Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/15/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Colin Jager will present at the Humanities Center Colloquium on Thursday, October 15th @ 3:30pm in 4010 JFSB. This presentation will explore what it means to be “called” by a voice, a person, or a purpose, drawing on philosophy, sound studies, and examples from Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Kendrick Lamar to examine the relationship between sound, responsibility, and human experience. We hope you’ll join us. Refreshments will be served.
Title: Calling; or, Existential Sound
What does it mean to be “called” by something or someone outside the self? The language of calling survives in religious and legal traditions, and it points to a complex relationship both to authority and to what Sartre called responsibility–the manner, that is, in which we take up a situation and make it our own. Engaging with the literature in phenomenology and sound studies, this talk explores the idea of an invariant connection between a sound and its source. Aided by examples from Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Kendrick Lamar, I identify a tradition of thought that I am calling “existential sound,” for which the relevant matter is not epistemological skepticism but ontological faithfulness.
About our presenter:
Colin Jager is Professor of English and the former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. He is the author of two academic monographs, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007) and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015) and of articles on romanticism, religion, consciousness, secularism and existentialism. In 2018 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Lancaster University; in 2025-26 he was Laurance Rockefeller faculty fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
