"By looking at Zen Buddhist and Hindu notions of silence as compared to Hegel, Heidegger, and Blanchot, I am not attempting to supply a mystical interpretation of silence. Instead, moving beyond this, I want to use Kalamaras' point: "mystics of the East begin from the perspective of a reciprocity between self and other, personal and impersonal, and self and the divine that has informed their cultures for thousands of years; Western mystics, on the other hand, although enriched by their reciprocal unified experience, are still writing to and from a culture that has no tradition of reciprocity with which to interpret and express such experiences." (22)
[. . .] the concept of silence and intimacy yield important information about the nature of human relationships, as symbolic of greater unity. While some thinkers from typically “Eastern” traditions have regarded silence as crucial to intimacy, the Western thinkers previously discussed have leaned toward a much more annihilistic understanding of silence. While Kalamaras has argued for silence as a form of knowledge, he does not develop silence as generative condition specifically crucial for intimacy.
[. . .] The recent work of Luce Irigaray is particularly significant at this juncture, as her work inadvertently coincides with Kalamaras’ notion that silence is generative. Further, she acts as a kind of bridge between Western and Eastern notions of intimacy, and the role that silence plays within intimacy. Irigaray argues for the profound capacity for silence to create and allow intimacy and a different kind of exchange between two people in a relationship of any kind." (33)
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