Violence

What does voice require of the body? Texts considering voice in evolutionary, biological, anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific disciplines are examined. Fiction and theory-fiction are employed to illustrate imports from these fields. A key turn is the framing of voice as a delicate orchestration that brutalizes, co-opts and asphyxiates the body from which it issues. This concept is articulated on several levels: phylogenetic, evolutionary and developmental. The malady of voice is then amalgamated into Lacan’s comment that the subject is ‘captured and tortured by language’ (Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III 1955–1965, Trans. Russell Grigg, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London, UK: Routledge, 1993), 243.). This alloys Lacanian conceptions of voice to the suffering body. The chapter culminates in a close reading of Lacan and his commentators and argues that voice in his schema was always a locus of corporeal horror wrought from without.