An unusual intellectual history: a philosophical exploration of deafness, language, and perception that stretches from the Enlightenment to modern debates about communication and embodiment.

Rée approaches deafness and its interpretations as a conceptual problem that has shaped how philosophers, educators, and scientists have imagined language itself.

The book traces a series of curious historical encounters—teachers experimenting with manual alphabets, philosophers speculating about thought without sound, and early attempts to systematise gesture as language. Along the way, Rée reconstructs a forgotten archive of visual communication, including seventeenth-century diagrams of hand gestures and early theories about the expressive possibilities of the body.

I See a Voice quietly dismantles the assumption that speech is the natural centre of language. What emerges instead is a broader, more tactile view of human communication, where sight, movement, and gesture become forms of thought in their own right.

Hardback first edition.