_Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art_ demonstrates how silence as a form of indirect discourse provides us with access to hitherto inaccessible aspects of human experience.

This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership (...) and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness. (shrink)

Book Information Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. By Michelle Boulous Walker. Routledge. London and New York. 1998. Pp. x + 235.

Silence et sagesse montre combien les innombrables expériences et ascèses du silence, à travers la littérature ou les arts aussi bien que la philosophie ou la théologie, ont contribué à la constitution de la culture des hommes et de leur hominisation, au-delà ou en deça du logos et de son primat.

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

This article pursues Heidegger’s protracted engagement with the question of silent origins. First, I explore the so-called transitional thinking grounded in the fundamental attunement of reticence as it is put forward in the Beiträge zur Philosophie. Second, I consider the complex matter of Heidegger’s reference to the intimate, yet distinct, roles of poetry and thinking when it comes to articulating a response to the attunement of reticence. I then move to explain what is at stake in Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin (...) on the nature of language, silence, and listening. This latter task involves analyzing Heidegger’s contention that Hölderlin’s poetic thought is both philosophically exemplary and futural. Finally, since I take Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin to be a critical appropriation, we must assess the coherence of his redeployment of Hölderlin’s thought models, especially, I will claim, his appropriation of the halfgods. (shrink)

This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence (...) was an intentional intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

“To hear silence is to find stillness in the midst of the restlessness that makes creative life possible and the inescapability of death acceptable.” So writes Mark C. Taylor in his latest book, a philosophy of silence for our nervous, chattering age. How do we find silence—and more importantly, how do we understand it—amid the incessant buzz of the networks that enmesh us? Have we forgotten how to listen to each other, to recognize the virtues of (...) modesty and reticence, and to appreciate the resonance of silence? Are we less prepared than ever for the ultimate silence that awaits us all? Taylor wants us to pause long enough to hear what is not said and to attend to what remains unsayable. In his account, our way to hearing silence is, paradoxically, to see it. He explores the many variations of silence by considering the work of leading modern and postmodern visual artists, including Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, James Turrell, and Anish Kapoor. Developing the insights of philosophers, theologians, writers, and composers, Taylor weaves a rich narrative modeled on the Stations of the Cross. His chapter titles suggest our positions toward silence: Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Between. Toward. Around. With. In. Recasting Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit and Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way, Taylor translates the traditional Via Dolorosa into a Nietzschean Via Jubilosa that affirms light in the midst of darkness. Seeing Silence is a thoughtful meditation that invites readers to linger long enough to see silence, and, in this way, perhaps to hear once again the wordless Word that once was named “God.”. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman’s ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of ‘uptake’ of the woman’s intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor (...) is it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts. (shrink)

There is something mournful in discussing a painting that has been lost or destroyed. It is the futile attempt to recover something that is irreparably gone. In the end, it recovers nothing, save for the memory of it’s vanishing. There is something mournful in discussing a people that has been lost or destroyed. It is the futile attempt to recover something that is irreparably gone. In the end, it recovers nothing, save for the memory of it’s vanishing. This paper is (...) about a painting, a people, and a woman philosopher whose writing attempts to take account of their respective disappearances. In so doing, she developed a philosophy of subversion that articulated the tragic character of social-political.. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s essays and lessons compiled in the work Responsibility and Judgment are the guiding principle behind this paper, which intends to address certain moral issues recovered by the author after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem ”“ A Report on the Banality of Evil. Taking as focus the relation of the human being to himself, in other words, the silent relation characteristic of the individual who thinks, the author presents the thesis under which, even in the absence of others, (...) the individual is not totally alone, as he shares of himself. Taking this premise into consideration, Arendt affirms that the greatest evil, examined in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem, is committed by the one who refuses to think, or yet, the one who no longer recognizes himself as his own interlocutor, abandoning himself and no longer being incurred as somebody. (shrink)

Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It is within us, in the inner citadel that great writers, thinkers, scholars and people of faith have cultivated over the centuries. It characterizes our most intimate and sacred spaces, from private bedrooms to grand cathedrals – those vast reservoirs of silence. Philosophers and novelists have long sought solitude and inspiration in mountains and forests. Yet despite the centrality of silence to some of our most intense experiences, the transformations (...) of the twentieth century have gradually diminished its value. Today, raucous urban spaces and a continual bombardment from different media pressure us into constant activity. We are losing a sense of our inner selves, a process that is changing the very nature of the individual. This book rediscovers the wonder of silence and, with this, a richer experience of life. With his predilection for the elusive, Corbin calls us to listen to another history. (shrink)

This book charts the trajectory of Heidegger’s concept of silence by focusing on its relation to truth as the unconcealedness of being/beyng and language as disclosive sonorous saying. Wanda Torres Gregory concludes with critical reflections on the later Heidegger and proposes alternatives to his signature claims concerning silence.

Comment le silence agit-il au cinéma? Qu'est-ce qui permet d'identifier ce phénomène? Implique-t-il la disparition intégrale de la matière sonore ou seulement sa minimalisation à l'intérieur d'un film? Son intervention, ponctuelle ou durable, tend à engager une raréfaction, voire une suppression, des paroles et de la musique, mais pas forcément de tout bruit. Des lieux particulièrement silencieux, ainsi que le mutisme ou la surdité d'un personnage, sont également propices à l'instauration de telles situations audiovisuelles. Cet ouvrage analyse, à travers (...) une approche généalogique et herméneutique, la présence du silence dans le cinéma contemporain sur le double principe d'héritages figuratifs et de ruptures discursives. Il s'appuie sur un corpus de films réalisés entre autres par Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovski, Theo Angelopoulos, Tsaï Ming-liang, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa ou Sharunas Bartas. Au-delà des considérations esthétiques, le livre interroge aussi les valeurs anthropologiques, morales, sociales et/ou politiques qui se glissent derrière ces manifestations concrètes du silence. Celui-ci nous invite, tant sur le plan éthique que sensible, à repenser notre rapport fondamental au monde."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

"Le droit est traditionnellement appréhendé comme un phénomène inhérent au langage. Est-il possible, dès lors, pour ce droit, qui est enserré dans les rets du langage, de « dire le silence »? « Le silence du droit » ou « le silence dans le droit » témoignent ainsi d'une parole différée ou d'une voix impossible. Cette problématique a été appréhendée, dans cette étude, sur une base métaphorique. Comme toute métaphore, celle-ci rend compte d'une relation de substitution : (...) la relation d'absence qu'elle évoque a, cependant, été performante dans le domaine juridique afin de nous consoler des risques inhérents à l'inscription du droit dans l'ordre du langage. La métaphore du silence devient ainsi « la forme même de la consolation »".--Résumé de l'éditeur. (shrink)

In light of more contemporary interest in the concept of an immemorial past, this essay takes up the manner in which this idea figures in Merleau-Ponty’s works by turning to the famous reference to “a past that has never been present” in Phenomenology of Perception. In order to contextualize and think through what Merleau-Ponty means, I turn to a reference in the same text to “primary silence.” Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to disclose the differential between the concatenation of sensibility and (...) expression and what remains beyond the bounds of the sensible. The task of phenomenology, accordingly, is the disclosure of this primary silence, this primary non-sense. Finally, articulating that this differential never ceased to be a concern for Merleau-Ponty, and, turning to texts from the 1950s as well as to The Visible and the Invisible, we see the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the consistent effort to think through this question. (shrink)

This work is a detailed analytical study of different forms of silent doing. It explores a range of topics related to silence, including the theory of silent doing and its relationship to other forms of action and communication, silence and aesthetics, the ethics and politics of silence, and the religious dimensions of silence. The book, as an original contribution to analytical philosophy, should be of interest to philosophers and students. ".

I firstly argue that there are two ways of thematizing silence philosophically, either as a phenomenon of the world or as the silencing of the philosopher, and that the second way constitutes a problem without whose solution the first way of thematization cannot occur. Secondly, I discuss Pyrrhonian scepticism as that philosophical theory which generates the silencing of the philosopher and repudiate three objections to the claim that this scepticism is not spuriously constructed. Next I show how the German (...) philosopher Georg Hegel proposes to refute Pyrrhonian scepticism in his magnum opus, the Science of Logic. Finally, I draw the consequences of Hegel’s solution to the problem for a specific attempt in the history of philosophy to secure a place for silence in ontological theory and practice. (shrink)

Tradition has it that, although we experience darkness, we can neither hear nor hallucinate silence. At most, we hear that it is silent, in virtue of lacking auditory experience. This cognitive view is at odds with our ordinary thought and talk. Yet it is not easy to vouchsafe the perception of silence: Sorensen‘s recent account entails the implausible claim that the permanently and profoundly deaf are perpetually hallucinating silence. To better defend the view that we can genuinely (...) hear and hallucinate silence, we must reject the austere picture of conscious experience which underpins the cognitive theory. According to that picture, conscious experience is a simple relation between subjects and objects. In the absence of an object, there is no relation, and so no experience. By enriching this picture, room can be found for the experience of silence. I explore this idea in two phases. First, I defend the thought that we can hear and hallucinate certain forms of silence, such as pauses, in virtue of experiencing contrastive sounds. Second, I draw on Moore‘s analysis of sensation to suggest that simply experiencing silence is a special form of objectless consciousness. I offer two ways of fleshing out this idea. According to the first, auditory experience possesses a temporal field within which the absence of sounds can be perceived. According to the second, purely Moorean account, it is our capacity to listen in the absence of sounds that underlies the phenomenon of experiencing silence. (shrink)

This open-access editorial discusses confronting silences in different disciplinary contexts, such as science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. It has a focus on race and concludes with thoughts about Indigenous expertise, the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice, to parliament, and racism.

This paper identifies three claims that feature prominently in recent discussions concerning the experience of silence: that experiences of silence are the most “negative” of perceptions, that we do not hear silences because those silences cause our experiences of silence, and that to hear silence is to hear a temporal region devoid of sound. The principal proponents of this approach are Phillips and Soteriou, and here I present a series of objections to common elements of their (...) attempts to place these three claims within an account of experience of silence. The final section of the paper returns to the first of the three claims and argues that, in fact, there is no good reason to accept it as initially formulated. However, when properly formulated, the claim ceases to offer support for Phillips’s and Soteriou’s approach to experience of silence. (shrink)

Diverse interpretations of Maimonides’ Guide have abounded since it was first written. A recent school depicts Maimonides as a critical philosopher, in the Kantian mold, who was skeptical of claims to know certain metaphysical truths. Josef Stern’s new book is a landmark in this skeptical interpretation, which refines and extends the debate in various new directions. This chapter claims that focusing on skeptical motifs can bring Maimonides into line with recent developments in understanding the history of philosophy. Stern directs (...) attention to the role that questioning can play in religious faith, and contends that Maimonides’ arguments are a series of spiritual exercises leading to equipollence and, ultimately, to silence and incomplete knowledge of God and the intelligences. The second half of the chapter turns to arguments that oppose a straightforward reading. It contextualizes them in studies of recent decades and offers alternative explanations of key passages in order to preserve a traditional reading. (shrink)

In Silence et langage Stephen A. Noble offers a new interpretation of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology which analyses the central position of language within a philosophy of perception predicated upon the interdependence of seeing and speaking.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in recent decades of silence and silencing in psychoanalysis from clinical and research perspectives, as well as in philosophy, theology, linguistics, and musicology.

« Rendre encore possible un philosopher après Hegel » n’exige pas seulement que le penseur prenne position à l’égard de l’interprétation hégélienne de l’histoire de la philosophie pour rompre avec l’idéalisme millénaire de la pensée, mais également qu’il se mesure à la philosophie hégélienne de l’histoire pour en dénoncer la funeste vérité. Mais dès lors, comment différer de Hegel sans renoncer à concevoir l’histoire? L’œuvre de Franz Rosenzweig se propose de penser l’histoire sous condition d’une Révélation qui, en lui étant (...) extérieure, la rend intelligible et la sauve. Après avoir dénoncé dans toute philosophie de l’histoire une théodicée usurpée, et démontré le lien étroit entre le concept hégélien de Weltgeschichte et l’histoire du christianisme, Rosenzweig s’avance en direction d’une autre philosophie de l’histoire mondiale, laquelle entend rendre toute sa place à la Révélation et au peuple juif qui en est le porteur. La critique de l’histoire hégélienne se prolonge alors dans l’élaboration d’un nouveau concept, dialogique et pacifié, de l’histoire mondiale – lequel n’échappe pourtant pas à toute ambivalence à l’égard du modèle dont il cherche à s’excepter. (shrink)

When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry James’s last novel, The Golden Bowl. This ought to seem surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel. Almost nothing happens. In the course of more than five (...) hundred pages there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection, nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a “‘brilliant, perfect surface,’” one “scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty.”1 There are no extreme actions or high-flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the protagonists shied away from moral debate, it is The Golden Bowl.The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically important that philosophy cannot. 1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl , pp. 445, 172; hereafter cited by page number. Daniel Brudney is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

The current paper reflects my own personal struggle between two different fields of my training and career: religious studies and philosophy. Scholars with training in religious studies are understandably less interested in philosophical issues and more interested in such issues as myth, ritual, practice, eschatology, and, in the case of Buddhism and other Indian religions, soteriology. I will mainly address the tension between soteriological and philosophical discourses. I do agree that philosophy, Eastern philosophy in particular, is a (...) byproduct of religious activities. But I do not agree with a popular view among scholars of Buddhist studies that all the Buddhist philosophical discourses serve a soteriological goal. On my view, Buddhist philosophy may have been developed out of asoteriological context, but it takes its own life and cannot be reduced too quickly to soteriology. I will illustrate this point with the well-known silence of the Buddha. (shrink)

Le silence n'est pas la simple absence de bruit. Il réside en nous, dans cette citadelle intérieure que de grands écrivains, penseurs, savants, femmes et hommes de foi, ont cultivée durant des siècles. A l'heure où le bruit envahit tous les espaces, Alain Corbin revient sur l'histoire de cet âge où la parole était rare et précieuse. Condition du recueillement, de la rêverie, de l'oraison, le silence est le lieu intime d'où la parole émerge. Les moines ont imaginé (...) mille techniques pour l'exalter, jusqu'aux chartreux qui vivent sans parler. Philosophes et romanciers ont dit combien la nature et le monde ne sont pas distraction vaine. Une rupture s'est produite, pourtant, aux confins des années 1950, et le silence a perdu sa valeur éducative. L'hypermédiatisation du XXIe siècle nous contraint à être partie du tout plutôt que de se tenir à l'écoute de soi, modifiant la structure même de l'individu. Redécouvrir l'école du silence, tel est l'enjeu de ce livre dont chaque citation est une invitation à la méditation, au retour sur soi. Avec ce goût pour l'insaisissable qui a donné naissance à ses plus grands livres, (Le miasme et la jonquille, Les cloches de la terre...), Alain Corbin nous invite à entendre une autre Histoire. (shrink)

Pornography deserves special protections, it is often said, because it qualifies as speech. Therefore, no matter what we think of its content, we must afford it the protections that we extend to most speech, but don’t extend to other actions.1 In response, Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton have argued that the case is not so simple: one of the harms of pornography, they claim, is that it silences women’s speech, thereby preventing women from deriving from speech the very benefits that (...) warranted the special protections in the first place.2 At first glance, it is hard to see how to make sense of this response. If the claim is that pornography prevents women from actually uttering words, then it just seems false; on the other hand, if that isn’t the claim, then it isn’t clear how anyone can be said to be silenced. Faced with such worries, many have been inclined to dismiss these claims about silencing as confused. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of (...) reflection on philosophical education and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

The surprising comment Wittgenstein makes at the end of his Tractatus suggests that, even though the analysis of words is the proper method of doing philosophy, philosophy’s ultimate aim may be to experience silence. Whereas Wittgenstein never explains what he meant by his cryptic conclusion, Kant provides numerous clues as to how the same position can be understood in a more complete and systematic way. Distinguishing between the meanings of “silence,” “noise” and “sound” provides a helpful (...) way of understanding how philosophers can devote so much effort to analyzing words even though their quest is ultimately fulfilled only in a deep experience of reality that is most adequately expressed in silence. (shrink)

Silence can be a communicative act. Tanesini (2018) demonstrates how “eloquent” silences can virtuously indicate resistance and dissent; in this paper, I outline one way silence can also be used viciously to cause discursive harm, specifically by slurring victims. By distinguishing between eloquent and “signaling” silences (two kinds of what I call “performative” silences), I show how “slurring” silences — fully quiet discursive moves that signal one's commitment to a slurring perspective — function in a manner that illuminates (...) the pragmatic topography of conversational silence in general. (shrink)

Originally published in 1993, Silencing Ivan Illich fell out of print when the original publisher went out of business in 1995. The author, David Gabbard, states that the book was pivotal in the evolution of his understanding of schools. Delving into Foucault's work to forge a methodology, he wanted to understand the discursive (symbolic) forces and relations of power and knowledge responsible for the marginalization of Ivan Illich from educational discourse. In short, Illich was "silenced" for having committed the heretical (...) act of denying the benevolence of state-enforced, compulsory schooling. In Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited, Gabbard revisits the text as a means of opening the question of what schools should be. Inspired by Slavoj Zizek's call for a Positive Universal Project, the book provides an alternative vision of what our species ought to be doing in the name of collective learning. (shrink)

Plotinus, the greatest philosopher of Late Antiquity, discusses at length a first principle of reality - the One - which, he tells us, cannot be expressed in words or grasped in thought. How and why, then, does Plotinus write about it at all? This book explores this act of writing the unwritable. Seeking to explain what seems to be an insoluble paradox in the very practice of late Platonist writing, it examines not only the philosophical concerns involved, but the cultural (...) and rhetorical aspects of the question. The discussion outlines an ancient practice of ‛philosophical silence' which determined the themes and tropes of public secrecy appropriate to Late Platonist philosophy. Through philosophic silence, public secrecy and silence flow into one another, and the unsaid space of the text becomes an initiatory secret. Understanding this mode of discourse allows us to resolve many apparent contradictions in Plotinus' thought. (shrink)

In this response to Lu-Adler’s article, I focus on her claim that Kant’s positionality gives his theorizing “ideology-forming” and “world-making” power. I explore a way of understanding this idea through speech act theory, and in particular the way in which speech act theory interacts with the phenomenon of silencing. I propose two ways in which Kant’s positionality could give him world-making power. First, Kant (and other scholars) can be in a position of performing the kinds of speech acts that themselves (...) constitute the creation of certain forms of oppression, much in the way in which a legislator can create an oppressive law simply by proclaiming it to be so. Second, Kant can be in a position of creating an illocutionary disabling effect, namely a situation in which Chinese scholars become unable to perform the speech act of assertion in academic contexts. (shrink)