Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

writing—Plato's hierarchy affixes a system of value that distinguishes the communicative nature of a specific kind of “speech” as superior to that of writing. But how do we qualify this speech, if we can even call it speech, in the context of the Phaedrus, and what does it tell us about our relationship to the voice?

In the Greek, Plato uses the word logos, which Benjamin Jowett's English translation renders “word or speech.” Logos was coined by an earlier Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, to express what he thought was the divine and unifying principle of creation, and in his writing, Plato borrows Heraclitus's conception of logos and applies it to human rationality. Because the rational faculty has traditionally been thought to rely on language, the term logos has acquired several related translations and uses in Western philosophy, notably word, language, speech, and even thought.¹⁰ For Plato, the metaphysical dimension of ideality could be communicated and comprehended because logos as a form of speech—or put another way, as a vehicle of insight that “speaks”—makes it presentand affirms it in the soul of the human being. Logos seems to consist of a linguistic dimension because it has the ability to communicate itself, that is, to speak to a “learner,” or in Cavarero's translation, a “listener.”¹¹ This logos exists superiorto writing because the logos dwells within and communes with the human being, whereas only a verbal copy of what logos speaks finds expression on the printed page, not the living presence of the logos.

The assumptions inherited from Aristotle and Plato have shaped the traditional philosophic and linguistic understanding of language and vocalized speech, but the two philosophers reference the voice only to the degree that it imparts the sounds that make up language. Voice seems important, even central, to the hierarchies they establish, but theirs is a universal voice, a semantic voice, a voice in the abstract. It is not a voice we actually hear, a living voice, a voice “lined with flesh” or “a carnal stereophony,” as Roland Barthes puts it.¹² The often-cited quotations of Plato and Aristotle neglect the corporeal dimension of individual speakers. As Cavarero argues in her critique of Jacques Derrida's identification of the Phaedrus as the instigation of a “phonologic” tradition of Western