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In Plato's Apology, Socrates describes himself as being guided by a voice (phônê) that prevents him from doing the wrong thing. This voice is also a “sign” (sêmeion), whose absence is “proof” (tekmêrion) of correct action. Moreover, it is a “divine” (theion) and “spiritual” (daimonion) phenomenon (see Apology in Fowler, 1966, 31c-d, 40a-b).1 In contrast to scholars who refer to this phenomenon as Socrates's daimonion (“spiritual thing”) or as a “sign” that implicitly signifies something else, in this article I suggest that it is not truly a signifier, but is rather better understood as a sign that resists symbolization.2 In other words, I aim to take this “voice” seriously as a voice: one that is irreducible to language (it says nothing), representative of no one (its speaker is not identified), non-dialogic, acousmatic, and unknowable except by the act of negation or the nonperformance of this act. In these features, it resembles the negative capability of Jacques Lacan's object a, and, in a similar way, dwells almost outside of social existence, the symbolic order, a trace of the Real, as defined here:
The Real is essentially that which resists symbolization and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the symbolic order, in which one thing can be substituted for another. Not everything is fungible; certain things are not interchangeable for the simple reason that they cannot be “signiferized.” They cannot be found elsewhere, as they have a Thing-like quality, requiring the subject to come back to them over and over again. (Fink, 1995, p. 92)
Like the Real, this voice is embodied as unique, its own Thing, repeatedly present to and constitutive of Socrates, heard only as it frees him from the symbolic structures of language, law,
and Athens, despite the attempts of Socrates's many accusers and his still more numerous interpreters (including himself) to assign it a fixed meaning. It is only through its strange (dis) embodiment of (as) voice that we can un