Kristina Mendico is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty, also published by SUNY Press, and Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism.

"Well-researched and meticulously argued, Mendicino's book explores how even the most minimal, seemingly immediate experience of the self is marked, traversed by language, putting that very immediacy and everything that follows from it (not least the very notion of identity) into question." — Jan Plug, author of They Have All Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser"Passive Voices is a beautiful, if not magisterial, study of the pathos of language in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and several works of modern literature inspired by his philosophy. In exacting readings, Mendicino attends to the words and methods of phenomenology to call into question the concepts of subjectivity and givenness at the heart of this form of inquiry. The book is exhilarating to read in its precision, maturity, chiseled phrasing, and always incisive analysis." — Rochelle Tobias, author of Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Principally Unprincipled; or, Speaking of "Beginnings" 1. "Self" -Citations in Husserl and Augustine2. Provocations: "I," Husserl, and the Passive Voices of Phenomenology3. Parsing Pairing: George Bataille and the Scripts of Subjectivity4. Writing Out of Sight: On the Papers and Traces of Kafka5. Passive Voices: Echoes, BlanchotPostscriptNotesWorks CitedIndex

Kristina Mendico is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty, also published by SUNY Press, and Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism.

"Well-researched and meticulously argued, Mendicino's book explores how even the most minimal, seemingly immediate experience of the self is marked, traversed by language, putting that very immediacy and everything that follows from it (not least the very notion of identity) into question." — Jan Plug, author of They Have All Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser"Passive Voices is a beautiful, if not magisterial, study of the pathos of language in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and several works of modern literature inspired by his philosophy. In exacting readings, Mendicino attends to the words and methods of phenomenology to call into question the concepts of subjectivity and givenness at the heart of this form of inquiry. The book is exhilarating to read in its precision, maturity, chiseled phrasing, and always incisive analysis." — Rochelle Tobias, author of Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Principally Unprincipled; or, Speaking of "Beginnings" 1. "Self" -Citations in Husserl and Augustine2. Provocations: "I," Husserl, and the Passive Voices of Phenomenology3. Parsing Pairing: George Bataille and the Scripts of Subjectivity4. Writing Out of Sight: On the Papers and Traces of Kafka5. Passive Voices: Echoes, BlanchotPostscriptNotesWorks CitedIndex

Kristina Mendico is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty, also published by SUNY Press, and Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism.

"Well-researched and meticulously argued, Mendicino's book explores how even the most minimal, seemingly immediate experience of the self is marked, traversed by language, putting that very immediacy and everything that follows from it (not least the very notion of identity) into question." — Jan Plug, author of They Have All Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser"Passive Voices is a beautiful, if not magisterial, study of the pathos of language in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and several works of modern literature inspired by his philosophy. In exacting readings, Mendicino attends to the words and methods of phenomenology to call into question the concepts of subjectivity and givenness at the heart of this form of inquiry. The book is exhilarating to read in its precision, maturity, chiseled phrasing, and always incisive analysis." — Rochelle Tobias, author of Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Principally Unprincipled; or, Speaking of "Beginnings" 1. "Self" -Citations in Husserl and Augustine2. Provocations: "I," Husserl, and the Passive Voices of Phenomenology3. Parsing Pairing: George Bataille and the Scripts of Subjectivity4. Writing Out of Sight: On the Papers and Traces of Kafka5. Passive Voices: Echoes, BlanchotPostscriptNotesWorks CitedIndex