For more than one voice : toward a philosophy of vocal expression / Adriana Cavarero ; translated and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cavarero, Adriana.

Standardized Title:

A piy voci. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Speech--Philosophy.

Speech.

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

Philosophy--History.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

How logos lost its voice

Women who sing

A politics of voices.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [242]-262) and index.

ISBN:

0-8047-6730-0

1-4237-1655-8

OCLC:

614980358