Song, from the Latin cantio, means 'singing' and also 'to enchant'. In singing, the human voice simulates a musical instrument. Lyrical singing evolved from French troubadour songs, through Gregorian chant, cantatas, opera and Lied, to modern song. The themes of the songs were generally related to love, revealing the "specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life."1 A song, insofar as it is written by a subject, is also a product of the unconscious, and it will be necessary to decipher that amorous specificity, avoiding enchantment by the symptom, in order to hear what is sung beyond meaning.
Singing makes use of the voice. Lacan speaks of the voice based on the Shofar, a symbol of the voice separated from the signifier, because it generates a sound that comes from a dead animal.2 It is the voice separated from speech that indicates something of the object lost at the beginning of speech.
Miller says that the voice in the Lacanian sense does not belong to the register of sound but is ordered by its a-phonic function. For "the objects called a are tuned to the subject of the signifier only if they lose all substantiality, that is, only on condition that they are centered by a void, that of castration."3 Thus, the voice, emptied of its materiality, could be like the letter 'h' [in Spanish], without sonority between words.
The voice of a song tells a story, speaks of what resonates from the symptom. But the voice, in the Lacanian sense, is inscribed on a void. "If […] we sing and listen to singers, if we play music and listen to it, Lacan's thesis implies that it is in order to silence what warrants to be called the voice as object little a."4 The sonorous materiality of the voice in a song covers up the aphonic voice which, being of another order, can become a source of jouissance or anxiety.
The voice as object a, as the remnant of saying, is closer to the letter as littoral. It is closer to a letter that is located in a "space without a stage, with a play of light and shadow,"5 which writes a syncopated, dissonant, silent, out-of-tune song.
[1] Freud, S., "The Dynamics of Transference" (1912), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, p. 99.
[2] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014, p. 244.
[3] Miller, J.-A., "Jacques Lacan and the Voice", in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, eds. V. Voruz and B. Wolf, Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2007, p. 139.
[4] Ibid., p. 145.
[5] Vieira, M. A., Restos, Río de Janeiro, Contra capa editora, 2011. [Translated into Spanish by the author. Unpublished in English.]
