En souffrance d’un corps: essais sur la voix désincarnée by Marie-Chantal Killeen (review)

In this fascinating study Marie-Chantal Killeen offers an insightful analysis of disincarnate voices in literature, cinema, philosophy, and critical theory. She examines the figure of the disincarnate voice as a disruptive force and posits it as a powerful trope to explore issues of narrative, genre, gender, the politics of voice, and the body, as well as to reflect on the specificities of the deployment of voices in different media. The foreword provides a useful overview of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of voice, with regard to technological advances, literature and the novel in particular, psychoanalysis, and cinema. An important characteristic of the book is the attention paid to non-canonical works; this is evident in Chapter 1 especially, which takes as its object of analysis the posthumous narrative voices in novels by Didier Van Cauwelaert and Daniel Pennac. Killeen fruitfully analyses the ‘voices from beyond the grave’ of these novels in the context of the ‘retour du récit’ in contemporary French literature. The second chapter — on sound/image relations, and the voice-over in Claude Lazon’s film Léolo in particular — is perhaps the most illuminating; Killeen suggests that Lazon’s film presents us with a voice that is irretrievably acousmatic, in this way revealing the original noncoincidence between cinematic voices and bodies. Chapter 3 returns to literature and provides an engaging analysis of the ‘genderless’ narrative voices of Gilles Rozier’s Un amour sans résistance and Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and the ways in which they challenge principles of sexuation. Chapter 4 focuses on Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva and further explores the disjunction between the image track and the soundtrack in film as already examined with regard to Léolo. Killeen provides an original analysis of how the migration and confusion of voices in Diva question and defy genre classification. Chapter 5 explores the Romain Gary/Émile Ajar affair through the metaphor of ventriloquism, in terms of vocal manipulation and substitution. Chapter 6 turns to the politics of voice and draws on Gayatri Spivak to examine issues of mediation of voice and the complex relation between individual and communal voice in Assia Djebar’s seminal text L’Amour, la fantasia. The last chapter focuses on the Derridean conception of the disincarnate voice, articulated between the two poles of Husserl’s univocity and Joyce’s equivocity. The epilogue fruitfully joins together the case studies and the various types of disincarnate voices analysed, highlighting a poetics of ventriloquism in the complex relationship between voice and body in literature and cinema, and the persistent ambivalence of the disincarnate voice. It then provides a short analysis of how these issues have been playfully articulated in Michel Tournier’s Tristan Vox. Killeen’s En souffrance d’un corps is a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking book that draws on an impressively varied range of case studies and theoretical approaches. It is an important contribution to the analysis of voice in literature, film, and critical theory, using the disincarnate voice as a powerful and complex object of study to bring these disciplines into a critical dialogue.