We asked a variety of scholars to share their reflections on Elad Lapidot’s new book The Politics of Not Speaking.
The Politics of Not Speaking could not have appeared at a more pertinent time. At a time when Gaza is a turning point in contemporary history, two questions that we all ask ourselves are: what use is politics? What is the point of talking to one’s adversary? On closer inspection, these two questions are one and the same. If, as Aristotle famously defined, politics is something specific to humans as speaking animals, we must conclude that there is a fundamental relationship between politics and speech (logos). However, this relationship is twofold, involving four terms: peace/war and speaking/not speaking. One thesis that can be drawn from this hidden structure is that violence is always a ‘problem of expression’.
The Politics of Not Speaking explores this thesis by analyzing the deceptive evidence it may contain. It demonstrates that there is no direct correlation between peace and speech, or war and silence. In dialogue with five moments of contemporary thought, Elad Lapidot explains that sovereign power has in fact cunningly exploited speech as a means of exerting violence, perhaps as the most efficient means. By doing so, sovereign power aims to wage wars more successfully under the guise of politics and peace. Logos, discussion and deliberation are claimed to be the foundations of just and democratic politics. However, they are actually weapons used by sovereign power in its war against the oppressed, colonized or wretched of the earth — those considered irrational, incomprehensible or deprived of the faculty of speech. This war suspends politics in the name of politics.
The main question that arises is therefore: what should be done in response to this cunning? In other words, should we abandon politics and resort to war or violence as the only means of resistance in response to politics that has been hijacked and emptied of its meaning? Or is there an alternative way to rehabilitate politics, redefine the relationship between speech and politics, and thus challenge the false politics of sovereign power through another politics — a true one — rather than war?
Lapidot analyzes the first alternative, mainly through his discussion with Frantz Fanon. He highlights the inadequacy and problematic nature of this position by demonstrating that resorting to violence is not really a solution but perpetuates the state of war. As Lapidot argues, seeking to do away with the mediation of logos simply reproduces the structure of domination by attempting to justify violence. In contrast, he advocates the second alternative: reconsidering the relationship between speech and politics. From this perspective, the ‘politics of not speaking’ warns us against misunderstanding its meaning: it does not designate a politics that aspires to bypass speech; a politics without speech could not exist and would be a contradiction in terms.
Instead, the central thesis of The Politics of Not Speaking is that true politics, which does not reduce itself to a system of domination — a system ordered by and for sovereign power –, leaves open the possibility of interrupting speech or logos. Its aim is to interrupt the violence hidden behind logos and resist it. Politics is, in fact, the site of such an interruption, which Lapidot terms ‘logoclasm’:
“[…] politics does not begin with the rise of logos, of rational human speech, against animal violence; rather, it begins with the intervention of logoclasm against the violence of logos” (p. 102).
However, as Lapidot emphasizes, interruption should not be confused with negation. As an interruption to logos, ‘logoclasm’ is essentially a performative act. An example of such a performative act of interruption is the BDS movement against the Israeli state, as discussed in The Politics of Not Speaking. Two more classic examples of this in modern politics are the general strike and civil disobedience.
Force of voice
Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether the interruption of logos can in itself constitute politics. In other words, if such an interruption of logos is an act of violence or, more precisely, counter-violence against the dominant logic, how can we transition back to logos? For politics does not lie in interruption as such, but rather in a process that includes this transition. This transition does not simply reaffirm the existing logos, but must be able to restructure or modify it significantly each time. From this perspective, Lapidot’s true politics reveals its other name: translation.
As long as the performative act is not inscribed in the logos, we remain on the threshold of politics. By contrast, translation refers precisely to such a performative act inscribed in the logos or language. It is in relation to this definition of politics as translation that the chapter on Derrida reveals its importance within the overall structure of The Politics of Not Speaking.
Through his dialogue with Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, Lapidot reveals that true politics has two pitfalls that limit it on both sides. On one side, there is sovereign power, which aims to monopolize the decision of who among speaking beings has the right to speak and who does not. More fundamentally, its aim is to impose itself as the authority that decides who speaks (who makes proper use of logos) and who does not speak (who simply utters senseless words outside of logos).
By drawing our attention to this constitutive attitude of sovereign power, Jacques Rancière suggests in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), that politics should be defined as the space opened up by constant disagreement among subjects over the distinction between what falls within the realm of logos and what remains pure voice, or between meaningful and meaningless speech from the perspective of a shared logos.
As I said, there is another pitfall that threatens and limits politics on the other side. This occurs when each subject (whether individual or collective) seeks to interrupt the logos in order to substitute their own. Each subject wants to speak in their own language or idiom, no matter how incomprehensible or senseless their words may sound to their interlocutors. In this case, the destruction of the Tower of Babel – the myth that inspired Lapidot’s reflections – goes too far: when the communication becomes de facto impossible by an unlimited multiplication of languages. As I have explained elsewhere, ‘speaking in one’s own idiom’ would hence overshadow any other issues of politics to eventually end up itself being the real issue. It doesn’t matter whether such glossolalia is motivated by the speaking entity’s desire, their anarchic reaction to sovereign power, or even their divine invocation (see Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 14). In any case, we would be dragged out of politics, as the consequence of a generalized glossolalia is a situation of ‘war of all against all’!
To avoid these two pitfalls, the politics of translation takes a different approach. In line with both Lapidot and Derrida, we may formulate this approach as follows: to make their own voice heard in the language (the logos) of the other. However, this formula must be unpacked to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls of politics: the politics of translation doesn’t intend to render the singularity of a voice by domesticated speeches authorized in the logos. On the contrary, it involves making one’s voice heard in such a way that, precisely because of its singularity, it makes sense in the logos — a logos that always remains the same and belongs to the other by definition.
The challenge of the politics of translation is therefore twofold: on the one hand, the voice must not be reduced to any speech corresponding to the internal regime of the logos; instead, it must remain a ‘voice from outside’. At the same time, it must make sense within the established and given logos, which is ordered by and for the sake of sovereign power. Making a voice heard as a voice from outside is not the same as engaging in dialogue or democratic deliberation, which are only possible within a logos. Such a voice, by its very force, will always call into question the order of the logos, prompting it to restructure itself and reconsider the boundaries it has established between sense and nonsense, and between intelligible speech and unintelligible voice.
Simultaneously with Lapidot’s reflections in The Politics of Not Speaking, I attempted to implement such a politics of translation in an epistolary exchange with Jean-Claude Milner: Parler sans détours: Lettres sur Israel et la Palestine (Cerf, 2025). My aim was not to ‘dialogue’ with my interlocutor, which would have been an impossible objective in any case. Rather, I wanted to give a voice to those who have no voice in the matter, and make them heard by a Western readership, primarily a French one: precisely to make the voice of the other heard to them. However, once the book was published, I was confronted with another obstacle that I had underestimated: what can you do when your interlocutors block their ears so as not to hear your voice, acting as if no voice could exist outside ‘their’ logos? Ears deliberately blocked in this way seem to me to be the most blatant symptom of the deep crisis we are going through today. And this crisis is called Gaza. The question is how politics will be possible at all after Gaza.
