A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits) [Paperback]

Mladen Dolar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0262541874 | ISBN-13: 978-0262541879

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels--the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice--and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An immensely ambitious theoretical edifice in which new relations between Kant and Marx are established, as well as a new kind of synthesis between Marxism and anarchism. The book is timely from both practical and theoretical perspectives, and stands up well against a tradition of Marx exegesis that runs from Rosdolsky and Korsch to Althusser and Tony Smith."--Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane, Jr., Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke UniversityPlease note: Minor word changes -- apologies for the recirculations!

"In his first Duino Elegyand in a strophe dedicated to the hearing of voicesRilke speaks of 'the ceaseless message that forms itself from silence.' In this tour de force of philosophical engagement with our acoustic universe, Mladen Dolar has given us the key to this message, to what it means to be genuinely responsive to it. Our understanding of language, ethics, politics, philosophy, and aesthetic experience will never be the same." Eric L. Santner , Chair, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

"It takes a certain intrepid curiosity to pick up a book that is not of one's universe-to plunge into an in-depth examination of a common phenomenon. But the payoff can be huge: a new meaning, new resonance accruing to something one previously paid barely any attention to. A Voice and Nothing More is such a book-a deeply academic yet readable inquiry into the nature of voice and its role as a bridge between nature and culture, subject and other, body and language, the personal and the political....Again, no worries: There will be no final exam; this is just life, examined carefully." Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Mladen Dolar acts as if he is not an idiot and looks as if he is not an idiot, but this should not deceive youhe is NOT an idiot!" Slavoj Zizek

"The most telling, even thrilling, passages in this exacting book emphasize the intricate knitting together of body and soul in the voice....Though A Voice and Nothing More is driven throughout by ardent and formidable intelligence, Dolar is, like George Meridith's a 'Later Alexandrian,' mad for the kind of 'mystic wryness' that Lacanian theory so amply allows. Indeed, the last words of his book make it clear that he regards the mysteries of the voice as a kind of royal road to the Secret Doctrine of Psychoanalysis." Steven Connor Bookforum

"In his first *Duino Elegy* -- and in a strophe dedicated to the hearing of voices -- Rilke speaks of 'the ceaseless message that forms itself from silence.' In this *tour de force* of philosophical engagement with our acoustic universe, Mladen Dolar has given us the key to this message, to what it means to be genuinely responsive to it. Our understanding of language, ethics, politics, philosophy, and aesthetic experience will never be the same."--Eric L. Santner, Chair, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

About the Author

Andrei Ujica has published a number of writings, including Television/Revolution: Das Ultimatum des Bildes (1990). He dedicatedhimself to filmmaking in 1990, co-directing Videograms of a Revolution with Harun Farocki (1992). His critically acclaimed film,Out of the Present, was released in 1995. He is currently workingon a film project entitled The End of Gravity.

Mladen Dolar taught for 20 years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of a number of books, most recently (with Slavoj Zizek) Opera's Second Death.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (February 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262541874
• ISBN-13: 978-0262541879
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #516,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Can you hear me now?, March 8, 2009

By 

Lost Lacanian (Lost-in, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars His Master's Voice, March 22, 2009

By 

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

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.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The sounds of silence, November 18, 2007

By 

R. Goldenberg (Sao Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits) (Paperback)

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.