Echo: Or, on the Origin of Words

It is within the context of thinking about the phenomenology and semiotics of the human experience of the world that this article explores the twin topics of sound and listening. The discussion is informed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent volume Listening, a philosophy of sound that, I argue, raises communication as a question of listening. The first part of the article draws out this question from Nancy. The second part connects it to Werner Hamacher’s examination of the word as a gift of Being (Heidegger), which resonates, or can be heard, I argue, as an echo of being when taken up in communication. The perspectives on listening, word, and echo advanced in the article demonstrate how human communication may be understood philosophically, rather than theoretically, as a reversible semiotic and phenomenological relation