For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression

ISBN-13: 9780804749558 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 292 str.

Adriana Cavarero; Paul Kottman

Opis

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter -what- she says. We take this fact for granted--for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, -Who is speaking?- and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, -It's me.- Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history--along with the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality--might be grasped as the -devocalization of Logos, - as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures--from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers--provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a -politics of the voice- wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking.