Download the chapter: On Banishing Socrates’ Wife: The Interiority of the Ear in Phaedo
This essay appeared in Nathan Brown and Petar Milat’s 2017 volume, Poiesis.
“On Banishing Socrates’ Wife: The Interiority of the Ear in Phaedo” reads the scene of Socrates’ last argument for the first stirrings in the western tradition of an autonomous ear. It is the ear that listens to headphones and is determined to keep the voices of others for ourselves. It belongs to a subjectivity that cannot comfortably admit death. Working through the etymology of choreography (from choreo, or to admit), it is feminist intervention in the notion of Socratic listening, the essay redeems for the last argument and the autonomous ear a place for Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife. She is the background, the resonance, the outside. She admits death.
Julie Beth Napolin studies the history and theory of sound and its intersections with the novel, film, art, performance, psychoanalysis, gender, and race, asking what practices of listening can tell us about the politics of memory and form. She is the co-Editor of the William Faulkner Journal, a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the former President of the New School chapter of the American Association of University Professors. She received her PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley.