For More than One Voice

The book re-thinks the relation between speech and politics – announced in Aristotle's formula whereby man's nature as a political animal [zoon politikon] is bound up with man's characterization as that animal which has speech [zoon logon echon] – by focusing on the embodied uniqueness of the speaker as it is manifested in that speaker's voice, addressed to another. In this way, the investigation radically departs from more traditional conceptions of what constitutes 'political speech,' such as the signifying capacity of the speaker, the communicative capacity of discourse, or the semantic content of a given statement. By discussing Arendt’s, Derrida’s, Levinas’ and many other scholars’ positions, the book locates the political sense of speech in the singularity of the speaker's voice, the acoustic emission that emits from mouth to ear. Thus politics emerges from 'the reciprocal communication of voices,' wherein what comes to the fore is above all the embodied singularity of the speakers in relation to others, no matter what they say.