This dissertation examines the intersection of language and finitude in the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze. I analyze first how the voice serves in their writings as the figure for this intersection. Then I demonstrate how their work raises the question of whether finitude requires figuration or a “scene” of presentation in order to be thought.

As the intersection of language and finitude, the voice, I argue, is a properly Heideggerian problematic. It emerges in its particularity as a figure with Heidegger's text. One is then able to trace a reception of this problematic in the texts of Blanchot and Deleuze, who each in their own way offer different reconfigurations of the original relation conceived by Heidegger. The writings treated in support of this genealogy include: Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister” (1942); Blanchot's The Space of Literature (1955) and The Infinite Conversation (1969), and; Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968), and The Logic of Sense (1969).

Concluding the dissertation, and keeping open a space for further research, is a discussion of Luce Irigaray's The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1983). Her text contains a far-reaching critique of the Heideggerian voice and poses a serious challenge for any attempt to approach the voice in terms of its ethical and political implications.

A consideration of the voice from within this constellation of texts, including Irigaray's critique, offers us several standpoints from which to reassess the problem of language in not only Heidegger's thought, but also in that of Blanchot and especially Deleuze. We learn the notion of the “linguistic turn” is inadequate to the movement of what I call “the question of language” in Heidegger. We can also begin to understand Deleuze as primarily a philosopher of language. Both Blanchot and Irigaray excavate the exigency to imagine a new relation to language and a new kind of speaking. All of the texts read in this thesis make possible the emergence of an ethico-political inflection of the voice untied to metaphysical subjectivity.