La voce umana

by Giorgio Agamben

I grammatici antichi cominciavano dalla voce la loro trattazione del linguaggio, distinguendo con cura la voce confusa degli animali – «il nitrito dei cavalli, l’urlo rabbioso dei cani, il ruggito delle fiere e il sibilo del serpente» – dalla voce «articolata» degli uomini. L’antropogenesi, il diventar umano del vivente «uomo» coincide cioè con un’operazione sulla voce, che la rende significante, trasformando il verso espressivo dell’animale in uno strumento impareggiabile di dominio e di conoscenza. Ma che cos’è una voce articolata? Attraverso una paziente indagine archeologica, il libro ricostruisce il senso e le modalità di questa «articolazione» della voce, interrogando la funzione che in essa ha svolto l’invenzione della scrittura e revocando innanzitutto in questione il rapporto fra voce e linguaggio, fra il nome e il discorso, fra chiamare e significare. Situare il linguaggio nella voce significa, infatti, articolare insieme non soltanto il suono e il senso, ma anche il vivente e il parlante, il corpo e la mente, la natura e la storia. La riflessione sulla voce è allora inseparabile da una riflessione sulla natura umana e costituisce in questo senso un problema essenzialmente politico, perché in esso ne va ogni volta della decisione di ciò che è umano e di ciò che non lo è.

Genres: Philosophy

98 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2023

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tem muitos livros que não são o que aquilo que a gente espera. A maioria deles fica aquém das nossas expectativas, mas acontece raras vezes de terem livros que superam aquilo que a gente esperava. Este é o livro mais recente do filósofo Giorgio Agamben e, como o título diz, fala sobre A Vaz Humana. Mas como todo livro de Agamben, e este é o melhor dos livros dele que li até agora, a coisa é mais complexa do que parece. Agamben analisa a voz humana no nível da linguagem, o quanto de tom e de expressão, de qualidade coletiva e de qualidade singular que a transformam. No meu caso, me interessa a engendração da voz, aquilo que é relacionado ao gênero masculino, ao feminino, a nenhum deles e a ambos. E Agamben traz algumas pistas sobre isso, que poderei explorar fortuitamente. Se o outro livro da Quina que comprei, sobre a nostalgia, tinha me decepcionado, este, da Voz Humana, superou o que eu esperava dele.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not an easy book to read. Matter of fact it was damn difficult. But my great teacher, Gordon Lish, taught me to read philosophy in a different way than my earlier schooling attempted. I read philosophy now as poetry basically, and let my feelings discern what is important to me and what is not. It is no longer necessary for me to understand every damn word or concept I read. I take notes and highlight the phrases and ideas that get my attention. What follows here are some of my notes, and you might do the same while perusing the text. Please read my entire view here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/msarki/...

[Kyle C]

Modern linguistics, as the conventional story goes, begins with Saussure and the division of signifier (the word) and the signified (the idea or the referent), of semiotics (signs) and semantics (meaning), of langue (the system of language) and parole (speech). From this perspective, the role of the linguist was to study the signifiers and the langue—from the individual phonemes that comprise speech to the morphological and syntactic rules that make speech comprehensible. Language and interpretation thereby could be an object of scientific inquiry, human communication organized schematically into ordered subdomains.

Agamben's rebuttal to this view of language begins, unexpectedly, with a study of the arcane scholarship of Greek and Roman grammarians. Tracing the idea of the grammatical case of the 'vocative' (the case of 'calling'), Agamben explores how the idea of naming (cognate with the word 'nominative' and 'noun') is inseparable from the idea of 'calling'. 'To call' is ambiguous: it can be an act of apostrophe or invocation (e.g. 'hey David!' or 'O clouds') or it can describe an act of denomination (e.g. 'I call you David' or 'I call these clouds'). In many languages, naming and calling are yoked together under the same word: phonein or kalein (in Greek), vocare (in Latin), rufen (in German), chiamare (Italian, and etymologically derived from the Latin clamare—to shout—as if calling and naming were an act of crying out). Naturally, in both Greek and Latin, the word for voice (vox, phone) also means word itself—since the use of voice, the act of calling and naming (vocare), becomes an act of word-smithing. Importantly, calling precedes all other language. Agamben quotes Augustine's opening sentence from the Confessions, "Let me know and understand, Lord, whether one first calls you or praises you, or whether one first knows you or calls you?" But the vocative 'Domine' points to the theological answer: Augustine can call God before he knows who God is or how to praise. Calling does not require—as signs do—a referent or a meaning. His voice can call out before it can name or refer to its signified.

From there, Agamben moves to the topic of voice versus writing. Ancient grammarians saw a difference between human voice and animal vocalization. The human voice can be transcribed into letters; animal sounds cannot, except by some facetious imitation or onomatopoeia (think Aristophanes' mimicry of birds: "brebebebebex"). It is precisely that writability that constitutes the human voice, breaking down the traditional opposition between oral and literary (what makes something meaningful speech is the fact that it can be captured in letters—the human voice is a "phone engrammatos", a lettered sound). Aristotle described language not as a binary of signifier and signified but as a quadripartite system of 1) the voice or 'things in the voice,' 2) the mental experience of the listener, 3) letters, and 4) the things themselves. Language involves a voicing of the signifier which refers to the mental images and experiences of the listener, which can be transcribed into letters and can refer to things in the outside world. But importantly, it is the grammaticality of the human voice, its ability to be written into graphemes, that makes it intelligible and, ultimately, linguistic. The voice both creates language and is an object of language; it makes words and, self-referentially, it is made part of and validated by language.

For Agamben, the historical division between signifier and signified, langue and parole, writing and orality, reflects a broader sundering of culture and nature, faith and reason, man and animal. But by recentering voice as the exception to, and the link between, these categorical divisions, Agamben posits a new possibility of philosophical and poetic recovery, of a new and ongoing anthropogenesis. This part of the essay is the most speculative and abstract, but one might imagine here that, by reconstructing the historical fractures in our metalanguage, and restoring the primacy of voice and reexamining the divide between articulated human speech and inarticulate animal vocalization, one can imagine new languages and new words—ones that can rescue human politics from the semantic quagmires of age-old debates.

It is common nowadays for English teachers to talk about 'finding one's voice'. Feminists and queer scholars have also challenged us to think about who has a voice and whose voice is heard—the whole politics of "voice-having" as Rebecca Solnit has called it. Modern theorists have pointed out that not all have a voice or, even if they do have a voice, their voice is derogated as 'shrill' or 'hysterical' or 'uppity'. At a higher abstract level, Agamben reaffirms why: the voice (broadly construed as both the individual vocals and the individual signature of language) is not just referential but self-referential. To have a voice is not simply to name things in the world or participate in language; it is to be an individual, to be heard and valued, to be human. To be denied voice, to be silenced, or to be tone-policed, is to be removed from human culture. The voice, then, is what creates our social reality and can become an instrument not just of signification but of moral significance and justice.

This translation and edition had a few minor issues ("quod scribe potest" should be "quod scribi potest", "aunruf" should be "ausruf", and Greek accent marks should be printed with an acute, not a grave, accent). Free indirect discourse in the translation was also sometimes confusingly presented as Agamben's own thoughts, making the paragraph seem contradictory.