Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

<p><b>Addresses the question of how language affects the subject of speech through readings of confessional philosophical and fictional writings.</b></p><p>At least since Aristotle's Peri <i>hermeneias</i> 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. <i>Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)</i> 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.</p>