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Abstract
This dissertation theorizes publics as a voice by drawing on both psychoanalysis and classical rhetorical literature. Currently, scholars theorize publics, and the public sphere, either as an empirical entity or as an imaginary construct. Instead, this dissertation argues that publics derive social force from their status as a perennially lost object. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, I argue that publics are an elusive object of desire, or objet petit a. Lacans notion of voice, otherwise known as the object voice, enables a theory of publics that centers upon their role as a prosthetic device rather than their presumed status as empirical or imagined social entities. To demonstrate this new theory of public objects I turn to classical texts in order to articulate the object voice to contemporary theories of public formation. Each chapter returns to a classical text that elucidates a particular aspect of the public as a lost object of desire. Chapter two reads the pears theft from Augustines Confessions as an exemplar of how the invocation of God (Lacans symbolic invocation) leaves an aphonic public as an excess or remainder. Chapter three then reads the discourse on love from Platos Symposium to theorize the temporal circularity of the publics voice as an object cause of desire. Chapter four reads the orator Crassus from Ciceros De Oratore as an example of how publics are radically prosthetic and exchangeable objects. The fifth and final chapter of this dissertation reads Michel Foucaults This is Not a Pipe in order to bring the contributions of these classical readings back into the present. After synthesizing the dissertations theoretical concepts into an ethics of counterpublicity, I then argue that Foucaults analysis in This is Not a Pipe encourages a rethinking of counterpublic formation from an ethical standpoint.