Thinking about silence

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511676178.002

1 - Thinking about silence

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010

Edited by

Ruth Ginio and

Efrat Ben-Ze’ev: Affiliation:
Ruppin Academic Centre, Israel
Ruth Ginio: Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Jay Winter: Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut

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Summary

Les souvenirs sont façonnés par l'oubli comme les contours du rivage sur la mer.

Memory is framed by forgetting in the same way as the contours of the shoreline are framed by the sea.

Marc Augé

To be silent is still to speak.

Maurice Blanchot

Below the surface

Marc Augé's elegant formulation of the embrace of memory and forgetting draws upon a long tradition of philosophical and literary reflection. It is time, though, to go beyond it, in the effort to transcend the now saturated field of memory studies dominated by scholarship which adopts this binary approach. For the topographical metaphor employed here is clearly incomplete. We need to see the landscape of the shoreline in all three dimensions. Doing so enables us to observe a vertical dimension to the creation and erosion of the shoreline which is dynamic, unstable, and at times, intrusive. We speak of those deposits below the surface of the water which emerge with the tides or with other environmental changes. In the framework of how we think about memory and forgetting, these hidden shapes cannot simply be ignored because they are concealed at some moments and revealed at others. They must be examined as part of the cartography of recollection and remembrance.

Silences: liturgical, political, essentialist

We call these hidden deposits silence. The composer John Cage said all that needs to be said about the performative nature of silence.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Shadows of War
A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century
, pp. 3 - 31

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511676178.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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