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Radio. John Mowitt
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Needless to say, the work of one thinker—however much he is not, as Žižek insists, “an idiot”—does not a resurgence make. Consider, then, in addition to the ample bibliography that appears at the end of A Voice, Giorgio Agamben’s trilogy, Homo Sacer, The Open, and The State of Exception, all of which appeared between 1995 and 2005.2 Rewarding though it might be, I have no intention of working carefully through each of these delicately argued texts. Instead, I want to scan immediately to the discussion of Aristotle that sets the stage for Homo Sacer and, by extension, for the trilogy as a whole.
Precisely because Agamben is concerned in Homo Sacer, as he says in chapter 3, to articulate a theory of politics “freed from the aporias of sovereignty,” he establishes and crosses the threshold of his text by putting in play the distinction that will ground the theory of politics that must be overcome. This is the distinction between the Greek terms zoe (life in general, singular) and bios (particular, or distinctive forms of life in the plural). Almost immediately Agamben will move to clarify that zoe encompasses the form of living that he, following Benjamin, calls vita nuda, the form of living that must be excluded from lives ordered by activity that is properly political. If this distinction is read too quickly, one fails to see that it not only triggers a subsequent one between voice and language but in so doing triggers the second volume of the trilogy. How so? What is crucial to the distinction is what is gathered on either side of it. Under zoe in its undifferentiated singularity are gathered “(animals, men and gods)” (Homo 1). Under bios are gathered the myriad different life forms. In other words, what might be said to require the political exclusion of zoe is the fact that under its auspices the animal and the human are not yet differentiated. Differentiating them will require the very distinction triggered by the first.
This is how Agamben presents the matter. He derives it from The Politics, where Aristotle writes:
Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their nature has developed to the point of having sensations of pain and pleasure and signifying the two). But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city. (1253a, 10–18)
In setting up this citation, Agamben makes it clear that he sees and appreciates the important link forged in Aristotle between the voice and zoe. Indeed, Dolar himself is drawn to this very discussion, confirming—if only obliquely—the common ground of their respective projects. The link at issue is that between zoe and the animal, or, to put the matter more carefully, the exclusion from the properly political—that is, the politics sustaining the aporias of sovereignty—the exclusion of the being who has a voice but not language, that is, the animal.
Voice, animal, bare life, politics: these terms, virtually in this syntagmatic order, reappear in The Open, Agamben’s unsettling meditation on the human-animal relation. He does not here return to Aristotle but instead restages the discussion of voice by appealing to Ernst Haeckle’s Anthropogenie, a text in which the origin of the human is grounded in an evolutionary transformation of a sprachloser Urmensch, a primordial man without speech. As in Homo Sacer, what Agamben wants to foreground is the relation between a politics founded on the aporias of sovereignty and the becoming human of the prehuman. And while this might lead one to assume that he aligns the animal, and therefore the voice, with naked life, he does not. Instead, what he aligns with naked life is the form of existence that serves as the background out of which emerged the human/animal distinction, that is, “a life that is separated and excluded from itself” (Open 38). Significantly, this life excluded from itself recalls Agamben’s earlier alignment of zoe and voice by stressing the fact that zoe refers to the undifferentiated background out of which the animal/human distinction will emerge. Nowhere in the trilogy does Agamben call for an evolutionary reversal, but it is clear that voice must be brought back, if for no other reason than to remind us of how deeply into the human sensorium the political cuts, and what precisely a politics freed of the aporias of sovereignty must seek to give expression to.
On the face of this, it is hard to recognize here the motif of phonocentrism. And while Agamben nowhere appeals to the Lacanian concept of the voice as the objet a, his treatment of voice as a concept through which to approach the means by which life excludes itself from itself certainly implies a somewhat less occulted affiliation with the psychoanalytical discussion—or so might one conclude before considering carefully how Agamben’s discussion of the animal takes up the work of Heidegger.
As Agamben acknowledges, his title derives from Heidegger’s lectures from 1929 to 1930 collected as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. There, Heidegger following Rilke’s invocation of “the open,” sets up an organizing tension between the animal, who is “poor in world,” and man, who is “world forming.” In the course of Agamben’s intricate and thought-provoking discussion, this tension is recast in ontological terms as one between concealedness and unconcealedness, a distinction that in the final paragraph of chapter 15 is made to reconnect with politics. To wit, the unconcealedness that sets the tone of Dasein is understood by Heidegger to find its proper locus in the polis, that is, a social order in which the animal’s mode of openness, that of captivation and extreme boredom, is left radically outside, as it were, both day and night. On Plato’s city map of Athens, and this would not have escaped Rilke, the poet and the animal are found in the same place: outside howling at the moon.
What brings this presentation into connection with the theme of phonocentrism does not, in fact, appear on its face. Instead, phonocentrism functions like what Michael Rifaterre used to call a “hypogram,” a borrowed, often unconsciously borrowed, grit of text matter that allows the pearl of a subsequent discussion to form. In this case, Agamben’s hypogram is the entirety of chapter 6 in Derrida’s Of Spirit (1987). Although Derrida is there concerned with the status of Geist, indeed, the difference between geistig and geistlich, and Heidegger’s avoidance of it, he too comes upon the animal that hides in the thickets of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Precisely because Heidegger defines the world as spiritual, geistlich, the animal, that is, the being poor in world, is essentially without spirit. What Derrida adds, and this will come as no surprise, is the problem of language. Specifically, starting from Heidegger’s acknowledgment that “the leap from the animal that lives to the man that speaks is as great … as that from the lifeless stone to the living being” (Of Spirit 53), Derrida lingers over Heidegger’s use of the “strike through,” the “crossing out” that is put to work in these pages. In discussing the poverty of the animal, Heidegger emphasizes that this bears on the matter that while a lizard may be stretched out on a rock, strictly speaking, the word rock should be crossed out (much as Heidegger will later cross out Being itself) because the lizard cannot relate to “the rock” as such. That is, the animal is poor in phonocentrism. It cannot be present to the signified of the signifier rock, a situation figured in the crossing out of the written word. Note that Heidegger insists that the lizard is certainly present to the referent, the rock upon which it lies, but not to the signified of the phonemic bundle rock. Linking this to the philosophical as such clarifies that we are indeed on the terrain of phonocentrism, that is, that the meaning of the rock in general is tied to the acoustic image that the lizard cannot fail to miss. Perhaps, if Thomas Sebeok is right, the lizard is simply poor in zoosemiotics. To be sure, we may never know.
My point: although manifest in a completely different way, to summarize crudely—through the crossed-out or suppressed Derridean hypogram—Agamben’s discussion of the voice is every bit as engaged with the legacy of its phonocentric critique as is Dolar’s. Whether one thinks about the voice as an object or as the avatar of a life that can be killed without sacrifice—and I am by no means saying that these are the