When it comes to understanding the ontology of individual existence—that is, the everyday behaviors that we all perform and hardly ever think about—the voice has a particularly complicated status. Together with writing, voice is the medium expressing ideas that, broadly speaking, we have previously formed in our minds. At the same time, voices trigger vague images and associations that do not have determinate forms.
Writing in both a personal and philosophical register, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores the complexity of the voice as an understudied philosophical, social, and existential phenomenon. He starts out with a focus on its core intellectual problem as 'the knot of the voice’ —referring to the inseparable proximity between meanings, images, and the physical perceptions on which they depend. In conversation with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Luhmann, and above all Roland Barthes, Gumbrecht addresses topics that range from the social functions of the voice to its status in different historical contexts, and to the ways in which the perception of voices animates imagination. Throughout, incisive analyses of moments such as Julius Caesar’s purportedly high-pitched voice, the surprisingly fragile authority of God’s voice in the Torah and in the Gospel, and Gumbrecht’s own personal attachment to the voices of popular singers such as Edith Piaf, Elvis Presley, and Adele, create a portrait of the voice that is both philosophically challenging and entertaining to read.
Spis treści
1. The Knot of the Voice:Energies of Impulse and Conceptual Intersections
2. Voices and Existential Spaces:The Fabric of Everyday Worlds
3. Singing Along:The Emergence of Mystical Bodies
4. Voices in History:Living Through Ontological Discontinuity
5. Voices and Imagining:On the Verge of Agency
6. Voices with Neutral Perfection:The Address of Transcendental Authority
7. Overwhelming Voices:An Unconcealment of Closeness
Gratitude for Intellectual Closeness
Notes
O autorze
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. His many books include
Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004),
In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006),
Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012),
After 1945 (Stanford, 2013), and
Crowds (Stanford, 2021), and
Prose of the World (Stanford, 2021).
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