'The subject' and voice: Cross-Chapter Discussion

Abstract

This cross-chapter discussion between Rachel Cockburn and Konstantinos Thomaidis centres around subjectivity formation, performativity and ideology. With a particular focus on voice and drawing primarily on Laclau and Althusser, voice is discussed in its entanglement with such notions as 'the individual', the 'self' and the 'subject'. Voicing is examined as steering away from essentialised understandings of selfhood and as partaking in the political scene of subjectivity-making. In this sense, Thomaidis inclines existing research towards two paradigmatic scenaria of subjectivity-making in/through voice: one that conceptualises voice as announcing an a priori self and a second one embracing the subject as always-already interrelated, porous and constitutively incomplete.