On Silence: Holding the Voice Hostage

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike.

Ed Pluth is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, USA. He is the author of Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New and the co-editor with Jan De Vos of Neuroscience and Critique.

Cindy Zeiher is a lecturer in the School of Language, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She writes and publishes in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis and continental philosophy and is co-editor for CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory.