Gani, Florianne
A firefly voice
- 2025.
65
The voice carries accents of the archaic and can bear witness to the period before infants gain access to speech. It transports traces of drives and affects prior to speech. Irreducible to logos, it calls for a certain kind of listening that requires a thinking body to hear the voice and make it resonate. Listening in this way opens up speech and makes a stifled voice resonate. The firefly voice is a voice that survives the work of the negative. Its intermittencies attest to the struggle against subjective disappearance, and its gleams appear as survivals of negativity. The syncopated voice expresses a pulsation and a psychic animation that reveal its attempts to relate to the world and to others, and to inhabit its body. Thinking about the voice at the level of its “zero degree of thinking” means learning to listen to its drive charge and its oscillations between unbinding and binding. The firefly voice, with its gleams and absences, bears witness to a flayed subjectivity which adjusted listening envelops so that it can resonate and be heard.