Medusa's Ear: University Foundings from Kant to Chora L

Notes

133 NOTES CHAPTER ONE. MOURNING THE VOICE 1. The modern viewing subject, along with its constitutive signifying process, is, to use Julia Kristeva’s words from “Holbein’s Dead Christ” (in Black Sun), “isolated, pruned, condensed, reduced” (Kristeva 1989, 115). It will be my task in this book to argue that the isolation and reduction have to do particularly with the viewing subject’s ear. 2. I concur with Mieke Bal in Double Exposures on the point that it is impossible to define vision, including modern vision, in unified and essentialist terms, as the ocularcentric narrative does; there are, she suggests, “differentiating modes, if not kinds of vision,” and our practices of reading should accordingly endeavor to proliferate points of view (Bal 1996, 9). Like Bal, my strategy will be to multiply perspectives —on ways of hearing, however, and not just looking. 3. In the Western philosophical tradition, the voice, says Rée, is at one with “‘spirituality’, ‘identity,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘mentality,’ ‘interiority,’ or ‘subjectivity’” (Rée 1999, 2–3). 4. See Martin Jay’s comprehensive analysis in Downcast Eyes of the shift that takes place with Descartes to “modern ocularcentrism.” As should be evident by now, I take issue with Jay’s thesis that modernity is based solely on the eye; as will become evident in later pages, I also take issue with his contention that “postmodern” French writing, particularly Derrida’s, is an “essentially ocularphobic discourse” (15). 5. While it is not an examination of the phonocentric ear or of the role of hearing in Derrida’s work, Robert Smith’s incisive study Derrida and Autobiography is an important resource for my work in this book. I am also indebted to Gregory Ulmer’s “Sounding the Unconscious,” and I draw much from Derrida’s The Ear of the Other. 6. Sacks alludes to this spatialization when he remarks that much of what seems to occur linearily in speech is “multileveled” in sign language, so that “what looks so simple is extraordinarily complex and consists of innumerable spatial patterns nested, three-dimensionally, in each other” (Sacks 1989, 87). By the same token, lip reading, “an extremely inadequate word for the complex art of observation, inference, and inspired guess-work which goes on” (2), entails spacing, the gap or delay between what is spoken and what the lip reader pieces together to hear. Whether it proceeds by the reading of hands, lips, or written words, or by the movement of sound waves imprinting the body, deaf hearing, because it is so radically embodied, breaches the space-time closure of metaphysics, “temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the moment [nun]” (OG 12). 7. As a partial exception to this omission, see Enterline’s (2000, 45) discussion of Echo and Narcissus. The exception does not really alter my point, however, which is that Enterline’s study of the voice and vocal trauma, as fine as it is, all but leaves out the ear. 8. For reasons that will continue to emerge in this chapter, I cannot adopt Enterline’s term “phonographic” to describe the imaginary that is at issue in the present book. I take her point in The Rhetoric of the Body (2000, 12) that no sooner is a phonocentric fantasy entertained than it is eroded, since subjects, and not only Ovidian subjects, are embodied and thus necessarily caught up in the “graphing” of signifiers. Nevertheless, the fantasy that concerns me has it otherwise: according to the fantasy of the lost voice/ear, the original phoné is precisely what precedes, and thus escapes, the graphic. 9. As C. D. O’Malley notes, it was Gabriello Fallopio (c.1523–62) who, in his Observationes anatomicae, first called attention to the third ossicle of the ear overlooked by Vesalius, who had described only the malleus and the incus. Despite his description of the third ossicle, Fallopio attributed its discovery to Ingrassia. As for Vesalius, he had already heard of the third ossicle, and had sought and found it himself, before reading Fallopio’s Observationes. This must have been between 1555 and 1559, O’Malley suggests , “as the revised edition of the Fabrica makes no mention of the ossicle” (291). It may be that Vesalius became “acquainted with the third ossicle from the reference to it—an unacknowledged borrowing from Ingrassia—by Valverde in 1556. In the Examen , his reply to Fallopio’s Observationes, Vesalius tells how, When I was cleaning a skull for preparation of a skeleton, an ossicle chanced to...