Sounds of subjectivity or resonances of something other

This chapter explores how the voice carries different meanings in early Greek conceptions of corporeality, contrasting Homer with later writers such as Plato. Sampson argues that both the notion of an autonomous subjectivity and an autophonous voice expressing this self are absent from the Homeric texts. Sampson shows how in Homer voices are said to flow through the speakers like rivers of breath, and reveals a heterophony of voices in the Iliad and the Odyssey: those of mortals and immortals, humans, animals, and even natural forces. The chapter uses such a detour into a distant past to complicate modern notions of subjectivity, and to open up alternative conceptions of corporeality and life within contemporary post-human thinking.