On Rhythm: Voice and Relation

I would like to start from a short proposition by Henri Meschonnic in his masterwork Critique du rythme - 'La voix est relation'(I) ('The voice is relation') - in order to propose a historical and relational anthropology of the voice. Such an anthropology necessarily passes through the poem, as a form of attentiveness building on the poem. Starting from the dialogism of the poem as 'la position du sujet de l'enonciation et du sujet de la lecture' (p. 456) ('the position of the subject of enunciation and of the subject of reading'), and the specific continuity that the poem constructs from the individual to society, from the intimate to the political, we can constitute the voice as a medium favourable to listening to the overflows of meaning in the poem and therefore trans-subjectivations in and through language. My contribution will show the consequences of this anthropological orientation derived from Meschonnic, both in terms of traditional stylistics and postmodern semiotics.