Recitative Voice: Reading Silently and Aloud, with Jean-Luc Nancy
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Joni P. Puranen
Abstract
This text studies the corporeality of attentive reading. It relies and builds upon philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion that there is, each time, a recitative voice within the heart of our advancement through a textual body. This text examines the intriguing figure of recitative voice by paying attention to two bodily variations of reading: reading aloud and reading silently. Nancy’s recitative voice, as a sonorous, resonant, oral, buccal and vocal notion, can help us in explicating how our bodies condition our experiences of reading, yet ultimately he remains rather implicit on how we advance through textual bodies. This short text argues that we can explicate the bodily weight implicit to reading, if we interpreted it as a recitative act. When we read aloud, our experience of a text consists of an advancement of our conjoined gaze and voice through the letters, words and sentences making up our text; when we read silently, our closed and silent mouth is still conjoined with our advancing gaze, advancing as desirous for speech and with words already grasped, even when no words are folded in (or with) exhaled warm air.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The Epigenesis of Germs and Dispositions in Logic and Life: Kant’s System of Pure Reason and His Concept of Race
- Recitative Voice: Reading Silently and Aloud, with Jean-Luc Nancy
- Powers that Reside in Communication
- From Tractatus to Later Writings and Back – New Implications from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass
- Book Reviews
- Kevin M. Cahill: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture: Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism
- Marie McGinn: Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism: Essays on the Later Philosophy
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The Epigenesis of Germs and Dispositions in Logic and Life: Kant’s System of Pure Reason and His Concept of Race
- Recitative Voice: Reading Silently and Aloud, with Jean-Luc Nancy
- Powers that Reside in Communication
- From Tractatus to Later Writings and Back – New Implications from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass
- Book Reviews
- Kevin M. Cahill: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture: Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism
- Marie McGinn: Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism: Essays on the Later Philosophy
