ABSTRACT
In this context, the appeal to silence is a tactical ploy, to escape the abstraction and evasions of language. Silence signifies – it alerts us to that in our experience which cannot be assimilated by the system, the order of knowledge. Soren Kierkegaard routinely couples silence and the feminine. In The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis discusses the different conceptions of beauty which are appropriate to men and women. The idea that God speaks in silence is also found in a journal entry of 1846, which contains a prayer to the Father who speaks in many ways. Silence can also cloak more insidious evils. As we saw, the seducer's love of silence formed part of a well-defined plan of manipulation, whilst intimating an unreachable condition of pure immediacy. The speculative philosopher seems condemned to chase a concretion which is always eluding him, whilst the mystic's interpretation of wordless is itself relativized by another, ironic, reading of silence as emptiness.
