Silence

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches silence from two angles. The first is musical and poetic. Speaking of Debussy, he argues that the music resounds in order to make the extent of silence felt, and that mystery, like the sphinx, reigns through silence. In the cycle devoted to Mignon, he describes a text that stays in the background, invisible and silent, which condenses what the texts under study have in common: a barycentre where all the sound emissions cross1. The heart of the sonic thing would thus be a certain silence, which he acknowledges is hard to characterise2. The second angle is political and concerns the media. He is less interested in how monstrous the facts are than in the fact that they are kept quiet, as with the indifference towards the dead of the Sahel3 or the silence covering a chief of staff's statement about a high-intensity conflict4. Later he adds that media noise does not contradict silence, since one noise can mask another5.

1. 1#1 Mignon, or the song of silence7 Apr 2021 · 1:10
2. 2#1 Mignon, or the song of silence7 Apr 2021 · 46:09
3. 3#10.6 War and peace: “The death drives advance in silence…” (Freud)8 Dec 2021 · 30:49
4. 4#10.6 War and peace: “The death drives advance in silence…” (Freud)8 Dec 2021 · 1:13:08
5. 5The silences of the media uproar: the Atlanticist re-Nazification21 Oct 2025 · 49:42

Summary produced automatically from 6 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.