When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by prophets, priests and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, novelists and filmmakers. Far Calls explores the powers of sonorous coincidence and the varieties of reading that it incites.

The book addresses two critical disturbances to the earliest mother-child relation: pregnancy and post-partum for women labelled “psychotic,” and the intensive care of gravely premature newborns. Through them, we discover that a mother’s granting of subjecthood is what allows the necessary separation that sustains newborn life.