Please join us for the launch of On the (Im)Possibility of Listening to Oneself by María del Rosario Acosta López. María will be joined by her colleague Fanny Söderbäck, for an informal conversation on questions of the unspeakable. The publication is part of a new series of pamphlets on listening, published in connection with The Listening Biennial.

Location: Errant Bodies studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin

María del Rosario Acosta López is a Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies in UC Riverside. She was until very recently Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. Before that she was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota. She obtained her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Colombian National University in 2007, and was a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, between 2013 and 2014. María conducts work on historical memory with survivors of police torture in Chicago and with survivors of political violence in Colombia. This work has informed her current book project, Grammars of Listening: Philosophical Approaches to Memory after Trauma.

Fanny Söderbäck is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University and the co-founder and co-director of the Kristeva Circle. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and has held positions at Siena College and DePaul University. She is the author of Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray (SUNY Press, 2019) and of numerous articles on topics ranging from embodiment, birth, Greek tragedy, and temporality to narration, historical memory, violence, and vulnerability. Her current research project, Between the Jewish Baltic to the Black Atlantic, examines attempts to narrate Jewish and Black women’s lives in the wake of violence, drawing from Hannah Arendt’s discussion of narration, Saidiya Hartman’s methodological framework of critical fabulation, and Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of narrative against destruction.