Silence, Violence and the Invisibility of Dissensus

In the aftermath of what happened in Paris in January 2015, I was disturbed by two deafening kinds of silence. One was the silence that violence wants and tries to impose (it is defined as the opposite of free speech). The other was a form of mourning, a ritualized collective performance of collective grieving in response to inadmissible violence. The former threatened our imminent future, the latter lasted one minute. Because the coexistence between the frightening “tyranny of silence” and the dignified “minute of silence” struck me as strangely parallel and still completely discrepant, I looked further into this double and contradictory chiasmic relationship between silence and violence. Were both definitions of silence instrumentalized in ways that I wished to critique? Or could I imagine or acknowledge other types of (non)silence that would help me come to terms with the kind of violence that occurred in January 2015.
My hypothesis is that depending on which definition and practice of silence are privileged, differently empowered subjects will be authorized to describe what happened in January 2015. Because I suspect the existence of a dissensus about the forms of silence that happened or were forbidden in January 2015, I would like to explore the connection between violence and silence to articulate that dissensus. Looking at the texts and comments published by Badiou, Balibar, Emmanuel, Mabanckou, Rancière, Todd, etc., I ask who has been using the concept of silence for or against whom, and perhaps more importantly how and when. I propose to look at the “tyranny” of silence, then the impossibility of silence, at the minute of silence and finally at the right to silence.