Socrates and the Voice that Says No: Listening to Plato's Apology

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: