Listening Against Morality: Toward a Receptive Praxis of the Unwanted

Listening, in its most familiar form, is tethered to virtue. We are taught that to listen is to care, to be generous, to bridge the gap between self and other. In the moral order, listening is the evidence of our goodness — a quiet proof of empathy, a performance of inclusion. Yet precisely here lies the problem. When listening becomes a moral task, it risks narrowing into a selective attention, an instrument of validation that hears only what aligns with our values. It becomes a filtering system rather than a field of encounter.

 

To listen against morality is to loosen this tether. It is not a rejection of care, but a refusal of its domestication; of only offering convenient care. It is an opening beyond the binary of good and bad listening — a step into the ambiguous, the dissonant, the difficult. Such listening is not performed to redeem the self or to soothe the other. It is not a therapeutic gesture or a disciplinary demand. Instead, it is a mode of attunement that lingers precisely where comfort falters.

 

We must begin by recognising how rarely we actually listen beyond ourselves. Too often, listening is an echo chamber: a reinforcement of what we already know, already believe, already desire to be true. This is a human condition. We lean toward the familiar cadences, the tones that reassure, the narratives that stabilise our sense of the world. We are trained in this, and it’s embedded in both our biology and culture. We listen for confirmation, rarely confrontation. In this, listening becomes complicit with broader architectures of control: algorithms that amplify the recognisable, institutions that reward certain speech acts, and cultural habits that privilege clarity over complexity. Voices that disturb, contradict, or destabilise are muted. Listening, when considered a moral, becomes a gatekeeper rather than a gateway.

 

A listening against morality resists this narrowing. It does not curate what it allows in. It receives not only the speech that affirms but also the utterance that wounds, the tone that disgusts, the silence that oppresses. It stretches receptivity beyond the realm of agreement, drawing in that which unsettles the self’s coherence. And crucially, it knows that hearing is not the same as endorsing. Just because we listen does not mean we must understand, justify, or agree. The full arc of our human existence is messy, complex, and often interwoven with histories and relations we barely grasp. Listening can be an act of attention without allegiance — a willingness to be in the presence of what we cannot or will not absorb.

 

Listening against morality also resists the fantasy of resolution. Where moral frameworks seek closure — a judgment rendered, a lesson learned — this listening stays with the unresolved. It dwells in the noise rather than extracting meaning from it. It becomes a practice of negative reception: gathering fragments that do not fit, allowing them to circulate without forcing them into harmony. In this, listening approaches the diplomatic and the poetic: it mediates without reconciling, holds without fixing. A preconceived moral response to what we encounter — a desire to find relief, harmony, resonance or beauty — hinders our ability to listen-with the encountered; to actually meet and foster relationships anew.

 

Crucially, this listening is not passive. Its receptivity is active, even insurgent. It counters systems of power that instrumentalize listening as surveillance or consumption by cultivating a more vulnerable, ungovernable openness. It becomes a site of encounter where asymmetries are felt and shared rather than erased, where histories of violence and exclusion reverberate without being pacified, glorified or inscribed in shifting moral dogmas. It insists on hearing the remainder — that which is left out, that which resists articulation — and in doing so, it unsettles the moral desire to master or contain.

 

To listen against morality, then, is to enter into a practice of living with what exceeds our comprehension and current values – a listening with what also disgust and upsets us. It is to treat listening not as a virtue but as a space of risk and exposure — an exposure that does not guarantee understanding, reconciliation, or goodness. This is listening as a poetic: an ongoing, unfinished engagement with the world as it is, not as it ought to be. It is an apprenticeship to what hurts and what haunts, to the whispers that disturb as much as the voices that console. To listen against morality is to listen against human mastery, dominant suppressive structures and to acknowledge the frictions within our encounter of others. And in remaining with these tensions — without seeking to solve them — we discover another possibility: a listening that does not confirm who we are, but transforms how we inhabit the world.

This text were written in relation to and under the manifestation of The Listening Biennial, 3rd edition, as it unfolded in Copenhagen. It’s the result of many people’s thinking, different notes and fragments, and slow conversation becoming condensed text. Many nuances, forgotten questions, and fun imaginations escaped the process of being included into the gathering of this text.

 

 

Especially the essays Against Morality by Rosanna McLaughlin and On Third Listening by Brandon LaBelle were influential on its becoming.