ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag's 'Aesthetics of Silence' is a work that leads people to important questions about theories of modernism, especially about the role of silence in art and in the modernist/post-modernist debate. As Sontag pointed out, 'the art of people time is noisy with appeals for silence'. Sontag alluded to a human dilemma that has been discussed in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories, namely the force of that which entices yet eludes. Silence is fragile, but the idea of silence is immensely powerful. In Sontag's view, the final achievement of silence must be to obliterate the work of art and the artist. Reading Silence, one needs to be aware that the 'truth content' of the texts is subject to the same laws of chance, the same zest for experimentation and play, as in the more obviously 'musical' works. By implication, Sontag reassessed her own work in the essay, and applied her analysis of silence as a corrective.
