Presented by the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies

This talk offers an overview of María del Rosario Acosta López's philosophical approach to listening as a response to what she calls "traumatic forms of violence." The task of listening to testimony in these contexts, she argues, is an aes-ethical one, since it involves a critique of the very criteria that decide in advance what is to be made audible and what is not, as well as an ethical commitment to listening to the "inaudito," a word in Spanish that denotes both the unheard and the unheard-of (that which is and has remained inaudible, while also radically challenging our ethical imagination and capacity for judgment). She will also briefly discuss the historical and political contexts in Colombia and in Chicago that have allowed her to arrive at these questions philosophically, and that are closely related to memory and counter-memory initiatives, as well as to various forms of aesth-ethical activism. 

Cosponsored by Penn's Department of Philosophy and Wolf Humanities Center.

María del Rosario Acosta López (PhD in Philosophy from Colombia's National University) is a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Philosophy at UC Riverside. She teaches and conducts research in aesthetics, critical theory, political philosophy, and decolonial studies, with an emphasis on issues of memory and trauma in the Americas. Her recent publications focus on aesthetics of resistance in Latin American art, decolonial perspectives on memory and history, and epistemic injustice and epistemic violence. She has recently co-edited volumes on F. Schiller (SUNY 2018), critique in German philosophy from Kant to the present (SUNY 2020), transitional justice in Colombia (Planeta 2023) and politics of memory in Colombia (World Humanities Report, 2023); and special issues on Memory and Art in Colombia (H-Art 2025) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Palabra y razón, 2024). Her most recent book is titled Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (forthcoming in Spanish with Herder and in preparation in English for Fordham). She is also working on the final editions of two manuscripts, one in Spanish on community in Hegel, Nancy, Esposito and Agamben (Narrativas de la comunidad: de Hegel a los pensadores impolíticos, in preparation for Ediciones Macul), and one in English, The Unstoppable Murmur of Being-Together, co-authored with Jean-Luc Nancy and the Group on Law and Violence (in preparation for Fordham).