On Speech as the Political Faculty in the Anthropocene. The Sensualities of Voice and Taste Combined

The paper revises the idea of speech as a fundamental political faculty in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. First, it is argued that, rather than as a subsystem of language, speech should be conceptualized as the expression of the embodied capacity of voice (in this respect, the paper follows Adriana Cavarero’s [2005] argument). Secondly, vocality is linked to the faculty of taste (understood as in Arendt’s reading of Kant) to locate politics in the broader order of materiality ( physis ). It is argued that the combination of these two sensualities can help us develop the idea of politics as an activity that is both specifically human and located in the broader order of materiality (the Earth system).