Reticent event: letting things happen

The essay explores poetry as performing silence in a double sense, that is, as both modern poetic text performing silence and silence as the performance of poetry par excellence. This specific notion of performing silence is clarified from the perspective of twentieth-century interest in temporality and event. Drawing on Heidegger's remarks on language and power and on the poetry of Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim, I suggest that the soundless underside of language - neither words normuteness, neither meaning nor its absence can perhaps be seen as ab-sense, that is, as a letting go of sense and an opening up sense to its underside of silence. This notion helps us differentiate between muteness and powerlessness, on the one hand, and silence thought as ab-sense. My point is that if muteness can be seen as the 'expression' of powerlessness, the lack of power to bring into language, silence not only eschews the easy codification into power and powerlessness but renders problematic the whole discourse of power. It is a performative opening which releases language from its drive toward meaning and comprehension, in order to release, as though back into language, its own silent force of the possible irreducible to the operations of power.