Create il silenzio! = Create silence!

Abstract

Create silence! The epistemology of the word “silence” leads us to the Latin distinction between tacere and silere, whose meanings express both its ambivalence either as absence of speech and as original dimension, the latter completely independent from speech. It seems like that the contemporary western world has lost recollection of the meaning of silere. In the so-called commons perspective, silence seems to fit well within the description of non-exclusive and non-rival good, as well as a potentially unlimited and totally ecological one. This paper proposes an epistemological revolution based on an ecology of silence, not only in relation to a perceptive and concretistic dimension, but also as an existential attitude or state of mind in relation to the symbolic and experiential aspects of our lives. Thus, silence becomes a practice of absence, diametrically opposed to the capitalist concepts of storage / filling / dogma of presence that informs our modus operandi and our mindset.