mouth of philosophy

<p>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). </p>