He arrives late, all of a sudden, drunk and yelling loudly: “the voice [phone] of Alcibiades was heard.”3 Closed in a room, before even seeing him, the others recognize him by his voice. The text goes no further with the theme of vocal uniqueness.
Marsyas initiated his listeners into the Dionysian experience
of the divine; “through his instruments he enchanted men with the power
of the mouth.”6 And yet, without instruments and with bare words alone
[psilois logois], Socrates does exactly the same thing. His logoi produce the
same effect as the flute. They enchant, and they subdue. Alcibiades
well. The only
choice—says Alcibiades—is thus to flee from Socrates, “as from the
Sirens, stopping my ears.”8
In contrast to Plato, Socrates does not write; he speaks. Logos comes out
of his mouth and effectively enters the ears of his interlocutors.
addressed—not
only Socrates but “also his logoi are very similar to the statuettes that open
up.”11 On the outside, they seem banal and ridiculous, because Socrates
speaks of donkeys, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and such. But when they
open up, one discovers that these discourses are divine because they have
inside them nous and the images of virtue.12 The rhetorical surface of the
Socratic logoi is ugly, but the content is beautiful. Alcibiades stops here.
His drunken discourse has reached its end. The whole of platonic philoso-
phy, however, without a drop of wine in its veins, goes well beyond this. It
devocalizes logos. It cuts off its sonorous skin and founds in its place an or-
der rooted in the videocentric and noetic sphere of thought. It makes of
speech an acoustic shell of the idea. If
The Cratylus, which compares logos to the god Pan, evokes an analogous position, corroborated by the fact that Pan plays the pipe; he belongs to the world of wind instruments, to the acoustic prosthesis of the mouth. As I already mentioned,
Pan is called on because of his duplicity; he has both a human and goatlike
semblance, he is divine and earthly, true and false.13 So, too, is logos—it is
both thought and language. The Silenic statuettes from the Symposium ex-
plain the importance of this reference to the two-sided Pan. Because they
have an inside and an outside, the statuettes serve to illustrate the funda-
mental metaphysical notion of being and appearing. Underneath
Mouth and sound are thus foregrounded and play
the crucial role of evoking the seductive power of the acoustic sphere.
στιχοι και σπαω το κεφαλι μου το χιλιοτσακισμενο που θελει παντα να κρατ'ω το στόμα μου κλειστό
more than seduction. if you are a skillfull mami.
In the platonic construction, the flute playing can be explained on
two levels. One is the superficial level, where speech resounds and the
acoustic sphere is in play—voice, mouth, and ears that get stopped in or-
der not to hear the Sirens. The other, more important level is the internal
realm, situated in the soul and in thought. In the second case, it is a ques-
tion of a flute playing that no longer shares anything with the world of
Dionysus or musical possession. By moving its listeners, this flute playing
evokes the agitation of pregnant souls, which Socrates-the-midwife helps
to give birth to true discourses.
There are no more flutes, nor
voices, nor sounds; only a perfect noetic ecstasy.
The minor metaphysics in-
stead proclaims the priority, with respect to vocalized discourse, of the
“silent dialogue of the soul with itself.”
rather than undergo the experience of the soul that dialogues with itself,
Socrates is often solicited by a voice that commands him not to take cer-
tain actions.14 No matter how large the temptation to read here a metaphor
for consciousness, this is not an interior voice, nor is it a voice of the soul.
It is the voice of the daimon, a divine, external, and imperative voice that
neither develops arguments nor proceeds in a dialectical mode but rather
commands. The fact that it is only audible to Socrates does not signal its
general muteness, but rather signals the singular uniqueness that is part of
the Greek meaning of daimon.
15 Socrates hears a divine voice, addressed
only to him, and he obeys its command.
As
a wind instrument, the flute is a substitute for the voice, one that impedes
the one who puts it to his mouth from speaking or singing words. As the
inarticulate voice of the infant or the animal, the sound of the flute in a
certain sense precedes speech.
It precedes it not only in the development of
a human life or in the genealogy of the species, but above all because it
does not need speech; it renders speech useless, or superfluous with respect
Some Irresistible Flute Playing
to the acoustic pleasure. The fable in fact teaches that sound is more pow-
erful than speech. Speech, especially that of the politicians of Hamelin
who talk without saying anything, does not enchant or produce a state of
irresistible ecstasy;
While he condemns the flute, or the
acoustic sphere in general, Plato in fact seems hesitant to fully renounce its
enchanting effect. In other words, he does not attack the forgetting of the
self that comes from the Dionysian but rather the acoustic, bodily solicita-
tions that provoke this forgetting. Plato asks the power of Dionysus—the
god of dispossessing ecstasy—for a contemplative ecstasy. For Plato, what is
needed is to flay Socratic flute playing, to tear off its sonorous shell, in or-
der to go inside—where the nous, the eye of the soul, shows itself as the
true protagonist of this enchantment.
If the bodily ear is replaced by the noetic eye, the effect of the flute be-
comes the effect of the idea.
Elusian mysteries. The initiation into these myster-
ies culminated “in an epopteia, in a mystic vision of beatitude and purifi-
cation, which in some sense can be called knowledge.”19
