Читать книгу Beckett, Lacan and the Voice - Llewellyn Brown - Страница 13

The enigmatic nature of the voice requires to be approached in a coherent manner, with adequate conceptual tools which, as this study will endeavour to demonstrate, are offered by the theories of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Indeed, among the particular innovations Lacan contributed to psychoanalysis after Freud—and which is particularly enlightening for Beckett—is the very concept of the voice. While the latter has been firmly established as a concept in Lacan’s theoretical developments as a whole, Mladen Dolar rightly points out that in his early elaborations, it often took second place by comparison with the gaze,[9] even though it ‘can be seen as in some sense even more striking and more elementary’ (2006, 39).

Lacan specifically situated the voice among the ‘objects’ that a subject uses to give a grounding to his reality, in an effort to hem in and keep at bay an uncontrollable force. The voice is thus not an abstract notion, nor is it a neutral phenomenon: it is a material element situated at the very heart of a subject’s existence. More precisely, it is inherent in the fact that the subject is founded in language, the consequence of which is that saying—or enunciation—is distinct from the utterance.

This grounding is crucial, but Lacan also renders possible the further discrimination between the voice that insists as the hidden and unconscious side of speech, and its complete exteriorisation for the psychotic (1998, 480): the ever-present threat of it forcefully intruding and destroying any coherent subjective reality. This will be apparent in the vociferation of the superego: that is to say, the fact that language, in the universal logic it imposes, is experienced in the form of an imperative that, in its ultimate consequences, demands the subject’s complete suppression. In a movement that counters such an extreme outcome, Lacan situates enunciation as the way a subject ‘gives voice’ (donner de la voix) in order to silence this destructive Other. An additional contribution Lacan makes regarding the structure of the voice, resides in the fact that language does not form a complete and totalising system, but is affected by an insurmountable hole, with the consequence that nothing can ultimately silence the voice by enclosing it within the bounds of a final naming. In both of these cases, the subject is obliged to invent, which is where the work of creation intervenes.