Kierkegaard, the silences

'Only he who is silent will amount to anything.... He who knows how to keep silent discovers an alphabet that has just as many letters as the ordinary one; thus he can express everything in his jargon, and no sigh is so deep that he that she does not have the laughter that corresponds to it in his jargon, and no request so obtrusive that he does not have the witticism to fulfill the demand.' - S. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 186

It is silence, Kierkegaard tell us, that is the key to life, the only way we will 'ever amount to everything.' But this silence is not total absence, a place full of it's own language, a language all it's own, a place that, like speech, possesses the building blocks of language, all the while escaping spoken language's grasp. Silence is the limit of total lack (of speech) on the one hand, and the presence of another kind of linguistic space, which is anterior from spoken language. There is, on the one hand, no similarity between them, they are the absence of the other, and on the other hand, they are coded like one another; that which so makes them different codes them along the same lines. Two things similar in absolute difference.

Beyond the paradox that asks, How silent is silence?, one also gathers from Kierkegaard the idea that one 'keeps silent,' holds silence, makes silence part of the self, assumes it with purposeful resignation. But it is a silence that one holds, one grabs the reigns and pulls them tight with content. But this content is not apathy; no, this content is the existential listening, the assumption of the self, the bracketing of the without in favor of the language that comes from within, or comes from silence, the language of silence.

Heidegger, even, in Being and Time, still chases this limit inward, in the 'calling' of the Da-sein from the 'They-self' towards the 'self.' Kierkegaard might set the limit for Heidegger, which even Heidegger is unable to push through, but complicates quite a bit. Heidegger combines the 'with' ('being-in-the-world') with the 'in[side]' to from the 'within,' though he retains this trip inward, where spoken language is the language of the outside, of the world. Kierkegaard and Heidegger, thus, are rather close on this. Where Kiekegaard wonders after the self with-in in his 'psychology,' wondering what is written (the 'alphabet') beneath, Heidegger attempts to write about the 'Being' (Da-sein) that is beneath all outside showing. Writing is thus conceived as both that which is other than speech, though writing is still conceived in relation to speech, as it's absence, it's silence.

Just some thoughts, of course a nod to Derrida. More soon.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans: Hong, Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.