Lives of the Voice
eBook - ePub

Lives of the Voice

An Essay on Closeness

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Lives of the Voice

An Essay on Closeness

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Lives of the Voice by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Aesthetics in Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. One. The Knot of the Voice: Energies of Impulse and Conceptual Intersections
  7. Two. Voices and Existential Spaces: The Fabric of Everyday Worlds
  8. Three. Singing Along: The Emergence of Mystical Bodies
  9. Four. Voices in History: Living Through Ontological Discontinuity
  10. Five. Voices and Imagining: On the Verge of Agency
  11. Six. Voices with Neutral Perfection: The Address of Transcendental Authority
  12. Seven. Overwhelming Voices: An Unconcealment of Closeness
  13. Gratitude for Intellectual Closeness
  14. Notes