The Grandmother's Voice
[excerpt]

Slavoj Zizek

[…] The magic power of voice as object is perhaps best rendered towards the end of the Chapter 1 of Marcel Proust's "The Guermantes Way," a novel which is part of his In Search Of The Lost Time. In a memorable scene, using the phone for the first time, Marcel (the narrator of the novel) talks to his grandmother[…]

What happens here is described by Proust in very precise terms which uncannily point forwards to Lacanian theory: voice is subtracted from its "natural" totality of the body to which it belongs, out of which it emerges as an autonomous partial object, an organ which can magically survive without the body whose organ it is—it is as if it stands "alone beside me, seen, without the mask of her face." This subtraction withdraws it from (our ordinary) reality into the virtual domain of the real, where it persists as an undead specter haunting the subject: "'Granny!' I cried to her, 'Granny!' and would have kissed her, but I had beside me only that voice, a phantom, as impalpable as that which would come perhaps to revisit me when my grandmother was dead." As such, this voice signals simultaneously a distance (granny is not here) and an obscene over-proximity, a presence more intimate, more penetrating, than that of an external body in front of us[…]

Art: Sigmar Polke
Untitled, 1964-68/90
Gelatin silver print



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