According to a common conception, modern politics is based on speaking, on discussion and rational argumentation-on “logos.” In contrast, The Politics of Not Speaking argues that politics is based not on speaking but on the suspension of conversation, on the break of rational discourse, on “logoclasm”-on politics of not speaking. Elad Lapidot presents the notion of politics as logoclasm through readings of five canonic thinkers of the twentieth century: Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, and Jacques Derrida. Tracing the development of the politics of not speaking from the 1930s to the 1990s, he shows how the notion of logoclasm, the rupture of rational discussion, explains key notions in modern politics, such as sovereignty, law, the state, violence, war, race, colonialism, decolonization, and boycott, and sheds light on current debates concerning the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Gaza war.
This forum reflects on Elad Lapidot’s The Politics of Not Speaking. In contrast to the common understanding of politics as a domain of speaking, this work reveals an alternative tradition where the spoken word fails, collapses, breaks (i.e., a politics of not speaking).
Symposium Essays
A Genealogy of Postcolonialism
The ability or inability of insiders to hear the silences that arise on the other side of the borders drawn by colonizing societies around themselves, to perceive them as the echo of missing voices, may constitute, for the victims of colonialism, an indication of whether they can place their hopes for a more just world in something other than violence.
Beyond the Politics of Numbness
Against the backdrop of Gaza and Europe’s muted response, this essay reflects on Lapidot’s challenge to recognize the violence hidden in the language of peace.
Beyond the Binary of Violence and Non-Violence
Violence here is not the symmetric flipside of speech. While destroying the semblance of peaceful normality, the violence of Palestinian armed struggle “communicates” on a political and epistemic level: it violently makes violence visible.
Politics, Speech and Voice
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.
Logoclasm? Not without Logogenics
This is the aspect that worries me most: radical logoclasm as the license to violence that can establish itself as a permanent stasis, infinitely delaying the logogenic challenge of creating a new way of speaking.
Book Forum: Response
Even the highly professionalized logos of scholarly discourse does not just suffer from logoclastic dynamics but is positively animated by them.