Between language and body
Theodor Valamoutopoulos
For this year’s Congress we will not gather en corps. We will testify on the bodily effects of language, with image and voice.
It is difficult to discern voice as an object. It seems to be everywhere, as we are constantly exposed to an urban acoustic aura comprised of shouts or chitchat, laughter or radio news.
Human anatomy obviously developed to make us hearing beings. The ear is an orifice that doesn’t close. “It is because the body has some orifices of which the most important is the ear, because it cannot be covered or closed; it is because of this that there is a response in the body to what I called the voice.” [1]
Nevertheless, it had taken Lacan and his “acquaintance” with the “straying voices of psychosis”[2] for this object to be inserted in the list of the Freudian objects. How are we to speak of voice as an object of the drive, that is mute by Freud’s definition? Neither an organ nor a function of any biology, which is the real object as element of a symbolic object that is speech?[3]
The logic inference of the voice seems to posit it everywhere. It is the part of the signifier that doesn’t contribute to making sense.[4]
It is outside meaning and it doesn’t belong to the order of sound. The voice is aphonic inasmuch as it evacuates its acoustic properties which have meaning effects.
One is not only exposed to the voice, but also by it. The absurdity or the grave effect of our associations surprise us on the couch. What is a lapsus if not the wrong signifier voiced? It is also an act of speech.
Voice gives life to the dead letter of the law. [5] Justice requires witnesses, accusers and accused to be physically present, to add a voice to an apology, plea or verdict.
“The voice responds to what is said, but it cannot answer for it. In other words, for it to respond we must incorporate the voice as the otherness of what is said.”[6] This is the reason that our voice appears foreign, detached from us, as our recorded messages on answering machines so often witness.
So the voice appears in its dimension as object when it comes from the Other and attaches me to the Other. It holds body and language together, being neither. It is a function of the signifying chain, equivalent to enunciation. And apart from his demand and an opening to the enigma of the Other’s desire, it contains a charge of jouissance.[7] “It is not the voice, it is not without the voice, it is the body in the voice”[8]
This is known to the infant who makes a short scream, for his dad’s demand “Scare!”, and the laugh he receives.
And it is known to psychoanalysis that provides the space for the voice. Vocifération and jaculation as modes of interpretation, respect the outside of meaning that jouissance and the voice share. It is the voice which returns in the jaculation as a new use of the signifier.[9]Vociferation adds something to speech. It adds the value, the dimension and the weight of the voice.”[10]
References
[1] Lacan, J., “The Sinthome, Seminar XXIII”, Polity, p9.
[2] Lacan, J., “Anxiety, Seminar Book X”, Polity, p251.
[3] Lacan, J., “Livre IV: La relation d’objet et les structures freudiennes”, Paris:Seuil, p175.
[4] Miller, J.-A. (1989). “Jacques Lacan and the voice” in, The Later Lacan, SUNY.
[5] Mladen Dolar, “The Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits)”, MIT Press.
[6] Lacan, J., “Anxiety, Seminar Book X”, Polity, p275.
[7] Miller, J.-A. (1989). “Jacques Lacan and the voice” in, The Later Lacan, SUNY, p.144-145.
[8] Dupont, L., “Formation of the Analyst, the End of Analysis”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks Issue 36.
[9] Laurent, É., “Interpretation: From Truth to Event.”, Argument for the 2020 Congress of the NLS.
[10] Miller, J.-A., “Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body”, Lacanian Ink. Issue 18.