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The Laws of the Unspoken: Silence and Secrecy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patrick Tacussel*
Affiliation:
Université le Montpellier

Extract

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Of silence, paradoxically, one can only speak. By virtue of the alliance that unites reason and language, the capacity to name and to address indeed obeys a certain desire to restrain excessive communication. Laughter, tears and silence are part of the expressive world: however, they attest to the impossible pitfall of words in the socializing function that we accord them. Of extreme sociality, of meaning that exceeds the bearable, the suitability and the commerce of ideas, the only thing that rises to the surface of the perceptible is that emotional logic whose significations shatter every criterion of certitude and of truth on the real. Confronted with three forms of experience of the unspeakable, we ordinarily allow ourselves to lend credit to the spontaneity of the first two (laughter and tears), while the symbolic dimension of silence seems to derive from an invisible orchestration, from a rather simple calculation or from a more elaborate strategy. This difference in nature is essential, and no one would dream of equating what “can” not be said with what “should” not be said. Silence exists as a sort of constraint, interiorized at various levels of the personality, and thereby more social than psychological. Even the involuntary silence of the unknowing person can be codified: as a disciplined avowal or the politeness of the humble who neither tolerates nor imagines any escape from his embarrassment. If speech is born in the abandon of a burst of expressivity, in hilarity or in sobs, it expires in a law, no less severe than the one which endows phrases with semantic coherence. Such a rule thus manifests a universal character socially more affirmed than the multiple syntaxes that organize each linguistic patrimony. That muteness can also be subject to a particular form of apprenticeship shows how each process of socialization determines the price of the communicable and assigns a value to the unformulated. Without pretending to offer a strict typology of this phenomenon, I will distinguish five classes that are capable of comprising its collective aspects.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 See Michel Maffesoli, "La mafia: notes sur la socialité de base", Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, vol. LXXIII, Paris, P.U.F., 1982, pp. 363 to 368.

2 Jean Wahl, Traité de métaphysique, quoted by Joseph Rassam, Le silence comme introduction à la métaphysique, p. 70, Publications de l'Université de Toulouse-le-Mirail, Toulouse 1980, Série A, t. 44.

3 M. Blondel, L'Action. I, in J. Rassam, ibid. p. 52.

4 Gabriel Marcel, Être et Avoir, in J. Rassam, ibid. p. 52.

5 Louis Lavelle, La parole et l'écriture, in J. Rassam, ibid., p. 61.

6 Georges Bataille, Sur Nietzsche, Paris, Gallimard 1967, p. 71.

7 Georges Bataille, idem, p. 124.

8 Georges Bataille, Le Coupable, Paris, Gallimard 1961, p. 88.

9 Georges Bataille, L'Érotisme, Paris, U.G.E., 1965, coll. 10/18 n. 221, p. 304.

10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Entretiens with Georges Charbonnier, Paris, Plon Julliard, 1961.

11 G.W.F. Hegel, Propédeutique philosophique, translated by M. de Gandillac, Paris, Denoël, 1971, coll. Médiations n. 26, introduction, § 5, p. 19.

12 Maurice Blanchot, Le livre a venir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 43.

13 Maurice Blanchot, L'Arrêt de mort, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, coll. L'imaginaire, n. 15, p. 57.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, Paris, N.R.F. Gallimard, 1964, p. 230.

15 Max Scheler, Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie, Gesammelte Werke, ed. M. Scheler and M.S. Frings, Bern, Francke, 1972, vol. 10, p. 380-381.

16 Max Scheler, Nature et formes de la sympathie, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1971, p. 329, note 1.

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18 Max Scheler, Le formalisme en éthique et l'éthique matériale des valeurs, trans. by M. de Gandillac, Paris, Gallimard, 1955, pp. 519-526. On this last idea, a comparison with the theory of Einfühlung is useful; cf. Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraction et Einfühlung, trans. by E. Martineau, Paris, Klincksieck, 1978.

* My italics.

19 Georges Bataille, "Attraction et répulsion. II. La structure sociale" in Denis Hollier, Le collège de sociologie, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, coll. Idées 413, p. 210.

20 The Sociology of George Simmel, p. 317. Tr. by K. Wolff, New York, Free Press of Glencoe; Robert A. Nisbet, La tradition sociologique, tr. by M. Azuelos, Paris, P.U.F., 1984, p. 133.

21 The Sociology of Georg Simmel, op. cit., p. 334ff; Robert A. Nisbet, op. cit.

22 Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1983, p. 22.