Entre Walter Benjamin e Søren Kierkegaard: o silêncio como resistência à tagarelice em uma linguagem vazia

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the possibility of silence representing a form of resistance to the chatter of an empty language. For this, it starts with Walter Benjamin's writings about language. According to Benjamin, language goes through a process of degradation. In this process language loses the immediacy of naming language, becomes an instrument for communication, and ceases to be the language of perfect knowledge, and becomes chatter. In this scenario, it seems possible to present silence as a way to counteract chatter. Silence, in this work, is understood according to Søren Kierkegaard's perspective. For Kierkegaard, silence is not restricted to the absence of speech, but reveals to man his union with the divine in an immediate way. Thus, articulating these two authors is relevant in order to analyze the philosophical possibility of silence being interpreted as a form of opposition to chatter, as a criticism of modernity, taking up concepts such as allegory and mourning to understand this articulation. Besides Benjamin's texts on language and Kierkegaard's analysis of the story of Abraham, taken in this work as allegory, we also use other Benjaminian concepts from later works.