Speaking for performance/writing with the voice

Fiona Templeton

pp. 177-186

in: Susan Broadhurst, Josephine Machon (eds), Sensualities/textualities and technologies, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

Orpheus's decapitated head, torn from his body by the female followers of the cult of Dionysus (the dark, the senses, life and death), was the book. Follower of Apollo (the light, the eye, the mind), the techné of his thought could remain after him, speaking as it rolled. In being separated from his body, it became the made thing, the defiance of death. It is the memory of speech, or the forecast of its possibility. Speech that imitates writing is papery.¹