ABSTRACT
The relationship between silence, remembering, and forgetting is an import ant topic in memory studies as well as in the philosophy of culture, a discourse that has recently been very much concerned with, as indicated by the increasing numbers of publications in the field, the question of passivity and the concept of the pathic (Roth 2011; Hobuß and Tams 2014: 7-28). In this context, critics have raised a variety of objections to theories of performativity, namely that they allegedly neglect the dimensions of the passive, the aesthetic, and silence. Responding to these objections, this essay examines the combination of the performative and the aesthetic in silence, remembering, and forgetting in the works of Wittgenstein, Cage, and Derrida. It will be shown that every claim that understands silence and speech as simple opposites can be seen as wrong. Or, in the context of memory studies, one could be inclined to equate memory with practices of talking, and, on the other hand, silence with the negation of remembering. But this is wrong in two respects: First, remembering can itself consist of practices of remaining silent, and second, every speech act is based on a basic kind of silence that cannot be fully expressed in language.
