This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike.
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Yes, you can access On Silence by Ed Pluth,Cindy Zeiher in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & Personality in Psychology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
In this chapter, we contrast a Lacanian approach to silence and language with another historically significant approach to the topics, studied and presented in detail by William Franke in a series of books, which we call apophatic discourse. We determine that the silence portrayed in this discourse is an imaginarized, impossible object, and we discuss how it manifests in some clinical cases Lacan discussed (Dora and the Papin sisters) as well as in his formulas for sexuation.
If only what we cannot speak about consented to be silent.
J.-C. Milner (1995, p. 169)
Who doesnât crave a bit of silence now and then? But what are we looking for from it? Why do we sometimes seem to expect more from it than a brief pause, or mere rest and relaxation: why do we sometimes expect from it something more deeply restorativeâpresumably the goal of a silent retreat? And why is it that we continue to yearn for silence even after we know quite well that we can never get it completely? The infamous Zen koanââwhat is the sound of one hand clapping?ââexpresses something of the near mystical fascination we have with silence. We seem to imagine that if it could be obtained egotism, rationality, the selfâŚall might be overcome. Silence promises a restoration of subjective wholeness and a way to forget lack. Yet doesnât this make our desire for silence into something nihilistic? Why not just render ourselves comatose instead?
Since we are taking a Lacanian approach to silence here, we are going to do the entirely expected thing and consider silence in terms of the three registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. But we promise that in doing so there will be a few surprises! Weâre not going to go so far as to say that we have discovered, through our reflections on silence, a fourth dimension (as nice as that would beâŚ). We do think we can show, however, that a Lacanian framework can shed light on the different appeals silence has for us, on the different relationships to (and expectations toward) silence that we have. We also think that a new perspective on Lacanian theory and practice is opened up by reflecting on silence. For a thinker who defines us as speaking beings, and who famously claims that even our unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan turns out to be someone who gives silence a very distinct and important function. As we will discuss in our Chapter 2, Lacanian psychoanalysis can even be considered, as Mladen Dolar put it, a pragmatics of silence (2006).
But letâs start with a bit of orientation. We can create a (somewhat precarious, perhaps overly positivist and even misleading) structuralist presentation of our trajectory. We start with an opposed pair, language and silence, and a possible over-valuation (represented by a plus sign) or under-valuation (represented by a minus sign) of each. In this scenario there would then be four possible positions on language and silence, which we can associate with a variety of disciplines, worldviews, discourses:
First, we want to point out that we do think it should be possible to value both language and silence equally highly. This is how we will portray the rather unique position that Lacanian psychoanalysis adopts. If silence and language are held in equally high esteem, silence is not taken to be something that compensates for the malaise of language, nor is language something one clings to as a defence against whatever might be threatening about silence. (We will be saying much more about both of these views later.) Getting ahead of ourselves a bit, in theoretical terms we can say that in this position it is possible for the speaking subject to be invested in its own division, rather than trying to avoid it or overcome it (although arguably we are invested in both). This double valuation of language and silence is in fact part of the reason why we want to say that any seeming opposition between language and silence is actually overcome in Lacanian theory and practiceâhence, our structuralist matrix is misleading (so we have already started with a negation of our own proposition, which is typical of how we think silence operates). The topological relationship between language and silence in Lacanian theory and practice is quite different from how the relationship shakes out in the other positions, in which silence is generally taken as a beyond, something on the other side of language as it were, either positively or negatively charged.
But let us continue with describing the positions on our matrix: in a second position, language is over-valued and silence acquires a negative connotation. This position can be found in forms of excessive chatter (logorrhea). The first-generation psychoanalyst Karl Abraham identified this trait in 1927 and linked it to the oral stage in his essay The Influence of Oral Eroticism on Character Formation:
With these subjects, we encounter certain character traits that oblige us to refer to a curious displacement to the interior of the oral domain. Their ardent desire for satisfaction by sucking is transformed into a need to give by the mouth, so much so that we discover in them, beyond a permanent desire to obtain everything, a constant need to communicate orally with others. Logorrhea is the result, connected in most cases to a feeling of plenitude. These subjects have the impression that the wealth of their thought is inexhaustible, and they attribute to their words a special power or an exceptional value. (Abraham, in Nasio [1987, p. 72])
We all know people who love to incessantly chatter about what they supposedly know! (And some of us, frankly, are people like thisâŚ) Abraham does not mention the status of silence in logorrhea, but Lacan does when he observes that an obsessiveâs logorrhea is an attempt to fill in the gaps in the Otherâs discourseâthe silences between signifiers that are associated with the troubling presence of the Otherâsdesire. This is way of understanding both how a logorrheic analysand may deal with silence in the analytic session and how obsessional neurosis generally tends to reduce desire into demand: replacing or reducing the obscurity of the Otherâs desire, expressed just as well in silences as in signifiers, to the more familiar, recognizable signifiers of demand (a topic we will explore in Chapter 2).
Much more common, and much more culturally significant, we think, is the third position, in which language is devalued and silence promoted. Weâll get back to this in a moment.
Jumping ahead to the fourth position, in which a pox is put on both language and silence, we first want to ask: is this actually a viable position? We think that to maintain it would require a truly tragic worldview, bemoaning the vanity of both silence and language. Maybe only Pascal, the first modern âtragic individualâ (if Lucien Goldmannâs 1964 analysis in his The Hidden God is correct) can be situated here. Weâll explore Goldmannâs reading of Pascal in our final chapter. We think that if his account is right, Pascalâs position can be portrayed as a transitional, dialectical moment on the way to creating the conditions for the possibility of the psychoanalytic-Lacanian perspective. Perhaps it is Pascal and not Descartes who presents us with the first modern subject. We think that a shift in the very status of silence itself is key to this point, and we think this is what Lacan chronicles in some ways when he discusses the emergence of psychoanalysis in the wake of the cogitoand the modern sciences, and in his own discussions of Pascal.
We want to spend the rest of this chapter on the philosophical assumptions behind the third position, in which silence is highly valued at the cost of a devaluation of language itself. This is a view with lasting social and psychological appeal: it is bound up with what we were describing in our opening paragraph.
Something that we think is interesting about Alain Badiouâs philosophy will take us to where we want to go. What is typically thought to make Alain Badiou unique among recent philosophers is his claim that the task of doing ontologyâthe very task Heidegger made into philosophyâs privilegeâshould be handed over to a branch of mathematics (specifically, set theory). Badiouâs interest in mathematics alone is enough to place him at odds with a dominant tendency in philosophy, one that he calls into question and that he refers to as the linguistic turn. While the linguistic turn commonly refers to the position of early analytic philosophers, in several different places Badiou has made the important observation that both analytic and continental philosophy, despite their sharp differences on nearly everything else, can in fact both be placed under this heading. This insight about a hidden unity between two very different traditions deserves more attention, and will set the scene for our interrogation into how and why language is given a negative evaluation in a tradition we will being paying close attention to in this chapter.
Badiouâs view of the linguistic turn can be put this way: it leads directly to anti-philosophy. When philosophy starts asking questions about language itself, its death is imminent. This may be one of the reasons why Badiou himself does not to our knowledge ever make language itself into an explicit topic or theme in his philosophy: what the linguistic turn and anti-philosophy seem to have taught him is that thinking about language is toxic for doing philosophy. Language is philosophyâs ultimate impasse: philosophy gets tripped up when it reflects on language. In order to be a philosopher, is it necessary to not problematize language? We inevitably think of Hegel here and indeed any philosopher who is committed to the view that philosophy can and should be practiced in ordinary language as a way to elucidate and elaborate upon an idea.
Of course, this intervention is not about Alain Badiou, the linguistic turn, or even anti-philosophy, although we inevitably touch on these areas throughout. Itâs about silence. But these questions and deliberations about language and its limits, and the very possibility of thinking, are good places to begin our exploration of the philosophical presuppositions involved in putting silence in very high esteem, while at the same time lowering the value of language itself. We could say that weâre engaged here in what looks like a Kantian transcendental endeavour: we are exploring the conditions for the possibility of any valuing or privileging of silence over languageâan exploration we admit is conducted at our own peril, since in writing about silence weâre committed to a linguistic treatment of it! And so, we are going to start our discussion with what we would qualify, in Lacanian terms, as a position in which silence is imaginarised.
