Giorgio Agamben, in his provocative work Language and Death, presents a picture of Western metaphysics as rooted in a conception of language as discursive logos from which the “voice”—the physical sound that reminds us of the inarticulate animal call—has been negated and removed. Agamben’s account provides the occasion for a closer look at what voice is, and why, in the interests of logos, it must be negated and put out of play. What I wish to show is that, as the physical phenomenon through which the body makes itself present to language, voice embodies a primary form of meaning and plays a crucial role in the realization of language.

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In Language and Death, Giorgio Agamben presents what is, in effect, a myth of the origins of the Western metaphysical tradition. It is a myth that describes the condition that makes possible the emergence of Western metaphysics—not ex nihilo, but rather in an event of negation, or negativity. Agamben locates the site of this originary negativity in the Western conception of language as logos. As an account of origins it may or may not be empirically true, but it explains, as myths explain, how things are the way they are, given what those things are. What those things are—what the myth attempts to explain the origin of—are the products of the rational discourse of Western metaphysical speculation.

Agamben’s argument throughout the seminar from which the material for Language and Death was taken is multifaceted and often quite subtle. Here I only want to consider one aspect of it, which to me is the central aspect: What is the founding event of the Western metaphysics that gives it its negative character? What, in other words, is the primordial event of negativity from which Western metaphysical tradition arises?

The Removal of Voice and the Emergence of “Voice”

On the Fourth Day Agamben restates the central question of the investigation as “What, in the experience of the event of language, throws us into negativity?” (LD p. 31) What, in other words, is it about the exercise of language (the utterance) that is bound up with—or better yet, is creative of—the negation on which Western metaphysics ultimately rests? Agamben’s answer is that “in order for meaningful discourse to take place,” the “voice […] phoné, […] must necessarily be removed” from the event of the utterance (LD p. 35). What is this “voice” that must be removed? Drawing on a reading of Hegel and others, Agamben argues that phōnē in its primordial form is the animal voice, an upsurge of inarticulate sound. That there can be the articulation of meaningful discourse, or logos, it is necessary that the physical presence of this inarticulate voice be negated; that there can be an “experience of the taking place of language,” there must be “the removal of the voice” (LD p 37, emphasis in the original). With the removal of voice qua physical phenomenon, we get something Agamben calls “Voice,” capitalized in order to “distinguish it from the voice as mere sound.” This “Voice” is an emptiness, a “nonplace of the voice” whose emptiness is the legacy of voice’s “having-been.” It is a strange phenomenon, a neither-this-nor-that which “enjoys the status of a no-longer (voice) and of a not-yet (meaning)” and thus “necessarily constitutes a negative dimension. It is ground, but in the sense that it goes to the ground and disappears” (LD p.35). Voice is voice negated; it is the inarticulate sound within voice repressed or struck out: “Voice” presupposes voice where voice is the negated phenomenon of sound without gramma, an event from which logos as such is excluded.

In sum, it is only on the negative ground—the “nonplace” of “Voice”—from which the voice as phōnē has been removed that the taking place of language proper can take place. Understood as the physical phenomenon—the carrier wave, as it were—through which the logos is transmitted, voice cannot ground language precisely to the degree that the latter is understood as logos. Logos can only emerge onto the negative ground of “Voice” which has been cleared of voice once voice has become voice. And it is this clearing of voice in favor of rational discourse that serves as the founding event of Western metaphysics, to the extent that this latter presupposes rational discourse as its precondition. It, no less than the logos on which it rests, is thus itself grounded in a negativity for which “Voice” sine voice is the “originary stratum.” (LD p. xii).

The Gramma

Where does this positing of a founding move of negativity come from? Agamben traces it back to the thinking of the ancient and medieval grammarians who divided the voice of spoken language into two aspects: phōnē, or sound in its immediacy, and gramma, literally “letter,” or the sign that the voice carries and through which it signifies itself. The gramma has something of a dual nature: it’s both sound and sign, being “the sign of the voice” but also “its element” (LD p. 37). It’s through the gramma that voice transcends itself as a physical phenomenon and takes on signification; we might think of the gramma as representing the capacity of sound to embody meaning—as the basic element making the signification of language possible. As such, Agamben describes it as “the ground that sustains the entire circle of signification.” (LD p. 39, italics in original)

Through the gramma voice, in its immediacy as a purely physical phenomenon akin to, and continuous with, the inarticulate animal voice, opens itself up to the possibility of bearing a meaning that transcends it in the form of the logos that it now is licensed to convey. The raw physicality of the voice, its presence as an index of the contingent existence of the speaker as well as of the contingency of the situation within which the taking place of language actually takes place, consequently recedes to the background and is obscured—or, to borrow a psychoanalytic metaphor, is repressed in the way that an unwanted desire or memory is repressed. It’s through the gramma that voice qua physical phenomenon is removed and becomes voice, to be replaced by “Voice,” and that the ontic, or the domain of beings as particular existents inhabiting the time-bound world of the concrete and finite, can be subsumed into the ontological domain of the logos of Ideas and essences. Hence the gramma, as the capacity of sound to signify, serves as the ontological foundation on which metaphysics rests. But because it involves a repression or removal of phōnē as such, it “functions as the negative ontological foundation” (LD p. 39, italics in original). When language is theorized as originating in the gramma, as Agamben argues is the case with Western thought, then “[n]othing is in the voice, the voice is the place of the negative” (LD, p. 39). In short, it is the gramma, as the original vehicle of signification, that negates voice as something both inarticulate (meaningless) and present to the contingent moment of the taking place of language.

And yet at the same time, the gramma is a part of that voice. What I take away from this is that the gramma has a profoundly dual nature as a kind of intermediary between the inarticulate cry and articulate meaning. As both sound and sign, as both physical (audio) phenomenon and indication of that phenomenon, it heralds the emergence of language in its most basic, elemental form, providing an interface between pure sound and realized meaning. If by itself not quite yet sense, it is the condition for the possibility of there being sense. In its dual nature, it is in effect the pivot point at which the pure sound of the voice potentially turns into the signification of a meaning. Or better, it’s a Janus figure facing in both directions: in the direction of the animal voice and in the direction of the logos. But ultimately, the face directed toward the animal voice turns away and looks instead toward the logos that it articulates. Relegated to the blind spot that results, voice in its invisibility becomes voice.

But Why Must Voice Be Removed?

The turning away from the animal voice, and its consequent removal from speech, is the crucial event in the negative creation myth of Western metaphysics. We might see this removal as a kind of bracketing or epochē through which one aspect of speech is suspended or put out of play in order that the other aspect—that aspect that consists in signification or logos—can take its place, and thus can assume the role of being foundational or elementary for speech and through it, for language per se. The upshot of this removal and substitution is that meaning is conceived of in terms of rational discourse while phōnē, with its trace of the animal voice, is repressed and consigned to forgottenness. Such a repression is necessary simply because voice in its aspect as phōnē represents the intrusion of the body and its brute physicality into the rational and transcendent logos, a body whose states, needs, desires, and perishability define it as irrational or, perhaps better, arational, and reveal it to be an entity bound by a finite existence. If the removal of voice represents a negation, it is this that is being negated. If voice qua phōnē is equated to the animal cry, then its appearance within human speech is ostensibly a relic of the meaningless and irrational—the animal, the bodily—persisting within the uniquely human facility of meaningful language. Another way of putting this is to ask why logos, as rational discourse, needs to have voice removed. And the answer is, because it must break the continuity of the human voice with the animal cry in order to assert human exceptionalism.

The gramma, to the extent that it turns away from the physical phenomenon of sound and toward the possibility of meaningful discourse—the possibility of the emergence of logos—in effect licenses this notion of exceptionalism by disclosing the taking place of speech as the event in which mere sound becomes intellect or, to use the more traditional (and telling) term, Spirit. In so doing, the gramma metaphorically disembodies the physical act of speech and reimagines it as something rarefied and Ideal. And that is why voice as phōnē must be repressed and become voice: it carries the memory of an animal, bodily existence that ultimately is incompatible with the transcendent structures of discursive meaning, which is the primordial soup out of which metaphysics congeals. (And to the extent that language is conceived of as the medium of the universal Ideal, it already presupposes the metaphysical outlook that will emerge fully blown from it.)

Voice, Nevertheless

And yet, and yet…is there really nothing left of voice when, as the primary event in the taking place of language, the gramma comes into play as sign and denies phōnē as a meaningful element within speech? To be sure, when we subtract the physical dimension of voice—when we convert voice to voice—we’re left with the sign qua sign, but this sign paradoxically signifies that which it removed, or which its recognition repressed. In truth, the voice, ruled out of bounds for language, remains as a presence inseparable from the taking place of language, just as the letters spelling out “voice” are still perceptible under the struck-through “voice.”

We’ve already seen how voice as pure sound embodies the memory of the animal and with it, the bodily, within logos. The human voice, the voice of speech, consists in continuity with the animal voice; it is the appearance of the body, through its affective states, as being present to language. As such, it constitutes the context within which speech appears and signals an emotional opening to the interlocutor, thus initiating the relationship to him or her before any actual signification is articulated through logos. I would argue in fact that that is what the intention to mean comes down to: a clearing opened by the desire to speak. This clearing, although a precondition for language, isn’t yet language accomplishing itself through discursive meaning. Voice, as the intention to mean qua opening to language, is strictly speaking outside of language but with a force that impacts language and that constitutes the context of the speaking situation. Understood this way, voice is proper to the way of saying rather than to what is said—proper to how what is said is said—and as such is one of the various behavioral and emotional cues that provide boundaries around what what is said can be said to signify.

Thus if metaphysics requires the negation of voice, it is because it must repress the event-specific affective and behavioral cues attendant to the language event—the traces of the animal body impinging on discourse—in order to transcend them in the service of the Ideal. If voice as the intention to mean is an invitation to participate, an opening within which the taking place of language can realize itself as a participatory activity in which the interlocutors are physically present to each other in a given situation, then it is a phenomenon of contingency and particularity. And we can see how metaphysics, understood as consisting in the universal or general concept—the Ideal as Real—requires the removal of voice precisely because voice, which conserves the presence of the bodily, is a physical presence that constitutes the taking place of language as both a contingent event and a participatory activity. Against the generalized Ideas that constitute the logos, it is a reminder of the particularity and ephemerality of language qua event.*

Voice and Meaning, Voice as Meaning

But if voice in all its contingency and bodiliness is thrown out the front door, it nevertheless manages to slip back in through a side door. Negated by the sign and exiled from the domain of language as meaningful discourse, voice constitutes an essential, if extra-linguistic, dimension of meaning. Not only does it convey an intention to mean, but it also conveys a meaning of its own.

To understand the role of voice in meaning, we need to look again at animal vocalization. Is it really meaningless? I think not, but it doesn’t fit within the conventional paradigm of meaning. It is a direct expression—externalization—of the animal’s condition as and when the animal experiences it, inseparable from the state it signifies. There is no mediation of description or reference, properly speaking, intervening between the vocalization and its meaning. No gramma or logos, no sign representing what the vocalization expresses. There just is the vocalization, as a dimension of the state it expresses. But there is meaning nevertheless—a meaning of affect and bodily presence rather than signification proper. It is a meaning that indicates how what is spoken matters to the speaker.

Through its comportment, which takes various forms including the speaker’s and interlocutors’ gestures, facial expressions, and—most directly to the point here—tones of voice, the body conveys the layer of affective meaning, or significance, through which discourse reveals itself as something of concern. Something meaningful. But “meaning” here doesn’t refer to semantics or reference but instead to something describable as value, consequence, or vital interest. This layer of meaning isn’t discursive in the narrow sense but rather existential, in the context of the immediate situation in which language appears. Voice, along with the contingent meaning it exemplifies—the meaning literally embodied in the state of the speaker in the performance of speech—demonstrates the centrality of the body to our being in a world pervaded by meaning. In a very real sense, the body, through its emotions, needs, and senses, discloses what is meaningful in the world by relating it to those emotions, needs, and senses. The emotions it invests in the world constitute the world as mattering, as being something of concern and to which its affective states provide eloquent, if unspoken and perhaps ultimately unspeakable, witness.

If affect is the body giving witness of itself to itself and to others beyond itself, voice is affect giving witness to the presence of the body to language. Voice isn’t the presence of emotion in language, but to language. Emotion isn’t inside language any more than the context of speech is speech, but it supplements language by conveying something prior to language that language by itself—language as logos—cannot convey. It adds a certain thickness and urgency to the meaning that language can convey. I’m reminded here of primatologist Frans de Waal’s assertion that the body, through its visible states and its direction of attention through the gaze, can communicate a range of meanings much better than can language (de Waal, p. 65).

The kind of presence to the world embodied—literally—in our body is a presence that exists prior to the kind of presence critiqued as metaphysical. Bodily presence is the presence of affect and sensation before concepts or ideas proper can gain any purchase; the body is in a real sense the original source of meaning, and this meaning supplements, as it underlies and is prior to, the meaning proper to language as logos. The voice that Western metaphysics must remove from language is a form of this bodily presence; it is a physical phenomenon, a vibration manifesting the lived presence of the body and which, as such, occupies a level of being prior to analysis and to the logos through which analysis articulates itself.

It’s worth noting in passing that voice as phōnē is a sensual phenomenon and thus belongs to the aesthetic, which Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, described as the

high point of communication and transmission between living creatures […] This is where languages originate: the languages of tone as well as the languages of gestures and glances […] One never communicates thoughts: one communicates movements, mimic signs, which we then trace back to thoughts. (Nietzsche, § 809)

In the persistence of voice, in its witness to the continuity of human with animal existence, language experiences a kind of return of the repressed. Although voice, as phōnē, can for purposes of analysis be separated from the content or meaning of speech and thus removed as a factor in considering what is spoken, from the point of view of the speaking situation it is an integral, meaningful dimension with a crucial role to play. In face-to-face speech it is meaningful in and of itself, but its meaning is of a specific kind. Its meaning isn’t the meaning of logos—of the kind of conceptual or categorial content through which the particulars of the world are generalized and made recognizable and intelligible—but rather the meaning of the particular as conveyed in an invitation indicating that something is being spoken by the being from whom the sound originates. It clears a space in which the interlocutorial relationship can establish itself and in which logos can be shared. Voice can carry this meaning because it establishes presence in a way comparable to the way that the animal sound establishes the animal’s presence, as an indication inseparable from the animal’s actual, bodily state of being whose meaning ultimately derives from the fact that it is through the body and its states that the animal—and we as well—is present to the world and the world is present to it. Seen this way, phōnē is meaning beyond the semantic or semiotic: it isn’t a sign of affect but rather is affect in its outward manifestation which, along with bodily attitudes and gestures, provides the framework of meaning within which the speaking situation can arise. It is the trace of the animal presence within the human voice, the grounding of what is said in the felt need to say it—a felt need that is preconceptual, something expressed rather than described, a condition rather than an observation or reflection.

What then does the persistence of the voice mean for the negativity in whose name it is repressed? In short, it means that while Western metaphysics undoubtedly has been shaped by the demands of logos, and the demand that logos qua Spirit free itself of the body and hence of the residue of the animal, like any human endeavor it rests on an affective foundation—on the non-, pre-, or even irrational. Seen this way, the creation myth is be about sublimation and integration rather than transcendence and overcoming. On negation as affirmation. Does this invalidate the history of Western metaphysics, or the inherited language of terms and categories through which we both perpetuate and challenge it? I think not. The voice of the animal may speak through us, but in the end, it’s capable of speaking in the language of abstract concepts and universals.

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*It also is a reminder, in a larger sense, of the finitude of the speakers participating in the taking place of language. Agamben in fact cites Hegel to the effect that voice as phōnē is the sound of the dying animal. This raises a question far beyond the scope of what can be addressed here.

Daniel Barbiero writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in After the Art, Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). His website is here.

References

Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, tr. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991). Internal cites to LD.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968).

Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019).