ABSTRACT
Silence is often analysed as an absence, a lack, a disability. Most of the time, silence is even discarded analytically because what matters in social sciences, and in the field of international relations (IR), is the word, to speak or to have the ability to express oneself. Even among approaches in social sciences and IR that have engaged with silence more directly, silence often is seen as the result of a process of silencing. Silence thus is an outcome which may, or may not, become a modality of expression itself. Yet, even taken as a modality, silence is a reaction to an imposition, thus something ultimately passive rather than the (normatively expected) active act of saying, telling or voicing. This chapter moves beyond most current understandings of silence as absence, as reaction, hence away from a logocentric problematisation of it, and takes silence not necessarily as an outcome, which it can be, but rather as an equal component in a language game. Similar to Wittgenstein’s conceptualisation of language in which words have no ultimate meaning but are defined through their different functions in different language games (Wittgenstein 2003 [1960], p. 23), silence can be an intentional move or an unintentional act in a language game that is always part of a practice and form of life. We take silence to be an active, productive element of our political life, whether it produces intended consequences or ambiguities in a language game, performs a yielding constitutive of communities, or interpellates a reaction from those who are confronted with it.
