The ethics of silence: an interdisciplinary case analysis approach

Abstract

This book's first line contains its core premise: ‘silence is an essential and ubiquitous aspect of all communication’ (p. 1). Many of us intuitively know that silence matters, but even those of us who work on narrative, communication or even affect rarely analyse it. Nancy Billias and Sivaram Vemuri note that, even when silence does catch the attention of scholars, research usually focuses on involuntary silence—where the silenced presumably would like to be heard but cannot be (p. 162). As such, ‘silence is always present, but it is often treated as though it exists only at the margins, if anywhere’ (p. 17). The authors—a philosopher and an economist—look to provide a more comprehensive account of silence. Yet such an account cannot be simple or straightforward. Billias and Vemuri argue that defining silence is difficult (p. 1), and provide instead a definition of seven modalities of silence: empty rhetoric; insolent silence; the silence of hopelessness; the silence of the oppressed; the silence of fear; the silence of attentive listening; and the silence that makes space for dialogue (p. 20). Throughout the book, all of these modalities are explored in different contexts, and other modalities are revealed through the authors' interviews—for example, as self-sacrifice (p. 167) or bridging difference (p. 168).