Abstract
In the final chapter we look at Lacan’s provisional uptake of Pascal and elaborate on this as a way of understanding silence as crucial in psychoanalysis and in everyday life. We contend that the impossibility of silence is a quest worth embarking on as it raises a number of questions about subjectivity and its relation to truth.
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Notes
- 1.
In another respect, we could say that our hostage-taker up to this point has been Lacan. His orientation has provided a way for us to think about language in all its nuances. We have encountered a few others also, Franke, Jankélévitch and Badiou; far from deterring us from thinking silence, they have enabled us ways into thinking about it as a singular category.
- 2.
In Seminar VIII, Lacan remarks that the “eternal silence only scares us a moitié” and further attributes this to science having “expulsed the subject from language. It creates its formulas with a language voided of the subject, and, Lacan adds, this rejection/throwing of the subject outside of the symbolic and its reappearance in the real have an effect on the history of science. This effect is the new linguistics” (1960–1961 [2015], p. 129).
- 3.
A provocative thesis, in light of which it is interesting to note that Pascal appears briefly on only one page in Hegel’s entire History of Philosophy, and that is in the introduction—it is a passing reference in which Hegel expresses some praise for the “brightest gleams of thought” in the Pensées. Despite this, Pascal apparently was not worthy of his own entry in the rest of the history, and Hegel seems to have found Pascal to be merely an edifying religious thinker (Hegel, I, p. 93). This is quite underwhelming given that Pascal and Hegel seemed to perhaps share a philosophical comradery: when push came to shove, they were both willing to stand within a possible dread as a certainty, against any kind of falsity. In this way, they both tarry with hesitating, doubt, and anxiety as essential parts of the procedure of thinking.
- 4.
Even then, there is not ‘complete silence’. The analysand hears the analyst breathing, shift around in her chair, the pen scrawling on paper as she takes notes and so on. The thing is that these are not communicative silences or intended to be.
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Pluth, E., Zeiher, C. (2019). The Silent Treatment. In: On Silence. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28147-2_4
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