Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences
-
Katariina Kaura-aho
Abstract
The article analyses the political meaning of silence by reflecting on the communicative, autonomous and aesthetic function of silence in context of prevailing political speech systems. In the article, silence is interpreted as an active communication form, as an activist protest tactic and as an aesthetic practice. The article argues that silence can have a politically subversive function toward prevailing aesthetically organised speech systems.Conventionally, silence is devalued in Western societies that primarily celebrate the expressive and communicative capacity of verbal speech. In theorising about radically egalitarian politics, it is however crucial to note the various ways in which silence can be an important source of power. Silence holds the potential for certain active political change in current legal-political frameworks. On the one hand, silence can enable new communication forms and actualise alternative political solidarities and attachments. Also, the logic of oppressive speech systems can be resisted through silent political action. On the other hand, it is in an individual’s own practices of silence, ones that silent protests can bring about in their aftermath, where the sensibility of prevailing political speech orders can be rearranged. The article analyses these many meanings of political silence.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Law in End Times: A North/South Collaboration
- Focus: Law in End Times
- The Judgment as Revelation
- ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’: Tracing Faust’s Influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law
- The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes
- Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film
- Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences
- Research
- “The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism
- Intervention
- A (Lay) Catholic Voice Against a National Consensus
- Book Reviews
- Jani McCutcheon and Fiona McGaughey: Research Handbook on Art and Law
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Law in End Times: A North/South Collaboration
- Focus: Law in End Times
- The Judgment as Revelation
- ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’: Tracing Faust’s Influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law
- The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes
- Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film
- Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences
- Research
- “The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism
- Intervention
- A (Lay) Catholic Voice Against a National Consensus
- Book Reviews
- Jani McCutcheon and Fiona McGaughey: Research Handbook on Art and Law
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
