(the) American (Novel of)

110 Brian Schroeder
it denotes a refusal to listen to the silent voice of the other. The silent
voice, however, resounds with a rhythm of its own, vibrating and pulsating
through the body, through the very earth itself. De Certeau
poignantly notes that Native Americans, for example, have retained in
the silence of the “tortured body” and “altered earth” the memory of
what European culture has largely “forgotten.” 11 But this is not a forgetting
in that active sense of which Nietzsche writes; rather, it is a
reactive forgetting wherein the sound of silence is repressed precisely by
keeping silent, by remaining consciously mute.
To transfigure the reactive into the active, the paralysis of nihilism
into the ecstasy of self-overcoming, the no-saying into the great Yes—
this is the task and goal of future affirmative willing, adjures Nietzsche;
this is awakening. Standing at the bitter end of and staring dumbly
down the tracks leading to the Birkenau crematoria, for instance, one
finds oneself at the center of the world, seemingly powerless in the full
awareness of humanity’s capacity for cruelty and horror, suspended
between the possibilities of hell and heaven, of inaction and action.
Here one is mute in the face of recognition and realization. “Yes,
awakening can stop and silence us,” writes Lingis, “freezing the continuity
and momentum of movements,” but it “can also give rise to
action”—the action of responsibility. “My action arises when I wake up
to what I have to do. In the action the I awakens.” 12 In doing so, the I
gives birth to a new rhythm, a new silence, a new speech, and a new
listening—a new I.
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Silence disturbs, if not frightens, many, and those who command
silence are often viewed as the most fearsome because they are generally
the least understood. Silence dissipates the veils of meaning, of
sense, within which one wraps oneself to stem the blackness of the
night, the cries of the other, the pervasive present absence of death. If
pure absolute silence is, then it is nothing that one can know or
experience directly. Even if one denies mediation as the epistemic
power proper, to realize the infinite depths of pure silence would be
tantamount to becoming absolutely other. It would be nothing short of
becoming God—or nothingness.
Indeed, nothing perhaps defines the postmodern condition more
than the need to fill the void that is absolute silence itself. Nietzsche