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whose development is deter-mined by the autonomy of a field of research, "heterological"
sciences engender their products by means of a passage through or by way of the other. They
advance according to a "sexual" process that posits the arrival of the other, the different, as a
detour necessary for their progress. In the perspectives we have adopted here, that means that
orality remains indefinitely something exterior without which writing does not function. The
voice makes people write. Such is the relationship Michelet's historiography has to "the voice
of the people," which nevertheless, he says, he has never "succeeded in making speak"; such
also is the relationship Freud's psychoanalytic writing has to his patient Dora's pleasure,
which "eluded" him all through the oral exchange in her treatment.
From ethnology to pedagogy, we see thåt the guaranteed success of writing hinges on an
initial defeat and lack, as if discourse were constructed as the result and occultation of a loss
that is the condition of its possibility, as if the meaning of all scriptural conquests were that
they multiply products that substitute for an absent voice, without ever succeeding in
capturing it, in bringing it inside the frontiers of the text, in suppressing it as an alien element.
In other words, modern writing cannot be in the place of presence. We have already seen that
scriptural practice arises precisely from a gap between presence and the system. It is formed
on the basis of a fracture in the antique unity of the Scripture that spoke. Its condition is its
non-identity with itself.
All "heterological" literature can thus be considered as the result of this fracture. It tells both
what it does with orality (it alters it) and it remains altered with and by the voice. Texts thus
express an altered voice in the writing the voice makes necessary by its insurmountable
difference. In this literature, we have thus a first image of the voice simultaneously "cited" (as
before a court of law) and "altered" a lost voice, erased even within the object itself (the
"fable") whose scriptural construction it makes possible. But this "sexual" functioning of
hetero-logical writing, a functioning that never succeeds entirely, transforms it
((162))
into an erotics: it is the inaccessibility of its "object" that makes it produce.
The sounds of the body
From this formation, I shall distinguish another modern figure: the "voices of the body." An
example of this other scene is furnished by the opera, which gradually established itself at
around the same time the scriptural model organized techniques and social practices in the
eighteenth century. A space for voices, the opera allows an enunciation to speak that in its
most elevated moments detaches itself from statements, disturbs and interferes with syntax,
and wounds or pleasures, in the audience, those places in the body that have no language
either. Thus in Verdi's Macbeth, in Lady Macbeth's mad aria, the voice that is at first
supported by the orchestra soon continues alone after the orchestra has fallen silent, follows
the curve of the melody a moment longer, vacillates, slowly slips away from its path, gets lost
and finally disappears into silence. One voice among others breaching the discourse in which
it constitutes a parenthesis and a deviation.
On the modern stage the oral trajectories are as individual as the bodies and as opaque to
meaning, which is always general. Thus one cannot "evoke" them (like the "spirits" and
voices of earlier ages) except in the way Marguerite Duras has presented "the film of voices":
"Voices of women . . . they come from a nocturnal, elevated space, from a bal-cony
overhanging the void, the totality. They are linked by desire. Desire each other. . . . Do not
know we exist. Do not know that people hear them." Destroy, she said: "Writing has ended."''
Even philosophy, from Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus to Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, has labored
to hear these voices again and thus to create auditory space. This is a reversal that is leading
psychoanalysis to pass from a "science of dreams" to the experience of what speaking voices
change in the dark grotto of the bodies that hear them. The literary text is modified by [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]