Cavarero asks us to think of uniqueness as "an understanding [un'intesa] and as a reciprocal dependence" (p. 182). The latter term suggests what Cavarero might mean by "understanding," but I'd like to begin by asking what kind of understanding is possible in the absence of consciousness, for Cavarero's privileging of speech over thought in the logos comes with a hearty dose of antipathy toward nous. She writes of a phenomenology of the voice, yet there is no place in her phenomenology for a conscious subject. Mouths communicate with ears and the recognition of vocal uniqueness occurs spontaneously, as if by magic. "The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears comes to the fore" (p. 174). By "autonomous" Cavarero means autonomous with respect to thought, that speaking isn't merely the acoustic manifestation of thinking. She intends to give back flesh and bone back to the subject, but unlike the phenomenologies of Patočka, Herny or Merleau-Ponty, she has not elaborated a notion of bodily awareness–actually she sort of does have such a notion, but it comes in bits and pieces. For example she says that the "ear distinguishes sound and knows it to be human not only because it vibrates in the specifically human element of speech, but also because the ear percieves its uniqueness" (p. 178). Whereas Cavarero portrays the communication between mouths and ears of others as direct and instantaneaous, she cuts out of the picture altogether communication between the ears and mouth of a conscious subject. There is nothing to explain the unity of the mouth and ears, no explanation of how the knowledge that the ear possesses pertains to the mouth of a hearing subject or anything other than the ear.
Speaking of Levinas' ontology of the face-to-face, Cavarero says that "[r]ather than the atemporal dimension of a lasting permanence, the face to face evokes a discontinuous becoming, characterized by the ever-new 'present' of the 'nows' in which the gazes intersect" (p. 177). While reciprocity is sometimes an attribute of the gaze, Cavarero argues it always an attribute of the voice. "[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational" (p. 177). In one manner of speaking, relationality is not a contingency but a necessary condition of a kind of understanding. To make this argument was it necessary to dethrone to nous? I see two steps that had to be taken: (1) the critique of atemporality, or presence, which Cavarero sees as a property claimed for nous; and (2) a decentering of understanding. I don't see how the complete obliteration of a noetic faculty makes sense in this context, though I will admit that this is not the kindest reading of Cavarero, and what I am really after is settling a question in my own mind as to how understanding is possible.
Labels: body, Cavarero, noesis, plurality, reciprocity, uniqueness
2 Comments:
That seems to depend upon what understanding is. What concept or kind of understanding is at issue?
I don't know a jot of Italian so I don't know exactly why Cavarero's translator provided the term intesa. I'm assuming that there's some specific sense of understanding that Cavarero has in mind. When Cavarero writes of the ear knowing that a voice belongs to a unique human being, this suggests to me a kind of understanding. My criticism is that by Cavarero's account this understanding seems to remain localized in the ear even while the tongue is engaged in interlocution. I think she also means to suggest an understanding that arises from the "discontinuous becoming" of interlocution, and I'm not sure how this is possible unless the ear and the voice operate under a "shared" understanding of what is going on. So I have these several senses of understanding: what the ear knows, what the body who speaks knows, what the person who speaks knows, and what people who speak to each other know together. This latter kind of understanding interests me the most. I don't see how it could be possible based solely on what the ear knows.
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