The Present Voice

If the voice is present, it can also disappear. Ryoko Sekiguchi's The Present Voice (translated by Lindsay Turner) is a series of poetic meditations on the materiality of the voice. What, Sekiguchi asks, remains of the voice when the person it belongs to is no longer living? Sekiguchi's work extends into musings on the voice and its relationship to images, to odors, to all sensory experiences--and most poignantly, into a timely commentary on the body, media, mortality, loss, and time. Evoking thinkers and writers from Giles Deleuze to Edouard Glissant, Rene Char to Atiq Rahimi, The Present Voice gently and sensitively theorizes what the voice means to us today, at a moment of global displacement, exile, and "social distance," when so much of our communication occurs through the medium of the recorded voice.