French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Baas, La Voix déliée
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
La Voix déliée
Bernard Baas
ISBN/EAN : 9782705669560
Hermann, 2010
44 €
Experience shows that the voice is intimately connected to speech and the speaking subject. Yet, within that very speech, the voice tends to detach itself from discourse and make its own unique resonance heard. Such is the unmoored voice (*la voix déliée*). It is the calling voice, whose intonation echoes within the subject, compelling them to break free from the subtleties of discourse. It is also the singing voice, which seeks to emancipate itself from speech in order to freely relish its own existence. In various ways, the unmoored voice brings into play the jouissance of what Lacan termed the 'invocatory drive': the cruel voice of moral injunction, the voice of existential debt, the voice of musical jouissance... These various modalities of the voice are explored here in the company of Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Freud, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Mozart, Leibniz, Bach, and others. This book is thus addressed to philosophers, psychoanalysts, musicologists, music lovers... and, more generally, to all those who are not deaf to the call of the voice.
Bernard Baas is an *agrégé* professor and holds a doctorate in philosophy, teaching in the *khâgne* preparatory classes in Strasbourg. His published works have been translated into several foreign languages.
The relationship between voice and speech has long preoccupied Western thought, from classical philosophy to modern psychoanalysis. While traditional metaphysics often links the voice directly to presence and the speaking subject, psychoanalytic theory—particularly through Jacques Lacan's concept of the invocatory drive—reconceptualizes the voice as an autonomous object of desire and *jouissance*. In this intellectual tradition, the voice is not merely a vehicle for linguistic meaning, but an independent force that can detach itself from discourse. In La Voix déliée, Bernard Baas explores these modalities of the voice, examining how it detaches itself from discourse.
The tension between the singing voice, which seeks to emancipate itself from speech, and the calling voice of moral injunction reflects a long intellectual history. This tradition involves figures as diverse as Plato, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Readers interested in the philosophical and psychoanalytic dimensions of music and speech may find this work relevant.
Read the press review on the publisher's website…
Visit the author's website…
See a review in the Lettre de la Magdeleine.
See, on the Mezetulle blog, C. Kintzler's article: "The Voice, an Unassignable Object and Its Philosophical Figures."