Abstract

This essay puts forward an alternative cloacal theory of birth that is implicit in Freud and Lacan, and yet still largely implicit in Žižek. The anal voice is the meeting-place of shit and the rectum , which inaugurates the subject qua the subject of discourse, the speaking-being or what Lacan simply calls parlêtre. Summoning from inside the incipient subject the alien within, the object that is in the subject more than the subject itself, the anal voice introduces the subject to the distinction between inside and outside by way of the bowel “moment,” that is, by way of the involuntary expulsing of the alien within. Ultimately, this essay argues that we give birth to our speaking selves through our own anuses, for the anal voice is the wholly Other that, initially, we must passively respond to