Beyond the Veil of Our World

This is an engagement with Dolar’s work on voice seeking to impress the significance of the body and horror in ‘object a voice’. It is claimed that ‘the object voice’ is an inexact phrase for voice as it is located within Lacan’s schema. Then, similitudes of horror and voice qua object petit a are articulated. The vocabulary of the Slovenian school’s most significant commentators on voice is highlighted as pulp horror vernacular. Object a voice is framed as an object that announces horrors for the subject. Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth ties this synthesis to corporeality. The chapter then moves to readings of Freud and Dolar, expressing how both impose meaning too quickly on the sounding body, suggesting their texts betray a hyperphasic ear. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is considered, and drawing on Irigaray, it is argued that Freud, in the writing of Ernst’s ‘expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’’, moves too quickly to assume it meant fort/go away. (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Connecticut, USA: Martino Publishing, 2009). 12). The second example of Freud’s problematic treatment of voice is his reading of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581). Here, voice resounds in the moment of horror, yet Freud takes it up as a marker of repetition. These readings explore voices coming from traumatized and brutalized bodies, announcing horrors. The chapter concludes by proposing object a voice to have always concerned the exogenous nature of the horrors of vocalizing bodies: vox-exo.