Silence = Death

Sometime during my second analysis, I fell silent. This silence lasted, with intermissions, for a period of 2 years. In this essay, I explore this silence as the effect of an encounter with a psycho-social threshold. I lean on Ferenczi’s unwelcome child and his death instinct, on Green’s “dead mother” and on Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier. I think through Schmitt’s “state of exception,” Agamben’s homo sacer, Girard’s scapegoat, and the biblical stories of Isaac and Ishmael. I argue that the relations between subjects and collectives are structured by an unconscious knowledge of the abandonment, sacrifice and exile at the foundation and horizon of human community; hence their inherent vulnerability and unease. I suggest that my very private silence was an inability to articulate and share my version of this fundamental vulnerability and unease.