This talk will articulate the capacity for silence and explore its breakdown in the context of mania. Silence is ubiquitous.

We are surrounded by the silences of objects, spaces, other people, and our own bodies. Generally, these silences go unnoticed, forming a background against which we skillfully engage with people and the world through speech and sound. For example, we can pre-reflectively grasp the silence punctuating an interlocutor’s utterance as a solicitation to break our own silence by speaking, just as we can pre-reflectively grasp their waning attention as a solicitation for us to become silent again, enabling them to speak and us to listen. I will propose that we can usefully understand this as involving the sense of silence.

I will define and explore this sense of silence through a case in which that sense has apparently broken down, namely, mania. Symptoms of mania include an unmanageable flood of thoughts and an urge to speak. First-person accounts of those symptoms indicate that they may bring a profound disruption in the individual’s relationship to silence. In some, silence is described as a newfound source of agony, in others, as an elusive goal. Individuals appear reflectively aware of social norms and personal habits that ordinarily govern silence but their affective hold has loosened. Some people invent painful, physical methods to try to replace that hold. This suggests that the sense of silence is an embodied capacity constituted through the sedimentation of norms and habits.

The paper, thus, offers two benefits: firstly, a better understanding of how our relationship to silence enables us in our everyday lives and, secondly, insight about of how its disruption may disable us in mania.