to the contrary notwithstanding, is unambiguously set opposite the voice as ground, but also that its ineradicable ambiguity cannot easily be disambiguated from precisely what Derrida means by the trace. To say, as Dolar does, that the object is an “interior obstacle to (self-) presence” is not thereby repeating the structure of the trace, except for the careless invocation of an “interior” that neither he nor Derrida believes in. In effect, Dolar gives us a voice, even the voice, that is the trace, simply now rebaptized as “voice.” Armed with this voice, he then goes about separating himself from a position he is obliged to caricature, as if conceding that the whole exercise is, at bottom, a performative articulation of the structure of the objet a. In effect, the voice as ground tears a hole in the voice as object so that the latter can get on with the pressing business of demonstrating that the voice resonates in the void left by this tear.
One is reminded here of chapter 25 in Tristes Tropiques, “A Writing Lesson,” except that what is at stake here is not finally about the right word and how to spell it properly. The intellectual historical question of precedence is not without interest—who came up with the logic of post-dialectical difference, if it makes any sense to say this, “first”—but a responsible, that is, thorough, treatment of the prolonged confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis will take us out of signal range.
I will settle for a few observations. First, regardless of whether one agrees with Dolar’s reading of Derrida, what is beyond serious doubt is that the former’s approach to the voice, his reinvestment in it, is marked profoundly by the perceived impact of the critique of phonocentrism. In this sense my characterization of the resurgence of interest in the voice is at least partly justified—about which more in a moment. Second, and this is closer to the gist of the matter, Dolar’s discussion, while it certainly succeeds in disambiguating the voice and presence as the phenomenological condition of meaning, avoids wrestling with precisely the acoustic character of the void within which the voice as object is said to resonate. How are we to think the resonance of the void? Is it to be ceded to the concerns of psycho-acoustics? In short, sound again drops out. Perhaps the clearest symptom of this is in Dolar’s effortless gliding from voice to music, a gliding rendered in an arresting formulation late in the text: “What Freud and Kafka have in common … is their claim that they are both completely unmusical—which made them particularly susceptible to the dimension of the voice” (Voice 208). While on the face of it this would appear to oppose music to voice, my point is that Dolar appears here to assume that the relation between music and voice is so intimate as to be organized by the law of inverse proportion. The less you think you know about music, the more you clearly don’t know you know about the voice, and vice versa.
Needless to say, the work of one thinker—however much he is not, as Žižek insists, “an idiot”—does not a resurgence make. Consider, then, in addition to the ample bibliography that appears at the end of A Voice, Giorgio Agamben’s trilogy, Homo Sacer, The Open, and The State of Exception, all of which appeared between 1995 and 2005.2 Rewarding though it might be, I have no intention of working carefully through each of these delicately argued texts. Instead, I want to scan immediately to the discussion of Aristotle that sets the stage for Homo Sacer and, by extension, for the trilogy as a whole.
Precisely because Agamben is concerned in Homo Sacer, as he says in chapter 3, to articulate a theory of politics “freed from the aporias of sovereignty,” he establishes and crosses the threshold of his text by putting in play the distinction that will ground the theory of politics that must be overcome. This is the distinction between the Greek terms zoe (life in general, singular) and bios (particular, or distinctive forms of life in the plural). Almost immediately Agamben will move to clarify that zoe encompasses the form of living that he, following Benjamin, calls vita nuda, the form of living that must be excluded from lives ordered by activity that is properly political. If this distinction is read too quickly, one fails to see that it not only triggers a subsequent one between voice and language but in so doing triggers the second volume of the trilogy. How so? What is crucial to the distinction is what is gathered on either side of it. Under zoe in its undifferentiated singularity are gathered “(animals, men and gods)” (Homo 1). Under bios are gathered the myriad different life forms. In other words, what might be said to require the political exclusion of zoe is the fact that under its auspices the animal and the human are not yet differentiated. Differentiating them will require the very distinction triggered by the first.
This is how Agamben presents the matter. He derives it from The Politics, where Aristotle writes:
Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their nature has developed to the point of having sensations of pain and pleasure and signifying the two). But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city. (1253a, 10–18)
In setting up this citation, Agamben makes it clear that he sees and appreciates the important link forged in Aristotle between the voice and zoe. Indeed, Dolar himself is drawn to this very discussion, confirming—if only obliquely—the common ground of their respective projects. The link at issue is that between zoe and the animal, or, to put the matter more carefully, the exclusion from the properly political—that is, the politics sustaining the aporias of sovereignty—the exclusion of the being who has a voice but not language, that is, the animal.
Voice, animal, bare life, politics: these terms, virtually in this syntagmatic order, reappear in The Open, Agamben’s unsettling meditation on the human-animal relation. He does not here return to Aristotle but instead restages the discussion of voice by appealing to Ernst Haeckle’s Anthropogenie, a text in which the origin of the human is grounded in an evolutionary transformation of a sprachloser Urmensch, a primordial man without speech. As in Homo Sacer, what Agamben wants to foreground is the relation between a politics founded on the aporias of sovereignty and the becoming human of the prehuman. And while this might lead one to assume that he aligns the animal, and therefore the voice, with naked life, he does not. Instead, what he aligns with naked life is the form of existence that serves as the background out of which emerged the human/animal distinction, that is, “a life that is separated and excluded from itself” (Open 38). Significantly, this life excluded from itself recalls Agamben’s earlier alignment of zoe and voice by stressing the fact that zoe refers to the undifferentiated background out of which the animal/human distinction will emerge. Nowhere in the trilogy does Agamben call for an evolutionary reversal, but it is clear that voice must be brought back, if for no other reason than to remind us of how deeply into the human sensorium the political cuts, and what precisely a politics freed of the aporias of sovereignty must seek to give expression to.
On the face of this, it is hard to recognize here the motif of phonocentrism. And while Agamben nowhere appeals to the Lacanian concept of the voice as the objet a, his treatment of voice as a concept through which to approach the means by which life excludes itself from itself certainly implies a somewhat less occulted affiliation with the psychoanalytical discussion—or so might one conclude before considering carefully how Agamben’s discussion of the animal takes up the work of Heidegger.
As Agamben acknowledges, his title derives from Heidegger’s lectures from 1929 to 1930 collected as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. There, Heidegger following Rilke’s invocation of “the open,” sets up an organizing tension between the animal, who is “poor in world,” and man, who is “world forming.” In the course of Agamben’s intricate and thought-provoking discussion, this tension is recast in ontological terms as one between concealedness and unconcealedness, a distinction that in the final paragraph of chapter 15 is made to reconnect with politics.
