Horrors of a Voice (object a)

This book reframes the Lacanian object a voice as a horrific register of alterity. The object gaze has received, as it does in Jacques Lacan’s work, more commentary than voice. Yet recently voice has garnered interest from multiple disciplines. The book intervenes in the Slovenian school’s commentary of the ‘object voice’ in terms of two questions: audition and corporeality. This intervention synthesizes psychoanalysis with recent theorizing of the horror of philosophy. In this intervention the object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae – epistemological voids that evoke horror in the subject. Biological and evolutionary perspectives on voice, genre horror film and literature, music videos, close readings of Freudian and Lacanian case studies and textual analysis of ancient philosophy texts all contribute to an elucidation of the horrors of the object a voice: Vox-Exo. Tristam Adams is a theorist and writer. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths college, London in 2019. His research explores voice, horror, mask, empathy, cringe comedy, popular culture, capitalism and technology in an interdisciplinary mode encompassing Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, critical theory and literary criticism.