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Everyone is a Ventriloquist

Mladen Dolar interviewed by Aaron Schuster

(Metropolis M, April/May 2009)

Aaron Schuster: One of themes running through A Voice and Nothing More—perhaps the
main theme—is that, from the psychoanalytic viewpoint, the voice is not a form of self-
affection or self-presence, but precisely an obstacle to the subject’s identity: it is the
objective correlate of what Lacan calls the split subject. Part of the difficulty of grasping
the voice lies in its peculiar topology, which you describe as a precarious border between
the inside and the outside: while the voice emanates from within the body, it is also a
part of the world, an uncontrollable outside, a “missile” with its own trajectory. My
voice is never simply my own, but there is always, as you note, a “minimum of
ventriloquism”; it is not so much I who speaks, but rather I am spoken, the voice speaks
in and through me. How strongly do you see this notion linked with psychopathology? Is
not the paradigmatic case of the voice in psychoanalysis that of auditory hallucination,
an extreme instance in which the voice appears as a form of otherness or hetero-
affection?

Mladen Dolar: As far as the general argument of my book is concerned, your question states
it very well and I couldn’t put it better myself. You also point to what I see myself as a certain
deficiency of my book, namely the question of the status of the voice in psychosis. This is
indeed, as far as the analytic practice is concerned, one of the most frequent and spectacular
telltale signs of psychosis, presenting probably the most compelling instance of the voice as
an intruder, the alien kernel which immediately imposes itself as real. It points to the sheer
impossibility of sorting out the inner and the outer, for the voice heard is experienced as more
intimate than the inner and more compelling than any exterior voice. In this sense there is
something psychotic in every voice, and psychosis only amplifies, or rather distills something
which is usually kept at bay—the difficulty of distinguishing the inner and the outer and the
persistent ambiguity of this division.

A simple reason for this lack in my book is that having no clinical expertise and technical
knowledge I lack the competence to elaborate it, beyond embroidering on what many
illustrious clinicians have already said. But this reason is not enough, and it is not enough to
confine the voice to psychopathology. This compelling voice beyond one’s power has a long
history as a divine sign, before it became a matter of psychopathology. Consider the
paradigmatic figure of Socrates, a man whose ‘hearing voices’ is intimately linked to the very
foundation of philosophy (I have dealt with him far too briefly in the book and have tried to
remedy this since). Lacan speaks somewhere of 19th century psychography1 which took
Socrates as a case of madness (as Lélut put it, roughly, ‘If a philosopher claimed today to be
in direct communication with divinity and to hear its voice—would we appoint him a chair in
the University or a cell in Charenton?’ Indeed). The history of hearing voices was intertwined,
up to modern times, with the history of divine signs, the authority of wonders and the wonders
of authority, which could have the shattering resonance of Joan of Arc, or of mystic visions
(and Lacan had a special predilection for the discourse of the mystics). Hegel says somewhere
that the Socratic “daemon stays in the middle between the exteriority of the oracle and the

1
The Four fundamental concepts, Penguin, London 1979, p. 258.

1
pure interiority of spirit” (TWA 18, p. 495). This puts the question in ‘ontological’ and
structural terms rather than in terms of psychopathology, and the point of psychoanalysis is
not so much to explain psychopathology, but rather to restore its ‘ontological’ value, as it
were. Modern spiritual interiority allows for no divine voices and relegates them to nut-cases,
and no doubt Schreber, this great ‘hearer of voices’, can serve as a paramount modern nut-
case, endowed with the value of a harbinger, a token of modernity, a very troubling sign of a
transformation of authority, investiture, the function of the father. His ‘hearing voices’ has an
emblematic value—this is also taken up by Deleuze, and I will just point out Eric Santner’s
‘definitive’ book on it, My Own Private Germany. Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity
(Princeton UP, 1996). So to answer your question properly I would have to write another
chapter on the history of hearing voices from Socrates to Schreber, and if Socrates presents
the foundational moment of philosophy, then we must bear in mind Schreber’s proximity to
the foundational moment of psychoanalysis.

One of the most theoretically dense sections of your book concerns the relationship
between desire and drive, a difficult topic in Lacanian theory. To greatly simplify, you
argue that desire is on the side of meaning or signification, whereas the voice as drive-
object emerges when meaning falls away, and the subject disappears into enjoyment
(jouissance). To take the case of psychoanalytic therapy, the process of uncovering
repressed material and unraveling the symptoms—the detective side of analysis—is a
clear example of desire at work. On the other hand, the strange game of free association
(“say anything that comes to your mind…”) can produce its own pleasure,
independently of any insight gained: one gives oneself over to the ongoing flow of
associations, a quasi-automatic speech not governed by rules of propriety, morality or
common sense, and without any goal (even a therapeutic one) beyond its own free
movement. I wonder if this accurately captures the distinction you want to make, or else
how would you characterize the voice in desire as opposed to drive?

I rather think that the pleasure produced by the quasi-automatic flow of free associations
continues and extends the fireworks of desire and thrives upon the infinitely expandable
network of what Lacan called lalangue and its jouissance. If you want a literary counterpart,
think of Finnegans Wake, this amalgamation of sound and sense in endless punning. But there
is another experience of the voice in analysis, which is there from the outset and gradually
imposes itself: the presence of the analyst and his/her silence which acts as the stumbling
block to the free flow of associations. Against its backdrop the words sound hollow, they
stumble, one loses one’s thread, the machine producing pleasure keeps getting stuck, there is
something spoiling the fun of the babbling machine. Something insists in this, and I think that
the experience of the voice as the object of the drive emerges there, with the insistence and
the repetition of the voice as the stumbling block, making a caesura in the blahblah. Hence
Lacan speaks of the transference as both opening and closure, linking desire and drive. To be
sure, it is no easy feat to be silent, and one of Lacan’s écrits is called “On the Freudian Trieb
and the Desire of the Analyst”—what sort of desire sustains this? And this is not about
listening to silence or opening one’s ears to it, but rather an attempt to keep this experience, to
maintain it as an opening, to persist with it, and to bring it to speech. This is not some
bottomless unspeakable ineffable mystery; the point of analysis is to bring this other of
speech, this heterogeneity of the drive, into speech, to give it a structure, to turn the drive into
driving force. After all, what Freud called the death drive, if we look at it closer, is an excess
of life, a surplus life, so to speak, and the voice can serve as an opening to it.

2
One of the main ideas explored in your book is this ambivalence of the voice, at once
terrifying and pacifying, siren song and call of conscience, vehicle of the law and its
transgression. One could conclude that the voice’s ethico-political significance is strictly
“undecideable.” However, beyond this ambivalence there also seems to be a “good”
voice, which you qualify as “mere voice,” “pure enunciation,” or the silent voice of the
drive. This voice compels us to assume responsibility, but—crucially—without dictating
what form our engagement should take. This looks like a mixture of Heideggerian
authenticity and Badiousian fidelity, though here what one must assume responsibility
for is the unconscious.

The object voice is on the edge, at the crossing. It’s not the voice of the Other and not the
subject’s own voice either, it emerges in a strange loop between the two. It is unplaceable, yet
one has to ascribe it a place and assume it. Speaking schematically, there is one way which
turns it into the point which sustains the Other – hence the figure of the superego, or various
figures of political authority; and there is another way which turns it into the pledge of one’s
own presence and authenticity, finding one’s own voice, as the phrase goes. The two can go
together, or even structurally support each other, as Althusser’s concept of interpellation tries
to show: finding one’s own ‘authentic’ ego by submitting to the call of the Other, assuming
the posture of its addressee. But the subjectivity which is at stake here is something very
different from the ego and it emerges with tackling the edge and the crossing point. So how
can one show fidelity to something which is neither the subject nor the Other? Or to maintain
the authenticity of the experience of ‘inauthenticity’, so to speak, a dispossession or a
dislocation? Both Heidegger and Badiou deal with this in certain ways, very different ways –
let’s say with an ‘alien kernel’ as the core of ‘subjectivity’, although neither would be happy
with this formulation – and I am aware of the pitfalls which may lie on the way. If you say
‘the voice compels us to assume responsibility’, this may be understood as the response to the
enigmatic call of the other which exceeds us, in relation to which one is always responsible
and also always deficient. This is the logic of Levinasian ethics, and although it maintains the
alterity of the Other as an infinite and enigmatic opening, it still strangely reproduces, in a
roundabout way, the logic of what psychoanalysis has called the superego. The Other is an
enigma and poses a demand, demand as such, not some positive injunction, and one has to
respond, although one can never measure up to it. The responsibility is infinite and it grows
with its accomplishment: “The better I accomplish my duty, the less rights I have; the more I
am just and the more I am guilty.”2 So the subject responds, but never enough, never
adequately, and the Other remains infinitely exceeding one’s response, one’s permanent
responsibility, reproducing one’s permanent guilt. Psychoanalysis differs from this, it doesn’t
sustain the enigma of the Other as an infinite demand, but rather works at dispossessing the
Other of its enigma. One could say that the object is the limit of the Other, not something
perpetuating its infinity, and that the object doesn’t pertain to the Other any more than it
pertains to the subject. It is their link, but this link is a practice, a constant renegotiation of the
limit. The voice may not be mine, but it has the power to operate in the Other, to dislocate its
enigma and its demand, rather than maintain it as the infinite abyss of otherness and
transcendence. Response and responsibility is not quite enough to get at what is at stake in the
voice.

To give a more cheerful line on this, one could think of the practice of comedy, which hinges
on constant renegotiation of the object between the subject and the Other (as opposed to e. g.

2
Levinas, Totalité et infini, Paris, Le livre de poche, 1987, p. 274.

3
Heidegger’s complete lack of comedy, to say the least), and which is closer to the
psychoanalytic bone than the usual vision of tragic loss and guilt. This line is magisterially
developed by my friend Alenka Zupančič in her book The Odd One In (MIT 2007).

You warn a number of times against the aestheticization of the voice, and even give the
impression that art, as opposed, for example, to philosophy, does not allow access to the
voice in its most radical dimension. On the other hand, you turn to literature, Kafka in
particular, in order to gain insight into voice—yet even here, in the story of “Josephine
the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” you find a kind of parable of art’s failure. My question is
thus, bluntly put, can there be an “art of the voice,” and if so, do you see any examples
of it in contemporary art?

I didn’t include a separate chapter in my book on the aesthetics of the voice, along with the
ethics, metaphysics, physics, politics of the voice, and I am in retrospect a bit sorry about it,
for certain formulations, warning against the inherent fetishization of the voice in music, have
given rise to a criticism from various quarters and even raised a suspicion about my hostility
to art. Yet, I have co-authored a book called Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, New
York, Routledge, 2002), where I deal at great length with the problem of the proper aesthetics
of the voice, of staging the voice, of operatic voice as the bearer of social phantasies and its
capacity for provoking and registering social transformation. And yes, I am a great opera
lover, as well as a follower of various contemporary artistic practices which tackle the voice.
In the last months I participated in a strange exhibit at Manifesta 7 and engaged with the work
of e.g. VALIE EXPORT, Smadar Dreyfus, Katarina Zdjelar, among others. I am not listing
these names as model examples, their work is extremely different, just stating that I gladly
engage, theoretically and practically, with people working as artists on the voice in various
manners.

Is art doomed? Absolutely not, and the parable of the singer Josephine is there as a warning
against a certain trap: the confinement of art to a particular glorified place within the social,
turning it into a cultural good. One could even roughly say, although this is a bit quick, that
culture basically functions as a domestication of art, endowing it with sense, a higher
meaning, and allotting it a socially recognized and codified place. To worship art in this way
is to condemn it. It only exists as a constant question mark displacing its own boundaries (‘a
social antithesis to society’, to quote again Adorno), and hence necessarily trespassing on the
political.

The final chapter of your book, “Kafka’s Voices,” ends with a tantalizing suggestion
about how we might rethink freedom from a psychoanalytic perspective. As you remark,
“freedom” is hardly a word that looms large in Kafka’s universe, and yet there it is at
the conclusion of “Investigations of a Dog”—you even go so far as to call it Kafka’s fin
mot, the key term that in its very absence resounds throughout his writing. The same
might be said of Freud and Lacan. Both of them rarely speak of freedom, and when they
do it is usually in a dismissive way; Freud denounces free will as a narcissistic fantasy,
and Lacan famously stated (inaccurately, I might add) “I have never spoken of
freedom,” letting it be understood that he considered such talk naïve humanist ideology,
a misrecognition of the subject’s radical dependence on the Other. Yet one could argue
that the whole wager of psychoanalysis is precisely to create a “freer” relation to those
desires and fantasies that move one so inexorably. I wonder if you could elaborate here a
little on the conclusion to your book: what is the new conception of freedom you see in
the wake of Kafka and Freud?

4
Lacan was notoriously a man of extremely difficult style, but this arduous side was as if
counterbalanced on the other hand by his great talent to produce a number of short and
striking slogans (like ‘The Woman doesn’t exist’ or ‘There is no sexual relationship’). And
one of these slogans is ‘Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche’, ‘There is a cause only in
something that doesn’t work,’3 or ‘there is a cause only of what limps’. The line is paradoxical
and I suppose counterintuitive. For it would seem that causality is what works in a network of
causes and effects which constitute the basis of regularity and law, and so that what doesn’t
work or doesn’t add up would appear to be a breach of causality, a crack in the causal chain.
Yet it is in the place of this break, this glitch, that Lacan places the question of the cause. This
is indeed something that has to do with the very origins of psychoanalysis, since the first
phenomena that it dealt with were tiny things like slips of the tongue, or dreams as slight slips
of conscious life, something appearing in a crack of normal causality, a momentary hitch,
which hinted at another kind of cause, irreducible to both causality of nature or the intentional
causality of consciousness. Yet, Freud insisted on the strict determination of psychic life, so
that even such slight phenomena must have a determinist explanation, and therefore it would
seem that this leaves no space for freedom. Still, what is a slip determined by? Is the
unconscious the name of another causality determining us behind our backs? If we look at it
more closely, we can see that the basic problem is that no such substantive, objective,
independent causality exists, that it cannot be spelled out as a latent content or a latent cause
simply to be unearthed behind the manifest one. Rather, the spelling out of the latent content
makes the paradox of the cause even greater: it shows that the distorted form of the
unconscious formations cannot be explained away with the latent content, so that the form
itself is endowed with a surplus of distortion which testifies to a glitch, a crack of contingency
within the regularity of laws and rules.

This is where the object appears, precisely the object as cause, ‘object cause of desire’, as
Lacan would insist, and the object voice is one of the ways of getting to it. So the object
appears as cause at the point of the missing cause, and there is subjectivity only insofar as
there is a missing link, a glitch in the seamless chain. And this is the trouble with the talk
about freedom in psychoanalysis: it is not posed in terms of the freedom of the will or as an
abandonment of determinism – relying on the sheer will-power or glorifying the decision can
easily be prey to condoning repression and the self-delusion of the ego. It is only by working
through, by repeating, by engaging with the object that one can work towards the point where
necessity and contingency overlap, and where one is far more free than one can imagine, or
more than it is supposed by the usual theories of subjective freedom. This is where Kafka
takes on a special value, for it seems that his universe is the epitome of non-freedom, of total
closure and entrapment, yet he works all the time towards an opening in midst of the very
closure. One could say that what both Kafka and Freud have in common is the following: to
look very closely at the ways of entrapment, and through this to work towards the way where
the seemingly objective causality crushing us itself involves contingency and subjectivity, and
the way we are inscribed in it gives us more power than we could ever hope for.


3
The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 22.

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