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colin_cox's review against another edition
5.0
Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More is a rich, complex, and lucid meditation on the voice as understood through, primarily, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology. In many ways, reading A Voice and Nothing More reminds me of Alenka Zupančič's What IS Sex? in so far as the density of the argument on practically every page is both revelatory and disarming. I cannot address the size and scope of Dolar's argument here, but I will cite my favorite observation about the voice and how it functions as an "extimate" object. Dolar writes, "Where does the voice come from? It comes from the innermost realm of our being, but at the same time it is something that transcends us, it is in ourselves more than ourselves, yet again, a beyond at our most intimate" (96). Here we see Dolar synthesize Lacanian psychoanalysis with Hegelian thought, specifically the relationship between the transcendent and the material. As Dolar sees it, we must locate the transcendent in the here and now, which is to say, in the mundane materiality of human existence. Quite simply, the transcendent lives among us, and it is incumbent upon us all to search for it there. For Dolar, the voice is the here that houses the there.
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