The Politics of Not Speaking

In contrast to the common understanding of politics as a domain of speaking, reveals an alternative tradition where the spoken word fails, collapses, breaks (i.e., a politics of not speaking).

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.