Abstract

Max Picard, in his illuminating book, The World of Silence, offers a gripping phenomenological account of silence. His work is valuable in rescuing silence from the conventional stance that characterizes and theorizes it as a form of absence. In contrariety, Picard interprets silence as a presence and this proportion underscores the phenomenological account of it. However, Picard’s project, plating as one of the first philosophical examinations of silence, has a limitation of being ‘gender-neutral’. In this background, the fundamental aim of this paper is to address this limitation and to theoretically dilate and escalate the notion of silence, in a feminist pneuma. Here, the primary purpose of undergoing a re-consideration of silence in a feminist spirit orbit around three ideas: first, the idea of highlighting gender neutrality in philosophical theories of silence, second, to unveil gender-biasness that persists in those theories and third, to establish a newfangled ‘gendered’ theory of silence, by and large. To institute these ideas, we shall predominantly, employ the philosophical stance of the philosopher of sexuate difference, Luce Irigaray. We argue that Irigaray’s revelatory contribution can be accommodative and symbolic of our re-modeled understanding of silence and the views shall be illustrated not by employing empirical references, but everyday examples.