A voice and nothing more

The voice was not an object of serious philosophical interest until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan, although separately, placed it at the center of their theoretical concerns. In The Voice and Nothing More, one of the leading representatives of the Ljubljana School of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar, a close friend and associate of Slavoj Žižek, moves beyond Derrida’s idea of ​​“phonocentrism,” returning instead to Lacan’s claim that the voice is one of the most expressive embodiments of the psychoanalytic object. Dolar argues that in addition to the two most common uses of the voice—as a carrier of meaning and as a source of aesthetic delight—there is a third level to the voice: the voice as an object in itself, a psychoanalytic object that meaning and wonder only mask and muffle. Dollar analyzes the voice-object in several different planes, sequentially considering the "physics" of the voice, the linguistics of the voice, the ethics of the voice, and the politics of the voice, as well as the use of the voice in the texts of Freud and Kafka, building in the process of presenting his thoughts a fundamental philosophical theory of the voice that forces us to look at this, without exaggeration, unique human phenomenon in a way we have never looked at it before.