(the) American (Novel of)

The Taciturn Tongue
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characterizes our age as one of nihilism, the legacy of God’s complete
annulment, but an age virtually ignorant of this death and more so of
its causes. Debord declares that ours is the “society of the spectacle,” 13
though surely no time before our own has been as determined and
defined by so much relentless sound. Is this not an example of the
paradox of silence? The spectacle reduces all to the gaze of the observer,
but the silence of this reduction is overwhelming and calls forth the
rush of speech to insulate against the terror of silence’s indeterminacy.
Nietzsche could name the rhythmic repetition of the silence of
silence as the eternal recurrence of the same and know it as his most
abysmal and yet most liberating thought, for while in the eternal recurrence
life is repeatedly affirmed in its repetition, death is also both
continuously staved off and repeated ad infinitum. Could it be that the
pure silence left in the wake of God’s death can only be known by not
knowing the meaning of that silence? Is it not precisely this that most
characterizes the present consciousness?
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Silence resounds spatially, despite its apparent temporal dislocation.
Is this its secret? And if silence does speak, then it can be said that there
is a type of sound to silence. Levinas teaches that “sound is the quality
most detached from an object. Its relation with the substance from which
it emanates is not inscribed in its quality. It resounds impersonally. Even
its timbre, a trace of its belonging to an object, is submerged in its quality,
and does not retain the structure of a relation. Hence in listening we do
not apprehend a ‘something,’ but are without concepts.” 14 This impersonal
quality, however, does not necessarily indicate a nonrelation with
the listener, or a relation without affectivity. It could also signify a universal
aspect, an issuing forth of sense to all who have the ears to hear,
all the while leaving open the nonspatial hermeneutical space.
Silence dictates that we not only recognize it through its opposite,
speech, but that we locate it phenomenally, in the earth, the cosmos, in
ourselves, and in the other. Nietzsche, Levinas, and Lyotard all refer in
their own way to the “listening eye, 15 a term used earlier by Swedenborg,
16 realizing that the meaning of silence cannot be fully reduced to
speech but nevertheless cannot be absolutely separated from language
if it is to have any signification at all. Knowing when and where to
speak is the key to understanding, or at least effectively interpreting, this