David Appelbaum

THE SHOCK of LOVE is a book about spirit. It is a book within a book. The book found within is a manuscript entitled THE SHOCK of LOVE. It is purportedly written by Paolo Cellini, Professor of Romance Languages and a student of the era of the troubadours and courtly love. Based on the idea of a book of the heart, current during that time, it is divided into nine chapters that give allegorical detail of the journey of love, a love that completes the spirit in a person. There the reader follows the courtship, the 'alchemical' marriage, and the dark gestation before emerging transformed and completed. The outer book, the book that encloses the found manuscript, tells the story of Cellini as well as speculating on why it came to be written.

Drawing on clues from Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Jacobson, Condillac, and Diderot, Appelbaum investigates the vocalized, acoustical aspect of audible expression. He analyzes the tendency to equate voice with speaking, and speaking with writing, the result being that vocalizing is equivalent to thinking aloud. Appelbaum affirms the body’s role in vocalizing expression by proposing a new and radical interpretation of the truth of voice: that it is true if it provides a disclosure of our human contradictions. Sound, or the acoustical properties of a person’s voice, is able to bring about the revolutionary new set of conditions which reveal the truth of one’s condition. The author provides a unique account of the subjugation of voice by thought, indicating means for reversing the authority of the sound and for freeing up the voice. He concludes with the argument that poetic voice reconciles the search for semantic meaning with the raw, acoustical effect that the free voice causes

I have been experimental in my comparative approach, using the instrument of Hua-yen Buddhism to investigate Kant's ‘fact or reason’. What has been demonstrated? Certainly, the hypothesis that comparative study is flexible enough to illuminate strands of our own philosophical tradition is both interesting and compelling. But for Kant, does the study of practicability with reference to the buddhi-mind end in the perception of the dharmadhatu? I have marshalled some evidence to support this theory, implicit throughout the Second Critique. At the end of the Grundlagen, Kant offers one further note suggesting this conception must have been a continuing influence on his later moral thinking. Referring to the idea of a purely intelligible world, he says it serves to produce in us a lively interest in the moral law by means of the splendid ideal of a universal kingdom of ends in themselves (rational beings), to which we can belong as members only if we are scrupulous to live in accordance with maxims of freedom as if they were laws of nature.41

How do we perceive reality? What role does the body play in the act of perception? Making the Body Heard takes up a neglected aspect of perceiving our surroundings, inner and outer. It shows how perceptual habit has encrusted a receptivity to impressions. It argues that we must relinquish a hold on visual metaphor in favor of the auditory and tactile. Through the development of a new organ of perception, we are able to come into contact with novelty and existence. The study of perception includes an investigation of perceptual dimension and voice.

In one accessible, beautifully designed and illustrated volume, scholars have gathered the major theories and key ideas of world's greatest thinkers. The presentation of material sets this reference apart from other philosophy books by providing both the historical and cultural context of the ideas being explored, and by giving visual expression to the arguments and insights themselves through the artwork of the time. Immerse yourself in both Eastern and Western philosophy, spending time with Plato on knowledge, Aquinas on ethics, Marx on religion, and Confucius on human destiny. Designed for maximum flexibility of use, all thinkers and issues are cross-referenced, enabling you to move within or across branches of philosophy and historical periods, to get either a broad overview of the whole world of philosophy, or a more detailed exploration of a particular thinker or approach.

Blanchot’s rejection of vision as the fundamental philosophical metaphor is well known: “Seeing is not speaking” (The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 25). Furthermore, his central idea of the limit-experience (borrowed from Bataille) is a “detour from everything visible and invisible” (210). As part of his Heideggerian heritage, the increased importance of hearing (and aurality in general) lacks the critical appraisal it deserves. Pari passu for voice. Blanchot’s investigation of voice, spoken, interior, literary, is extensive. Various works of fiction, notably The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, explore the meme, which is intensified in critical essays on Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, and Valéry, where the voice’s musicality is given to performance. The studies exemplify the operation of “pure voice,” voice no longer in relation to and under the constraints of the interlocutor: its rhythm, tempo, and melody. His clearest, though lapidary, remarks on voice appear in discussion of the Narcissus mythomeme. There, voice is related not only to Narcissus’ love of an (unrecognized) self but also to the intrigue of Echo and her mimetic reproduction of voice. I give a close reading of Blanchot’s rendition of Ovid’s story to show the central role that voice plays in his “great refusal” of philosophy and concomitant opening to the outside, the “beyond being,” its nomadism and messianism.