“On This Haunted Ground I Was Lost and Found“ – Echo’s Litography
Abstract
Ovid’s work represents Echo in turning from bodily to bodiless shape, from the talkative voice to the surplus of voicelessness. Being punished to repeat the end of the sentences of the speaking-other, Echo is the ultimate figure of metamorphosis and of wandering – always lost in repetitions, always lost to be found in écriture in stone, in engraved narratives of the other, as a ghostly identity of the other. Therefore, Echo is a decentred, meandering voice – a voice only until there is any voice at all. Being the undercurrent of speech, Echo is a figure of fragmented, dismembered, detached speach, a travelling postcard on an errant, wandering course. The mythical Echo creates a sonorous ground to be written upon, only to be multiplied. Belonging to no-body, she is always on her way to die away and close, a voice-thing destabilizing the voice-subject. This research paper deals with the mythic figure of Echo in terms of Gayatri’s notion of „deconstructive embrace“ and the concept of the subaltern. Can Echo’s „fragile auricle“ be aligned to „non-mimetical“ identity, to multiplicities of repetitions in conflict to the voice-subject, the same and the different at once? Or, if Echo „has no identity proper to itself“, as Spivak puts it, what can be lost and found in echoland of identity, in the political space of „the catachresis of response as such“?
References
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