Abstract

In the present article we try to trace back what we call the "hegemony of silence" in some of Molavi's verses and poems. The advocates of the "hegemony of silence" over-value silence at the cost of a devaluation of language and take it to have a special kind of intuition, a special kind of insight into the Thing beyond language. This attitude towards silence and language has a long-lasting history and has only been questioned recently. We will try to read this hegemonic attitude against the background of a Hegelian-Lacanian attitude, a modern attitude which highly esteems both language and silence and ultimately considers silence as a linguistic phenomenon. We will argue that these two attitudes have two different logics as their ground: the first attitude, the hegemony of silence, is grounded on Sohravardi's "Imkan-e Ashraf" and the second one, on the retroactive logic of German Idealism. After examining the epistemological and ontological consequences of these two attitudes, we will come to the conclusion that the position of the "hegemony of silence" is a contradictory and impossible position.