Secondary literature 2006

A Voice and Nothing More

Mladen Dolar

Synopsis

Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006) takes as its central question what the voice is once it is understood neither as the vehicle of meaning nor as an aesthetic object of sublime fascination — arguing that psychoanalysis alone can remain faithful to the voice as a third term, the Lacanian objet petit a, a remainder produced by the very signifying operation that tries to dissolve it. Beginning with the phonological paradox — that structural linguistics kills the voice by reducing it to differential features, yet thereby produces it as a residue — Dolar moves through the metaphysics of presence (against Derrida's phonocentrism, but also beyond it), the acousmatic tradition, and the drive-structure of the voice as object, before applying this theoretical apparatus to ethics (conscience, the superego, Heidegger's Ruf), politics (sovereignty, biopolitics, totalitarianism, vox populi), Freud's own agonistic relationship to voice across fantasy, desire, and the drive, and finally to Kafka's literary staging of voices at the boundary of law, animality, and freedom. The book's argumentative arc is thus from a negative definition of the voice (what it is not for linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics) to a positive Lacanian account of it as extimate object: neither inside nor outside the subject, neither inside nor outside the law, a structural operator that founds authority, desire, and ethical responsibility while permanently threatening to dissolve them in jouissance or silence. Dolar shows that voice and letter stand in the same relation as sovereign and law — the voice is permanently at the point of exception — and that psychoanalysis' distinctive achievement is to have invented a practice (the analyst's silence) that uses the object voice against itself to dispossess the subject of self-presence and open a passage from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive.

Distinctive contribution

Dolar's book makes a contribution that no other single work in the Lacanian corpus replicates: it constructs a unified, systematic theory of the voice as objet petit a traversing linguistics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and literature simultaneously, rather than treating the voice as one illustrative example among others. Where Žižek deploys the voice occasionally as a political figure and Lacan himself addresses it primarily in scattered seminars (especially Seminar X on anxiety and the graph of desire in Écrits), Dolar builds the voice into the load-bearing structure of a general Lacanian ontology of the partial object. His argument that phonological reduction produces rather than pre-supposes the voice-as-remainder is a genuinely original move that turns the structuralist project against itself, showing that the ambition to eliminate the voice from linguistics is precisely what installs it as the irreducible Lacanian real. The topology of extimacy — the voice as simultaneously excluded from and constitutive of logos, the political, and the subject — is here worked out with a rigour and breadth unmatched in discussions of the Lacanian objects.

The book also makes a distinctive contribution to the intersection of biopolitics and Lacanian theory. By mapping Agamben's phone/logos :: zoe/bios analogy onto Lacanian object-theory, Dolar produces a framework in which sovereignty (the capacity to suspend the law) is shown to be structurally homologous with the voice's position as the exception that founds the legal order — and does so without reducing politics to psychoanalysis or vice versa. The chapters on Kafka extend this into literary theory: rather than reading Kafka allegorically (as Agamben tends to) or as a writer of pure intensity (as Deleuze and Guattari do), Dolar reads the Kafkan voice — Josephine's squeak, the Sirens' silence, the dog's investigations — as precision demonstrations of how the object voice operates at the limit of the law, art, and science, with the final claim that the "ultimate science" the dog dimly gestures toward is psychoanalysis itself. This makes the book one of the most original sustained engagements with Kafka in the Lacanian tradition.

Main themes

The voice as objet petit a: remainder produced by the signifying operation
Phonocentrism and its limits: against and beyond Derrida
Acousmatic voice: the concealed source and the drive-structure of authority
Extimacy of the voice: simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from logos and the political
Voice, ethics, and the superego: from conscience to the categorical imperative
Sovereignty and exception: the voice as structural analogue of the state of emergency
Voice in Freud: fantasy, desire, and the silent drive
Lalangue, jouissance, and the sonorous texture of the unconscious
Silence as the analyst's act and the zero-point of the drive
Kafka's literary staging of voice at the boundary of law, animality, and freedom

Chapter outline

Introduction: Che bella voce! — p.11-18
Chapter 1: The Linguistics of the Voice — p.12-43
Chapter 2: The Metaphysics of the Voice — p.34-81
Chapter 3: The 'Physics' of the Voice — p.58-103
Chapter 4: The Ethics of the Voice — p.82-125
Chapter 5: The Politics of the Voice — p.104-163
Chapter 6: Freud's Voices — p.126-188
Chapter 7: Kafka's Voices — p.164-198

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Che bella voce! (p.11-18)

The introduction opens with two parables — an Italian joke about soldiers who, instead of obeying their commander's order to attack, appreciate the beauty of his voice, and a genealogy of speaking machines from Kempelen's vocal automaton to the chess-playing Turk — to establish the book's central problematic. The soldiers' response demonstrates that the voice can function as a vehicle of interpellation (the commander's message) but also as an object that disrupts interpellation by seizing attention in its own right. Dolar argues that the voice appears here as a third thing, irreducible to meaning and irreducible to aesthetic pleasure: the moment the addressees constitute themselves as a community of opera connoisseurs rather than as soldiers, they perform a substitution of one interpellation for another, but the voice that catalyses this remains in excess of both.

Key concepts: Voice, Interpellation, Objet petit a, Signifier, Drive Notable examples: Italian soldiers joke (Che bella voce); Kempelen's speaking machine; HMV / Nipper the dog

Chapter 1: The Linguistics of the Voice (p.12-43)

Dolar opens by asking what linguistics can make of the voice and immediately shows that the voice is constitutively resistant to linguistic capture. His provisional definition — the voice is what does not contribute to making sense — sets up a series of test-cases: accent, intonation, and timbre each seem to harbour an excess over the signifier, yet each proves susceptible to linguistic description and codification; they can all be submitted to differential analysis. The conclusion is not that linguistics successfully dissolves the voice but that the voice eludes these categorisations not through some positive ineffable quality but precisely as a structural remainder: it is the Lacanian graph of desire (Lacan 1989, p. 306) that first correctly positions the voice, not as the origin of the signifier but as its outcome, the leftover of the signifying operation.

Key concepts: Voice, Signifier, Objet petit a, Enunciation vs Statement, Symbolic Notable examples: Jakobson's Stanislavski actor and forty intonations; Aristophanes' hiccups in the Symposium; Shaw's Pygmalion (accent as class struggle)

Chapter 2: The Metaphysics of the Voice (p.34-81)

This long chapter engages the Western metaphysical tradition's ambivalent relationship to the voice, arguing against Derrida that the tradition is not simply phonocentric: it is equally marked by a deep distrust of the voice's excess over logos. Dolar traces the history of efforts to subordinate the voice to the word — from the Chinese emperor Chun through Plato's Republic, Augustine's Confessions, the Council of Trent's decrees on sacred music, and Hildegard of Bingen — showing that each attempt to pin the voice to meaning generates a residue of jouissance that escapes. The shofar section, drawing on Lacan's Seminar X reading of Reik, shows that the paternal voice founding the law (the voice of the dead primal father, the roar of the shofar) is structurally identical to the 'other' voice that logos ostensibly excludes: both are organised around the lack in the Other, S(Ⱥ), and both testify to the impossible foundation of the law.

Key concepts: Acousmatic Voice, Voice [lacan], Objet petit a [lacan], Jouissance, The big Other, Extimacy, Symbolic Order Notable examples: Shofar / Theodor Reik / Lacan Seminar X; Pythagoras' curtain and the acousmatic school; The Wizard of Oz (disacousmatization); Hitchcock's Psycho; Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo virtutum

Chapter 3: The 'Physics' of the Voice (p.58-103)

Having established the voice as remainder and as the structural operator of the drive, Dolar turns to what he calls the 'physics' of the voice — its bodily topology and its relation to the drive-object. The HMV 'His Master's Voice' discussion shows the dog Nipper in the exemplary posture of listening-as-obedience, establishing the etymological and structural link between audire and ob-audire (to hear and to obey). This is not merely a linguistic curiosity: the drive-structure of the voice means that listening is always an incipient subjection to the Other, an exposure of the interior to an exterior that bypasses all defences.

Key concepts: Drive, Objet petit a, Extimacy, Voice, Surplus-jouissance, Jouissance Notable examples: HMV / His Master's Voice / Nipper; Proust on hearing one's grandmother's telephone voice; Voice and psychosis

Chapter 4: The Ethics of the Voice (p.82-125)

Dolar traces a continuous line through the ethics of the voice from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's 'voice of the heart', Kant's 'voice of reason' (Stimme der Vernunft), and Freud's superego to Lacan's account of the superego as constitutively vocal. The Socratic daemon — apotreptic, negative, non-prescriptive, intimate yet transcendent — provides the model of the 'voice of pure enunciation without a statement': it compels but does not command. Kant's voice of reason is shown to be a structurally paradoxical moment in the Critique of Practical Reason: reason itself is endowed with a voice, silent yet 'unovercryable' (unüberschreibar), which Dolar reads as the blind spot of Kantian reason coinciding with unconscious desire.

Key concepts: Superego, Enunciation vs Statement, Voice [lacan], The big Other, Desire, Drive, Fantasy Notable examples: Socrates' daemon (Plato, Apology); Rousseau's Savoyard vicar; Kant's Stimme der Vernunft; Heidegger's call of conscience (Being and Time §§55-60)

Chapter 5: The Politics of the Voice (p.104-163)

Building on Agamben's topology of inclusive exclusion (phone/logos :: zoe/bios), Dolar shows that the voice occupies an extimate position in the political: it is neither simply presocial nor merely a cultural instrument but is the product of logos itself that haunts logos at its core. He offers a phenomenology of institutionalised sites where voice is obligatory — religious rituals (viva voce, prayer), courtrooms (the principle of orality), elections (vox populi) — arguing that these are not archaic residues but structural moments where the letter of the law can be enacted only by being assumed by a living voice. The voice functions as the 'missing half' of the letter that enables its performativity.

Key concepts: Biopolitics, Extimacy, The big Other, Symbolic Order, Voice, Topology, Void Notable examples: Fascism vs. Stalinism and their differential relation to the voice; Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator; Agamben's Homo Sacer / Kafka's 'Before the Law'; Hegel's monarch and the signature vs. voice; Vox populi vox dei

Chapter 6: Freud's Voices (p.126-188)

Dolar examines Freud's own complex relationship to voice, beginning with Freud's famous aversion to music (he cannot surrender to its fascination without losing analytic distance) and arguing that this immunity paradoxically makes Freud a superior listener of voices in other registers. He organises Freud's voices into three levels: fantasy, desire, and drive. In the domain of fantasy, the paranoid click case (1915) and the early Fliess letters reveal that primal fantasies are built around sonorous kernels — things heard and only later understood (nachträglich) — establishing a constitutive temporal loop between hearing and retroactive sense-making that coincides with Lacan's logic of the retroactive vector in the graph of desire.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Drive, Unconscious, Jouissance, Letter, Real, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Freud's case of paranoia and the click; Freud's self-reported indifference to music; Slips of tongue in Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Lalangue and Jakobson's Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning; Analyst's silence and the subject supposed to know

Chapter 7: Kafka's Voices (p.164-198)

The final chapter reads three Kafka texts as precision demonstrations of the object voice at the limit of law, art, and science. 'The Silence of the Sirens' stages the law's mechanism at its most minimal: the Sirens are irresistible not because of their singing but because of their silence — the zero-point of voice, the voice reduced to pure validity beyond meaning (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), against which there is nothing to resist. Kafka's Ulysses escapes by a self-cancelling pretense (believing he has outwitted them) whose structure mirrors the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact and confirming that the only available 'strategy' against the law is a naïve performance of escape that the law has already anticipated.

Key concepts: Voice, Real, Symbolic, Void, The Act, Sublimation, Drive, Objet petit a Notable examples: Kafka, 'The Silence of the Sirens'; Kafka, 'Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk'; Kafka, 'Investigations of a Dog'; Kafka, 'The Burrow' (Lacan, Seminar IX on topology); Gregor Samsa's voice (Metamorphosis); Deleuze and Guattari on deterritorialization of the mouth

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (Four Fundamental Concepts)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Michel Chion, La voix au cinéma
Theodor Reik (on the shofar)
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes
Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Franz Kafka (literary works)
Plato, Republic
Augustine, Confessions

Position in the corpus

A Voice and Nothing More sits at the intersection of several strands of the Lacanian secondary corpus. It is most immediately a companion to Žižek's work on the objet petit a (especially The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Plague of Fantasies), but where Žižek treats the voice primarily as one political-ideological illustration among the partial objects, Dolar makes it the exclusive and systematic focus of a book-length argument. It should be read alongside, and partly as a response to, Lacan's own scattered treatments of the voice — especially Seminar X (Anxiety), the graph of desire in Écrits, and Seminar XX — which Dolar synthesises into a coherent theory that Lacan himself never produced. For readers coming from film theory or sound studies, the book is in close dialogue with Michel Chion's La voix au cinéma and Pierre Schaeffer's acousmatic tradition, but radically transforms these frameworks through Lacanian object-theory. In relation to Derrida, the book is a sustained implicit critique: Dolar agrees that metaphysics is not simply phonocentric but argues that Derrida misses the properly Lacanian remainder — the voice that phonocentrism's own critique produces — and thereby cannot account for jouissance.", "Readers coming to this book should have prior familiarity with the Lacanian concepts of objet petit a, drive, and the graph of desire (Lacan's Écrits and Seminar XI are the minimum), and will benefit from acquaintance with Derrida's Of Grammatology since much of Chapter 2 is an implicit debate with it. After reading Dolar, natural next steps include Alenka Zupančič's Ethics of the Real (which develops the Kantian strand of the argument), Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies (which extends the object-voice in political analysis), and for the biopolitical dimension, Agamben's Homo Sacer. Those interested in the Kafka chapter will want Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature as a counterpoint. The book is a central reference in any serious engagement with Lacanian approaches to music, film sound, political rhetoric, and the phenomenology of conscience."