Abstract
The construction of sound theory is still in its initial stage, requiring exploration of existing intellectual resources. Agamben's insights into sound not only inform sound studies theoretically but also offer a new direction in connecting his early linguistic philosophy with later political philosophy. Agamben's awareness of the problematics lies in the fact that, despite Derrida's deconstruction of the present illusion of sound, a more covert transcendental illusion, the Voice, persists. The Voice, as sound and metaphysical grammar, resolves philosophical binary opposition through transformation. Nevertheless, achieving such unification requires that the Voice, endowed with an embedded function of “dividing and connecting,” inevitably establishes an unjust threshold between animal sound and human speech. This threshold lacks legitimacy but evolves into the absolute standard for creating naked phoné. Constrained by this anthropological apparatus, the human voice is endlessly commandeered, transformed and shaped by micropolitics, potentially reduced to a subject of governance. Agamben proposes a redemption strategy from the perspective that the threshold also serves as the resolution to distinctions, hindering the Voice from intersubjectivity. Therefore, Agamben's critique of sound politics aims to unveil the sound grammar concealed behind the subject's auditory experience, which is then subject to criticism and dispelling.
Keywords
Agamben, the Voice, mechanism of transformation, threshold, articulation
Recommended Citation
Guo, Jian. 2024. "The Vanishing Sound Grammar: Agamben's Critique of Sound Politics." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 44, (1). https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol44/iss1/19
