January 19, 2006: Why are "silences" interesting?
Why are "silences" interesting?
Althusser, who was interested in building tools for analyzing forms of discourse, follows Freud in understanding silences as symptoms of repression. Silences are locations where repression has distorted the discourse; or to be more literal, silences are irruptions of the unconscious into conscious discourses.
Is that true also of the theoretical silences which we've tolerated? For instance, by not confronting that revolution inevitably implies civil war?
If yes, what does that mean?
