Monika SkoludSchweigen – Ein ethisches Phänomen

About this book deutschenglish

To write a book on silence is a paradoxical enterprise, because, apparently, no definite content can be assigned to it. Bearing this in mind, the text at hand attempts to examine silence in an ethical and political context, clearly showing it to be a human possibility for the transmission of meaning and the confirmation of the self. As a pre-predicative kind of speech, silence determines all audible speech - and it may at the same time undermine it, insofar the latter is being used as a means of power and of violence. Silence is localized and made explicit in its own materiality and as an activity of its own. Although it has no defined content as such, silence can be characterized as an element of the ethics of the speech event. As ‘speech preceding speech’ it opens up a social dimension, shows itself as an ethical obligation, and always remains linked to the dimension of plurality and of the other. Such an ‘ethics of silence’ can only appear at the margins of our system of intelligibility. Not only, because silence in itself is radically wordless, but also, because the ethics in question is grounded in a pre-predicative event.

Derrida’s deconstructive theory of language is central for this study, because it embraces the breaks, limits, and self-transcendences of our system of language, and shows how the productive uncertainties involved retroactively influence the system itself. Of equal significance are the philosophico-theological works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of Meister Eckhart: Their theories, which are located in the context of negative theology, can be productively read against the background of an ethics of speech events. Last but not least, testimonies of important mystics and literary excursions, into the work of Paul Celan among others, serve to make tangible silence as it operates along the border-lines of rational-cognitive and of intuitive-somatic knowledge.

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