This text considers several case studies of subaltern silence as micro political resistance. Around these examples I thread a theoretical model (using ideas of such thinkers as Spivak, Bataille, Foucault and Baudrillard) to explain how performing silences could resist oppression without assuming an underlying well-articulated subjectivity. The article deals with the force of silence, its conditions of possibility, and its position with respect to representation.

This article attempts a re-configuration of silence, suicidal identity deconstruction and the politics of anti-racism. I will explore the potential of dismantling whiteness by way of a silence that involves the refusal to claim whiteness, a whiteness that, in effect, denies humanity to ‘others’. Such silences are insubordinate, as they challenge the hegemony of a racialized polity, attempting to resist its privileges, as well as its destructive and restrictive consequences.

In this paper, I suggest that one of the ways in which problems of exclusion from deliberation and uptake within deliberation can be ameliorated is to develop a more robust account of the deliberative virtues that socially privileged speakers/hearers ought to cultivate. Specifically, privileged speakers/hearers ought to cultivate the virtue of actively facilitating equitable and inclusive deliberative exchanges and the deliberative virtue of training their ‘testimonial sensibility’ to correct for prejudicial judgments about other speakers.

The social contract tradition has been critiqued for harboring ‘domination contracts’ that exclude women, people of color, people with disabilities, and others from political life. In this article, I build on these critical analyses to argue that the liberal ideal of the reasoning and speaking citizen entails the anti-democratic disqualification of ‘silent’ citizens such as young children and many peoples with intellectual disabilities. The liberal veneration of voice and the corollary vilification of silence represent the internal logic of all domination (...) contracts, since it is by comparison to silent children and peoples with disabilities that groups such as women and people of color are viewed as justifiably excluded. I identify two distinct but interacting forms of liberal disqualification: (1) contingent domination contracts, which can be potentially disputed and temporarily resolved by proving a group’s fulfilment of the qualifications of speech and reason; and (2) structural domination contracts, which cannot be resolved for ‘silent’ citizens. Moreover, any viable challenge to a contingent domination contract must centre on the democratic inclusion of silent citizens, which itself will require the reconceptualization and redesign of political processes, as well as workplaces, economies, and other social institutions. (shrink)

Predicated on a one-sided focus on political ‘voice’, analyses of political silences traditionally focused almost exclusively on their negative role as the harmful absence of participation or responsibility. More recently, a new appreciation for the wide spectrum of political functions of silence has gained ground, including forms of willful renitence and even active resistance. Yet this thematic expansion has also resulted in a loss of focus. Lacking a common analytical framework, research on political silences risks limiting itself to the purely (...) additive: finding and filling in ever more minute ‘blank spots’ on the periphery of the map of political research. Building on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this paper proposes a solution to this dilemma by means of a reconsideration of the political role of expectations. In political discourse, the expected distribution of moments of silence and articulation expresses established power structures, while unexpected silences and the breaking of expected silences conversely present a powerful means of calling these into question. Focusing on this ambivalence paves the way to a new systematic typology of political silences as a distinct mode of political communication. But above all, it points to the value of silence as an analytical probe, an instrument to fathom the expectations and constraints structuring political discourse in various contexts and spaces. Besides providing the study of silence with an overarching research focus, such an approach would thus build a bridge between the issue of political silence and wider debates on the structures of the political field as a whole. (shrink)

This article attempts a re-configuration of silence, suicidal identity deconstruction and the politics of anti-racism. I will explore the potential of dismantling whiteness by way of a silence that involves the refusal to claim whiteness, a whiteness that, in effect, denies humanity to ‘others’. Such silences are insubordinate, as they challenge the hegemony of a racialized polity, attempting to resist its privileges, as well as its destructive and restrictive consequences.