I
Reading Notes from the book “Gaze and Voice as Love Objects”, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, editors. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1996
There is the signifying chain, reduced to its minimal features, which yields, as a result or as a leftover, the voice.
(…)
The subject is always only represented by a signifier for another signifier, as the famous dictum goes. In itself it is without foundation and without a substance; it is a lack, an empty space necessarily implied by the nature of the signifier—such was for Lacan, as it is well known, the nature of the subject that can be assigned to structure. So the voice seems to endow this empty and negative entity with a counterpart, its “missing half,” so to speak, a “supplement” that would enable this negative being to acquire some hold in positivity, a “substance,” a relationship to presence
S’entendre parler—to hear oneself speak—is maybe the minimal definition of consciousness
