Ventriloquizing Nation: Voice, Identity, and Radical Democracy in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

TLDR: The subject's speech is always a "gift of language" that comes from without and thus remains irretrievably other as discussed by the authors, and if that voice acts to confer and confirm a certain identity, it is an identity that is forever split by the foreign body of the voice.

Abstract: Compressed within (and between) the two epigraphs that begin my essay is a theory of subjectivity.1 According to Lacan, the subject finds (or identifies) itself in language only to lose itself at the same time. Refusing any transparency to speech, Lacan highlights the loss inherent in any act of (self-)representation. The subject’s speech is always a ‘‘gift of language’’ that comes fromwithout and thus remains irretrievably other. In the search for a stable identity, the subject is captivated by ‘‘corporeal images’’ that might serve to mirror the subject’s elusive wholeness and thus confirm its identity. One word for Lacan’s ‘‘subtle body’’ of language is voice. In subjectformation, voice confers and confirms identity and, at the same time, dissolves it. There is an irreducible tension in the effort to subjectify voice—to make it both the source and expression of the subject—because voice, in Lacan’s reading, remains on the side of the object. Extrapolating from Lacan’s formulations, a subject’s speech could thus be figured as an act of ventriloquism, appearing to emanate from the subject but articulated from without. And if that voice acts to confer and confirm a certain identity, it is an identity that is forever split by the foreign body—the objectal nature—of the voice.