There is a line in Hegel’s Aesthetics, which seems exactly to fit the Derridean idea that the illusion of ‘presence’ is related to the experience of hearing oneself speak:
‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself’
In the voice, words are flooded with soulful intentionality; the soul emerges briefly from the obscure corporeal dark and is suddenly there. But Hegel also qualifies this immediately (so to speak):
In the voice, ‘a vibration is set up in a body indifferent to the soul and its expression’.
The material body deposits, however obscurely, its trace in the voice – the vibration of air, the stretched muscle etc, are all opaquely present. And this materiality of the body is indifferent to the soul. Hegel reminds us that sound is always the index of a substance – the sound of wood, glass, metal etc. As such, a sound is one of the properties of that substance, like its weight or density. It is in this sense that sound is a ghost of matter, carries the latter’s after-trace within it.
There is in the voice, then, a residuum which escapes the ‘soul’ and which has an object-like quality. Only in certain privileged moments of illusion, some operatic climax, for example, do we seem to apprehend the voice-as-pure-soul.
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