Download the chapter: On Banishing Socrates’ Wife: The Interiority of the Ear in Phaedo

This essay appeared in Nathan Brown and Petar Milat’s 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.