Kristina Mendicino 
Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) [EPUB ebook] 

At least since Aristotle’s Peri
hermeneias, there has been talk of the pathos of language, of language as ‘symbols of the affections in the soul.’ The way these affections are registered, however, suggests that they are themselves structured like language. For Aristotle and others, language is suffered before any sense can be voiced. The pathos of language thus becomes a question of how language affects the subject of speech and, in the last analysis, of how language could respond to these questions of language.
Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) approaches these questions, first, through readings of Augustine’s investigations into language and mind and Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of passive synthesis. It then traces the further resonance of Augustine’s and Husserl’s interventions in selected literary experiments by Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot that recall Husserl and Augustine while exceeding the restrictive fictions of phenomenological ‘science.’ In drawing out the echoes that emerge across confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings, this book exposes the ways in which speech occurs in the passive voice and affects any claim to experience.

Table des matières

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Principally Unprincipled; or, Speaking of “Beginnings”



1. “Self” -Citations in Husserl and Augustine



2. Provocations: “I, ” Husserl, and the Passive Voices of Phenomenology



3. Parsing Pairing: George Bataille and the Scripts of Subjectivity



4. Writing Out of Sight: On the Papers and Traces of Kafka



5. Passive Voices: Echoes, Blanchot



Postscript

Notes

Works Cited

Index

A propos de l’auteur

Kristina Mendico is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of
Announcements: On Novelty, also published by SUNY Press, and
Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism.