mouth of philosophy

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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).