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Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 9 (2005) 99-105



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A più voci. Filosofia dell'espressione vocale. By Adriana Cavarero. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003. 270 pp.

The year 2003 will be remembered as an annus mirabilis for Italian feminist studies because two very important books were published: Adriana Cavarero's A più voci. Filosofia dell'espressione vocale and Luisa Muraro's Il Dio delle donne.1 Both writers teach at the University of Verona, where the philosophical community known as Diotima was born and still acts as one of the most authoritative centers of feminist philosophy and theory in Italy, well known for having developed "il pensiero della differenza sessuale" [the theory and practice of sexual difference].2

In the following pages I discuss the implications of Cavarero's newest book for feminist theory, particularly for political theory, and at the same time look for the relevance that Cavarero's proposed philosophy of voice could eventually have for gender musicology in opera. Even if I can't hide my enthusiasm for Butler's concept of gender [End Page 99] performance as a working category in the epistemology of opera criticism, I do believe that we should practice a sort of synergistic approach, and we should be open to the new philosophical issues proposed by feminist theorists. Furthermore, I'm inclined to suspect that inside the field of musicology it is time to speak of feminist musicologies, to reflect (as for feminist theory) a plurality of positions wider than the "envoicing/undoing of women" debate that was so influential in the last decades.3

A più voci has a symptomatic subtitle—a philosophy of vocal expression. Here the word "voice" isn't used as "the unsounding voice of soul and conscience" (189), not the one with which the traditional male subject of philosophy talks to himself in the cogito, but as phonè—the peculiar human capacity to produce sounds that enter into language, coming from "a throat of flesh" that is unique, unrepeatable, and, of course, sexed.

So a feminist philosophy of vocal expression is chiefly a philosophy of the female voice, a crossing of myths, philosophical narratives, and literary representations, a journey, step-by-step, from the vindication of the lost, corporeal, asemantic features of voice to new political issues. Cavarero's stress is not on the communicative traits of phonè but on the relational aspects of the act of speaking, that is, "on the saying rather than on the said" (205, Cavarero's emphasis), on the bodily link between mouth and ear rather than on the meaning of the message.

If voice implies a mutual presence of speakers, the connection is one-to-one and takes its roots in the carnal body; it is a matter both of the uniqueness of a single being and of resonance from one's throat to the other's ear. Posing the physicalness of human sounding as a basic quality of the subject is an undeniable step forward in the direction of what Cavarero calls "a vocal ontology of uniqueness" leading to the proposal of "a politics of voices."

In Cavarero's thought this volume is a prosecution of the deconstructive, antimetaphysical battle she waged against the patriarchal logos of Western philosophical tradition, the core of her previous In Spite of Plato (1995), and, at the same time, a development of the attention she paid to orality and narration in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000).4 She takes her risks: the target of her criticism is the representation of voice in different disciplines (semiotics, linguistics and psychoanalysis, orality studies), and her aim is to disclose their implicit attitude to an eye-centered speculation.

Each traveler has her guide, and Hannah Arendt is Cavarero's; the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy is a sort of contentious travelmate. We find inside her baggage Plato, Aristotle, the beloved Homer, Ovid, the Bible, Borges, Braithwaite, Calvino, Rosenzweig, opera, and, in the complex, theoretical appendix "Dedicato a Derrida" (A Dedication to Derrida), a highly inspired reading of Romeo and...

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