention to both critique and
responsiveness to other ways of thinking and forms of knowledge. Weir
engages closely with the Islamic feminist philosophies of Amina Wadud
and Aysha Haidayatullah in order to trace a genealogy of alternative con-
ceptions of relational freedom, to decolonise the concept of freedom as
developed within Western secular feminisms. Weir finds that Wadud’s con-
ceptualisation of engaged surrender offers a practice of individual freedom
and of freedom of speech that involves deep listening along with speaking,
receptivity along with action—and could thus be exemplary for feminist
philosophy and for Western secular conceptions of free speech. Garman
reflects on her own experience and implication as an academic who is
being asked not only to listen, but to listen to something in particular that
is very hard to hear and very possibly unhearable in the context of wide-
spread student protests in South Africa. Grappling with how best to
respond to students’ call to decolonise curricula and knowledge, Garman
argues that there can be no global justice without global cognitive justice.
Nicole Curato and Jonathan Ong provide a vital reminder that authoritar-
ian rulers often claim to ‘listen’ to the marginalised and dispossessed in
their analysis of the populist politics of the Philippine President Rodrigo
Duterte. Duterte, like President Trump in the United States, claims to
respond to the pain of the Philippines’ poor and yet deploys state violence
and human rights abuses against a range of groups described as ‘enemies’.
This chapter illustrates the ambivalent character of responsiveness, which
can be used for democratic or for authoritarian purposes—and can pursue
liberal or illiberal projects. To ensure safeguards against the ‘selective
responsiveness’ of authoritarian rulers such as Rodrigo Duterte, Curato,
and Ong pose three vital questions to identify ethical responsiveness:
responsiveness for whom, responsiveness how, and responsiveness for
what? The chapter is a call to locate our emergent interest in responsive-
ness firmly within frameworks of ethics and justice.
The book then moves on to two papers on the representation of refu-
gees that pose questions about what forms an ethical responsiveness can
take in response to ‘distant others’, and whether this can go beyond mere
‘empathy’. The chapters by Sukhmani Khorana and Anna Szörényi both
attempt to account for and theorise forms of ethical responsiveness that go
at least some way beyond the liberal humanist paradigm (as, indeed, do
Garman and Weir). Seeking to move beyond the empathy and humanisa-
tion strategies that are so prevalent in screening refugee-themed docu-
mentaries, Khorana finds that a shift from affect to responsibility is more
likely to happen with a public that reflects on the ‘distance’ inherent in
representations. In line with many of the contributions to this volume, this
‘ethical witnessing’ redistributes the burden of decolonisation from the
colonised to those who benefit from the privileges of settler colonialism.
Szörényi further develops the critique of ‘recognition’ introduced by Thill
and draws on Levinas’ ethics and on Judith Butler’s work on precarious-
ness to analyse how proximity is structured by inequality and exclusion.
Szörényi begins with the well-known photograph of the Syrian toddler
Alan Kurdi, dead in the arms of a Turkish rescue worker. Contrasting this
image to a photograph by French-Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada,
and finally to a Turkish newspaper photo montage, the chapter extends
debates on distant suffering and potential responsiveness by demonstrat-

ing that it is not physical distance that separates, but political distance.
Khorana and Szörényi unsettle the distanced binaries of spectator/wit-
ness and the object of their gaze, and they both implicitly therefore unset-
tle the ‘inside/outside’ distinction on which the nation-state is founded.
This theme of unsettling (the nation, the self) is extended as Indigeneity
becomes a major motif in the latter stages of this volume, for Indigeneity—
and listening to Indigeneity—is deeply unsettling to the social and cultural
imaginaries of settler colonial nations. This is developed in Lisa Slater’s
chapter, which picks up on questions of ‘recognition’ raised by Thill, and
elaborates it in relation to the challenges posed to non-Indigenous people
by the invitation to listen to forms of knowledge, aspirations, and political
projects that are largely untranslatable into the paradigms of modern gov-
ernmentality. In contrast to the policy imperative to ‘improve’ or ‘correct’
Indigenous peoples/cultures, Slater asks ‘what futures are Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people trying to make possible, and what might
enable non-Indigenous people to listen, hear and ethically respond?’
Ethical political listening, then, requires the rearrangement of the frames
of reference through which settlers interpret Aboriginal people’s lives and
a need to create places for unguarded, respectful non-comprehension.
Bina Fernandez returns our attention to the politics of listening within
academic research, asking how the discursively privileged can begin to
listen for, and to, silences in the context of prevailing assumptions that
silence need only be interpreted as an absence, a lack, or a negation.
Fernandez’s particular focus is on the possible meanings of silence as a
form of agency identified by analysing the agency of different women in
the Indian context who, in different ways, ‘refuse to speak’. Teasing out
the multiple registers in which ‘resistive silence’ might be viewed,
Fernandez argues that silencing ourselves (as the discursively privileged) is
an essential first modality of really listening. ShinEn Wong brings together
a commitment to decolonising solidarities and First Nations sovereignties
with a deep understanding of Zen Buddhist epistemologies to propose a
‘Buddhist alter-politics’. Like Dreher and de Souza, Wong grounds his
work in an Acknowledgement of Country, forming the foundation for a
meditation on Ghassan Hage’s alter-politics and Buddhist conceptualisa-
tions of Noble Speech and Noble Silence. Wong’s ‘Buddhist alter-politics’
framework centres on radical attentiveness or thunderous silence to better
appreciate both the instrumental potential of silence in ethical responsive-
ness to injustice and its provisionally ‘sovereign’ nature. The challenge of
developing ethics rooted in non-Western epistemologies is further taken

up in Lisa Waller’s chapter on Dadirri methods of listening and what these
might offer by way of alternative approaches to listening. The chapter is
itself marked by this attempt to listen ‘otherwise’ in order to hear First
Nations’ knowledges in the first place. With a focus on research ethics,
Waller analyses Dadirri as a practice of listening with an intention to act,
and a responsibility learned from listening. The chapter concludes that
working with Indigenous knowledge can not only shift ways of seeing and
hearing, but also the collaborations we form, the questions we ask, the
findings we make, and the actions that flow from this.
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CHAPTER 2
Locating Listening
Tanja Dreher and Poppy de Souza
This chapter develops an argument that the politics of listening should be

understood as situated—operating within singular and specific contexts—
rather than as an overarching or universal abstraction. As the politics of
listening seeks to shift responsibility and equalise relationships, it is vital to
locate political listening within embodied relationships, colonial histories,
and networks of privilege and power. Within the developing theorisation
of listening as a political practice, there has been relatively little attention
paid to how individuals or collectives might prepare for such listening.
Because listening as a political practice has been under-valued in Western
political theory and ethics (Bickford 1996; Lacey 2013; Dobson 2014),
there is a paucity of scholarship and practice on the conditions of possibil-
ity for a politics of listening that could function as a ‘solvent of power’
(Dobson 2014) and transform entrenched hierarchies of attention (Dreher
2009; Thill 2009). Political listening is not to be conflated with the quo-
tidian practices of friendship (Bickford 1996); it is rather a ‘complex art’
T. Dreher (*)
University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: t.dreher@unsw.edu.au
P. de Souza
Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: poppy.desouza@griffith.edu.au
© The Author(s) 2018 21

T. Dreher, A. A. Mondal (eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics
of Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93958-2_2
22 T. DREHER AND P. DE SOUZA
(Coles 2004) that requires commitment and courage (Thill 2009). As

such, the politics of listening requires some preparation.
We begin by rejecting a simplistic argument that ‘everyone needs to
listen to everyone’—a position that would be both practically impossible
and politically inadequate (Dreher 2009, p. 452). Instead, we argue that a
politics of listening must be ‘power-sensitive and responsive to the inequal-
ities and conflicts that shape speaking and listening relationships’ (ibid.).
Listening, then, if it is to function as a form of ethical responsiveness, must
be located within specific contexts and networks of privilege and power. In
this chapter, we sketch two practices of located listening which might
(a) hold the potential to unsettle comfortable relations and (b) help us to
hold open the possibility to settle into discomfort/difference—and hence
might serve as preparations for political listening.
First, we discuss the protocols for Acknowledging Country that pro-
vide a framework for locating listening in the networks of power and privi-
lege in settler colonial Australia. While these protocols can often be
dismissed as mere token gestures, we focus on Welcomes and
Acknowledgements which might serve to unsettle colonial relations. We
also argue that these practices, developed specifically in Australia, like simi-
lar First Nations Protocols for Acknowledging Traditional Territories in
Canada, might prompt the development of comparable protocols in other
national contexts. Next, we explore the practice of ‘attunement’. Andrew
Dobson (2012) discusses ‘attunement’ practised at meetings of the Green
Party of England and Wales (GPEW), developed from a Quaker practice.
Attunement involves specific forms of silence and pause, in preparation for
listening. These practices have been developed in specific contexts and do
not presuppose or require one another; however, we do briefly reflect on
how they might resonate when put into conversation. Our conclusion
highlights the more general principles for locating listening. In particular,
we emphasise that it is the privileged and powerful who bear the responsi-
bility for transforming hierarchies of attention which determine who and
what can be heard.
Locating Listening in Settler Colonial Australia

Given that our central argument in this chapter concerns the importance
of situating the politics of listening within specific contexts and struggles,
it seems appropriate to locate the chapter itself. Fifty years ago anthro-
pologist W.E.H. Stanner (1969) delivered a now seminal lecture diagnosing
LOCATING LISTENING 23
what he termed The Great Australian Silence, a ‘cult of forgetfulness prac-

ticed on a national scale’ in regard to the history of settler colonial
Australia, including a persistent refusal to acknowledge invasion, massa-
cres, and colonial violence. Against the Great Australian Silence, there are
consistent calls for non-Indigenous or settler Australians to listen to First
Nations demands, expertise, history, and truths. Most recently, the Uluru
Statement from the Heart issued by the First Nations National
Constitutional Convention in 2017 called for a First Nations Voice to
Parliament and concluded with the line, ‘we seek to be heard’. A co-author
of the statement, Professor Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble Aboriginal
woman from Queensland, argues explicitly for a ‘Right to be Heard’
(Davis 2017). The Uluru Statement further calls for agreement-making,
or Treaty, based on truth-telling. The call for truth-telling is a reminder
that the official Reconciliation process in Australia did not include a Truth
Commission and hearings as has been the case in Canada, South Africa,
and elsewhere. Such truth-telling would require a willingness to listen to
uncomfortable truths and unsettling histories.
The call for non-Indigenous Australians to listen to the history of dis-
possession, massacres, and colonial violence runs through recent debates
including calls to amend or remove statues of colonial ‘explorers’ and
Governors, heightened in the wake of the violence at Charlottesville in the
United States (Grant 2017). In public policy, the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ensures the right to be
consulted on decisions which affect Indigenous peoples, and policy reports
in Australia usually begin with the principle that First Nations must have
maximum input on programmes developed for Indigenous communities.
Yet despite ongoing public debates, First Nations voices are rarely heard.
Writing on the persistent public scrutiny of violence against Indigenous
women, Aboriginal academics Marlene Longbottom, Yvette Roe, and
Bronwyn Fredericks (2016) observe:
In light of the research and media attention, it is evident that Aboriginal

women’s voices are not being heard, thereby raising the question: who speaks
for who? Aboriginal women are either not given the platform to speak, nor are
they heard when they do. (italics in original)
Across policy debates and history wars, scholarship, and media in settler
colonial Australia, we hear a consistent and persistent call for non-
Indigenous Australians to genuinely listen to First Nations voices and
istories. As settlers, we take on the responsibility to consider ways in

h
which a politics of listening and an ethics of responsiveness might be
developed. We also suggest that the protocols and debates specific to set-
tler colonial Australia might provide some inspiration for developing pro-
cedures to develop a situated politics of listening in other contexts.
Political Listening
This chapter extends the emerging scholarship on the politics of listening
by introducing practices that might serve to prepare for or locate listening.
In this section, we sketch the key arguments put forward for understand-
ing listening as a political practice. There are two, intersecting lines of
argument—the scholarship on listening and democracy (including the
work of Susan Bickford, Andrew Dobson, and Romand Coles) and the
scholarship on listening, intersectionality, and privilege (including the
work of Krista Ratcliffe and Susan Bickford). This literature approaches
listening as a political practice and a metaphor, much as ‘voice’ is used in
democratic theory. Where finding or having a voice and giving voice to the
voiceless are commonly understood as vital to democracy, listening as the
‘other side’ of communication (Fiumara 1990) is relatively under-theorised
and under-appreciated. Understood as a political practice, ‘listening’ is not
concerned primarily with auditory signals, but rather with practices of
receptivity, attentiveness, and response that are just as crucial for democ-
racy as speaking up, sharing stories and ‘voice’ (Thill 2015).
If debates on free speech and the politics of voice often focus on rights,
the literature on the politics of listening brings questions of responsibilities
to the fore. We grapple with the politics of listening in order to shift some
of the onus and responsibility for change from marginalised voices and on
to the relatively more discursively privileged and powerful (Dreher 2009).
Dobson (2014) and Lacey (2013) argue for ‘listening out’ for unheard
voices: ‘an ethical obligation to listen out for otherness, for opinions that
challenge and clash with one’s own, for voices that take one out of one’s
comfort zone’ (Lacey 2013, p. 195). For Dobson (2014, p. 128), listen-
ing out produces rather than overcomes or resolves difference, so that ‘the
success of dialogical democracy will be determined by the degree to which
it brings previously unheralded voices into the political arena’.
Political listening also involves attention, reflexivity and, crucially, con-
tinuation—a commitment to keeping possibilities for shared action open
(Bickford 1996). In a close reading of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty, Susan
Bickford identifies a normative standard that is ‘neither consensus or con-

trol, but something like continuation’ (1996, p. 170):
Whether our perspectives merge, or we disagree but must act, we might be

guided by what would make it possible to act together in the future, or to
expand the reach of our deliberations to include still others. (Bickford 1996,
p. 171)
The shifting of responsibility and the commitment to difference means

that political listening also involves elements of uncertainty and the poten-
tial for discomfort or unsettling—what Romand Coles (2004) calls ‘a little
vulnerability’. When we listen, we leave ourselves open to the possibility of
persuasion, or that change will be expected of us (Bickford 1996). Krista
Ratcliffe (2005, p. 29) highlights the ceding of control, transposing ‘a
desire for mastery into a self-conscious desire for receptivity’.
However, while there is a growing literature on the practices, ethics,
and politics of listening, there is very little work which analyses what might
come before political listening, or how to prepare for listening as a political
practice. Given the complex definition of political listening sketched
above, it is clearly not a simple, everyday auditory practice. If the politics
of listening is an important contribution to shifting responsibility and
working for more just futures, as argued by Bickford, Ratcliff, and others,
what practices might set this shift in motion? And if political listening
requires a little vulnerability and the potential for discomfort and unset-
tling—how can this be prepared for?
While we are interested in listening as a political practice, we are
reminded of Bickford’s crucial observation that Western political theory,
since the Greeks, has paid remarkably little attention to the theory or prac-
tice of listening. Like several authors before us and in this volume, we look
beyond liberal political theory for concepts and practices which might be
generative for our thinking on locating listening. Bickford (1996) herself
engages intersectional feminist and critical race theories in her chapter on
political action and Charles Husband (1996) turned to the African Charter
of Rights rather than the ‘ego-centric’ Western human rights tradition in
developing his argument for a Right to Be Understood. In this chapter,
we engage with First Nations protocols in settler colonial Australia and
with spiritual traditions including the Quaker practice of silence and rituals
of attunement. We argue that it is vital to value concepts, epistemologies,
and ontologies beyond the Western, secular epistemology that underpins
most social and political theory (see also chapters by Slater, Waller, Weir
and Wong in this volume).
Acknowledgement of Country
Over the last 25 years in Australia, Welcome to Country and
Acknowledgement of Country have become established protocols which
recognise and pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,
their cultural authority as traditional owners and custodians of the land,
and their ongoing connection to Country.1 Delivered at the start of formal
proceedings, both Welcomes to and Acknowledgements of Country
(Welcomes and Acknowledgements henceforth) are a regular and visible
part of both civic and political life in Australia—from government ceremo-
nies and formal gatherings, to community meetings and public celebra-
tions, and very commonly at academic events and conferences.2 Indeed,
Welcome and Acknowledgement protocols, along with former Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, may be the
‘greatest success story’ of the Reconciliation movement in Australia
(Kowal 2015).
At the same time, these protocols remain a site of contention and
unease for non-Indigenous Australians, unsettling any easy assumption of
belonging. For Kowal (2015, p. 176), Welcome and Acknowledgement
protocols can offer a ‘potent commentary on belonging’, as ‘a political act
of defiance in the face of originary and ongoing dispossession, marginali-
sation, racism and genocide’. Even in their simplest form, they serve as a
reminder of ‘the incompleteness and failure of the colonising project of
replacement’ (Dempster 2007, p. 92) by recognising First Nations sur-
vival. We understand Acknowledgement of Country as a protocol that can
enable settlers to come with respect on to First Nations Country, although
there is no doubt that this is not always the case.
A typical example of an official Acknowledgement is the wording sug-
gested by the University of New South Wales (UNSW):
I would like to acknowledge the Bedegal people that are the Traditional
Custodians of this land. I would also like to pay my respects to the Elders
both past and present and extend that respect to other Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islanders who are present here today.
UNSW is located in Sydney, Australia, several suburbs away from the

famous Bondi Beach. The Acknowledgement of Country locates UNSW
in a First Nations geography, the lands or Country of the Bedegal people
of the Eora nation. This simple acknowledgement might bring to mind
the AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia which seeks to represent the
hundreds of First Nations,3 in contrast to the map of the Commonwealth
of Australia with seven post-federation states and territories. The potential
of Welcomes and Acknowledgements to prepare for a politics of listening
lies in the possibility of locating the listener and drawing attention to colo-
nial histories:
The truth is, there is a disconnect between political symbolism and action on
Indigenous issues in Australia. The recognition of traditional owners, the
welcome to country, is essential if only because it draws attention to this
disconnect. It reminds the nonIndigenous listener of the fact of their colo-
nial heritage, of the continued existence of Indigenous people and culture,
and their direct relationship to everyone who calls themselves Australian. Or
at least, it should. (Convery 2010)
The Acknowledgement of Bedegal ownership of the land on which the

Kensington campus of UNSW stands can serve, even just momentarily, to
disrupt The Great Australian Silence and to locate the speaking and listen-
ing to come in the founding violence of settler colonial Australia.
Further, protocols for Acknowledgement of Country are based on
ontologies which sit in uneasy tension with the territorial possessiveness
enshrined in the white sovereignty of ‘the (never quite) post-colonial
nation-state’ (Haggis 2016, p. 16). Gangulu man Mick Gooda, former
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, insists
acknowledging traditional owners is a ‘contemporary and practical way of
enshrining the High Court decision in Mabo’ (Gooda, cited in McKenna
2014, p. 487). They remind the settler that the doctrine of terra nullius
has been overturned and reaffirm First Nations connections to place and
land that are not framed through Western epistemologies of ownership
and possession of territory.
They serve as a reminder that, as Aboriginal writer and educator Tony
Birch (2001, p. 21) insists, Aboriginal ‘legitimacy does not lie within the
legal system and is not dependent on state recognition’. This speaks to
how the protocol of Welcome and Acknowledgement can also be an
unsettling one for settlers who prefer the Great Australian Silence to
r eckoning with an investment in the status quo or the benefits of ongoing

dispossession.
There is no doubt that Acknowledgement of Country can function as a
token gesture (Everett 2009). It is not unusual to hear a CEO or a Vice
Chancellor offer an Acknowledgement of Country while presiding over a
company or a university that consistently falls well below its targets for
Indigenous employment, for example. Emma Kowal, following Sara
Ahmed, argues Acknowledgements can be understood as White anti-racist
speech acts: they are ‘“non-performative” in that they serve mainly to
distinguish the speaker from “those racists” over “there”’ (Ahmed 2004;
cited in Kowal 2015, p. 192). Acknowledging Country does not produce
Indigenous sovereignty but rather simply produces good feelings for
White anti-racists.
While specific instances of Acknowledging Country may well be non-
performative, token gestures, Welcome protocols have also been under-
stood as ‘contemporary political acts of resistance to the ongoing process
of colonisation’ (Pelizzon and Kennedy 2012, p. 63). The continuing
debates at all tiers of government as to whether, how and when
Acknowledging Country is appropriate or right indicate something of
their political potency, as these debates centre around ‘whether Australians
should be explicitly reminded of the unceded, unresolved sovereignty of
Aboriginal people’ (Cox 2011, p. 1). The protocols can provoke questions
around what it means for the settler to be recast as a guest and welcomed
by a Sovereign, injured, and dispossessed party; or, in the case of
Acknowledgements, what it means to acknowledge one’s status as an
uninvited guest on unceded Aboriginal land. We suggest these relational
rearrangements that differently locate the settler in a political landscape of
ongoing colonialisms and First Nations survival may also prepare us for a
politics of listening ‘out’ or listening differently.
We are therefore most interested in how protocols for Acknowledging
Country might serve to unsettle the Great Australian Silence. Goenpul
woman Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 4) has argued
Indigenous people’s inalienable relationship to land and Country ‘contin-
ues to unsettle non-Indigenous belonging based on illegal dispossession’.
Welcomes can trigger ‘anxieties around belonging as the audience ponders
why they need to be welcomed again and again’ (Kowal 2010, p. 16).
Acknowledgements and Welcomes that draw attention to this ontological
incommensurability (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 11) dislodge comfort-
able narratives of settlement and migration that anchor belonging for
on-Indigenous people. In her Welcome to Country speech at a 2017

n
Anzac Day memorial service, Kaurna elder Katrina Ngaitlyala Power made
reference to slavery, invasion, and the Stolen Land of her ancestors. One
member of the crowd was ‘upset she referred that we were standing on
stolen Kaurna Land and to her relative returning from Gallipoli to slavery
and rations […] I’m not aware we had slavery in Australia’ (Cook 2017).
Power stood by her words, explaining: ‘I want us to move forward together
in reconciliation but you can only do that with truth telling’ (NITV 2017).
As truth-telling disrupts the founding myth of peaceful settlement and
terra nullius it upsets the settler. Discomfort can arise from being located
as a listener by the other, exposing listeners to uncomfortable truths
regardless of, (and potentially against), a willingness or readiness to
listen.
In another example, Arrernte woman Celeste Liddle (2017) began a
recent speech at a book fair in Melbourne by acknowledging the unceded
sovereignty of the traditional owners, as well as acknowledging ‘the vic-
tims of massacres, rapes, land clearings and other such governmental poli-
cies and I call for the due acknowledgement of these atrocities and for
compensation to be paid.’ Liddle refuses to smooth over comforting nar-
ratives of peaceful settlement; instead she names colonising acts of state-
sanctioned violence that continue to structure and maintain a state of
Indigenous dispossession. Her acknowledgement locates the non-
Indigenous listener as a witness to historical and ongoing injustice, and
can be understood as an ethical invitation to pay attention. Drawing atten-
tion to unceded First Nations sovereignty unsettles the notion of sover-
eignty as developed within capitalist modernity as intrinsically linked to
property and ‘white possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2005).
The authority of the nation state is also called into question in acts of
solidarity and welcome between Aboriginal people and asylum seekers and
refugees. In a variation on the guest-host relationship that official Welcome
to Country performs, Original Nation Passports have been issued to asy-
lum seekers by Aboriginal elders (see Cox 2015, p. 148), and Aboriginal
passport ceremonies have been held. Tony Birch (2001) has argued this is
one of the ways in which First Nations can continue to assert their sover-
eignty. In another variation of acknowledgement, participants in Aboriginal
Passport ceremonies have taken the following pledge:
By accepting the Aboriginal Passport the recipients actively commit to

respect and protect the land and its people. This includes speaking out and
acting against the unabated murder of Indigenous people in various

Australian institutions, as well as the continual theft of Aboriginal land by
large corporations with the protection of the Australian government.
Also, the passport ceremony is not intended to be a feel-good event. As

migrants that have come to live and be privileged by a colonial occupation
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands, we believe that it is our duty
to respect the people, the stories and the land, if we choose to continue
living here (Researchers against Pacific Black Sites 2015).
Welcomes and Acknowledgements that work to unsettle settlers can
serve to locate listening in the specific history and contemporary struggles
of settler colonial Australia. Acknowledgement of Country operates within
a system of protocols and responsibilities that can signal what is to come
and might suggest specific responsibilities in terms of speaking and listen-
ing. Indeed, First Nations ontologies centre on relationships of responsi-
bility and respect, rather than individual freedoms (Araluen Corr 2017;
Longbottom 2017, see also Weir in this volume), turning attention to
listening responsibilities as much as speaking rights. These protocols have
the potential to ground the interactions that follow in specific First Nations
Country and Indigenous sovereignties. First Nations and non-Indigenous
settler Australians are differentially located in Country and differentially
located in settler colonial relationships of privilege and power. Non-
Indigenous Acknowledgement of Country might include acknowledge-
ment of meeting on stolen land and a commitment to privilege First
Nations voices and story. Australia is reimagined as a contested space,
unsettling the everyday erasure—silence—of First Nations sovereignties
on which settler colonialism is founded. Instead, through an ethical yield-
ing of authority to the ongoing presence and survival of First Nations, the
temporal (1788) and spatial (terra nullius) markers to which the nation
state has historically been anchored are dislodged.
Formalised protocols for Welcome and Acknowledgement have been
developed in contemporary Australia, and may at first glance appear to
have little relevance beyond this specific time and space. Nevertheless, we
would like to suggest that comparable practices for locating the politics of
listening might be developed in a wide range of contexts. A Visiting
Professor from a UK university recently remarked approvingly on the
Acknowledgement of Country that preceded his public lecture, and
quipped that if such events in London began with an Acknowledgement
of British Colonialism there would be no time for the public lecture itself.
There are certainly many parallels to The Great Australian Silence—and

connections to be made as movements to decolonise knowledge gain
momentum. From Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa inspiring a Rhodes
Must Fall movement at Oxford University to debates on the erasure of
First Nations history in US Thanksgiving traditions and projects which
seek to make visible the Dutch involvement in the slave trade, settler colo-
nies, and their colonial metropoles are increasingly called on to acknowl-
edge colonial histories and to unsettle the continuing legacies of silencing
colonised voices, knowledges, stories, and epistemologies. Locating listen-
ing might prepare for the crucial ethical imperative described by Krista
Ratcliffe (2005, pp. 31–32), ‘an ethical imperative that, regardless of who
is responsible for a current situation asks us to recognize our privileges and
non-privileges and then act accordingly’.
In the following section, we turn our attention to spiritual and eco-
political practices of attunement to think through how moments of silence,
pause, and reflection in decision-making and politics might cultivate a
respectful and active attention to otherness. We approach them as ‘rituals
of listening’ which, like protocols for Welcome and Acknowledgement,
frame and choreograph listeners and speakers within a set of differently
located, interdependent relationships. We also refer to the Quaker practice
of ‘settling’ into silence, careful to point out that this practice is not con-
cerned with territorial expansion or occupation as it is in the settler colo-
nial context, discussed above. Settling in the Quaker sense is not aimed at
achieving a sense of comfort or resolution—it does not seek to smooth
over difference or collapse the space between others and ourselves—rather,
it suggests the cultivation of a state of open acceptance, potentiality, and
transformation grounded in a deep interdependence.
Attunement
In his work on Listening for Democracy, Andrew Dobson (2014, p. 62)
argues that silence can be a preparation for communication, but should
not be a refusal of it. In fact, he suggests that we develop ways to incorpo-
rate silence in to politics. One example, mentioned briefly by Dobson
(2012, p. 9), is that practised by the GPEW, which observes a one-minute
period of ‘attunement’ before each plenary debate in the EU Parliament
in order to help ‘focus delegates’ attention on their new surroundings […]
and what is going to happen there’. Dobson (2010, p. 766) suggests these
‘periods of silent “attunement” could be incorporated into political debate
Another random document with
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soudain à cette ravissante matinée où, précisément au fond du
grand parloir en bois de chêne sculpté qui servait de salle à manger,
elle vit son beau cousin pour la première fois. Effrayée par les
séditions de Paris, la famille de sa mère envoyait à Rouen ce jeune
courtisan, dans l’espérance qu’il s’y formerait aux devoirs de la
magistrature auprès de son grand-oncle, de qui la charge lui serait
transmise quelque jour. La comtesse sourit involontairement en
songeant à la vivacité avec laquelle elle s’était retirée en
reconnaissant ce parent attendu qu’elle ne connaissait pas. Malgré
sa promptitude à ouvrir et fermer la porte, son coup d’œil avait mis
dans son âme une si vigoureuse empreinte de cette scène, qu’en ce
moment il lui semblait encore le voir tel qu’il se produisit en se
retournant. Elle n’avait alors admiré qu’à la dérobée le goût et le luxe
répandus sur des vêtements faits à Paris; mais, aujourd’hui plus
hardie dans son souvenir, son œil allait librement du manteau en
velours violet brodé d’or et doublé de satin, aux ferrons qui
garnissaient les bottines, et des jolies losanges crevées du pourpoint
et du haut-de-chausse, à la riche collerette rabattue qui laissait voir
un cou frais aussi blanc que la dentelle. Elle flattait avec la main une
figure caractérisée par deux petites moustaches relevées en pointe,
et par une royale pareille à l’une des queues d’hermine semées sur
l’épitoge de son père. Au milieu du silence et de la nuit, les yeux
fixés sur les courtines de moire qu’elle ne voyait plus, oubliant et
l’orage et son mari, la comtesse osa se rappeler comment, après
bien des jours qui lui semblèrent aussi longs que des années, tant
pleins ils furent, le jardin entouré de vieux murs noirs et le noir hôtel
de son père lui parurent dorés et lumineux. Elle aimait, elle était
aimée! Comment, craignant les regards sévères de sa mère, elle
s’était glissée un matin dans le cabinet de son père pour lui faire ses
jeunes confidences, après s’être assise sur lui et s’être permis des
espiègleries qui avaient attiré le sourire aux lèvres de l’éloquent
magistrat, sourire qu’elle attendait pour lui dire: «—Me gronderez-
vous, si je vous dis quelque chose?» Elle croyait entendre encore
son père lui disant après un interrogatoire où, pour la première fois,
elle parlait de son amour: «—Eh! bien, mon enfant, nous verrons. S’il
étudie bien, s’il veut me succéder, s’il continue à te plaire, je me
mettrai de ta conspiration!» Elle n’avait plus rien écouté, elle avait
baisé son père et renversé les paperasses pour courir au grand
tilleul où, tous les matins avant le lever de sa redoutable mère, elle
rencontrait le gentil George de Chaverny! Le courtisan promettait de
dévorer les lois et les coutumes, il quittait les riches ajustements de
la noblesse d’épée pour prendre le sévère costume des magistrats.
—«Je t’aime bien mieux vêtu de noir,» lui disait-elle. Elle mentait,
mais ce mensonge avait rendu son bien-aimé moins triste d’avoir
jeté la dague aux champs. Le souvenir des ruses employées pour
tromper sa mère dont la sévérité semblait grande, lui rendirent les
joies fécondes d’un amour innocent, permis et partagé. C’était
quelque rendez-vous sous les tilleuls, où la parole était plus libre
sans témoins; les furtives étreintes et les baisers surpris, enfin tous
les naïfs à-comptes de la passion qui ne dépasse point les bornes
de la modestie. Revivant comme en songe dans ces délicieuses
journées où elle s’accusait d’avoir eu trop de bonheur, elle osa
baiser dans le vide cette jeune figure aux regards enflammés, et
cette bouche vermeille qui lui parla si bien d’amour. Elle avait aimé
Chaverny pauvre en apparence; mais combien de trésors n’avait-elle
pas découverts dans cette âme aussi douce qu’elle était forte! Tout à
coup meurt le président, Chaverny ne lui succède pas, la guerre
civile survient flamboyante. Par les soins de leur cousin, elle et sa
mère trouvent un asile secret dans une petite ville de la Basse-
Normandie. Bientôt les morts successives de quelques parents la
rendent une des plus riches héritières de France. Avec la médiocrité
de fortune s’enfuit le bonheur. La sauvage et terrible figure du comte
d’Hérouville qui demande sa main, lui apparaît comme une nuée
grosse de foudre qui étend son crêpe sur les richesses de la terre
jusqu’alors dorée par le soleil. La pauvre comtesse s’efforce de
chasser le souvenir des scènes de désespoir et de larmes amenées
par sa longue résistance. Elle voit confusément l’incendie de la
petite ville, puis Chaverny le huguenot mis en prison, menacé de
mort, et attendant un horrible supplice. Arrive cette épouvantable
soirée où sa mère pâle et mourante se prosterne à ses pieds,
Jeanne peut sauver son cousin, elle cède. Il est nuit; le comte,
revenu sanglant du combat, se trouve prêt; il fait surgir un prêtre,
des flambeaux, une église! Jeanne appartient au malheur. A peine
peut-elle dire adieu à son beau cousin délivré.—«Chaverny, si tu
m’aimes, ne me revois jamais!» Elle entend le bruit lointain des pas
de son noble ami qu’elle n’a plus revu; mais elle garde au fond du
cœur son dernier regard qu’elle retrouve si souvent dans ses songes
et qui les lui éclaire. Comme un chat enfermé dans la cage d’un lion,
la jeune femme craint à chaque heure les griffes du maître, toujours
levées sur elle. La comtesse se fait un crime de revêtir à certains
jours, consacrés par quelque plaisir inattendu, la robe que portait la
jeune fille au moment où elle vit son amant. Aujourd’hui, pour être
heureuse, elle doit oublier le passé, ne plus songer à l’avenir.
—Je ne me crois pas coupable, se dit-elle; mais si je le parais
aux yeux du comte, n’est-ce pas comme si je l’étais? Peut-être le
suis-je! La sainte Vierge n’a-t-elle pas conçu sans... Elle s’arrêta.
Pendant ce moment où ses pensées étaient nuageuses, où son
âme voyageait dans le monde des fantaisies, sa naïveté lui fit
attribuer au dernier regard, par lequel son amant lui darda toute sa
vie, le pouvoir qu’exerça la Visitation de l’ange sur la mère du
Sauveur. Cette supposition, digne du temps d’innocence auquel sa
rêverie l’avait reportée, s’évanouit devant le souvenir d’une scène
conjugale plus odieuse que la mort. La pauvre comtesse ne pouvait
plus conserver de doute sur la légitimité de l’enfant qui s’agitait dans
son sein. La première nuit des noces lui apparut dans toute l’horreur
de ses supplices, traînant à sa suite bien d’autres nuits, et de plus
tristes jours!
—Ah! pauvre Chaverny! s’écria-t-elle en pleurant, toi si soumis, si
gracieux, tu m’as toujours été bienfaisant!
Elle tourna les yeux sur son mari, comme pour se persuader
encore que cette figure lui promettait une clémence si chèrement
achetée. Le comte était éveillé. Ses deux yeux jaunes, aussi clairs
que ceux d’un tigre, brillaient sous les touffes de ses sourcils, et
jamais son regard n’avait été plus incisif qu’en ce moment. La
comtesse, épouvantée d’avoir rencontré ce regard, se glissa sous la
courte-pointe et resta sans mouvement.
—Pourquoi pleurez-vous? demanda le comte en tirant vivement
le drap sous lequel sa femme s’était cachée.
Cette voix, toujours effrayante pour elle, eut en ce moment une
douceur factice qui lui sembla de bon augure.
—Je souffre beaucoup, répondit-elle.
—Eh! bien, ma mignonne, est-ce un crime que de souffrir?
Pourquoi trembler quand je vous regarde? Hélas! que faut-il donc
faire pour être aimé? Toutes les rides de son front s’amassèrent
entre ses deux sourcils.—Je vous cause toujours de l’effroi, je le vois
bien, ajouta-t-il en soupirant.
Conseillée par l’instinct des caractères faibles, la comtesse
interrompit le comte en jetant quelques gémissements, et s’écria:—
Je crains de faire une fausse couche! J’ai couru sur les rochers
pendant toute la soirée, je me serai sans doute trop fatiguée.
En entendant ces paroles, le sire d’Hérouville jeta sur sa femme
un regard si soupçonneux qu’elle rougit en frissonnant. Il prit la peur
qu’il inspirait à cette naïve créature pour l’expression d’un remords.
—Peut-être est-ce un accouchement véritable qui commence?
demanda-t-il.
—Eh! bien? dit-elle.
—Eh! bien, dans tous les cas, il faut ici un homme habile, et je
vais l’aller chercher.
L’air sombre qui accompagnait ces paroles glaça la comtesse,
elle retomba sur le lit en poussant un soupir arraché plutôt par le
sentiment de sa destinée que par les angoisses de la crise
prochaine. Ce gémissement acheva de prouver au comte la
vraisemblance des soupçons qui se réveillaient dans son esprit. En
affectant un calme que les accents de sa voix, ses gestes et ses
regards démentaient, il se leva précipitamment, s’enveloppa d’une
robe qu’il trouva sur un fauteuil, et commença par fermer une porte
située auprès de la cheminée, et par laquelle on passait de la
chambre de parade dans les appartements de réception qui
communiquaient à l’escalier d’honneur. En voyant son mari garder
cette clef, la comtesse eut le pressentiment d’un malheur; elle
l’entendit ouvrir la porte opposée à celle qu’il venait de fermer, et se
rendre dans une autre pièce où couchaient les comtes d’Hérouville,
quand ils n’honoraient pas leurs femmes de leur noble compagnie.
La comtesse ne connaissait que par ouï-dire la destination de cette
chambre, la jalousie fixait son mari près d’elle. Si quelques
expéditions militaires l’obligeaient à quitter le lit d’honneur, le comte
laissait au château des argus dont l’incessant espionnage accusait
ses outrageuses défiances. Malgré l’attention avec laquelle la
comtesse s’efforçait d’écouter le moindre bruit, elle n’entendit plus
rien. Le comte était arrivé dans une longue galerie contiguë à sa
chambre, et qui occupait l’aile occidentale du château. Le cardinal
d’Hérouville, son grand-oncle, amateur passionné des œuvres de
l’imprimerie, y avait amassé une bibliothèque aussi curieuse par le
nombre que par la beauté des volumes, et la prudence lui avait fait
pratiquer dans les murs une de ces inventions conseillées par la
solitude ou par la peur monastique. Une chaîne d’argent mettait en
mouvement, au moyen de fils invisibles, une sonnette placée au
chevet d’un serviteur fidèle. Le comte tira cette chaîne, un écuyer de
garde ne tarda pas à faire retentir du bruit de ses bottes et de ses
éperons les dalles sonores d’une vis en colimaçon contenue dans la
haute tourelle qui flanquait l’angle occidental du château du côté de
la mer. En entendant monter son serviteur, le comte alla dérouiller
les ressorts de fer et les verrous qui défendaient la porte secrète par
laquelle la galerie communiquait avec la tour, et il introduisit dans ce
sanctuaire de la science un homme d’armes dont l’encolure
annonçait un serviteur digne du maître. L’écuyer, à peine éveillé,
semblait avoir marché par instinct; la lanterne de corne qu’il tenait à
la main éclaira si faiblement la longue galerie, que son maître et lui
se dessinèrent dans l’obscurité comme deux fantômes.
—Selle mon cheval de bataille à l’instant même, et tu vas
m’accompagner. Cet ordre fut prononcé d’un son de voix profond qui
réveilla l’intelligence du serviteur; il leva les yeux sur son maître, et
rencontra un regard si perçant, qu’il en reçut comme une secousse
électrique.—Bertrand, ajouta le comte en posant la main droite sur le
bras de l’écuyer, tu quitteras ta cuirasse et prendras les habits d’un
capitaine de miquelets.
—Vive Dieu, monseigneur, me déguiser en ligueur! Excusez-moi,
je vous obéirai, mais j’aimerais autant être pendu.
Flatté dans son fanatisme, le comte sourit; mais pour effacer ce
rire qui contrastait avec l’expression répandue sur son visage, il
répondit brusquement:—Choisis dans l’écurie un cheval assez
vigoureux pour que tu me puisses suivre. Nous marcherons comme
des balles au sortir de l’arquebuse. Quand je serai prêt, sois-le. Je
sonnerai de nouveau.
Bertrand s’inclina en silence et partit; mais quand il eut descendu
quelques marches, il se dit à lui-même, en entendant siffler
l’ouragan:—Tous les démons sont dehors, jarnidieu! j’aurais été bien
étonné de voir celui-ci rester tranquille. Nous avons surpris Saint—
Lô par une tempête semblable.
Le comte trouva dans sa chambre le costume qui lui servait
souvent pour ses stratagèmes. Après avoir revêtu sa mauvaise
casaque, qui avait l’air d’appartenir à l’un de ces pauvres reîtres dont
la solde était si rarement payée par Henri IV, il revint dans la
chambre où gémissait sa femme.
—Tâchez de souffrir patiemment, lui dit-il. Je crèverai, s’il le faut,
mon cheval, afin de revenir plus vite pour apaiser vos douleurs.
Ces paroles n’annonçaient rien de funeste, et la comtesse
enhardie se préparait à faire une question, lorsque le comte lui
demanda tout à coup:—Ne pourriez-vous me dire où sont vos
masques?
—Mes masques, répondit-elle. Bon Dieu! qu’en voulez-vous
faire?
—Où sont vos masques? répéta-t-il avec sa violence ordinaire.
—Dans le bahut, dit-elle.
La comtesse ne put s’empêcher de frémir en voyant son mari
choisir dans ses masques un touret de nez, dont l’usage était aussi
naturel aux dames de cette époque, que l’est celui des gants aux
femmes d’aujourd’hui. Le comte devint entièrement méconnaissable
quand il eut mis sur sa tête un mauvais chapeau de feutre gris, orné
d’une vieille plume de coq toute cassée. Il serra autour de ses reins
un large ceinturon de cuir dans la gaîne duquel il passa une dague
qu’il ne portait pas habituellement. Ces misérables vêtements lui
donnèrent un aspect si effrayant, et il s’avança vers le lit par un
mouvement si étrange, que la comtesse crut sa dernière heure
arrivée.
—Ah! ne nous tuez pas, s’écria-t-elle, laissez-moi mon enfant, et
je vous aimerai bien.
—Vous vous sentez donc bien coupable pour m’offrir comme une
rançon de vos fautes l’amour que vous me devez?
La voix du comte eut un son lugubre sous le velours; ses amères
paroles furent accompagnées d’un regard qui eut la pesanteur du
plomb et anéantit la comtesse en tombant sur elle.
—Mon Dieu, s’écria-t-elle douloureusement, l’innocence serait-
elle donc funeste?
—Il ne s’agit pas de votre mort, lui répondit son maître en sortant
de la rêverie où il était tombé, mais de faire exactement, et pour
l’amour de moi, ce que je réclame en ce moment de vous. Il jeta sur
le lit un des deux masques qu’il tenait, et sourit de pitié en voyant le
geste de frayeur involontaire qu’arrachait à sa femme le choc si
léger du velours noir.—Vous ne me ferez qu’un mièvre enfant!
s’écria-t-il. Ayez ce masque sur votre visage lorsque je serai de
retour, ajouta-t-il. Je ne veux pas qu’un croquant puisse se vanter
d’avoir vu la comtesse d’Hérouville!
—Pourquoi prendre un homme pour cet office? demanda-t-elle à
voix basse.
—Oh! oh! ma mie, ne suis-je pas le maître ici? répondit le comte.
—Qu’importe un mystère de plus! dit la comtesse au désespoir.
Son maître avait disparu, cette exclamation fut sans danger pour
elle, car souvent l’oppresseur étend ses mesures aussi loin que va la
crainte de l’opprimé. Par un des courts moments de calme qui
séparaient les accès de la tempête, la comtesse entendit le pas de
deux chevaux qui semblaient voler à travers les dunes périlleuses et
les rochers sur lesquels ce vieux château était assis. Ce bruit fut
promptement étouffé par la voix des flots. Bientôt elle se trouva
prisonnière dans ce sombre appartement, seule au milieu d’une nuit
tour à tour silencieuse ou menaçante, et sans secours pour conjurer
un malheur qu’elle voyait s’avancer à grands pas. La comtesse
chercha quelque ruse pour sauver cet enfant conçu dans les larmes,
et déjà devenu toute sa consolation, le principe de ses idées, l’avenir
de ses affections, sa seule et frêle espérance. Soutenue par un
maternel courage, elle alla prendre le petit cor dont se servait son
mari pour faire venir ses gens, ouvrit une fenêtre, et tira du cuivre
des accents grêles qui se perdirent sur la vaste étendue des eaux,
comme une bulle lancée dans les airs par un enfant. Elle comprit
l’inutilité de cette plainte ignorée des hommes, et se mit à marcher à
travers les appartements, en espérant que toutes les issues ne
seraient pas fermées. Parvenue à la bibliothèque, elle chercha, mais
en vain, s’il n’y existerait pas quelque passage secret, elle traversa
la longue galerie des livres, atteignit la fenêtre la plus rapprochée de
la cour d’honneur du château, fit de nouveau retentir les échos en
sonnant du cor, et lutta sans succès avec la voix de l’ouragan. Dans
son découragement, elle pensait à se confier à l’une de ses femmes,
toutes créatures de son mari, lorsqu’en passant dans son oratoire
elle vit que le comte avait fermé la porte qui conduisait à leurs
appartements. Ce fut une horrible découverte. Tant de précautions
prises pour l’isoler annonçaient le désir de procéder sans témoins à
quelque terrible exécution. A mesure que la comtesse perdait tout
espoir, les douleurs venaient l’assaillir plus vives, plus ardentes. Le
pressentiment d’un meurtre possible, joint à la fatigue de ses efforts,
lui enleva le reste de ses forces. Elle ressemblait au naufragé qui
succombe, emporté par une dernière lame moins furieuse que
toutes celles qu’il a vaincues. La douloureuse ivresse de
l’enfantement ne lui permit plus de compter les heures. Au moment
où elle se crut sur le point d’accoucher, seule, sans secours, et qu’à
ses terreurs se joignit la crainte des accidents auxquels son
inexpérience l’exposait, le comte arriva soudain sans qu’elle l’eût
entendu venir. Cet homme se trouva là comme un démon réclamant,
à l’expiration d’un pacte, l’âme qui lui a été vendue; il gronda
sourdement en voyant le visage de sa femme découvert; mais après
l’avoir assez adroitement masquée, il l’emporta dans ses bras et la
déposa sur le lit de sa chambre.
L’effroi que cette apparition et cet enlèvement inspirèrent à la
comtesse fit taire un moment ses douleurs, elle put jeter un regard
furtif sur les acteurs de cette scène mystérieuse, et ne reconnut pas
Bertrand qui s’était masqué aussi soigneusement que son maître.
Après avoir allumé à la hâte quelques bougies dont la clarté se
mêlait aux premiers rayons du soleil qui rougissait les vitraux, ce
serviteur alla s’appuyer à l’angle d’une embrasure de fenêtre. Là, le
visage tourné vers le mur, il semblait en mesurer l’épaisseur et se
tenait dans une immobilité si complète que vous eussiez dit d’une
statue de chevalier. Au milieu de la chambre, la comtesse aperçut un
petit homme gras, tout pantois, dont les yeux étaient bandés et dont
les traits étaient si bouleversés par la terreur, qu’il lui fut impossible
de deviner leur expression habituelle.
—Par la mort-dieu! monsieur le drôle, dit le comte en lui rendant
la vue par un mouvement brusque qui fit tomber au cou de l’inconnu
le bandeau qu’il avait sur les yeux, ne t’avise pas de regarder autre
chose que la misérable sur laquelle tu vas exercer ta science; sinon,
je te jette dans la rivière qui coule sous ces fenêtres après t’avoir mis
un collier de diamants qui pèseront plus de cent livres! Et il tira
légèrement sur la poitrine de son auditeur stupéfait la cravate qui
avait servi de bandeau.—Examine d’abord si ce n’est qu’une fausse
couche; dans ce cas ta vie me répondrait de la sienne; mais si
l’enfant est vivant, tu me l’apporteras.
Après cette allocution, le comte saisit par le milieu du corps le
pauvre opérateur, l’enleva comme une plume de la place où il était,
et le posa devant la comtesse. Le seigneur alla se placer au fond de
l’embrasure de la croisée, où il joua du tambour avec ses doigts sur
le vitrage, en portant alternativement ses yeux sur son serviteur, sur
le lit et sur l’Océan, comme s’il eût voulu promettre à l’enfant attendu
la mer pour berceau.
L’homme que, par une violence inouïe, le comte et Bertrand
venaient d’arracher au plus doux sommeil qui eût jamais clos
paupière humaine, pour l’attacher en croupe sur un cheval qu’il put
croire poursuivi par l’enfer, était un personnage dont la physionomie
peut servir à caractériser celle de cette époque, et dont l’influence se
fit d’ailleurs sentir dans la maison d’Hérouville.
Jamais en aucun temps les nobles ne furent moins instruits en
sciences naturelles, et jamais l’astrologie judiciaire ne fut plus en
honneur, car jamais on ne désira plus vivement connaître l’avenir.
Cette ignorance et cette curiosité générale avaient amené la plus
grande confusion dans les connaissances humaines; tout y était
pratique personnelle, car les nomenclatures de la théorie
manquaient encore; l’imprimerie exigeait de grands frais, les
communications scientifiques avaient peu de rapidité; l’Église
persécutait encore les sciences tout d’examen qui se basaient sur
l’analyse des phénomènes naturels. La persécution engendrait le
mystère. Donc, pour le peuple comme pour les grands, physicien et
alchimiste, mathématicien et astronome, astrologue et
nécromancien, étaient six attributs qui se confondaient en la
personne du médecin. Dans ce temps, le médecin supérieur était
soupçonné de cultiver la magie; tout en guérissant ses malades, il
devait tirer des horoscopes. Les princes protégeaient d’ailleurs ces
génies auxquels se révélait l’avenir, ils les logeaient chez eux et les
pensionnaient. Le fameux Corneille Agrippa, venu en France pour
être le médecin de Henri II, ne voulut pas, comme le faisait
Nostradamus, pronostiquer l’avenir, et il fut congédié par Catherine
de Médicis qui le remplaça par Cosme Ruggieri. Les hommes
supérieurs à leur temps et qui travaillaient aux sciences étaient donc
difficilement appréciés; tous inspiraient la terreur qu’on avait pour les
sciences occultes et leurs résultats.
Sans être précisément un de ces fameux mathématiciens,
l’homme enlevé par le comte jouissait en Normandie de la réputation
équivoque attachée à un médecin chargé d’œuvres ténébreuses.
Cet homme était l’espèce de sorcier que les paysans nomment
encore, dans plusieurs endroits de la France, un Rebouteur. Ce nom
appartenait à quelques génies bruts qui, sans étude apparente, mais
par des connaissances héréditaires et souvent par l’effet d’une
longue pratique dont les observations s’accumulaient dans une
famille, reboutaient, c’est-à-dire remettaient les jambes et les bras
cassés, guérissaient bêtes et gens de certaines maladies, et
possédaient des secrets prétendus merveilleux pour le traitement
des cas graves. Non-seulement maître Antoine Beauvouloir, tel était
le nom du rebouteur, avait eu pour aïeul et pour père deux fameux
praticiens desquels il tenait d’importantes traditions, mais encore il
était instruit en médecine; il s’occupait de sciences naturelles. Les
gens de la campagne voyaient son cabinet plein de livres et de
choses étranges qui donnaient à ses succès une teinte de magie.
Sans passer précisément pour sorcier, Antoine Beauvouloir
imprimait, à trente lieues à la ronde, un respect voisin de la terreur
aux gens du peuple; et, chose plus dangereuse pour lui-même, il
avait à sa disposition des secrets de vie et de mort qui concernaient
les familles nobles du pays. Comme son grand-père et son père, il
était célèbre par son habileté dans les accouchements, avortements
et fausses couches. Or, dans ces temps de désordres, les fautes
furent assez fréquentes et les passions assez mauvaises pour que
la haute noblesse se vît obligée d’initier souvent maître Antoine
Beauvouloir à des secrets honteux ou terribles. Nécessaire à sa
sécurité, sa discrétion était à toute épreuve; aussi sa clientèle le
payait-elle généreusement, en sorte que sa fortune héréditaire
s’augmentait beaucoup. Toujours en route, tantôt surpris comme il
venait de l’être par le comte, tantôt obligé de passer plusieurs jours
chez quelque grande dame, il ne s’était pas encore marié; d’ailleurs
sa renommée avait empêché plusieurs filles de l’épouser. Incapable
de chercher des consolations dans les hasards de son métier qui lui
conférait tant de pouvoir sur les faiblesses féminines, le pauvre
rebouteur se sentait fait pour les joies de la famille, et ne pouvait se
les donner. Ce bonhomme cachait un excellent cœur sous les
apparences trompeuses d’un caractère gai, en harmonie avec sa
figure joufflue, avec ses formes rondes, avec la vivacité de son petit
corps gras et la franchise de son parler. Il désirait donc se marier
pour avoir une fille qui transportât ses biens à quelque pauvre
gentilhomme; car il n’aimait pas son état de rebouteur, et voulait faire
sortir sa famille de la situation où la mettaient les préjugés du temps.
Son caractère s’était d’ailleurs assez bien accommodé de la joie et
des repas qui couronnaient ses principales opérations. L’habitude
d’être partout l’homme le plus important avait ajouté à sa gaieté
constitutive une dose de vanité grave. Ses impertinences étaient
presque toujours bien reçues dans les moments de crise, où il se
plaisait à opérer avec une certaine lenteur magistrale. De plus, il
était curieux comme un rossignol, gourmand comme un lévrier et
bavard comme le sont les diplomates qui parlent sans jamais rien
trahir de leurs secrets. A ces défauts près, développés en lui par les
aventures multipliées où le jetait sa profession, Antoine Beauvouloir
passait pour être le moins mauvais homme de la Normandie.
Quoiqu’il appartînt au petit nombre d’esprits supérieurs à leur temps,
un bon sens de campagnard normand lui avait conseillé de tenir
cachées ses idées acquises et les vérités qu’il découvrait.
En se trouvant placé par le comte devant une femme en mal
d’enfant, le rebouteur recouvra toute sa présence d’esprit. Il se mit à
tâter le pouls de la dame masquée, sans penser aucunement à elle;
mais, à l’aide de ce maintien doctoral, il pouvait réfléchir et
réfléchissait sur sa propre situation. Dans aucune des intrigues
honteuses et criminelles où la force l’avait contraint d’agir en
instrument aveugle, jamais les précautions n’avaient été gardées
avec autant de prudence qu’elles l’étaient dans celle-ci. Quoique sa
mort eût été souvent mise en délibération, comme moyen d’assurer
le succès des entreprises auxquelles il participait malgré lui, jamais
sa vie n’avait été compromise autant qu’elle l’était en ce moment.
Avant tout, il résolut de reconnaître ceux qui l’employaient, et de
s’enquérir ainsi de l’étendue de son danger afin de pouvoir sauver
sa chère personne.
—De quoi s’agit-il? demanda le rebouteur à voix basse en
disposant la comtesse à recevoir les secours de son expérience.
—Ne lui donnez pas l’enfant.
—Parlez haut, dit le comte d’une voix tonnante qui empêcha
maître Beauvouloir d’entendre le dernier mot prononcé par la
victime. Sinon, ajouta le seigneur qui déguisait soigneusement sa
voix, dis ton In manus.
—Plaignez-vous à haute voix, dit le rebouteur à la dame. Criez,
jarnidieu! cet homme a des pierreries qui ne vous iraient pas mieux
qu’à moi! Du courage, ma petite dame!
—Aie la main légère, cria de nouveau le comte.
—Monsieur est jaloux, répondit l’opérateur d’une petite voix aigre
qui fut heureusement couverte par les cris de la comtesse.
Pour la sûreté de maître Beauvouloir, la nature se montra
clémente. Ce fut plutôt un avortement qu’un accouchement, tant
l’enfant qui vint était chétif; aussi causa-t-il peu de douleurs à sa
mère.
—Par le ventre de la sainte Vierge, s’écria le curieux rebouteur,
ce n’est pas une fausse couche!
Le comte fit trembler le plancher en piétinant de rage, et la
comtesse pinça maître Beauvouloir.
—Ah! j’y suis, se dit-il à lui-même.—Ce devait donc être une
fausse couche? demanda-t-il tout bas à la comtesse qui lui répondit
par un geste affirmatif, comme si ce geste eût été le seul langage qui
pût exprimer ses pensées.—Tout cela n’est pas encore bien clair,
pensa le rebouteur.
Comme tous les gens habiles en son art, l’accoucheur
reconnaissait facilement une femme qui en était, disait-il, à son
premier malheur. Quoique la pudique inexpérience de certains
gestes lui révélât la virginité de la comtesse, le malicieux rebouteur
s’écria:—Madame accouche comme si elle n’avait jamais fait que
cela!
Le comte dit alors avec un calme plus effrayant que sa colère:—
A moi l’enfant.
—Ne le lui donnez pas, au nom de Dieu! fit la mère dont le cri
presque sauvage réveilla dans le cœur du petit homme une
courageuse bonté qui l’attacha, beaucoup plus qu’il ne le crut lui-
même, à ce noble enfant renié par son père.
—L’enfant n’est pas encore venu. Vous vous battez de la chape à
l’évêque, répondit-il froidement au comte en cachant l’avorton.
Étonné de ne pas entendre de cris, le rebouteur regarda l’enfant
en le croyant déjà mort; la comte s’aperçut alors de la supercherie et
sauta sur lui d’un seul bond.
—Tête-dieu pleine de reliques! me le donneras-tu, s’écria le
seigneur en lui arrachant l’innocente victime qui jeta de faibles cris.
—Prenez garde, il est contrefait et presque sans consistance, dit
maître Beauvouloir en s’accrochant au bras du comte. C’est un
enfant venu sans doute à sept mois! Puis, avec une force supérieure
qui lui était donnée par une sorte d’exaltation, il arrêta les doigts du
père en lui disant à l’oreille, d’une voix entrecoupée:—Épargnez-
vous un crime, il ne vivra pas.
—Scélérat! répliqua vivement le comte aux mains duquel le
rebouteur avait arraché l’enfant, qui te dit que je veuille la mort de
mon fils? Ne vois-tu pas que je le caresse?
—Attendez alors qu’il ait dix-huit ans pour le caresser ainsi,
répondit Beauvouloir en retrouvant son importance. Mais, ajouta-t-il
en pensant à sa propre sûreté, car il venait de reconnaître le
seigneur d’Hérouville qui dans son emportement avait oublié de
déguiser sa voix, baptisez-le promptement et ne parlez pas de mon
arrêt à la mère: autrement, vous la tueriez.
La joie secrète que le comte avait trahie par le geste qui lui
échappa quand la mort de l’avorton lui fut prophétisée, avait suggéré
cette phrase au rebouteur, et venait de sauver l’enfant; Beauvouloir
s’empressa de le reporter près de la mère alors évanouie, et il la
montra par un geste ironique, pour effrayer le comte de l’état dans
lequel leur débat l’avait mise. La comtesse avait tout entendu, car il
n’est pas rare de voir dans les grandes crises de la vie les organes
humains contractant une délicatesse inouïe; cependant les cris de
son enfant posé sur le lit la rendirent comme par magie à la vie; elle
crut entendre la voix de deux anges quand, à la faveur des
vagissements du nouveau-né, le rebouteur lui dit à voix basse, en se
penchant à son oreille:—Ayez-en bien soin, il vivra cent ans.
Beauvouloir s’y connaît.
Un soupir céleste, un mystérieux serrement de main furent la
récompense du rebouteur qui cherchait à s’assurer, avant de livrer
aux embrassements de la mère impatiente cette frêle créature dont
la peau portait encore l’empreinte des doigts du comte, si la caresse
paternelle n’avait rien dérangé dans sa chétive organisation. Le
mouvement de folie par lequel la mère cacha son fils auprès d’elle et
le regard menaçant qu’elle jeta sur le comte par les deux trous du
masque firent frissonner Beauvouloir.
—Elle mourrait si elle perdait trop promptement son fils, dit-il au
comte.
Pendant cette dernière partie de la scène, le sire d’Hérouville
semblait n’avoir rien vu, ni entendu. Immobile et comme absorbé
dans une profonde méditation, il avait recommencé à battre du
tambour avec ses doigts sur les vitraux; mais, après la dernière
phrase que lui dit le rebouteur, il se retourna vers lui par un
mouvement d’une violence frénétique, et tira sa dague.
—Misérable manant! s’écria-t-il, en lui donnant le sobriquet par
lequel les Royalistes outrageaient les Ligueurs. Impudent coquin! La
science, qui te vaut l’honneur d’être le complice des gentilshommes
pressés d’ouvrir ou de fermer des successions, me retient à peine
de priver à jamais la Normandie de son sorcier. Au grand
contentement de Beauvouloir, le comte repoussa violemment sa
dague dans le fourreau.—Ne saurais-tu, dit le sire d’Hérouville en
continuant, te trouver une fois en ta vie dans l’honorable compagnie
d’un seigneur et de sa dame, sans les soupçonner de ces méchants
calculs que tu laisses faire à la canaille, sans songer qu’elle n’y est
pas autorisée comme les gentilshommes par des motifs plausibles?
Puis-je avoir, dans cette occurrence, des raisons d’État pour agir
comme tu le supposes? Tuer mon fils! l’enlever à sa mère! Où as-tu
pris ces billevesées? Suis-je fou? Pourquoi nous effraies-tu sur les
jours de ce vigoureux enfant? Bélître, comprends donc que je me
suis défié de ta pauvre vanité. Si tu avais su le nom de la dame que
tu as accouchée, tu te serais vanté de l’avoir vue! Pâque-Dieu! Tu
aurais peut-être tué, par trop de précaution, la mère ou l’enfant.
Mais, songes-y bien, ta misérable vie me répond et de ta discrétion
et de leur bonne santé!
Le rebouteur fut stupéfait du changement subit qui s’opérait dans
les intentions du comte. Cet accès de tendresse pour l’avorton
l’effrayait encore plus que l’impatiente cruauté et la morne
indifférence d’abord manifestées par le seigneur. L’accent du comte
en prononçant sa dernière phrase décelait une combinaison plus
savante pour arriver à l’accomplissement d’un dessein immuable.
Maître Beauvouloir s’expliqua ce dénoûment imprévu par la double
promesse qu’il avait faite à la mère et au père:—J’y suis! se dit-il. Ce
bon seigneur ne veut pas se rendre odieux à sa femme, et s’en
remettra sur la providence de l’apothicaire. Il faut alors que je tâche
de prévenir la dame de veiller sur son noble marmot.
Au moment où il se dirigeait vers le lit, le comte, qui s’était
approché d’une armoire, l’arrêta par une impérative interjection. Au
geste que fit le seigneur en lui tendant une bourse, Beauvouloir se
mit en devoir de recueillir, non sans une joie inquiète, l’or qui brillait à
travers un réseau de soie rouge, et qui lui fut dédaigneusement jeté.
—Si tu m’as fait raisonner comme un vilain, je ne me crois pas
dispensé de te payer en seigneur. Je ne te demande pas la
discrétion! L’homme que voici, dit le comte en montrant Bertrand, a
dû t’expliquer que partout où il se rencontre des chênes et des
rivières, mes diamants et mes colliers savent trouver les manants
qui parlent de moi.
En achevant ces paroles de clémence, le géant s’avança
lentement vers le rebouteur interdit, lui approcha bruyamment un
siége, et parut l’inviter à s’asseoir comme lui, près de l’accouchée.
—Eh! bien, ma mignonne, nous avons enfin un fils, reprit-il. C’est
bien de la joie pour nous. Souffrez-vous beaucoup?
—Non, dit en murmurant la comtesse.
L’étonnement de la mère et sa gêne, les tardives démonstrations
de la joie factice du père convainquirent maître Beauvouloir qu’un
incident grave échappait à sa pénétration habituelle; il persista dans
ses soupçons, et appuya sa main sur celle de la jeune femme,
moins pour s’assurer de son état, que pour lui donner quelques avis.
—La peau est bonne, dit-il. Nul accident fâcheux n’est à craindre
pour madame. La fièvre de lait viendra sans doute, ne vous en
épouvantez pas, ce ne sera rien.
Là, le rusé rebouteur s’arrêta, serra la main de la comtesse pour
la rendre attentive.
—Si vous ne voulez pas avoir d’inquiétude sur votre enfant,
madame, reprit-il, vous ne devez pas le quitter. Laissez-le longtemps
boire le lait que ses petites lèvres cherchent déjà; nourrissez-le
vous-même, et gardez-vous bien des drogues de l’apothicaire. Le
sein est le remède à toutes les maladies des enfants. J’ai beaucoup
observé d’accouchements à sept mois, mais j’ai rarement vu de
délivrance aussi peu douloureuse que la vôtre. Ce n’est pas
étonnant, l’enfant est si maigre! Il tiendrait dans un sabot! Je suis sûr
qu’il ne pèse pas quinze onces. Du lait! du lait! S’il reste toujours sur
votre sein, vous le sauverez.
Ces dernières paroles furent accompagnées d’un nouveau
mouvement de doigts. Malgré les deux jets de flamme que dardaient
les yeux du comte par les trous de son masque, Beauvouloir débita
ses périodes avec le sérieux imperturbable d’un homme qui voulait
gagner son argent.
—Oh! oh! rebouteur, tu oublies ton vieux feutre noir, lui dit
Bertrand au moment où l’opérateur sortait avec lui de la chambre.
Les motifs de la clémence du comte envers son fils étaient
puisés dans un et cætera de notaire. Au moment où Beauvouloir lui
arrêta les mains, l’Avarice et la Coutume de Normandie s’étaient
dressées devant lui. Par un signe, ces deux puissances lui
engourdirent les doigts et imposèrent silence à ses passions
haineuses. L’une lui cria:—«Les biens de ta femme ne peuvent
appartenir à la maison d’Hérouville que si un enfant mâle les y
transporte!» L’autre lui montra la comtesse mourant et les biens
réclamés par la branche collatérale des Saint-Savin. Toutes deux lui
conseillèrent de laisser à la nature le soin d’emporter l’avorton, et
d’attendre la naissance d’un second fils qui fût sain et vigoureux,
pour pouvoir se moquer de la vie de sa femme et de son premier-né.
Il ne vit plus un enfant, il vit des domaines, et sa tendresse devint
subitement aussi forte que son ambition. Dans son désir de
satisfaire à la Coutume, il souhaita que ce fils mort-né eût les
apparences d’une robuste constitution. La mère, qui connaissait bien
le caractère du comte, fut encore plus surprise que ne l’était le
rebouteur, et conserva des craintes instinctives qu’elle manifestait
parfois avec hardiesse, car en un instant le courage des mères avait
doublé sa force.
Pendant quelques jours, le comte resta très-assidûment auprès
de sa femme, et lui prodigua des soins auxquels l’intérêt imprimait
une sorte de tendresse. La comtesse devina promptement qu’elle
seule était l’objet de toutes ces attentions. La haine du père pour son
fils se montrait dans les moindres détails; il s’abstenait toujours de le
voir ou de le toucher; il se levait brusquement et allait donner des
ordres au moment où les cris se faisaient entendre; enfin, il semblait
ne lui pardonner de vivre que dans l’espoir de le voir mourir. Cette
dissimulation coûtait encore trop au comte. Le jour où il s’aperçut
que l’œil intelligent de la mère pressentait sans le comprendre le
danger qui menaçait son fils, il annonça son départ pour le
lendemain de la messe des relevailles, en prenant le prétexte
d’amener toutes ses forces au secours du roi.
Telles furent les circonstances qui accompagnèrent et
précédèrent la naissance d’Étienne d’Hérouville. Pour désirer
incessamment la mort de ce fils désavoué, le comte n’aurait pas eu
le puissant motif de l’avoir déjà voulue; il aurait même fait taire cette
triste disposition que l’homme se sent à persécuter l’être auquel il a
déjà nui; il ne se serait pas trouvé dans l’obligation, cruelle pour lui,
de feindre de l’amour pour un odieux avorton qu’il croyait fils de
Chaverny, le pauvre Étienne n’en aurait pas moins été l’objet de son
aversion. Le malheur d’une constitution rachitique et maladive,
aggravé peut-être par sa caresse, était à ses yeux une offense
toujours flagrante pour son amour-propre de père. S’il avait en
exécration les beaux hommes, il ne détestait pas moins les gens
débiles chez lesquels la force de l’intelligence remplaçait la force du
corps. Pour lui plaire, il fallait être laid de figure, grand, robuste et
ignorant. Étienne, que sa faiblesse vouait en quelque sorte aux
occupations sédentaires de la science, devait donc trouver dans son
père un ennemi sans générosité. Sa lutte avec ce colosse
commençait dès le berceau; et pour tout secours contre un si
dangereux antagoniste, il n’avait que le cœur de sa mère, dont
l’amour s’accroissait, par une loi touchante de la nature, de tous les
périls qui le menaçaient.
Ensevelie tout à coup dans une profonde solitude par le brusque
départ du comte, Jeanne de Saint-Savin dut à son enfant les seuls
semblants de bonheur qui pouvaient consoler sa vie. Ce fils, dont la
naissance lui était reprochée à cause de Chaverny, la comtesse
l’aima comme les femmes aiment l’enfant d’un illicite amour; obligée
de le nourrir, elle n’en éprouva nulle fatigue. Elle ne voulut être aidée
en aucune façon par ses femmes, elle vêtait et dévêtait son enfant
en ressentant de nouveaux plaisirs à chaque petit soin qu’il exigeait.
Ces travaux incessants, cette attention de toutes les heures,
l’exactitude avec laquelle elle devait s’éveiller la nuit pour allaiter son
enfant, furent des félicités sans bornes. Le bonheur rayonnait sur
son visage quand elle obéissait aux besoins de ce petit être. Comme
Étienne était venu prématurément, plusieurs vêtements manquaient,
elle désira les faire elle-même, et les fit, avec quelle perfection, vous
le savez, vous qui, dans l’ombre et le silence, mères soupçonnées,
avez travaillé pour des enfants adorés! A chaque aiguillée de fil,
c’était une souvenance, un désir, des souhaits, mille choses qui se
brodaient sur l’étoffe comme les jolis dessins qu’elle y fixait. Toutes
ces folies furent redites au comte d’Hérouville et grossirent l’orage
déjà formé. Les jours n’avaient plus assez d’heures pour les
occupations multipliées et les minutieuses précautions de la
nourrice; ils s’enfuyaient chargés de contentements secrets.
Les avis du rebouteur étaient toujours écrits devant la comtesse;
aussi craignait-elle pour son enfant, et les services de ses femmes,
et la main de ses gens; elle aurait voulu pouvoir ne pas dormir afin
d’être sûre que personne n’approcherait d’Étienne pendant son
sommeil; elle le couchait près d’elle. Enfin elle assit la Défiance à ce
berceau. Pendant l’absence du comte, elle osa faire venir le
chirurgien de qui elle avait bien retenu le nom. Pour elle, Beauvouloir
était un être envers lequel elle avait une immense dette de
reconnaissance à payer; mais elle désirait surtout le questionner sur
mille choses relatives à son fils. Si l’on devait empoisonner Étienne,
comment pouvait-elle déjouer les tentatives? comment gouverner sa
frêle santé? fallait-il l’allaiter longtemps? Si elle mourait, Beauvouloir
se chargerait-il de veiller sur la santé du pauvre enfant?
Aux questions de la comtesse, Beauvouloir attendri lui répondit
qu’il redoutait autant qu’elle le poison pour Étienne; mais sur ce
point, la comtesse n’avait rien à craindre tant qu’elle le nourrirait de
son lait; puis pour l’avenir, il lui recommanda de toujours goûter à la
nourriture d’Étienne.
—Si madame la comtesse, ajouta le rebouteur, sent quoi que ce
soit d’étrange sur la langue, une saveur piquante, amère, forte,
salée, tout ce qui étonne le goût enfin, rejetez l’aliment. Que les
vêtements de l’enfant soient lavés devant vous, et gardez la clef du
bahut où ils seront. Enfin, quoi qu’il lui arrive, mandez-moi, je
viendrai.
Les enseignements du rebouteur se gravèrent dans le cœur de
Jeanne, qui le pria de compter sur elle comme sur une personne
dont il pouvait disposer; Beauvouloir lui dit alors qu’elle tenait entre
ses mains tout son bonheur.
Il raconta succinctement à la comtesse comment le seigneur
d’Hérouville, faute de belles et de nobles amies qui voulussent de lui
à la cour, avait aimé dans sa jeunesse une courtisane surnommée la
Belle Romaine, et qui précédemment appartenait au cardinal de
Lorraine. Bientôt abandonnée, la Belle Romaine était venue à Rouen
pour solliciter de plus près le comte en faveur d’une fille de laquelle il
ne voulait point entendre parler, en alléguant sa beauté pour ne la
point reconnaître. A la mort de cette femme qui périt misérable, la
pauvre enfant, nommée Gertrude, encore plus belle que sa mère,
avait été recueillie par les Dames du couvent des Clarisses, dont la
supérieure était mademoiselle de Saint-Savin, tante de la comtesse.
Ayant été appelé pour soigner Gertrude, il s’était épris d’elle à en
perdre la tête. Si madame la comtesse, dit Beauvouloir, voulait
entremettre cette affaire, elle s’acquitterait non-seulement de ce
qu’elle croyait lui devoir, mais encore il s’estimerait être son
redevable. Ainsi sa venue au château, fort dangereuse aux yeux du
comte, serait justifiée; puis tôt ou tard, le comte s’intéresserait à une
si belle enfant, et pourrait peut-être un jour la protéger indirectement
en le faisant son médecin.

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Ethical Responsiveness and the

Politics of Difference 1st ed. Edition

ISBN 978-3-319-93957-5 ISBN 978-3-319-93958-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952067

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: ass29/iStock/Getty Images Plus

This book began with a colloquium on Ethical Responsiveness held at the

This volume is the outcome of a Vice-Chancellor’s VISA Award from

1 From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness

3 On Liberty on Listening: John Stuart Mill and the Limits

4 Listening with Recognition for Social Justice 57

5 Freedom and Listening: Islamic and Secular Feminist

6 When the Students Are Revolting: The (Im)Possibilities

7 Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness

8 Watching to Witness: Responses Beyond Empathy

9 Facing Vulnerability: Reading Refugee Child Photographs

10 The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics

11 Silence as a Form of Agency? Exploring the Limits

12 Noble Speech/Thunderous Silence: Towards a Buddhist

13 Indigenous Research Methodologies and Listening

research on democratic innovations in post-disaster contexts. She is editor

to broadening and challenging key concepts that inform policies and

Fig. 12.1 A Buddhist alter-political rubric on speech and silence (Part I)

From Voice to Response: Ethical

Tanja Dreher and Anshuman A. Mondal

This book focuses on the ethics, politics, and practices of responsiveness in

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Some aspects of this conjuncture are especially germane to the issues

First Nations resurgence in settler colonies including Australia, Canada,

on dissenting Arab voices (Titley et al. 2017). In so many ‘free speech

Re-orienting the Politics of Difference:

to foreground the politics of reception, and in this volume we focus atten-

One notable exception to this imbalance between voice/expression/

foregrounding the ethics of response in debates about the politics of dif-

This is not simply a matter of what ‘happens’ to signifiers as they migrate

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the contemporary retrenchment

demonstrate in relation to Duterte’s violent (both physically and rhetori-

Beyond Western Liberalism

The particular challenge for scholars trained in the modern disciplinary

side of voice/speech/representation therefore requires the mobilisation

Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics

By focusing on practices and politics of responsiveness, the chapters in this

debates on distant suffering and potential responsiveness by demonstrat-

developing ethics rooted in non-Western epistemologies is further taken

Dreher, Tanja, Lisa Waller, and Kerry McCallum. 2018. Disruption or

Tanja Dreher and Poppy de Souza

This chapter develops an argument that the politics of listening should be

© The Author(s) 2018 21

(Coles 2004) that requires commitment and courage (Thill 2009). As

Locating Listening in Settler Colonial Australia

what he termed The Great Australian Silence, a ‘cult of forgetfulness prac-

In light of the research and media attention, it is evident that Aboriginal

­ istories. As settlers, we take on the responsibility to consider ways in

Bickford identifies a normative standard that is ‘neither consensus or con-

Whether our perspectives merge, or we disagree but must act, we might be

The shifting of responsibility and the commitment to difference means

UNSW is located in Sydney, Australia, several suburbs away from the

The Acknowledgement of Bedegal ownership of the land on which the

1 From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness

3 On Liberty on Listening: John Stuart Mill and the Limits

4 Listening with Recognition for Social Justice 57

5 Freedom and Listening: Islamic and Secular Feminist

6 When the Students Are Revolting: The (Im)Possibilities

7 Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness

8 Watching to Witness: Responses Beyond Empathy

9 Facing Vulnerability: Reading Refugee Child Photographs

10 The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics

11 Silence as a Form of Agency? Exploring the Limits

12 Noble Speech/Thunderous Silence: Towards a Buddhist

13 Indigenous Research Methodologies and Listening

istories. As settlers, we take on the responsibility to consider ways in

r eckoning with an investment in the status quo or the benefits of ongoing

on-Indigenous people. In her Welcome to Country speech at a 2017