Genesi ed epifania della voce. Per una filosofia della phoné attraverso Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This article has a double purpose. The first is to establish that the voice theme is an underground river flowing across the thought of Merleau-Ponty, from Phenomenology of Perception to Visible and invisible. The second one, more ambitious, wants to move beyond his insights, through the folds of his unthought, to build a philosophy of phoné on them.

Particularly, we will maintain that the voice shows itself as the singular point of turning, insertion and reversal between the cogito tacito and the cogito langagier.

In more detail, using the courses on Nature that Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France, and the notion of cavity (creux), we will attempt to show the possibility of the passage from the symbolic architecture of the body expressiveness to the most transparent significations of the language flesh (chair).

In the author’s opinion, this passage is guaranteed by three peculiarities of human vocality.

The first emerges from the ontological isomorphism between the voice and the topological multidimensionality of Being of nature, just as described by the French philosopher. The second from the structural negativity that innervates it (displacement from reference, sound evanescence, movement without place from the source). Finally the third from the dimension of the double and the public sphere that it triggers immediately and which constitutes the intersubjective field from which the language-games will not be able to retire any more.