Il canto mostra come la voce possa essere uno strumento di godimento. Per arrivare a comprenderne le ragioni, occorre dapprima riconoscere come il carattere enigmatico della voce sia stato tradizionalmente celato dall’idea che essa sia un trasparente veicolo del significato, che riesce a svolgere la sua funzione in modo immediato, e che annulli la distanza che separa l’espressione dal contenuto. Si può però pensare la voce quale oggetto indipendente dalla relazione con il concetto, e rivolgersi a quei momenti nella storia (...) della riflessione filosofica in cui si è tentato di mostrare come la voce sia materia acustica, e non sia un mero medium: la voce acquisisce in questa circostanza lo statuto di “corpo”, e solo in quanto tale essa è capace di dare piacere. Attraverso la definizione di Lacan della voce come “oggetto pulsionale” si possono esplorare le ragioni che fanno del canto un godimento: l’oggetto, in psicoanalisi, è ciò attraverso il quale la pulsione riesce a trovare soddisfazione. Oltrepassando la teoria freudiana, la voce è introdotta da Lacan tra questi oggetti che consentono alla pulsione di raggiungere il suo obiettivo: soddisfarsi. La voce lacaniana non solo non è in nessun modo assimilabile al discorso, ma non ha proprio niente a che fare con il parlare: è in relazione solo con il corpo e con il godimento. Così l’oggetto-voce, inteso come originario oggetto pulsionale, è quanto più si avvicini a descrivere il “cantare”. (shrink)

In this first original collection of essays on Catholic Biblical Ethics ever done in English, renowned Jesuit moral theologian James Keenan brings together distinct voices from numerous cultures and language groups. The result is a volume representing a truly global community of Catholic ethics scholars. The Bible and Catholic Theological Ethics deepens contemporary understandings of the relationship between the Holy Bible and the world of Catholic ethical reflection. Like the four other books in the prestigious CTEWC Series, this volume aims (...) at offering a more systematic, comprehensive, and global perspective than typical Anglo-centric or North American-focused offerings. (shrink)

This text practices a philosophical voice that deviates from visuo-centric theory and the muteness of its language and instead sings a complex simultaneity of things and thoughts that burn through the walls of the discipline and illuminate the activities at the margins. This philosophical voice sings a refrain of “I,” which brings us back to bring us forward, surprising us in its renewal again and again. It is a body that is, as Samuel Beckett’s Not I, at once not I (...) and I; an idiosyncratic subjectivity that carries its plural name in its mouth. In this way, it further diffracts the sonic possibility of counterfactual slices into simultaneous dimensionalities open to our gaze in the dark, when we have let go of a normative orientation and are able to see the image at its depth. Between text scores, Churten theory, Canto Cardenche, and the breath of a humpback whale, this voice tries not to theorise. It does not want to produce a philosophical message, supporting a “philosophism” which akin to “scientism” treats philosophy as a phenomenon unconnected to cultural values or location, gender or racial specificity. Instead, it aims to practice a philosophy that opens in song to its own anxiety of objectivity, its fear of a reflective centre, and performs a translucent marginality that generates the view of a plural world burning through a permeable skin. (shrink)

Music, as sung and listened to, has been described in many a tale as powerful and transformative. Yet, the important question is not so much if that claim is true or whether it may be verified, but what kind of power and transformation are alluded to in those mythical and literary sources? Taking these symbolic claims and elaborating on their possible meaning, alongside thinkers such as Carolyne Abbate or Roland Barthes, proceeds to find ways in which these claims may suggest (...) different roles that music and singing play in human lives. As much as current musicological and anthropological academic narratives point to the power and its negotiation in society, there is more to singing voices’ charms than this. The author points to an important transformation that happens when the human existential qualities found in the voice’s imperfections (its materiality) are matched with the music’s aesthetic qualities (its beauty, sublimity, its symmetry, its impression) to transform the listener and make her listen. (shrink)

Thirty observers were asked to name the emotion (surprise, fear-pain, sorrow and anger-hate) a singer sought to convey by singing a single note (duration about 1½ seconds) five times. Eighteen emotions were variously named. Simple melodic sequences were also used. Both single tones and melodies "may convey emotional significance to the listener." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA ).

The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father. “When I was born, my father was already no longer there.” Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of Lacan's first marriage: the fruit of (...) despair (“some will say of desire, but I do not believe them”). Lacan abandoned his old family for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle. For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized child of Lacan—even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. In one sense, then, A Father presents the voice of one who, while bearing his name, had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described the word as a “presence made of absence,” Sibylle Lacan here turns to the language of the memoir as a means of piecing together the presence of a man who had entered her life in absence, and in his passing, finished in it. In its interplay of absence, naming, and the despair engendered by both, A Father ultimately poses an essential question: what is a father? This first-person account offers both a riposte and a complement to the concept (and the name) of the father as Lacan had defined him in his work, and raises difficult issues about the influence biography can have on theory—and vice versa—and the sometimes yawning divide that can open up between theory and the lives we lead. (shrink)

‘Pupil voice’ is a movement within state education in England that is associated with democracy, change, participation and the raising of educational standards. While receiving much attention from educators and policy makers, less attention has been paid to the theory behind the concept of pupil voice. An obvious point of theoretical departure is the work of Jürgen Habermas, who over a number of decades has endeavoured to develop a theory of democracy that places strong significance on language, communication and discourse. (...) This paper is an attempt to gauge the usefulness of Habermas’ approach to understanding the theory of pupil voice, in particular how his theory of universal pragmatics lends itself to a ‘philosophy of between’, a philosophy that finds echoes in the conflicted nature of schooling that ‘pupil voice’ is supposed to rectify to some extent. The paper also explores the drawbacks of a Habermasian approach, in particular his overreliance on rationality as a way of understanding communication. Lacan’s concept of the objet petit a is introduced as an alternative way of understanding pupil voice. (shrink)

In this essay I explore problems of pedagogy related to Hans Krása’s Brundibár by drawing heavily upon the thinking of two divergent theoretical perspectives regarding Holocaust testimony as advanced by Giorgio Agamben (2002) and Shoshana Felman (1992). I theorize that lodged within a space of difficult knowledge coalesced through violence, trauma, complicity, memory, and music lies a rupture at the heart of the Brundibár experience. This space is created yet not altogether embraced by contemporary musical experiences of Brundibár in the (...) most extensive and all-encompassing comprehension of its musicking: experiencing the operetta allows its participants to hear those whom it is impossible to hear. I claim that the musical experience as inhered within and enabled by the operetta serves a testimonial and therefore pedagogical function. This function, figuratively hearing and being present to Brundibár’s present absences, implies an empathic walking-beside-in-solidarity and is a position that I suggest allows participants to engage with the operetta more fully. (shrink)

Auditory-guided vocal learning is a mechanism that operates both in humans and other animal species making us capable to imitate arbitrary sounds. Both auditory memories and auditory feedback interact to guide vocal learning. This may explain why it is easier for humans to imitate the pitch of a human voice than the pitch of a synthesized sound. In this study, we compared the effects of two different feedback modalities in learning pitch-matching abilities using a synthesized pure tone in 47 participants (...) with no prior music experience. Participants were divided into three groups: a feedback group receiving real-time visual feedback of their pitch as well as knowledge of results; an equal-timbre group receiving additional auditory feedback of the target note with a similar timbre to the instrument being used ; and a control group practicing without any feedback or knowledge of results. An additional fourth group of violin experts performed the same task for comparative purposes. All groups were posteriorly evaluated in a transfer phase. Both experimental groups improved their intonation abilities with the synthesized sound after receiving feedback. Participants from the equal-timber group seemed as capable as the feedback group of producing the required pitch with the voice after listening to the human voice, but not with the violin. In addition, only participants receiving real-time visual feedback learned and retained in the transfer phase the mapping between the synthesized pitch and its correspondence with the produced vocal or violin pitch. It is suggested that both the effect of an objective external reward, together with the experience of exploring the pitch space with their instrument in an explicit manner, helped participants to understand how to control their pitch production, strengthening their schemas, and favoring retention. (shrink)

One of the main issues raised over the years has been how religion feels about music. The relationship between religion and music as a promoting and not a corrupting art is one of the problems that warrants further research in this area. According to this article, phonic music can be a source for various services and be supported by religion in particular circumstances. The article discusses the musical elements of several religious texts, how religion affects the creative process, the human (...) voice, and religious music. In popular music, voices and vocal expression are extremely important. Voices are instantly connected to the body and different emotional states. However, learned cultural patterns of expression can also conventionalize and alter vocal expression; this is true for both music and daily speech. We know from day to day experience that singing might give us energy and, surprisingly, an actual exercise. Anecdotal suggestions that singing is good for your health and happiness are backed up by a growing body of research. It has been demonstrated that singing causes a variety of physiological changes. Persistent singing practice uses the cardiorespiratory system, strengthening the respiratory muscles and improving breathing efficiency. The up rule of oxytocin, immunoglobulin A, and endorphins, which work on immunological capacity and raise impressions of joy, is only one of the progressions in synapses and chemicals that singing can achieve. In this essay, we examine the role that religious singing plays in promoting the vocal arts. (shrink)

In the present paper, we explore the impact of singing for girls in rural Bangladesh. Previous findings in this field-based interview study (with 18 girls) have demonstrated that singing can act as a driving force in young girls’ psychological individuation processes, implying increased agency and autonomy. A critical question, however, is to what extent the village girls will manage to maintain a feeling of agency as they pass through puberty. How do they navigate between their own wish to (...) continue singing and pressure from cultural norms (such as getting married)? Using Margareth Archer’s morphogenetic approach and Arjun Appadurai’s approach to culture as a capacity as analytical tools, we connect different modes of reflexivity to the girls’ capacity to aspire. We discuss specific mechanisms that emerge as relevant for the girls/young women as they navigate their way through the Bengali rural society. (shrink)

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients (...) Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)

This study collects oral histories in intersubjective methods. Grounded methods allowed for themes to emerge that revealed strategies of self-definition expressed by survivors of ethnic cleansing. The discussion draws on interdisciplinary literature to broaden the scholarly focus from bounded wholes to historical experience. Political scientists convincingly define Silesia as ethnicity and geographical areas in Europe today, yet this anthropological study focuses on the effects of history (sensu Foucault 1972) as experienced, especially emotionally and traumatically, when geopolitical powers divided families into (...) those who stayed and those forced to leave. The discursive field and historical experience of Silesia is vast. An innovative methodology, the ethnography of historical experience, allows for people's experiences of geopolitical boundaries and nation–states to emerge. Themes that emerge distinguish this discursive field in its polyvocality and heteroglossia as creole and multilingual people who experience the imposition of nation–states repeatedly in history. Intersubjective methods change the subjectivity and singing voice of the text author over the long period of this study, and the silent space of trauma is mutually revoiced. Theory from interdisciplinary fields contextualizes the empirical evidence after the themes emerged. (shrink)

The Voice of Virtue illuminates the musical practices at the heart of the Neostoic movement that spread across French lands during the Wars of Religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Guided by twin reparative traditions granting music and philosophy therapeutic power, composers and performers across the embattled Catholic and Protestant confessions turned to moral song as a means of repairing personal and collective virtue damaged by the ongoing conflict. Moral song collections enlarged interest in Stoic philosophy by (...) circulating its ethical program to a broader audience through attractive paraphrases of Stoic maxims set to music. Even more importantly, this skillfully composed repertoire of polyphonic song offered a multi-sensory moral practice that would have resonated powerfully for those well-versed in the paradoxes of the Stoic tradition. Bringing together a repertoire of little-known music prints, a rich visual culture, and an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, The Voice of Virtue not only illuminates the influence of Stoicism on music, but also reveals that we cannot fully understand Neostoicism as an intellectual or cultural movement without accounting for its vibrant musical sounds. Virtue, as voiced in these Stoic practices, proves to be both rational and fully invested in the sensory processes of the singing body. (shrink)

Lena Horne was the first African-American woman to be signed to a contract to a major Hollywood studio, who did however not know what to do with her. Her >colour< – in her voice as well as her looks – meant that she did not fit into the racial hierarchies of the day and she was largely confined oppressively to the margins. However, she was also able to some degree, and in collaboration with other African-American figures in Hollywood, to use (...) this to give a glimpse of African-American modernism in Hollywood cinema. This is thus a case study of cultural production as struggle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Voices by John SallisSean KirklandSALLIS, John. Nietzsche’s Voices. Edited by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 202 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper and eBook, $35.00George Bataille, perhaps the twentieth century’s most fundamentally Nietzschean thinker, suggests that a book should not be viewed as an independently existing entity to be assessed on its own terms. Rather, a book is, according to Bataille, always one brick placed by the (...) author in an already standing wall, resting upon and constituted partly by its relationship to its predecessors. John Sallis has placed an extremely rich new brick into the already extensive wall of Nietzsche scholarship, situated on the one hand between many important continentally-inflected book-length studies, by the likes of Heidegger, Klossowski, Deleuze, Kofman, Derrida, Irigaray, and Krell, and on the other those influential monographs from more traditional or analytic readers, such as Kaufmann, Danto, Hollingdale, Schacht, and Nehamas. Indeed, Sallis’s closest interlocutor is perhaps David B. Allison, whose indispensable Reading the New Nietzsche finds its way into this intermediate space as well. Sallis’s work wins its originality neither by imposing on Nietzsche’s works any fashionable theoretical frameworks or methods nor by insisting that those works conform to any purportedly established philosophical requirements or forms, mining them for comfortingly recognizable positions or claims. Rather, he engages the text utterly on its own terms with extreme sensitivity and insists on placing every line, every claim, every concept, and every argument within the encompassing textual whole, which is to say within the essay or book in which it appears and further within the context of the whole Nietzschean corpus—and for Sallis, Nietzsche’s many “voices” sing in harmony with one another over the course of his largely consistent seventeen-year philosophical career.Nietzsche’s Voices is the eleventh volume in Indiana University Press’s ongoing series The Collected Writings of John Sallis. Sallis being one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Martin Heidegger, his Collected Writings seem to be conceived somewhat on the model of that thinker’s Gesamtausgabe, gathering together not only all of Sallis’s published books but also a number of unpublished manuscripts and shorter texts, complete transcriptions of his lecture courses and seminars over the years, and indeed even some informal addresses and interviews. Richard Rojcewicz reports in his editor’s afterword that these are lecture notes for a course that took place over two semesters at Duquesne University during the 1971–72 academic year.After a brief introductory discussion of the challenge of reading Nietzsche’s unorthodox texts rigorously as philosophical works, the second chapter is devoted to a philosophical consideration of the importance of biography, especially as concerns a thinker who insists generally on the necessity of a close relationship between life and thought. The third chapter presents an extensive reading of The Birth of Tragedy and some of the contemporary unpublished materials. The early essays “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” and “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life” are treated in chapters 4 and 5. The sixth and seventh chapters turn to Nietzsche’s “free spirit” works, first addressing [End Page 726] the critique of all received moral values and the call to invent wholly new kinds of values, in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, and then turning to The Gay Science for Nietzsche’s analysis of the loss of any ultimate foundation for morality, knowledge, and even being itself in our late-modern historical moment. The eighth and final chapter comprises over half the book’s total length, offering a very detailed reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work Nietzsche himself saw as central to his entire corpus, indeed even central to the “history of humanity” insofar as it “splits it into two halves.”The book is full of penetrating insights into the Nietzschean text, and often Sallis’s close attentiveness and holistic approach succeed in resolving previously vexing interpretive problems. In the interest of brevity, I limit myself here to two examples.(1) In the Birth, Nietzsche famously traces the emergence of tragedy back to an almost miraculous marriage of two opposing... (shrink)

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called "movement music," supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the "women's music" of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, exemplifies (...) this transformative power of musical sound. (shrink)

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.The voice did not figure as (...) a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object. Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels--the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice, the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice--and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause. (shrink)

Singing is a way of musical expression interwoven into the human beings' very essence. Voice, as an intimate instrument invisible to the eye, demands as fuller use as possible, which includes muscular stamina and refined listening to sounds. In the educational system, singing is a part of a structured programme with the goal of developing singing abilities and musical culture of participants in the educational process in general. Feeling self-confident and having an image of oneself as a (...) competent and qualified expert in the singing area is of the utmost importance for quality work in the profession of preschool teachers or teachers. The goal of this study was to examine how students at the Teacher Education faculty perceive themselves and assess their singing abilities according to the singing elements we should nourish in working with children. The study aimed at examining how much the students enjoy singing activities, how they appraise their sense of self-confidence in singing, and to which extent the feeling of competence in singing is related with the time component of learning. It was investigated how teachers assess their satisfaction and self-confidence in singing, and whether the connection between these constructs and the type and year of study exists. The research involving 162 participants was conducted in the academic year 2021/2022. The results have shown that students of teacher education faculty are satisfied with their singing abilities and evaluate them well. On the other hand, they lack self-confidence and are not self-assured during singing activities. The results of the t-test showed a statistically significant difference in the assessment of satisfaction with singing abilities between students of early and preschool education and teacher education. The Kruskal-Wallis test determined the existence of statistically significant differences between students of higher years of study and those at lower year of studying according to their assessment of satisfaction with singing activities, wherein students at higher study years gave higher assessments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 112-125 [Access article in PDF] You Make My Heart Sing David Rothenberg Last March I went to Pittsburgh to play music live with birds. The plan was to arrive at dawn, to catch the wary singers at their best—in the early morning chorus, when the most sound was happening. I met my friend Michael Pestel at the gates of the National Aviary, a (...) mostly forgotten federal institution in a rundown neighborhood. I had never heard of the aviary before Pestel told me what a great place it was to jam with the more-than-human world. The staff was rumored to be friendly, and they liked to let musicians in during the early hours before the public, mostly guided schoolchildren, would storm the gates.Pestel was there with his flute and various homemade stringed instruments. I had clarinets and saxophones, coaxed out of their cases, a bit tired from the long ride, but ready to hear what these birds had up their sleeves. We headed for the marsh room, a vaulted expanse with an observation deck and waterbirds from all over the world. I strained my ears to catch some pretty rocking bird beats, but they sounded familiar. Too familiar—the aviary was blaring Marvin Gaye at top volume to these birds at six o'clock in the morning. They were definitely squawkin' and squealin'."I cannot work in these conditions," muttered Pestel. "We've got to get these people to turn that racket down.""Didn't you warn them we were coming?""No," he shook his head. "You can't do that. Art always arrives without warning." [End Page 112]"You sure they'll let us do this?""No problem, man, I've come here many times before. These people know me. These birds know me."Marvin was turned down. The sprinklers were turned down (rain must start in the rainforest room every day before sunrise). How else to keep the gaudy barbets happy? Does a blue-crowned motmot (Momotus momota) or a violaceous euphonia (Euphonia violacea) really want to hear strange instrumental shrieks before breakfast? Weren't they content with "What's Going On?"Athanasius Kircher 1 knew the birds were onto something even in 1650:And then Wittgenstein had the nerve to warn us that if a lion could talk, we would not understand him. 2 When a lion roars, we do understand him (or her). If a cat purrs, we understand her, too. If the voice of an animal is not heard as message but as art, interesting things start to happen: Nature is no longer inscrutable, some alien puzzle, but instead immediately something beautiful, a source of exuberant song, a tune with some space for us to enter, at once a creative place for humanity to join in.We set up on the wooden deck, listening out over the water. Instruments out of their cases, recording equipment wired and set to go. An American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) was in the center of the action, sitting on a branch at the side of the room. He cocked his head, eyed us knowingly. Looking like there was something he wanted to say. [End Page 113]Pestel played a long, low sliding note, followed by a scratchy puff of air. Something strange swooped down next to my feet, shuffled its large black wings. Some kind of ungainly turkey... I read from a plaque on the railing that it was a Palawan peacock pheasant (Polyplectron emphanum). Its quizzical gaze was mute."What are you looking at?" I glared. He stepped cautiously toward the microphone cable, ready to gobble it in his hooked, formidable beak."Hey," I brushed him off. "Stop dancing. Sing!" But no, he was the prancing, silent type.All of a sudden there was a strange voice. A human voice? "Who." I heard. "Who. Who what where why. Who what where why."It was the crow. But not just any crow. He spoke."Did you hear that?" I coaxed Pestel up from the flute."Oh," he said. "That's Mickey. He's been here for years.""Does... (shrink)

In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community (...) that touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/i) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity. (shrink)

In this extraordinary tribute to the importance of the ordinary places in our lives, fifty-two Minnesotans write about the special, sometimes secret, places that give their lives meaning. For some it is their home or cabin or lake. For others, it's a family farm or neighbourhood park, a backyard garden or north woods trail: all places where we find a personal and spiritual connection to the land. VOICES FOR THE LAND explores this complex relationship by linking these personal essays with (...) striking images captured by award-winning photographer Brian Peterson. This marriage of words, images, and landscape provides a powerful reminder of our deep and abiding connection to the land. The writers share the experience of these favourite places through their senses, from the aching tingle of a cold winter night and the sound of ice 'singing' to the buzz of mosquitoes and the acrid smell of burning peat. The Voices for the Land project, organised by the non-profit group 1000 Friends of Minnesota, encouraged Minnesotans to write about the land they love and to fight for its preservation. The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a selection of these essays, paired with Brian Peterson's photos, in an award-winning series. VOICES FOR THE LAND brings these essays and photos together in book form for the first time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Louise Pascale, “Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer: Embracing Two Aesthetics for Singing”Vicki R. LindIn "Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer: Embracing Two Aesthetics for Singing," Louise Pascale explores classroom teachers' beliefs about singing. Specifically, she looks at possible reasons why many classroom teachers who have been raised in the Western traditions of music-making do not feel comfortable singing. As a vocal music (...) education professor and an avid singer, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. My image of a vibrant elementary classroom, rooted in my experiences as a student and later as an elementary music teacher, includes singing. If, as Pascale notes, there is a growing number of teachers who define themselves as "non-singers" and who, because of this, do not include music in the classroom, there is indeed reason for alarm.As I read the introductory paragraph of this paper I immediately thought of elementary teachers who had at one time or another been labeled as "tone deaf" and who had allowed an early negative singing experience to cause them to believe they could not sing. Pascale challenged this simple explanation of the non-singer and made a strong case for a more thorough investigation of the problem.Pascale began her investigation by conducting a series of interviews with people who believed they could not sing. She found a variety of reasons for the self-proclaimed non-singers negative self image including: 1) never being selected to sing a solo; 2) not being able to lead songs, and 3) not singing in tune. Pascale used the story of a young Barbados woman, Onika, as an illustration of how these experiences could be linked to Western music traditions. Onika was born in Barbados but moved to the United States at the age of four. This young woman considered herself a singer in her native country but a non-singer in America. Onika felt she was a singer in Barbados because she enjoyed singing music in the Solka tradition; the music was fun, moved fast, and she could sing along without being concerned about how she sounded. She described herself as a non-singer in the United States because she was not able to lead songs and did not have a strong voice.I agree that the conventional Western view of music in the schools is rooted in classical traditions that value performance, perfection, and virtuosity and that these views may lead to the above mentioned assumptions regarding singing. I question, however, whether this conventional view permeates the beliefs of those [End Page 200] outside of the traditional music education circle. Onika's experiences with music in Barbados seemed to be very natural, a part of life; her experiences with music in the United States seemed limited to formal experiences in church or school settings. It would be interesting to investigate whether the dichotomy is between two cultures, the United States and Barbados, or between two different ways of experiencing music, in school and in everyday life.The main body of Pascale's work is the description of two aesthetics for singing, Aesthetic A, the classical Western tradition and Aesthetic B, a broader, multi-dimensional perspective. The list of characteristics differentiating Aesthetic A and Aesthetic B relate to the teaching of music, the process of music education. Emphasizing product and performance, stressing the importance of skill building and relying on classical repertoire are characteristics related to the traditional viewpoint, or Aesthetic A. These characteristics are contrasted with those related to Aesthetic B; the emphasis is placed on process and participation, stress is placed on social value and feeling, and vernacular repertoire is used. Pascale makes the point that Aesthetic B is not meant to replace "traditional" thinking but is a broadening of the perspective. Two questions emerge from Pascale's two aesthetics. First, is there a commonly held "traditional" culture of singing that exists in schools today? Schools and learning populations in the United States are so diverse it is hard to imagine a single philosophy driving music education. Second, does Aesthetic B add new dimensions, or does it describe a balance that is necessary in any philosophy that... (shrink)

'Sound Effects' collects original articles on English and American prose fiction which analyse vocal phenomena by using the psychoanalytic concept of the object voice - introduced by J. Lacan and theorised by M. Dolar - as their interpretative tool.

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly (...) lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of postmodern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature. (shrink)

Packed with ideas designed to help children learn to sing, this booklet offers criteria for selecting songs, strategies to bring out the best in children's voices, and suggestions for games, ideas, and resources.

Packed with ideas designed to help children learn to sing, this booklet offers criteria for selecting songs, strategies to bring out the best in children's voices, and suggestions for games, ideas, and resources.

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more (...) recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer:Embracing Two Aesthetics for SingingLouise M. PascaleI entered the Music Workshop course with trepidation. Of all the courses in my Master's program, I feared this one the most. My experiences with music have always been negative ones. As I entered the classroom, memories surfaced of the time I was told to mouth the words so I would not throw the rest of the class (...) off key and when I was laughed off the stage after a friend and I attempted a rendition of "Rolling O'er the Billows." After that, I was convinced I should not sing.1Maxine Greene reminds us how easy it is to get caught in the "main text of life," one that is "negotiated mostly by convention, routine, habit, duty and one we have very little choice in."2 Our long-held acceptance of the "singer" and "non-singer" provides a perfect example of Greene's metaphor. The traditional meaning of "singing" is created out of convention and habit, perpetuated by the "main text" (white, middle class) values of American society.Singing, as it is understood in today's educational settings, settled into its role in American music education as a result of a number of significant decisions made as early as the 1600s by prominent leaders of the church.3 Each of these decisions added to the growth and strength of the view of singing that became [End Page 165] what I refer to as a "taproot"4 in music education. This taproot continued to settle comfortably into the groundwork of music education and has had major and long-lasting effects on how we generally perceive and experience singing.The Western perspective of singing is wedded to a multitude of assumptions and beliefs and, over a period of time, has taken on complex meaning. It is associated with subtle nuances, such as valuing the high, lilting soprano voice over the alto. It is connected to various philosophies and strongly held convictions, such as improving vocal performance through the mastery of musical literacy, and even exclusionary practices, such as selecting out the "better singers" and suggesting that others refrain from singing at all.Perhaps the most profound consequence of this entrenched taproot is that it has left American society with a very limited perception of "singing." This singular, well-supported root, albeit strong, impenetrable, and closely connected with a number of cultural and societal assumptions, effectively narrows the scope of our perceptions, our language, our philosophy, and our teaching practices in the domain of singing in education. Illustration of the powerful ways music relates to and directly expresses the social attitudes and cognitive processes of a culture are found in the work of John Blacking and John Miller Chernoff.5 Their work provides an opportunity to reflect on the cultural and societal influences of the "taproot" philosophy of music education and the ways these have created limitations on who expresses themselves musically, why, how, and for whom.One of the most critical of those limitations is that we have classroom teachers who rarely, if ever, sing with their students. The gap between those in education who sing and offer musical activities to their students and those who do not is greater than ever. The "non-singer" mentality persists in educational communities and is not being addressed in music education circles. Singing continues to be considered, by most educators, to be a complicated skill that must be learned and requires training in breathing, vocal technique, and diction, and a basic knowledge of note reading.Many have strong feelings about singing; it is not a neutral subject. When the topic of singing is brought up, some involved in the conversation are likely to personalize it and be eager to share stories about their singing ability and to express their opinions about whether or not they qualify as a "singer." Sometimes the reactions can be extreme. Some people shy completely away from singing, to the point of running from the room at the mere suggestion that they might be asked to participate in singing in public. Others have an opposite reaction and experience singing as an enjoyable activity... (shrink)

The Second Vatican Council, taking into account the modern needs of mankind, called for the mutual tolerance of denominations, reforms and compromise in church traditions and practices. This was a response to the practical life of the Ukrainian church in the diaspora. For the Eastern Churches, the Council adopted a separate Decree "The Constitution for the Eastern Churches" 1, on the basis of which a conference of the UCP bishopric, led by the Supreme Archbishop Joseph Slipy, was convened on December (...) 14, 1966 in Rome. It discussed a number of issues, including the case of Divine Liturgy, the liturgical language, the introduction of the Ukrainian spoken language, some reductions in the Service of God, and the reformation of church singing. It was for this purpose that the dioceses established Liturgical Commissions, in particular at the Chicago Department in the United States, which included the musicologist, composer, and musical culture activist of the Diaspora Myron Fedorov. One of the tasks of the commission was to preserve the traditional self-made singing, so that he "did not disappear, but he lived and developed under different kinds: single-handed, double-voiced or in choral works, which most would be out of the richness and beauty of our rite". (shrink)

Distinguished historian of Judaism Jacob Neusner here ventures for the first time into constructive theology. Taking the everyday life of contemporary Judaism as his beginning, Neusner asks when in the life of the living faith of the Torah does Israel, the holy community, meet God? Where does the meeting take place? What is the medium of the encounter? In his attempt to answer these questions, Neusner sets forth the character and the form of the Torah as sung theology. Israel, the (...) holy community, meets God in the synagogue, while at prayer, and in the yeshiva, when studying the Torah—at the moment in each setting when the Torah is received. In both circumstances people do not read but sing out its words. With the written part of the Torah sung in the synagogue, and the oral part declaimed in centers of sacred learning, music provides the medium for Judaism's theological voice. Neusner identifies a reciprocal exchange between the holy community Israel and God: Israel sings to God when the Torah is studied, and God sings to Israel when the Torah is declaimed. Through the metaphor of music, Neusner offers an account of how he believes those faithful to the Torah meet God in the Torah, and how they should listen to the melody of God's self-revelation. The result is an original theological reflection that will interest all students of Judaism. (shrink)

Musical ensemble performances provide an ideal environment to gain knowledge about complex human interactions. Network structures of synchronization can reflect specific roles of individual performers on the one hand and a higher level of organization of all performers as a superordinate system on the other. This study builds on research on joint singing, using hyperscanning of respiration and heart rate variability from eight professional singers. Singers performed polyphonic music, distributing their breathing within the same voice and singing without (...) and with physical contact: that is touching each other's shoulder or waist. The idea of singing with touch was motivated by historical depictions of ensemble performances that showed singers touching each other. It raises the question of the potential benefit of touch for group performances. From a psycho-physiological point of view, physical contact should increase the synchronization of singing coordination. The results confirm previous findings on synchronization of respiration and HRV during choir singing and extend those findings to a non-homophonic musical repertoire while also revealing an increase in synchronization in respiration during physical contact. These effects were significant across different frequency ranges. The effect of physical contact was stronger when all singers were singing in comparison to the partial ensemble. Importantly, the synchronization could not be fully explained by the singing action or by the standing position or touch. This finding suggests a higher level of organization of all singers, forming a superordinate system. (shrink)

This paper, a version of which was presented at the ‘Feminist Futures’ twentieth Anniversary conference of the British and Irish Feminist Theology Summer School in July 2012, is, in one sense, a misnomer. Through the lived experience of one remarkable woman with whom I have the privilege of working as a mental health chaplain and companion, I recount her past of pervasive patriarchal abuse, pain, and psychic ‘storms’ but also her present that contains her songs of survival and her language (...) of liberation. It is one woman’s life, a life that could be replicated in many women’s lives, not only in the past, but in the present and throughout the world. But it is only by being acutely reminded of the unique, personal narratives of women, and men, whose past continues to invade our presents by their unbearable witness to the actual violence of the patriarchal landscapes in which their ‘voices’ have been seemingly silenced and their language pathologized, that we shall be able together to conceive of futures. These are futures where, whilst, acknowledging the continuing severe and enduring psychological damage to the abused and the violated and enabling appropriate treatment to be available, we shall also empower the bearing of the witness, the resolute and hard won language of the remaining, the bursting forth from the deadness of tombs of terror, of resurrected lives in the dance of the garden. This will require a sea-change in the way we imagine and establish mental health services and it will require an applied feminist theological methodology to be at the heart, not only of the theoretical models, but of the witnessing to the theology-making that such hidden, ‘anonymous’ lives intrinsically reveal. To imagine such mental health services is a subject for another paper. For now I want to introduce one such life I have been describing and with whom I have the privilege of travelling, consciously and shamefully aware of my gender in a way which seems OK, which seems re-imagined through the eyes of a woman who has absolutely no reason to love men but who has invited me to tread tenderly towards the sights and seasons of her pain and abuse. (shrink)

Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is taken for granted. Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the body-voice relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête, Writing to Vermeer, Three Tales, One, Homeland and (...) La Commedia and dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies. (shrink)

In For More than One Voice, Adriana Cavarero argues that “voice” has primacy over other concepts characterizing human existence.1 She introduces this claim through an exegesis of Italo Calvino’s text “A King Listens”.2 The fictitious king, paranoid, insomniac, has reduced himself to a “great ear.” He no longer pays attention to the content of what his courtiers say to him. His ear picks up only the “vocal timbre of their voices.” This timbre is “artificial, false, ‘cold,’ like death.” But it (...) is sufficient for the king’s fanatical vigilance to distinguish between fawning fidelity and furtive betrayal. One day, however, the king’s auditory world is disturbed by the singing of a woman whose voice he hears... (shrink)

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. (...) This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike. (shrink)

Studying Lacan's Seminar VII offers a contemporary, critically informed set of analyses of Lacan's ethics seminar and astute reflections about what Lacan's ethics offers to the field of psychoanalytic thought today. The volume interrogates the seminar with fresh voices and situated curiosities and perspectives, making for a compellingly exciting range of explorations of the crucial matters related to an ethics of psychoanalysis. The essays question and tease out the paradoxes Lacan draws attention to in his seminar of 1959-1960, and in (...) addition, offer radical engagements with the seminar in light of theories of racism, inequality, capitalism, education, and subjectivity. The key elements in Lacan's seminar are explained, debated, and reconsidered with Antigone, das Ding, and the inevitable "ne ceder pas sur son desir" duly unpacked, examined, and ruminated upon. Studying Lacan's Seminar VII will be of interest to psychoanalytic scholars and students of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts. It will also be of interest to scholars and students of politics, philosophy, and studies at the intersections of racism, film, feminism, sociology, gender and queer theory. (shrink)

To better understand the knowledge of language we study how it interacts with other kinds of knowledge in the performance of different abilities and their corresponding knowledge structures, for example in reading and writing or in comparing prose and singing. The more difficult study is to gain a better understanding of how language emerged in our species. Comparative research with other species focused on communication, especially when expression is vocal and reception is auditory, may help us to formulate the (...) right questions. In the comparisons in which the mechanisms of communication and aspects of the underlying knowledge are learned, another dimension of the research program presents itself. A recent survey of the field by Nicolas Mathevon maps out some of the main results of this research in The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate (2023). The following review essay will be selective, as the survey is wide-ranging and covers related topics that will take us too far, even though they are, ultimately, related. (shrink)

Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The Jazz Singer’s protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his father. The Birth of a Nation, climaxing the worst period of violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth. Birth, a product of the progressive movement, has national political purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat from (...) public to private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political regeneration but urban entertainment.[ … ]Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither. Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness. Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian , Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville , “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. (shrink)

Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science and Art brings together reflections on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in dialogue with Lacanian theory. Rather than focus on the thinkers who came before Lacan, the editors maintain attention on innovations in contemporary philosophy that owe their emergence to complimentary, critical, direct, or tangential engagement with Lacan. This collection makes one of the first concerted efforts to expand discussions between psychoanalysis and more recent philosophical thinkers while gathering chapters by some of the leading philosophical (...) voices of the present moment. With contributors from around the world, this book has international appeal and is unique in its emphasis on contemporary philosophies inspired or influenced by Lacan. Philosophy After Lacan will not only appeal to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, but also to students and professors of philosophy, critical theory, psychology, politics, history, and literature. (shrink)

Obscurity is not the worst failing, and it is philistinism to pretend that it is. In a series of brilliant essays written over the last fifteen years Stanley Cavell has consistently argued that more important than the question whether obscurity could have been avoided is whether it affects our confidence in the author. Confidence raises the issue of intention, and I would have thought that the primary commitment of a psychoanalytic writer was to pass on, and (if he can) to (...) refine while passing on, a particular way of exploring the mind. Indeed this is how Lacan himself proposes that his work should be judged. “The aim of my teaching,” he writes, “has been and still is the training of analysts.” For decades now Lacan has been insisting that the nature of this commitment has been systematically obscured, particularly in North America. Training has become “routinized”, and analysis itself has become distorted into a process of crude social adaptation. There is much here to agree with. Yet two questions must be raised. Has Lacan devised a more effective method of training analysts? And, would one expect this from his writings? Neither question gets a favourable answer. All reports of his training methods, over which he has now brought about three distinct secessions within the French psychoanalytic movement, are horrifying. 13 It is now, I am told, possible to become a Lacanian analyst after a very few months of Lacanian analysis. And what pedagogic contribution could we expect from a form of prose that has two salient characteristics: it exhibits the application of theory to particular cases as quite arbitrary, and it forces the adherents it gains into pastiche. 14 Lacan's ideas and Lacan's style, yoked in an indissoluble union, represent an invasive tyranny. And it is by a hideous irony that this tyranny should find its recruits among groups that have nothing in common except the sense that they lack a theory worthy of their cause or calling: feminists, cinéastes , professors of literature. Lacan himself offers several justifications for his obscurity, about which he has no false modesty. At times he says that he is the voice, the messenger, the porte-parole , of the unconscious itself. Lacan's claim stirs in my mind the retort Freud made to a similar assult upon his credulity and by someone who had learned from Lacan. “It is not the unconscious mind I look out for in your paintings,” Freud said to Salvador Dali, “it is the conscious.”. (shrink)

What is profoundly under question, especially today, in the aftermath of the pandemic, is on one hand the phenomenon of desire, on the other hand the experience and capability of desiring of the human being. Taking a look at the social situation of the country – recalling first the investigation of the 44th Censis Report 2010, the contents of which in some ways are re-proposed in a naturally volved way in the following one of 2020 –, we are given an (...) image that relaunches our thought owards a need to deepen the ontology of desire and a possible educational pedagogy about it. Our society is depicted as “with no inner desire”: a crisis of desire emerges, in the sense of a crisis about the power of having a vision about the future and capacity of planning with excitement. In this paper, recalling Kant and his transcendental productive imagination as well as the new path of affective neurosciences perspective, going through the Theory of Attachment, I aim at opening a possible way to overcome this impossibility to desire arguing a different hermeneutics in comparison to what the tradition, especially that of J. Lacan, left us about this important and vital faculty of the human being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the InvisibleCharles Shepherdson (bio)This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real.—Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject”This moment of cut is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap—the pound of flesh that life pays in order to turn it into the signifier of signifiers, which it is impossible to restore, (...) as such, to the imaginary body.—Lacan, “Direction of the Treatment”A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.—Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible1. The Limit of LanguageWhen The Visible and the Invisible was published in 1964, Lacan was teaching for the first time at the École normale supérieure. In the fall of 1963, the previous semester, the French Society for Psychoanalysis had excluded Lacan from its list of approved training analysts, which also meant his rejection from the society founded by Freud himself, the International Psychoanalytic Association. 1 As a result, Lacan cancelled his seminar at Sainte-Anne [End Page 70] Hospital, where it had been running for ten years, and began teaching for the first time before a university audience (at the invitation of Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and other supporters who had arranged for him to continue his teaching). Philosophers like Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite had of course taken an interest in his work for many years, but this was the first time that participants in his seminar no longer needed the special credentials required to enter the psychiatric clinic at the teaching hospital. The seminar was now open to the public, was considerably larger than it had ever been, and its participants came mainly from the university. Lacan was now obliged to make a case for his work before the academic world.The seminar he had planned for that year was called Les noms-du-père (The Names-of-the-Father), but only one session took place. 2 When he moved from Sainte-Anne to the École normale, he offered a different course, which was published as Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, although it was originally entitled Les fondements de la psychanalyse (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis). 3 It is clear, therefore, that this seminar constitutes a new beginning of sorts, a return to fundamental principles. It also involves a concerted effort, on Lacan’s part, to prove himself.If we begin with these historical details, it is not because of their intrinsic importance, or because a theoretical text can be reduced to its historical milieu, but because Lacan’s remarks on The Visible and the Invisible can be grasped only if we recognize the specific concerns that occupied him during this course. 4Before we turn to that course, however, let us sketch its horizon more precisely. The ill-fated session from the Names-of-the-Father seminar, which has been published in the English (but not the French) edition of Television, contains an analysis of the “voice” which is very close to the account of the “gaze” that organizes his discussion of Merleau-Ponty [see Salecl and Zizek]. The session on the “voice” develops through a reading of the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac [see Derrida], which is in turn elaborated by reference to Caravaggio’s depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling—the entire session providing a brief summary of Lacan’s course on anxiety from the previous semester (the unpublished Seminar X: L’angoisse, 1962–63), in which Heidegger is never far away. 5 The context for his treatment of Merleau-Ponty is therefore extremely complex and overdetermined, opening in many directions, but at the same time it is extremely precise, in the sense that Lacan’s purpose in exploring these materials is not primarily philosophical, but concerns the development of a fairly narrow and technical point within psychoanalytic theory, namely, the problem of the drive. 6 [End Page 71]We thus have an initial orientation: as objects of the drive, the “voice” and the “gaze” are not properties of the subject (the... (shrink)

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is (...) only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality, and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality. This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself. (shrink)