mouth of philosophy

In his 2006 monograph, A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar opens his study of the voice with an epigraph from Plutarch: "A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said: 'You are just a voice and nothing more'" (3). Using it as the inspiration to study the voice in philosophy and psychoanalysis, Dolar begins-as do many thinkers of the voice-by forgetting the mouth.1 For if the little bird is indeed "a voice and nothing more," it is only so by virtue of its failure as something good for the mouth. The epigraph thus proposes a paradox: to know the voice, one must forget the mouth and to know the mouth, one must forget the voice.2 This dissertation takes up but one side of this irresolvable dialectic-it forgets the voice in order to know the mouth- and returns to Jacques Derrida's 1975 essay, "Economimesis," to think the mouth as an "abyssal provocation" for philosophical thought ("On Touch-Jean-Luc Nancy" 25).