Mladen Dolar
The Voice and the Stone: From Hegel to Beckett
[this is an excerpt. for the full article please see our order page]
The voice and the stone are, to say the least, obviously at opposite ends, they form maximum extremes. ‘Silent as a stone’, one says in many languages; stone-deaf, one says in English. The being of stone implies the impossibility of both emitting a voice and receiving it. Stones can neither speak nor hear. Furthermore, the stone implies inert materiality, lifelessness, and immobility (one says ‘stone-still’), whereas the voice is the sure sign, indeed the first sign of life. The voice is mobility itself, the undulation of air that can never be fixed; it cannot be present as a thing, it is presence at its most elusive (and therefore, I suppose, at its most inveterate). If material, then it is the slightest form of materiality: mere vibration, quaver. The voice is almost immaterial; it is, as one might say, written in the air, i.e., vanishing the moment it is emitted. Whereas if something is written in stone, then it is there to stay, presumably for good, resisting the vicissitudes and ravages of time. They both have a close relation to time, but in the opposite sense: voice epitomizes time as fleeting; it is its transitory aspect, the ephemeral moment which escapes the moment it arises. The passing of the voice—its evanescence, its instant evaporation—is the metaphor of the passing of time. The stone is time as endurance, permanence, durability, and intransience; its materiality is such that it, of all things material, comes closest to eternity. Their relation to life is, again, at the maximum distance: the stone is non-life par excellence, the thing as dead as can be, a metaphor of death; whereas the voice not only stands for life, insofar as it stems from a living creature and serves as the proof of life, but it is also more than life as far as human voice is concerned: the voice epitomizes life at its purest, i.e., its being ethereal, the subtlest version of materiality there is. It is as if the voice were preordained to epitomize the life of spirit, the quintessential spiritual life irreducible to matter, the intangible matter beyond matter just as spirit is, supposedly, beyond the material forms of life, their secret mover, more alive than mere life, like material transcendence of materiality. Thus, in a reversal, it is the voice as the bearer of spirit that can be the harbinger of eternity in its very evanescence: true eternity as opposed to the mere durability of the stone. The stone is pure exteriority; the voice is pure interiority: it stems from, and testifies to, an unfathomable interior endowed with a soul or a spirit. The metaphoricity of both, as well as of their opposition, is heavily laden. It inevitably has a long and winding history with many ramifications—the history of metaphysics as its telltale sign? Oh, but the word itself is so heavily laden that it has started to resemble a black hole; one would need more precise means to tell the story of the voice and the stone.
There is a philosophical discourse on both, involving their opposition, their necessary hierarchy. If there is a philosophical discourse on the stone, then it epitomizes the lowest region of being: the lifeless, the selfless, the inert. Without any principle of movement or action in itself it is objectivity at its deadest, deafest, dumbest, and most senseless. Two famous examples must suffice. Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, when discussing the ethical action, guilt, and destiny (in the context of ancient Greece), argues that the deed, a voluntary action, involves loss of innocence: it implies guilt and consequences that one did not bargain for. However, taking that risk is, for Hegel, the only way to ethical action. Hegel asserts that “[i]nnocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child” (282). The stone has the privilege of innocence in being deprived of any possible action, it is always equal to itself and can only be moved from outside. Innocent as a stone, no departure from self-identity, no inequality, no split into interior and exterior. Heidegger, in a section of Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik which is notorious and heavily commented upon, says that the stone is weltlos, worldless, deprived of a world, as opposed to the animal which is weltarm, poor in its world, and finally to the man, who is weltbildend, forming a world, constructing the world of his (her? one hesitates with Heidegger) own. [1] The stone is always the epitome of the inanimate, the spiritless, the worldless. [2]
Notes
[1]
This is amply discussed by Jacques Derrida in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), p.
58-72, and by Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), p. 71ff.