This working group’s point of departure is the proposition that democracy can be understood not primarily as a space of visibility, discursivity, or deliberation, but as an acoustic field structured by reverberation, resonance, and the distribution of what can be heard. Its ethos lies not in a self-centered, intentional gaze that administers a visible order of representation, but in a tentative, exposed voice that reconfigures what it means to appear and expose oneself in public. Following Blanchot’s claim that “to speak is not to see,” democracy may depend on the capacity to speak without the assurance of visibility, to inhabit a space where sounding precedes authoritative recognition.
Within this acoustic horizon, two phenomenological registers orient the inquiry: voice and rhythm. Voice is approached in its relation to interiority, presence, and authority, while exceeding the subject that emits it and opening onto a dimension of mere sounding. Voice thus marks a threshold at which subjectivity is both constituted and unsettled, where the speaking individual is at once singular and a conduit for impersonal, collective, or relational forces. Rhythm, by contrast, designates the temporal and relational dynamics through which bodies gather, synchronize, and disperse, shaping modes of shared existence that resist stabilization in fixed identities. Together, voice and rhythm offer a way of thinking the political as an ongoing process of sounding, in which singular expressions and collective formations continually modulate one another.
The working group extends this inquiry into literary practices, with a particular focus on autofiction. Here, the question of voice becomes inseparable from issues of narration, authorship, and subject formation: What is at stake in invoking a “voice” in writing? How do author and reader participate in the emergence of voice as an effect of the text? And how do contemporary practices of self-writing unsettle the boundaries between interiority and exposure, singularity and collectivity? By bringing philosophical, political, and literary perspectives into dialogue, we seek to explore how voice and rhythm operate across these domains as key modalities through which subjectivity, truth, and democratic participation are acoustically constituted.
The working group engages a selection of philosophical, political, and literary texts that trace the acoustic dimensions of voice and rhythm across different traditions. Readings range from foundational distinctions between phone and logos (Aristotle) to critiques of phonocentrism and theories of vocal singularity (Derrida, Cavarero, Barthes), as well as reflections on listening, narration, and impersonal voice (Nancy, Blanchot, Kristeva, Cixous). In parallel, readings on rhythm explore its linguistic, ontological, and political articulations (Benveniste, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari) alongside accounts of mimetic resonance and collective formation (Lacoue-Labarthe, Benjamin, Canetti). Combined, the reading list provides a conceptual and methodological framework for examining how voice and rhythm shape modes of subjectivity, expression, and democratic participation.
Members: Achim Geisenhanslüke, Lorena Nauschnegg, Omer Oushia, Robert Thyssen
