Image: Ear Study No. 1 | Richard Sanger Smith 1840 | Public Domain

Paper delivered at the Critical Legal Conference 2026, Westminster Law School.

This continues a question I first broached in a chapter dedicated to The Legal Theory of Costas Douzinas,¹ which in turn was inspired by his claim that:

the theory of justice is the oldest failure of human thought … We know injustice when we come across it; its truth is felt. However, every time a theory of justice is put into practice, it soon degenerates into another instance of injustice.²

Unlike theories of justice, injustice can be sensed through the body before it is fully explained. We can feel it physically and emotionally. This led me to ask the following: Is it possible to bypass theory and to sense not only injustice, but justice itself directly on and through the body?

I do not mean sensing the justice administered by a court, a judge’s ruling or sentencing. I mean sensing the kind of justice that is unable to be exhaustively accounted for in legal and political theory, a justice that exceeds every concept, law, and institutional form, a justice that some call—though I hesitate because of its theological connection—divine. My answer is: perhaps yes, through listening.

But first, is it even possible to listen to something and for that listening to disclose a form of pre-conceptual knowledge?

Again, I would argue that it is. One way of demonstrating this is through the use of cadences, which function like punctuation—full stops and commas—in music. The following will be particularly useful to you if you are not familiar with them. Listen to the following cadences and try to sense or feel what they disclose. Then reveal details about them underneath and compare them with what you sensed.

Cadence, I think, is an especially useful heuristic because it is fairly easy to demonstrate, as I hope we have seen, how slight differences in sound can directly produce very different effects. Now to be clear, I am not saying those effects are independent of culture. And I am also not saying that they are the same as justice or even a representation of justice. I am saying that cadence offers a partial analogy with how we might sense justice. In other words, the way cadences affect us points to listening as a possible mode of apprehending pre-conceptual knowledge.

If listening, then, may be a way of sensing justice, but no musical event—let alone an isolated cadence—can be equated with justice, what if we were to consider instead the withdrawal of all forms of determinate sound, including music itself? Could this be a way of listening to justice? This is where I would bring silence into the argument and, importantly, distinguish between two kinds.

First, listen to the following cadential silence:

The delay in the expected resolution was effectively a silence, but one that I hope you will agree was not empty. The silence was filled with expectation or pressure. What had sounded before remained active in what was no longer sounding.

Silence also structures rhythm. A drumbeat does not sound continuously: it strikes, stops, and strikes again. The body dances into those gaps.

Now, the silences of music, whether they suspend a melody or give life to rhythm, are still silences held within sound and derive their power from their musical context. This is the first kind of silence.

But I would like to suggest another, second kind of silence, one that music can only gesture towards. This is not the space between the notes or beats, or even what follows the final cadence, but the silence beyond music altogether, the withdrawal of the sonic as such. This is a silence that marks the existential limit of sense itself, the withdrawal of every determinate articulation.

I am tempted to call this a radical silence—a sonic withdrawal that leaves only the relation of listening, a relation to something that does not sound, and from which something is nonetheless promised. This is the limit point of sense, and at that limit, listening no longer possesses what it hears as an object. It remains only as openness and response. This is what I have elsewhere called just listening.³

So far, I have treated listening as a mode through which something can be apprehended without the need for it to be theorised, conceptualised or explained. But I would go even further and claim that listening could itself be a form of thinking, provided that thinking is distinguished from theorising.

For me, thinking is a creative activity. In contrast, theory tends to calcify thinking, entombing it within various discourses. Thinking, then, in the Heideggerian register I invoke here, comes before theory: as responsiveness to something that calls for thought but has not yet assumed a determinate form—what Heidegger calls the Zusage, the pledge or promise that precedes the question and makes questioning possible.⁴ Thinking is a listening like that of the composer or improviser, that is, to what has not yet sounded but promises to come.

Such a listening may offer a way to think a justice that exceeds every articulation. This does not mean that there is simply nothing to hear. On the contrary, in this silence—the withdrawal of the sound-object—listening remains exposed to an exigency. Heidegger writes that ‘silence, too, which is often regarded as the source [or origin] of speaking, is itself already a corresponding’.⁵

The crucial term for me is ‘corresponding’. This is a translation of Entsprechen, which carries sprechen, to speak, within it. The English term carries something within it too: to correspond is to co-respond, to answer with and to what addresses us. Silence, then, is a mode of responsiveness, a co-responding to an exigency that has already touched the senses before any attempt to articulate it.

In his meditation on ‘Heidegger’s Ear’, Derrida notes Heidegger’s insistence that hearing must be thought starting from listening and not the other way round.⁶ Though hearing is a physical sense, the organs of hearing are not necessary to be disposed towards hearing. Derrida recalls Heidegger’s view that ‘we do not hear because we have ears, but we have ears because we hear’.⁷ Being able to listen to what disposes itself to being heard is a unique form of receptivity and, I would also add, a gift to creativity.

At the beginning I asked: Is it possible to bypass theory and to sense not only injustice, but justice itself directly on and through the body? I gave the answer: perhaps yes, through listening. I can now qualify that by saying perhaps yes, through listening, but not in the same way. If injustice is sensed through particular bodily and affective experiences, then justice may also be sensed—listened to and heard—but as exigency without closure.

To just listen is to remain exposed to this non-closure, and the thinking to which this gives rise is a form of co-responding, a responsiveness to what remains unheard in every judgement, every law, every claim to have done justice. Just listening discloses justice as inexhaustibility, incommensurability and deconstruction.

1Gilbert Leung, ‘Just Listening,’ in Rights, Resistance and Critique: The Legal Theory of Costas Douzinas, ed. Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa and Illan Rua Wall (London: Routledge, 2026), chapter 5.

2Costas Douzinas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Polity 2013) 80.

3Leung, ‘Just Listening,’ n 1.

4Cf Jacques Derrida, Of Spirt (University of Chicago Press 1989), 129 footnote 5.

5Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language,’ in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 131.

6Jacques Derrida, ’Heidegger’s ear: Philopolemology’ in ‘Reading Heidegger: Commemorations’ (John Wallis ed., Indiana University Press 1993) 188.

7Ibid.