ABSTRACT
Silence is often associated with liturgical reverence, piety and the limit of representation. What happens, though, when religious and aesthetic silence enters into the political realm? Does silence necessarily mean denial, evasion or forgetfulness? The final sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus famously elevates silence to a modest acceptance of the limitation of language to express experience. Inspired by George Steiner, I argue that silence can be understood in two ways: as a wall blocking communication or as a window leading to a deeper appreciation of the limit of knowledge and philosophical truth. If Plato and Maurice Blanchot provide windows for understanding silence as the limit of representation, Martin Heidegger’s poetic and political use of silence provides both a window into the nature of language and an impenetrable wall that haunts the history of philosophy with his evasion of the Holocaust.
