Lacan conceptualized the voice as an objet petit a: not a vehicle of meaning, but a remainder of the real, detached from signification. Jacques-Alain Miller articulates this when he writes that music and listening function "in order to silence what deserves to be called the voice as object little a".¹ Music thus operates as a screen, covering the invasive dimension of the voice while simultaneously attesting to its presence.
Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves² offers a striking clinical illustration of this logic. Throughout the film, for Bess the decisive voice is not what is heard externally, but what appears in her dialogues with God. There, her inner monologues emerge, harsh, accusatory, and merciless, exceeding all surrounding voices, whether those of the religious community or of moral injunctions. This internal voice, horrifically embodied in the perverse demands of her husband, Jan, drives her body toward sacrifice and self-destruction: jouissance in the form of the invocative voice of love, which calls, commands, and demands obedience.
In the final scene, after Bess's death, bells fill the sky, bells from a church that previously had none due to an explicit religious prohibition, a fact Bess herself laments. This prohibition exemplifies the local Name-of-the-Father, regulating music, joy, and expression. By offering her body and ultimately her life so that Jan may live, Bess enacts a passage beyond this paternal law. The ringing of the bells does not signal reconciliation with the church, but rather the collapse of its authority, much like the figure of Antigone.
Yet the bells, together with Bach's Siciliana heard over the closing credits,³ fail to mask the horror that precedes them. Although Jan is miraculously healed, Bess is dead, having paid with her life for his survival. This miracle, von Trier's cinematic construction of the non-existing sexual rapport, remains unconvincing as a harmonizing solution meant to veil the real of her sacrifice.
Von Trier, a filmmaker who suffered from severe depression,⁴ and who discovered from his mother on her deathbed that the man he believed to be his father was not his father, repeatedly stages figures of feminine sacrifice intertwined with death (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac, Antichrist). Again and again, love appears bound to destruction.
Faced with this devastating solution to love, an extreme figure of feminine ravage, psychoanalysis offers another response to the non-relation: one that does not annihilate the subject, but finds in breath, silence, and sound a way to live rather than perish. Perhaps in the direction of Bess's final words: "Maybe I was wrong after all". Each subject is responsible for their own choices. Along this path, I printed the score of the Siciliana and began learning to play the trumpet.

^[1] Miller, J.-A. (2001), "Jacques Lacan and the Voice," Psychoanalytical Notebooks 6, London, pp. 93–104.
^[2] Breaking the Waves, dir. Lars Von Trier, L. Zentropa, 1996.
^[3] Bach, J.S. (composer), "Siciliana." Performance by Kristian Steenstrup and Carl Ulrik Munk-Andersen over the end credits of Breaking the Waves. Available online: YouTube.com.
^[4] See here: Wikipedia.