The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Theories of Representation and Difference

by Kaja Silverman

" . . . a vitally new understanding that takes us from the terms of the representation of sexual difference to an anatomy of female subjectivity which will be widely influential." ―Stephen Heath

"An original work likely to have significant impact on all those with an interest in the vibrant intersection of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis . . . " ―Naomi Schor

" . . . powerfully argued study . . . impressive . . . " ―Choice

" . . . important because of its innovative work on Hollywood's ideologically-charged construction of subjectivity. . . . what is exciting about The Acoustic Mirror is that it inspires one to reevaluate a number of now classical theoretical texts, and to see films with an eye to how authorship is constructed and subjectivity is generated." ―Literature and Psychology

"As evocative as it is shrewdly systematic, the pioneering theory of female subjectivity formulated in the final three chapters will have wide impact as a major contribution to feminist theory." ―SubStance

The Acoustic Mirror attempts to do for the sound-track what feminist film theory of the past decade has done for the image-track―to locate the points at which it is productive of sexual difference. The specific focus is the female voice understood not merely as spoken dialogue, narration, and commentary, but as a fantasmatic projection, and as a metaphor for authorship.

Genres: Film, Feminism, Philosophy, Academic, Psychology, Theory, Psychoanalysis

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1988

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having myself an academic background in Film Studies, I am naturally more than passingly familiar w/ the strain of psychoanalytic discourse that functionally hijacked the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, etc. I have studied and made whatever use of them when I could. I was always especially fond of Kaja Silverman, who I always held to be the greatest writer of that school on the subject of castration. Silverman, like many of her contemporaries (all of whom she tangles w/, always in good faith) is a full-on Lacanian. When we are talking about castration in the Lacanian sense (rather than the purely penile Freudian sense) we are talking about symbolic castration, which is to say the castration experienced by the child when it becomes constituted as a subject (or even proto-subject) within the symbolic realm. This is the part of Lacan that matters to me. Lacan framing psychic life as conditioned by lack. If Lacanian symbolic castration is at the heart of THE ACOUSTIC MIRROR (as it is at the heart of the bulk of Silverman's writing) so too, alas, are the Oedipus complex and the negative Oedipus complex. At this point I come into some fundamental difficulty. I am very much a convert to the model(s) propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in their ANTI-OEDIPUS books. What that looks like at the level of psychoerotic life and film spectatorship: I see psychic, erotic, and fantasmic identity as a radically heterogeneous and polyphonic field, and those who create and consume texts as radically multiple beings (or becomings). Deleuze and Guattari are all about destratification and the explosion of the binary apparatus. That is where I find myself at home. Silverman, retaining Oedipus and much else, works within a rigorously stratified / striated discursive regime fundamentally informed by the clean split of sexual difference (which she does, however, compellingly problematize, especially in the final chapter on Liliana Cavani and film authorship). That being said, I continue to find her textual analyses (subservient though they are to the aforementioned discursive regime) breathtaking in their critical virtuosity. Her dissections of more mainstream films are the real highlights here: what she does w/ PEEPING TOM, THE CONVERSATION, and THREE WOMEN is dazzling. The final chapter on female authorship (and authorship more generally, as grounded in the fantasmic and its expression in the play of desire) is in some obvious ways a major break w/ the rest of the book, but is also in some ways its most theoretically valuable section. So while symbolic castration and lack are fundamental to the way I myself conceptualize desire, much of where Silverman goes from there differs substantially from where I take things. That being said, I find taking her journey w/ her to be insightful and fascinating. I picked up THE ACOUSTIC MIRROR, which I have had sitting around for quite some time, simply because I am intending to write something on one particular female voice in one particular film, and thought reading this might be useful in that regard. It both was and wasn't. But in a broader sense it was more than worth the effort.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

actually hates reading this but i learned like a whole new field of theory so... yeah gotta give it up. it is really excellent and intelligent feminist psychoanalysis and film theory i think I'm just over the whole freudian sexual difference thing idk... this let me write a fun essay though and is like exactly perfect for what it is its just.. not for me i guess idk. read it if ur into this shit or if u got an essay to write. shoutout silverman tho

[Lobo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doktorat in progress.

[Madelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

So frustrating and difficult to understand, but definitely an interesting idea.

[Mark F · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read Silverman in a graduate class on feminist film theory, but returned to it post-grad school because of a taste for intellectual calisthenics and because I was thinking about gendered subjectivity in authorship. What does it mean to write feminine--from a nonbiological standpoint--particularly in film, and how does the mastering vision (the auteur role) factor in? (And more basically, what use do we get in labelling authorship in gendered terms?)

Here's a taste of Silverman, where she delineates what a feminine author might look like (through Cavani):

"Authorial desire, as I have already indicated, is always closely bound up with authorial subjectivity, but in Cavani's films the two are almost impossible to separate. There is no object as such, to be yarned for or possessed; there are only models to imitate, replicate, or incorporate, or intersubjective "spaces" to be shared. This is a cinema of "being," not of "having." In attempting to summarize Cavani's authorial desire, I am thus obliged to repeat what I have already said about her authorial subjectivity: That desire finds expression through the repeated narrative figuration of phallic devestiture--through the repeated "scene" of male castration."

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh, my word, do I hate this book. Silverman first of all assumes that her audience has a detailed understanding of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and simply launches into a confusing and often unsupported argument. I've never really bought into suture theory or the way psychoanalysis has been applied to film and Silverman's application of those ideas to sound come across as mostly bullshit.

[Cody M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense review of past and (then) current feminist theory influenced by Freud. Silverman is primarily interested in the soundtrack as it relates to femininity in movies so most of her analyses deal with the way narrative movies treat the voice with respect to gender.