Insidious

Empirical studies, fiction and close intertextual readings are employed to explore the incursions and contagions of voice. Voice is pitched as analogous to slime, a vital and horrifying excess. The contagion theme is extended to a survey of ‘earworms’ (involuntary musical imagery [INMI]). The motif built here is voice’s incursion into bodies. Texts from Žižek and Dolar, exploiting a horror vocabulary, are employed to frame object a voice in terms of contagion, a parasitic pathogen. INMI are compared to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a parasite that compels a host body to behaviours expediting proliferation. A section focusing on Sirens extends the contagion of voice theme in terms of species and gender. For whom are such voices horrifying? It is concluded that historically the spell of voice is a register of a subject’s fears and horrors: a male subject. Political suppression of voice and music are surveyed, and these final turns continue to consider gender and species in terms of Plato and Aristotle; enjoyment in music and voice are presented as prospects of horror that man has legislated and sought to control. The final twist is explicated with a debt to Adriana Cavarero’s nuanced reading of Plato’s Symposium in For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. It is argued that Alcibiades and Plato are plagued by the contagious and spellbinding nature of Socratean voice, their love of this voice is unrequited: it is a torment. The former’s reaction is to flee the voice. Plato’s move is to devocalize logos, meaning and soul, from voice by reducing it to script. In each case, these are responses to the physical insidiousness of voice, methods of bearing the horrifying corporeality of voice—the horrors, the jouissance, the thrill, of a voice.