Published in 1967, Voice and Phenomenon marked a crucial turning point in Derrida's thinking: the culmination of a 15-year-long engagement with the phenomenological tradition. It also introduced the concepts and themes that would become deconstruction. Voice and Phenomenon is a short book, but it can be an overwhelming text, particularly for inexperienced readers of Derrida's work. This is the first guide to clearly explain the structure of his argument, step by step.

Reading Voice and Phenomenon from a phenomenological perspective, this paper argues that the book is an internal criticism of Husserlian phenomenology that, among other things, can serve as an introduction to Husserl’s genetic method. Derrida’s most powerful arguments are delivered by turning the Cartesian method of Logical Investigations and Ideas I to Husserl’s inquiries into time-consciousness; as such, it is a phenomenological criticism through and through. An analysis of Husserl’s later manuscripts and lectures published posthumously shows that driven by (...) what Derrida calls the radicality of intuitionism, Husserl has developed a genetic phenomenological method that breaks free from the metaphysics of presence and arrived at a conception of meaning and language that is similar to Derrida’s. (shrink)

Published in 1967, when Derrida is 37 years old, Voice and Phenomenon appears at the same moment as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. All three books announce the new philosophical project called “deconstruction.” Although Derrida will later regret the fate of the term “deconstruction,” he will use it throughout his career to define his own thinking. While Writing and Difference collects essays written over a 10 year period on diverse figures and topics, and Of Grammatology aims its deconstruction (...) at “the age of Rousseau,” Voice and Phenomenon shows deconstruction engaged with the most important philosophical movement of the last hundred years: phenomenology. Only in relation to phenomenology is it possible to measure the importance of deconstruction. Only in relation to Husserl’s philosophy is it possible to understand the novelty of Derrida’s thinking. Voice and Phenomenon therefore may be the best introduction to Derrida’s thought in general. To adapt Derrida’s comment on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, it contains “the germinal structure” of Derrida’s entire thought. Lawlor’s fresh translation of Voice and Phenomenon brings new life to Derrida’s most seminal work. (shrink)

Translator's introduction: The germinal structure of Derrida's thought -- Translator's note -- Introduction -- Sign and signs -- The reduction of indication -- Meaning as soliloquy -- Meaning and representation -- The sign and the blink of an eye -- The voice that keeps silent -- The originative supplement.

Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl in Voice and Phenomenon targets several ways in which Husserl’s theory of signs is said to remain dependent on a model of presence, and therefore to be a form of onto-theology. In a sense this simply extends Martin Heidegger’s own critique of Husserl as failing to account for what remains obscure behind any presentation to the mind. Yet Derrida’s critique is ultimately more radical than Heidegger’s, though the radicality is in this case unjustified. (...) Namely, Derrida goes beyond Heidegger’s critique of presence to mount an additional critique of “self-presence,” which is more often known as “identity.” Derrida’s insufficiently motivated critique of identity leads to additional problems for his philosophy. (shrink)

The article deals with the analysis of the experience of calling in the existential and phenomenological aspects. The phenomenon of call revealed in the experience of sensing and understanding of human being towards the world and as an event of a personal existence. The study proves that calling responds to the human need of going over the limits of own self towards the co-existence with people, serving the life-work and the ideals. The author analyses the problem of existential and religious (...) truth. The research discovers the meaning of voices and silence in the phenomenal field of calling. Analyzed the difference between the vocal and visual experience, between the feeling and seeing, the necessity of organization of a sound being in human self-consciousness. The meaning of silence is explicated as an internal space of human experience. Silence is researched as an existential phenomenon, as a special mood making possible for a personality to experience the fullness of being. Silence is revealed as an existential dimension of the origin of language, of the voice of conscience and as a reality of the experience of responsibility of a personality. Therefore, in silence takes place sensing of oneself and occurs the revelation of a call for a person. (shrink)

In this introduction we present the orthodox account of auditory verbal hallucinations, a number of worries for this account, and some potential responses open to its proponents. With some problems still remaining, we then introduce the problems presented by the phenomenon of thought insertion, in particular the question of how different it is supposed to be from AVHs. We then mention two ways in which theorists have adopted different approaches to voices and thoughts in psychosis, and then present the motivation (...) and composition of this special issue. (shrink)

The article examines the situation of the presence of virtual voices in modern reality. The voices of virtual assistants model a new relationship between voice and face, with anonymity and depersonalization being a priority. The closeness of the face from the voice peculiar to virtual assistants, the detachment of the voice from the facial "accompaniment", the fundamental possibility of the existence of a voice without a face — all this gives the voice as an anthropological (...) and cultural phenomenon of modernity fundamentally new parameters. Digital "logic" implies a departure from the human logos, which can be clearly seen in the example of the problem of "gender" of artificial assistants. Special attention is paid to the problem of correlation of voice and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence as an organizational form of cognition acquires a voice, merges with a voice, becomes a voice. The universal scale of the claims of virtual voices requires theological reflection, because the religious experience of "working" with voices, represented in a wide range of world religions, is able to offer a unique interpretation of the role of the voice in modern times. Internet voices can be called into the liturgical space, where they will be asked to sound in new registers and keys. Digital religion appears as a new liturgical reality, a new common cause. It is significant that the non-spiritual technogenic environment can only offer emptiness — the emptiness of digital dehumanization. Digital-humanitarian unity can be built on the adoption of a spiritual foundation, based on the conclusion of a "pact" on cooperation between the spiritual experience of mankind and cyber-information perspectives. (shrink)

This text practices a philosophical voice that deviates from visuo-centric theory and the muteness of its language and instead sings a complex simultaneity of things and thoughts that burn through the walls of the discipline and illuminate the activities at the margins. This philosophical voice sings a refrain of “I,” which brings us back to bring us forward, surprising us in its renewal again and again. It is a body that is, as Samuel Beckett’s Not I, at once (...) not I and I; an idiosyncratic subjectivity that carries its plural name in its mouth. In this way, it further diffracts the sonic possibility of counterfactual slices into simultaneous dimensionalities open to our gaze in the dark, when we have let go of a normative orientation and are able to see the image at its depth. Between text scores, Churten theory, Canto Cardenche, and the breath of a humpback whale, this voice tries not to theorise. It does not want to produce a philosophical message, supporting a “philosophism” which akin to “scientism” treats philosophy as a phenomenon unconnected to cultural values or location, gender or racial specificity. Instead, it aims to practice a philosophy that opens in song to its own anxiety of objectivity, its fear of a reflective centre, and performs a translucent marginality that generates the view of a plural world burning through a permeable skin. (shrink)

This book is a critical examination of certain basic issues and themes crucial to understanding how ethics currently interfaces with health care and biomedical research. Beginning with an overview of the field, it proceeds through a delineation of such key notions as trust and uncertainty, dialogue involving talk and listening, the vulnerability of the patient against the asymmetric power of the health professional, along with professional and individual responsibility. It emphasizes several themes fundamental to ethics and health care: (1) the (...) work of ethics requires strict focus on the specific situational understanding of each involved person. (2) Moral issues, at least those intrinsic to each clinical encounter, are presented solely within the contexts of their actual occurrence; therefore, ethics must not only be practical but empirical in its approach. (3) Each particular situation is in its own way imprecise and uncertain, and the different types and dimensions of imprecision and uncertainty are critical for everyone involved. (4) Finally, medicine and health care more broadly are governed by the effort to make sense of the healer's experiences with the patient, whose own experiences and interpretations are ingredient to what the healer seeks to understand and eventually treat. In addition to providing a way to develop ethical considerations in clinical life and research projects, the book proposes that narratives provide the finest way to state and grapple with these themes and issues, whether in classrooms or real-life situations. It concludes with a prospective analysis of newly emerging issues presented by and within the new genetics, which, together within a focus on the phenomenon of birth, leads to an clearer understanding of human life. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals who feel psychologically safe believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as voicing concerns, asking questions and giving feedback. Psychological safety is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by organizational, team and individual level factors. However, it has primarily been assessed as a team-level phenomenon. This study focused on understanding healthcare professionals' individual experiences of psychological safety. We aim to gain a fuller understanding of the influence team leaders, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics have on individuals' (...) psychological safety and their decisions to engage in voice or silence behavior. Thirty-four interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals from across five teams working within an acute, suburban hospital. Hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis focused on identifying themes which captured the complexities of individuals' varied experiences of psychological safety. The themes identified were: “Personal Characteristics,” “Past Experiences,” “Individual Perceptions of Being Valued,” and “Judged Appropriateness of Issues/Concerns.” These themes are explored within the context of motivating and inhibiting factors associated with the influence of leadership, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics on experiences of psychological safety and voice behavior. These results extend existing theoretical frameworks guiding our understanding of psychological safety by accounting for the variation in individuals' experiences and studying these significant influences on voice behavior. Important considerations for the development of interventions to enhance psychological safety are discussed. (shrink)

Autism is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon. Not only is it difficult to understand the various and diverse aspects of autism, their relation to each other is also complex and still poorly understood. In my article, “Material encounters. A phenomenological account of social interaction in autism,” I have addressed this heterogeneity by presenting an understanding of how social features of autism relate to behavioral features. Straddling this divide between the social and the non-social that still pervades much thinking in philosophy, psychiatry, (...) and psychology is crucial for understanding the diverse experiences of autistic persons and... (shrink)

Behind the frequent occurrence of business scandals, it is often the silence and connivance of organizational immorality. Moral voice, a kind of employee active moral behavior, inhibits and prevents the organizational unethical phenomenon. Some researchers have sought to explore how to arouse employee moral voice. However, the limited studies mainly investigated the antecedents of leadership styles, ignoring the impact of the organizational factor on moral voice. Based on the self-determination theory, the current study constructs a theoretical model (...) about how socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM) affects employee moral voice via autonomous motivation and controlled motivation and further considering the moderating role of person–organization value fit. From a two-stage research method and the analysis of 260 valid data, we found that SRHRM promoted employee moral voice and this positive linkage was mediated by autonomous motivation but not by controlled motivation. Besides, the findings also revealed that person–organization fit moderated the indirect influences of SRHRM on moral voice via autonomous motivation, such that the indirect influence was stronger for a high level of person–organization value fit than the low level of person–organization value fit. Some theoretical and practical implications also be discussed. (shrink)

Received approaches to a unified phenomenon called “language” are firmly committed to a Cartesian view of distinct unobservable minds. Questioning this commitment leads us to recognize that the boundaries conventionally separating the linguistic from the non-linguistic can appear arbitrary, omitting much that is regularly present during vocal communication. The thesis is put forward that uttering, or voicing, is a much older phenomenon than the formal structures studied by the linguist, and that the voice has found elaborations and codifications in (...) other domains too, such as in systems of ritual and rite. Voice, it is suggested, necessarily gives rise to a temporally bound subjectivity, whether it is in inner speech (Descartes' “cogito”), in conversation, or in the synchronized utterances of collective speech found in prayer, protest, and sports arenas world wide. The notion of a fleeting subjective pole tied to dynamically entwined participants who exert reciprocal influence upon each other in real time provides an insightful way to understand notions of common ground, or socially shared cognition. It suggests that the remarkable capacity to construct a shared world that is so characteristic of Homo sapiens may be grounded in this ability to become dynamically entangled as seen, e.g., in the centrality of joint attention in human interaction. Empirical evidence of dynamic entanglement in joint speaking is found in behavioral and neuroimaging studies. A convergent theoretical vocabulary is now available in the concept of participatory sense-making, leading to the development of a rich scientific agenda liberated from a stifling metaphysics that obscures, rather than illuminates, the means by which we come to inhabit a shared world. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Michel Foucault's early monograph, Maladie Mentale et Psychologie (1954/62); specifically the focus is on the issue of anxiety, which Foucault treats as central to pathological signification. Through a close reading of the text of Maladie Mentale and a comparison of the work to interpretive trends in French psychoanalytic theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper argues that anxiety as a discursive phenomenon overruns psychological discourse as well as Foucault's own theoretical engagement of such discourse. In (...) conclusion, the paper finds that the voice of unreason Foucault detects in psychological discourse is the anxiety of theory confined within the limits of individual psychology. (shrink)

In the 1980s, new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer became commercially available in the United States, and somatic cell nuclear transfer—the cloning process by which Dolly the Sheep would be conceived in 1996—was in its experimental phase. While anxieties concerning these new technologies escalated in the popular sensorium, Laurie Anderson explored the phenomenon of cloning in a short musical film called What You Mean We? (1986) in which Anderson consults a design team to clone herself (...) in order to manage her demanding workload. The videographic image of the clone is Anderson herself, performing in drag, and her clone’s body is partially created through the use of a pitch shifter which changes Anderson’s voice to that of the cloned—but ostensibly male—version of herself. In this article, I investigate Anderson’s technological consideration of the body, which extends beyond her own corporeality, to interrogate the biological and affective capacities of clones. I consider how Anderson addresses the convergence of reproductive technologies, the market and the creation of subjects within this market as participating in a shift in how voices are heard, governed and reproduced in the latter half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a (...) turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks - Facebook and WhatsApp especially - became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and (...) discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the 'new war' in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans. (shrink)

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it (...) serves is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist (...) account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit. (shrink)

Debate continues regarding the purpose and practice of music in relation to participation, cultural origin, and education internationally. A Darwinian approach that sees musical vocalization as the adaptive bridge between animal communication and human language remains hotly disputed where such a model does not suit the prevailing political or social agenda. The two books under review present contrasting viewpoints and evidence, while their concurrent publication illustrates the rich potential for developments in this field. Friedmann’s edited book presents separate chapters by (...) sixteen independent authors cover­ing a range of specialisms and topics. Wood’s monograph is, by contrast, an encyclopaedic exploration of the earliest writings on musical theory from China, Greece, and India and their influence on the world’s music over the last 4,000 years. Read both separately and comparatively, these two publications offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of music and its practice today. (shrink)

As soon as we stop talking aloud, we seem to experience a kind of 'inner voice', a steady stream of verbal fragments expressing ongoing thoughts. What kind of information processing structures are required to explain such a phenomenon? Why would an 'inner voice' be useful? How could it have arisen? This paper explores these questions and reports briefly some computational experiments to help elucidate them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents eds. by Michael J. Schuck and John Crowley-BuckSteven P. MilliesDemocracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents Edited by Michael J. Schuck and John Crowley-Buck NEW YORK: FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 350 pp. $105.00 / $35.00Democracy, Culture, Catholicism is the product of a three-year, international project that started from a less specific inspiration. Originally begun at Loyola University Chicago's Joan and Bill (...) Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage in 2010 as a broad inquiry into the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and politics, the project leaders eventually took a different bearing from events as diverse as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in Veritate to focus their project more squarely on democracy. Examining democracy from within the diverse experiences found in Lithuania, Peru, Indonesia, and the United States, the editors [End Page 208] present us with a valuable snapshot of where the Catholic engagement with democracy as a cultural expression finds itself today in a global perspective.Given the amount of material at play, the volume is a monumental achievement, if only for the clarity with which it presents its findings. Some essays are stronger than others. Still, the volume benefits tremendously from an apparent and unusual amount of editorial attention that sequences the essays and interrelates them with useful references to one another in such a way that Democracy, Culture, Catholicism escapes entirely the fate of so many volumes of collected essays. Here, the reader has the sensation of reading one coherent narrative, not twenty-three disparately connected, individual essays. This alone is impressive.The volume possesses other strengths. Reflections emerge throughout that engage the deeper questions of democracy. Who are these people making decisions together? How can we understand the composition of a political community? Too much democratic theory overlooks the complex interweaving of history, memory, and identity that operates like a substrate of our consciousness beneath our reason while we are presuming ourselves to be rational decision makers using democratic procedures. The book's engagement not just with democracy and Catholicism but also with culture is important. These essays treat culture not only in different local expressions but also (and in a way that is deep, serious, and sustained) as a phenomenon of consciousness.The American perspective always lurks in the narrative, threatening to dominate. This is inevitable not only because the project was managed in the United States but also because the polarizing obsessions of the church in the United States about how to acknowledge the norms of modern political arrangements have tended to dominate conversation in the church worldwide. The editors have shrewdly chosen to save the United States for the last part of this volume, allowing other voices to come forward first to claim their own space. This editorial decision, like so many others, improves the volume and keeps the narrative in good balance. Still, some questions linger in this reviewer's mind as the volume concludes.What do we mean by democracy? Throughout, the authors treat this as a question that is largely settled. Democracy is identified with democratic values that the church accepts, and in Schuck's words, what is under way is "a critical conversation with the culture of democracy" (330). Yet procedural democracy cannot be severed from these values. Are democratic norms and values vindicated when majorities choose undemocratic values? A more careful drawing of distinctions between democracy, liberalism, and republicanism would expose the inner conflicts in which Catholicism meets modern political norms.Perhaps most urgently for the subject matter of this book, are the claims of Catholic social teaching and Christian ethics a foundation for the democratic, participatory values of this secular age, as writers like Charles Taylor and David [End Page 209] Walsh have suggested? This also would raise questions about how culturally conditioned we should understand democracy to be, surely an important consideration for this very fine study.Steven P. MilliesCatholic Theological UnionCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Socrates’ notorious “divine sign” (δαιμόνιον) was a challenge for the later philosophical (esp. Platonic) tradition. Different attempts at interpretation were made throughout late Antiquity. One interesting approach, discussed in this article, was the strategy of interpreting the phenomenon by means of Homeric material. In particular, Athena’s famous epiphany to Achilles at the beginning of Iliad Book 1 provides interesting opportunities in such a context, although other Homeric lines are occasionally used as well. This rich tradition, beginning with Plutarch’s De genio (...) Socratis, can also be found in authors such as Maximus of Tyre, Apuleius, Julian, and Hermias of Alexandria, and turns up again centuries later in Byzantine Homeric exegesis. (shrink)

This paper examines the dynamics of thought-language interactions within the organisational context of business. Based on an assessment of the cognition-voice debate within the cognitive sciences and related areas of philosophical enquiry, the paper proposes that thought and language are distinct systems. This notion of modularity is developed into a framework within which the two systems interact and, in doing so, influence and shape each other. These interactions form multiple thought and voiced drafts, reflecting the ‘multiple drafts’ model developed (...) by Daniel Dennett to examine the phenomenon of consciousness. The drafting and re-drafting of thought and language are analysed via critical consideration of two transcripts of interviews with owner-managers. The overall theoretical approach suggests that the dynamics of voice-cognition drafting offer insights into: the development of expert cognitive frameworks; patterns in group development — in particular the emergence of shared values and concepts within the business; and processes of experiential learning within organizations. (shrink)

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. They remain in our memory, and we may even "hear" them as if immediately present, (...) but we are unable to detach the propositional contents they articulate from the centrifugal effects that they have on our lives. 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 Bartes, 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. (shrink)

In the early 1970s Japan witnessed the emergence of a new women's liberation movement that put forward an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese post-war society. Known as ūman ribu (woman lib) or simply ribu (lib), this movement appeared at a historical time when the numerical increase in cases of mothers who killed their own children prompted the news media to describe maternal filicide as a dramatic social phenomenon. This article explores ribu's engagement with the increased public visibility of mothers who (...) kill. It contends that the solidarity and support the movement demonstrated for these criminalised mothers radically challenged idealised notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother—child bond, and deeply questioned the post-war nuclear family as the cornerstone of society. The article investigates the revolutionary potential of ribu's preoccupation with murderous mothers by framing it in the context of the movement's call for consciousness transformation and for the pursuance of a more genuine relationality, and it gestures towards an understanding of what might be at stake in reading maternal filicide through the interpretative grid of a revolutionary agenda. (shrink)

A new, provocative study of the ethical, political, and social meanings of the everyday voice. Utilising the framework of feminist philosophy, authors Ann J. Cahill and Christine Hamel approach the phenomenon of voice as a lived, sonorous and embodied experience marked by the social structures that surround it, including systemic forms of injustice such as ableism, sexism, racism, and classism. By developing novel theoretical constructs such as "intervocality" and "respiratory responsibility," Cahill and Hamel cut through the static between (...) theory and praxis and put forward exciting theories on how human vocal sound can perpetuate -- and challenge -- persistent inequalities. Sounding Bodies presents a powerful model of how the seemingly disparate disciplines of philosophy and voice/speech training can, in conversation with each other, generate illuminating insights about our vocal lives and identities. (shrink)

This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is per­fectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But (...) the essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue. (shrink)

This paper highlights the need to apply an equity lens when assessing the impact of preemption and related legal doctrines on community health. Community autonomy to set and pursue public health priorities is an essential part of achieving health equity. Unfortunately, the priorities of organized industry interest groups often conflict with health equity goals. These groups have a history of successfully using law to limit community autonomy to pursue public health measures, most notably through preemption and related legal doctrines. We (...) examine this phenomenon using two examples. First, we look at dental association efforts to block the spread of dental therapists in Indian Country. Native dental therapists have been improving the oral health of native people in Alaska for over a decade; yet the national and state dental associations have sought with mixed success to leverage state and federal laws to hinder other tribal governments from utilizing these providers. We compare these efforts with a restaurant association-led movement to limit what municipal governments can do to address food-based health inequities, focusing on a “model” ALEC bill that started in Ohio. Finally, we discuss how municipalities and Tribes are fighting back and continuing to pursue health equity for their communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal ExpressionSarah K. Burgess and Stuart J. MurrayFor More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Adriana Cavarero. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 262. $65.00, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.Adriana Cavarero's most recent book, For More than One Voice, offers the reader a critique of Western metaphysics that challenges the hegemony (...) of speech's relation to thought within politics. Revisiting Aristotle's Politics, Cavarero examines the famous definition of man as "zoon logon echon"—usually translated as "rational animal." She is critical of the tradition that renders logos here as "reason" or "rationality," modeled on the abstract and disembodied Platonic idea. Reading the Politics alongside the Poetics, she brings politics into a distinctly rhetorical sphere, and therefore figures logos as "phone semantike." In this light, man is a "speaking animal," an animal who speaks with a voice (phone) that is meaningful (semantike—an adjectival form that qualifies the voice itself). Cavarero's argument is that voice and meaning—phonic and semantic—must be sharply distinguished. The history of Western philosophy, she contends, has effaced this vital difference and focused instead on speech as a unitary phenomenon in which the vocalic and the semantic are always already joined as meaningful signification. In this way, the singularity of the vocalic itself has been elided in favor of speech that strongly privileges meaning. She therefore wishes to deliver us from language, as it were, through a recuperation of the force of the vocalic, the acoustic, the resonant and sonorous auditory quality of phone.Absent in the history of Western philosophy, this sonorous aspect of the vocalic stands as a corrective to our logocentric metaphysical tradition that singularly values the visual over the acoustic, semantic content over vocal utterances, and an abstract, anonymous "what" over a particular, embodied "who." Cavarero claims that the vocalic is an "anti-metaphysical" force that exceeds and challenges signification. In other words, the vocalic immediately communicates the uniqueness of the speaker without recourse to the signifying content of his or her speech. The voice is essentially relational—a relation that is described as "the condition of every communication.... the communicability of the communicable, or the significance of signification" (29). Indeed, for Cavarero the voice is that which "precedes, generates, and exceeds verbal communication" [End Page 166] (29–30). In this way, remarkably, Cavarero refigures the voice as a presymbolic origin that is both temporally and ontologically prior to signification, as that which is a condition of possibility for signification, and as that which is never exhausted by any signifying speech act as such.The voice is the expression of one unique, embodied individual to another. This expression, a "reciprocal invocation" founded in the sonorous, rhythmic, and resonant materiality of the voice, constitutes a "duet," a musical exchange of voices in and through which individuals mutually invoke one another. Cavarero resists inscribing such a relation within the symbolic realm; yet for her this relation is a "wordless language" that takes place in the paradigmatic scene between mother and infant. Here, in this originary scene, there is not yet the movement of language or speech as such, but the rhythm and cadence of demand and response—the voices of mother and infant that invoke one another. Drawing on Hélène Cixous's and Julia Kristeva's well-known work on the maternal chora, Cavarero demonstrates that the cadence of the "la-la melody" exchanged between mother and infant "configure[s] a reciprocal dependence" (170) that takes a structural form in the movement between demand and response.For Cavarero, the "scene of infancy" enjoys a primacy: it is both ontologically and chronologically prior to the institution of language and law. The maternal chora is figured as that which invisibly underwrites what will be understood as the law of the father—a law that is said to mark the inauguration of language. But if the law of the father is rational and semantic, the maternal should not be conceived as simply irrational and pure sound. For Cavarero, the maternal vocalic demonstrates its own reason through its rhythmic and musical resonance... (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Derrida’s deconstruction (or critique) of the death penalty in his first set of lectures (The Death Penalty, Volume 1). The essay has two parts. First, I reconstruct this deconstruction. I show that the deconstruction depends on the difference between the calculable instant and the incalculable instant. Then, in the second part I show how this difference is based on the deconstruction of temporalization Derrida produced in his 1967 Voice and Phenomenon. The deconstruction of temporalization (...) shows that the calculated instant is impossible, and the future, including the instant of my death, remains incalculable. In the essay’s conclusion, I show that the pardon from the death penalty is only a gift of time, only more time or extra time. The pardon can pardon someone from the condemnation to death, but it cannot pardon anyone from the condemnation to die. The pardon can give only a finite survival. (shrink)

This article explains how Derrida’s notion of an originary or generalised metaphoricity can be understood in terms of the analyses presented in Voice and Phenomenon (1967) in response to Eugen Fink’s question of a ‘transcendental logos’ and of the paradoxical ontological status of phenomenological language. Tracing Fink’s impact on Derrida, as well as the key differences between them, the article shows that underlying Derrida’s reappropriation of the phenomenological concept of ‘life’ is an expansion of indicative relations—which in Husserl typify (...) the function of signs within intersubjective communication and modes of judgement characterised by the non-presence of the intended object—to a general feature of the ‘living present’. While for Fink the indicative or metaphorical nature of the transcendental concept of ‘life’ does not threaten the founding unity it serves to name, for Derrida it is this very unity which is undermined by the proliferation of indication at the core of temporal experience. (shrink)

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics. For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new (...) world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people's demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power? With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking and answering questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

The Stroop effect is a well-documented phenomenon, demonstrating both interference and facilitation effects. Many versions of the Stroop task were created, according to the purposes of its applications, varying in numerous aspects. While many versions are developed to investigate the mechanisms of the effect itself, the Stroop effect is also considered a general measure of attention, inhibitory control, and executive functions. In this paper, we implement “eStroop”: a new digital version based on verbal responses, measuring the main processes involved in (...) the traditional effect. eStroop features four categories of stimuli in four different colors: geometrical shapes, neutral words, congruent words, and incongruent words. The results of the administration to 307 University students confirm the Stroop effect and offer baseline data for future research and clinical testing. Direct comparisons with other recent versions of the task are discussed, offering insights into differences and similarities between different task variables. (shrink)

The phenomenon of 'hearing voices,' often viewed as a symptom of schizophrenia, is commonly called, in the scientific and clinical literature, 'auditory-verbal hallucination.' However, reports of hearing soundless voices, voices that are not auditory, which go as far back as Tuttle and Kraepelin and appear in phenomenological interviews and questionnaires are relatively common. What are we to make of such reports?One option is to dismiss these claims: one cannot hear soundless voices. This dismissal could be due to a combination of (...) the following seemingly reasonable claims, each sufficient to consign the notion of 'hearing soundless voices' to the status... (shrink)

Brentano’s theory of Intentionality gave rise to empirical psychology, considered by the mental acts of external objects and consciousness. In this sense, the purpose of this essay is to reflect on the phenomenon of auditory hallucinations, from the perspective of Franz Brentano’s intentionality, as a representative psychic phenomenon of internal experience. Auditory hallucinations, under a phenomenological approach, are considered as an experience of the relational process of a historical person. In analogy to the theory of the intentionality of mental acts, (...) the phenomenon of listening to voices becomes an experience perceived in the internal understanding of existential meanings, which must occur through two types of acts: the personal meaning, represented; and to relate, through intentional conduct, with the experienced reality. Finally, the importance of Brentano’s studies for humanist approaches I consider inseparable from phenomenological psychopathology, and therefore, makes it possible to reflect on the field of mental health. (shrink)

Musical elements in the structure of G. MacDonald’s Phantastes and Lilith in the context of the theory of intermediality are studied. The following musical elements are analyzed: motif of fairy world’s music, images of music of nature, musical description of characters’ voices, insertions of songs, interpretation of music as an art. These musical elements act as a characterization of topoi, landscape, characters, technique of stylistic imitation and means of rhythmic organization of narration, expression of author’s point of view. The paper (...) concludes that music in G. MacDonald’s fairy romances is represented by means of intermedial imitation and intermedial thematization used for creation of full of sound fairy world and expression of Romantic view on music essence. (shrink)

This chapter shows how Derrida's deconstruction in Voiceand Phenomenon exposes a double necessity that undergirds Husserl's phenomenological inquiry in the “First Logical Investigation,” especially with respect to expression and indication. It turns to Derrida's reflections on the aporia of blindness in Memoirs of the Blind in order to further develop the logic of double necessity and to examine Derrida's divergence from Merleau‐Ponty's thought. The chapter examines Derrida's critique of the auto‐affective movement of temporalization in Voice and Phenomenon that reveals (...) the impossibility of pure auto‐affection. It explores the limits of Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenology where he has moved beyond Derrida's deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. For Derrida, Merleau‐Ponty's emphasis on speech and perception reveals his entrenchment in the phenomenological prioritization of presence; “soaring up to the sun of presence, it is the path of Icarus”. (shrink)

The phenomenon of multimodality is central to our everyday interaction. 'Hybrid' modes of communication that combine traditional uses of language with imagery, tagging, hashtags and voice-recognition tools have become the norm. Bringing together concepts of meaning and communication across a range of subject areas, including education, media studies, cultural studies, design and architecture, the authors uncover a multimodal grammar that moves away from rigid and language-centered understandings of meaning. They present the first framework for describing and analysing different forms (...) of meaning across text, image, space, body, sound and speech. Succinct summaries of the main thinkers in the fields of language, communications and semiotics are provided alongside rich examples to illustrate the key arguments. A history of media including the genesis of digital media, Unicode, Emoji, XML and HTML, MP3 and more is covered. This book will stimulate new thinking about the nature of meaning, and life itself, and will serve practitioners and theorists alike. (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon has arisen on the global stage, as girls have increasingly begun to raise their voices. In an effort to achieve new philosophical understandings of contemporary childhoods in a post-truth era, the present article examines this Girl Rising movement from an existential perspective. In doing so, the article aims to problematise children’s right to be heard and listened to, as enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. (...) More specifically, the article explores children as rights-holders and their rights-subject position and how these positions are supported (or not) by adults in different ways. Throughout the analysis, Greta Thunberg is used as a case study to illustrate the phenomenon under study. This new movement highlights children’s right to be heard as a valuable right. The defence of this view relies on the claim that at the heart of adult’s acknowledgement lies the uniqueness of each child and the implications of this uniqueness. Taking into consideration the realisation of children’s rights, powerful stakeholders who seek to silence children’s voices are also identified, as are worldwide adult acknowledgements intended to empower girls to exist ‘in’ and ‘with’ the world in a ‘grown-up’ way. (shrink)

Phenomenological healthcare research should include the lived experiences of a broad group of healthcare users. In this paper it is shown how shadowing can give a voice to people in vulnerable situations who are often excluded from interview studies. Shadowing is an observational method in which the researcher observes an individual during a relatively long time. Central aspects of the method are the focus on meaning expressed by the whole body, and an extended stay of the researcher in the (...) phenomenal event itself. Inherent in shadowing is a degree of ambivalence that both challenges the researcher and provides meaningful insights about the phenomenon. A case example of a phenomenological study on the experiences of elderly hospital patients is used to show what shadowing yields. (shrink)

The current reform of nursing education is resulting in major changes in the curricula of colleges of nursing. For the first time, ethical and moral issues are being seen as an important theme underpinning the entire course. The moral theorist with whose work most nurse teachers are acquainted is Kohlberg. In this paper, it is suggested that his work, and the conventions of morality which he exemplifies, may not be the most appropriate from which to address the moral issues facing (...) the nurse. The author suggests that the work of Carol Gilligan of Harvard university is of great significance, not only for nurses involved in the teaching of ethics, but for all nurses. Gilligan's emphasis on caring and relationships accords with the common experience of the nurse, and echoes the current revival of interest within nursing in examining, and valuing, the phenomenon of caring. (shrink)

What is profoundly under question, especially today, in the aftermath of the pandemic, is on one hand the phenomenon of desire, on the other hand the experience and capability of desiring of the human being. Taking a look at the social situation of the country – recalling first the investigation of the 44th Censis Report 2010, the contents of which in some ways are re-proposed in a naturally volved way in the following one of 2020 –, we are given an (...) image that relaunches our thought owards a need to deepen the ontology of desire and a possible educational pedagogy about it. Our society is depicted as “with no inner desire”: a crisis of desire emerges, in the sense of a crisis about the power of having a vision about the future and capacity of planning with excitement. In this paper, recalling Kant and his transcendental productive imagination as well as the new path of affective neurosciences perspective, going through the Theory of Attachment, I aim at opening a possible way to overcome this impossibility to desire arguing a different hermeneutics in comparison to what the tradition, especially that of J. Lacan, left us about this important and vital faculty of the human being. (shrink)

In this article I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a method for presenting a disclosing critique of aphonia as the loss of a political voice of one’s own. I claim that aphonia is a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from a lack of opportunities for democratic participation and a lack of the communicative capabilities required for effective political participation. I give examples from sociological literature on social exclusion and political apathy, and then diagnose them using Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of (...) operative intentionality and the lived body. A picture emerges of aphonia as the diminishing of the expressive modality of the lived body. This can lead to the inability to perceive oneself as a capable public speaker and the public realm as a welcoming field of possibilities for political engagement. I propose that democratic theory should consider the way that the negative social experiences of social marginalization can diminish, or even completely take away, the capability to authentically give a voice to one’s experiences in public on one’s own terms. I conclude with a call for grass-roots alternatives towards engendering political participation among marginalized groups through a “therapeutic” approach to political inclusion. (shrink)

National identity and attachment to national culture have taken root even in this era of globalization. National sentiments find expression in multiple political spheres and cause troubles of various kinds in many societies, both domestically and across state borders. Some of these problems are rooted in history; others are the result of massive global immigration. As US Secretary of State John Kerry tries to broker a new round of Israel-Palestine peace talks, the Israeli government continues expanding its settlements in disputed (...) territories. As this proposal is being written, Japanese citizens are debating whether their politicians should visit the Yasukuni Shrine (靖國神社), where the spirits of fourteen Class A war criminals from WWII and more than one thousand others convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are honored with a distinguished resting place. As the Chinese government’s plan to bring economic prosperity to the Xinjian province unfolds, ethnic conflicts between Han Chinese and local Uyghur Muslims intensify. Tibetans still demonstrate to the Chinese government, some through the dramatic sacrifice of self-immolation, their determination to pursue a Tibet that is truly free and autonomous. The recent inflow of Muslim immigrants across Europa and North America forces those liberal democratic societies to rethink the meaning of multiculturalism. Should the state respect Muslim women’s freedom to wear burkas in public? What about other aspects of certain Muslim traditions such as arranged marriages or the honor killing of teenage girls who see boys their parents do not approve? Since these immigrants voluntarily moved from their homeland to a new society, do they have a duty to give up such practices, which conflict with their new societies’ fundamental commitment to individual autonomy? Eric Hobsbawm suggests that nationalism is a contingent phenomenon in history—it arises with important historical events such as industrialization and print journalism; eventually, it will disappear. Anthony Smith, on the other hand, argues that nationalism is deeply rooted in the human need for collective faith and dignity. How should we understand today’s nationalism? Is it a transient phenomenon that eventually will be eradicated from the world, or is it a timeless issue that confronts and will remain a challenge for every society? Is the conventional distinction between civic and cultural nationalism still relevant or helpful? The problems and ongoing challenges of nationalism are very much alive throughout East Asia where the myth of ethnically and culturally homogeneous nations is still paramount. In addition to the examples provided above, East Asian societies are increasingly multicultural, inevitably forcing their governments to come up with new immigration and border-control policies, revisit their laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, socioeconomic welfare, and, more fundamentally, rethink the constitutional make-up of the citizenry and the ideal of social harmony, one of their most cherished political values. Nevertheless, contemporary theoretical analyses, whether philosophical or empirical, of the phenomena surrounding nationalism, in all its forms, are almost exclusively focused on cases in western cultures and societies, preventing the East Asian people from developing a coherent idea of who they are or should be in a way that can track their deeply-held values and norms (such as Confucianism). One of the primary aims of this conference therefore is to address this ongoing neglect and explore new concepts and theories that are socially relevant in East Asia. Not only will this provide access to the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism throughout East Asia but it will bring to bear philosophical concepts, approaches, and styles of reasoning about them that currently are not part of this critical debate. Providing an opportunity to hear these distinct and different East Asian voices and opening up these conceptual and methodological resources to scholars around the world will greatly advance the understanding and appreciation of nationalism. In addition to this primary aim, the proposed conference will achieve two other, novel, and important goals. First, by design, it will bring to bear a multi and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of nationalism. We are not privileging either conceptual or empirical studies in the organization of our conference and will bring together philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians, making every effort to invite scholars who explicitly employ or are interested in exploring different and at times hybrid approaches. Second, we will draw together scholars from around the world: China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, North America, and Europe, including leading figures in the field, who will serve as keynote speakers for the conference. Combining these two additional goals will enable us to organize a uniquely diverse conference, both in terms of intellectual discipline and national origin. Along with our primary aim of introducing East Asian voices and theories, this will make our event original, distinctive, and unprecedented in value. Our age is one in which it is unavoidable for people of different cultural backgrounds to live together in many different places. For the sake of justice and stability, a comprehensive re-examination of nationalism is both urgent and necessary. (shrink)

In both “Answering for Sense” and “Sharing Voices,” Jean-Luc Nancy offers an account of the poet as an interpreter of the gods. The voice of the poet in both Homer’s Iliad and Plato’s Ion is intrinsically and originally doubled. Although there is no divine voice outside of the poet’s voice, the divine voice speaks in the poet’s voice and the poetic voice gives a voice to that of the goddess or the muse. What (...) exactly is at stake in this phenomenon that we encounter here in the poet, namely that of gods making us speak? How is it related to the threshold of speech and communication that Nancy invokes in Adoration, when he also mentions the gods that make us speak? In this essay, I want to think with Nancy to see what is at stake in the figure of a voice on the threshold of speech and communication. I consider how the figure of the gods that make us speak is brought into play to elucidate the threshold of language and how this figure, as that which makes us speak, somehow offers the crossing of this threshold. To this end, I want to discuss three different figures or scenes in which the gods make us speak. In the first part of this article, I explore in more detail Nancy’s own account of the poet as interpreter of the divine voice. What does it mean for the poet to give a voice to the goddess and to desire this giving a voice? What is the demand or call to which the poet in giving a voice answers? To further the analysis of this divine interpreter, I want to compare this interpreter with two other ones which arise in two other basic scenes in which the gods make an interpreter speak. The first concerns the scene of the calling of the prophet Jeremiah in the book of the same name. The second concerns Saint Paul’s reflections on the glossolalist in the First Letter to the Corinthians. By exploring the differences between these three divine interpreters, I aim to further elucidate and assess the phenomenon of the interpreter and the double voice that characterizes Nancy’s poet. (shrink)

This chapter considers the phenomenon of free indirect style, and what imaginative response it calls for from the reader who encounters it in a fiction. Two ‘single voice’ theories of free indirect style are discussed: one which argues that we should hear FIS only as implying the voice of a character whose experience is being evoked, and another which argues that we should hear FIS only as implying the voice of a narrator describing the experience of a (...) character. This chapter argues instead that the reader is called upon both to imagine from the inside the experience of a character, and that a narrator reports that experience; and that there is nothing incoherent or imaginatively challenging about this. Along the way, the chapter considers the relevance of this view to Goldie’s discussion of autobiographical memory ‘integrating’ ‘external and internal perspectives’ in The Mess Inside. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction in Jacques Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon. I argue that the in-between status of deconstructive readings becomes visible only if we understand the double movement of reading, which neither refutes phenomenology nor simply carries on its program. As I show, the necessity of a “double reading” can be grasped only in terms of the figure of diff.rance, which escapes the opposition between appearing and disappearing. Since there is no linear (...) transition from the field of phenomenality to diff.rance, deconstruction can only articulate itself as a transgression of the text, a transgression contained in the text itself which at the same time points to its irreducible duplicity. (shrink)