Abstract
This essay examines the sonic experience of silent reading. How are we to understand the peculiar nature of this sound experience that occurs in silence? The essay considers the ‘unsounded’ quality of this phenomenon and examines the contradictions implied by the notion of the read voice. This voice is the voice that is read – a voice, I argue, that occurs as the sub-vocalisation of the written word and which involves the perception of the written word’s inner sonority. Such a voice, however, is closely aligned with the inner voice. In investigating the complex dynamics of this voice that is read I draw on the work of Denise Riley, Mladen Dolar and Giorgio Agamben in order to argue that the read voice is proximate to the inner voice associated with conscience and that our experience of ‘silent’ reading marks a re-shaping of this vital force of conscience.
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