Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin's idea of the optical unconscious? In the
1930s Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention
of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive
before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us
to hear otherwise that is to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear.
Crucially they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words which Benjamin was
already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from
Tieck's Blonde Eckbert which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of
forgetting to Alexander Kluge's films and short texts where he develops what he calls sound
perspectives this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our
understanding of different media from the written word to radio and film. As the first
book-length study of Benjamin's linguistic cultural-historical and media-theoretical
reflections on sound this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both
German studies and sound studies.
