“Soldiers, attack!”

The soldiers do not attack, they do not even move, not even when the commander repeats his question, louder, angrier. Instead, they turn to each other and exclaim “What a beautiful voice!”

This is a joke, but you are not laughing. Instead, you massage your eyebrows and contemplate on the word voice. The word voice has been used so often as a metaphor, that you find it hard to explain what it is. To have a voice often means to be heard by others, to be acknowledged.

The core of the joke is the soldiers inability to admire the aesthetical beauty of the voice while simultaneously comprehending the content of what it says. It is taken from Mladen Dolar’s essay a Voice and Nothing More, page 3. He proposes a paradox, where the voice is both more and less than language.