A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits)

Jacques Lacan claimed there were four figures of objet petit a: the breast, feces, the gaze, and the voice. In the critical work on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the gaze has taken the spotlight--especially in the film studies reception of Lacan. Mladen Dolar seeks to rectify this situation by producing a book on the voice.However, if you are expecting a long commentary on the voice in Lacan or a spectacular application of Lacanian theory to film and other cultural phenomena, then you will be shocked. Dolar is a serious philosopher, and his book reflects that. What he attempts to do is isolate the voice as an object unto itself. What he needs to do this is psychoanalytic theory. Therefore, while psychoanalysis is very important, it is usually in the background informing his discussion of the voice in linguistics, politics, ethics, etc.The first 3 chapters are an attempt to distill the voice as an object of philosophical reflection. If language is a chain of signifiers, then the voice is the invisible but material string that holds it together. But what does that mean?--this is what Dolar attempts to answer in these three chapters.The next two chapters examine the voice in moral philosophy and political philosophy. These are very interesting discussions. What do we mean when we say "the voice of reason" or "the voice of conscience"? What do we mean when we enjoin others to "have a voice in the political process"? Especially if the voice is an object unto itself, which has rarely been thought through?--Dolar answers these questions in these chapters.The last two chapters are reflections on the voice in psychoanalysis and the work of Kafka. The discussion of Freud is logical. But why Kafka? It is never made clear.I have only two major quarrels with this book. One is its style. Dolar's style is highly idiosynchratic, and he rarely gets to his thesis. So often pages of analysis will go by without a framework from which to make sense of them. I am not quite sure his style is successful. But this is a matter of taste, and every reader will have to determine that for themselves. Two is only slightly less petty. Chapter 5 ends with Freud's very important thesis that government, psychoanalysis, and education are the three impossible occupations. Dolar covers the voice in the first and second of the impossible occupations. But he totally overlooks education. Instead he writes that "a book with many long chapters" would be needed to address the voice in education. Really? So, only one chapter is needed to tackle the voice in politics, one chapter is need for the voice in psychoanalysis, but a long book is necessary for education? On top of that, Dolar makes many references throughout the book to education, from Pythagoras' pedagogy of the voice, to criticisms of the university system. But somehow we are to believe that he does not include a chapter on education because he so highly esteems it that he refuses to patronize education with one chapter? Somehow I don't believe this. And his comment about a long book seems like a cop out. Especially, since a natural fit exists with Jacques Ranciere's book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. It seems that the pedagogical voice is the voice of ignorance or silence as such. It is curious that no book that seriously deals with psychoanalysis and education exists. Is education so mundane a topic that psychoanalytic theorists refuse to deal with it? I would argue it is just as, if not more, important than film. It is high time that a book that takes Freud's dictum of the impossible occupations serious be written. Dolar should have written a chapter on the voice in education, plain and simple.

To the list of objects inherited from Freud, Lacan notoriously added two new ones, the gaze and the voice. But one quickly took precedence over the other: as Mladen Dolar notes, "it seems that all gazes were fixed on the gaze, both in Lacan's own work and in a host of commentaries, while not all ears were open to the voice, which failed to get a proper hearing."If, according to Alain Badiou, "there are only bodies and languages", the voice is that which holds bodies and languages together. Yet the voice does not belong to either. It is not part of linguistics: it makes the utterance of meaning possible, but it disappears in it, like the Wittgensteinian ladder to be discarded when we have successfully attained the peak of the signifier. But it is not part of the body either: not only does it detach itself from the body and leaves it behind, it cannot be situated in it, and its point of origin is structurally concealed. It comes from a gaping hole, an undescribable place, so that every emission of the voice is by its essence ventriloquism.The voice comes from the innermost realm of our being, but at the same time it is something that transcends us, it is in ourselves more than ourselves, and represents a beyond at our most intimate. Its proper location is the Unheimlich, with all the ambiguity that Freud has given this word: the internal externality, the exclusive inclusion, the expropriated intimacy, the extimacy - the word Lacan uses for the uncanny.The voice shares with all the objects of the drive a topological paradox: they are situated in a realm which exceeds the body, they prolong the body like an excrescence or an appendix, but they are not outside the body either. This is the topology of what Lacan calls objet petit a. The voice stands at the intersection of two circles, the circle of language and the circle of the body, it is the element that ties the two circles together, yet it belongs to neither. "This paradoxical location - the intersection, the void - turns the voice into something precarious and elusive, an entity which cannot be met in the full sonority of an unambiguous presence, but it is not simply a lack either."The author revisits Derrida's hypothesis of the phonocentric bias, of the primacy of voice over writing throughout the history of metaphysics, and shows that there exists a different metaphysics of the voice, where the overarching goal is to protect the logos from the musical, feminine and joyful intrusion of the voice. The paradoxical topology of the voice, the simultaneous inclusion/exclusion which retains the excluded at its core, is used by Mladen Dolar in various settings: linguistics, metaphysics, ethics, politics and psychoanalysis. Just as it was placed at the intersection of body and language, the voice can be located at the juncture of the subject and the Other, circumscribing a lack in both. The topology of extimacy is also the basic structure of the political, where the letter of the law also calls upon the living voice to perform certain acts in well-defined and crucial situations.A last word on the book cover. Taken from Dead of Night, a spooky movie where a malevolent dummy takes control of its ventriloquist, it reverses the usual pattern of the voice and the gaze, where the ventriloquist is supposed to concentrate his eyes on his puppet and to hide the movement of his lips. I am sure the author would have had many comments to offer on this image, but he leaves them to the imagination of the reader, who is therefore invited to finish the book through her own means.

I'm taking my time reading this nearly inscrutable work. But it's so damn good, I can't put it down. Been reading it for 5 years...

If you are interested in the voice as "objet petit a" (I'm talking about the lacanian reading of the freudian theory of the drive -trieb) this is your book. I have been studying the subject for some time and there is hardly anything written (you would be luckier if your subject were the other object of the drive unearthed by Lacan: the gaze). You will profit too with the author's bibliography. The book is nicely written, it's witty and hits the voice from unsuspected angles (in politics, in writing, in painting). It's only flaw is taking for granted that Miller and Lacan are the same Jacques, they are not. I hope that on the future Mr. Dolar wouldn't, as he does sometimes here, fall into simplistic applications of lacanian theory to everything as Mr. Zizek (in whose mob he dwells) usually does.

Obra imprescindible. Sería perfecta sin algunos sobrantes; sobre todo, ese último capítulo "kafkiano" final. Probablemente dolar lo tenía ya escrito y lo metió con abuso de calzador.

Una edición muy cuidada, excelente para trabajar. Una muy original idea para debatir