O’Dwyer identifies no fewer than ten forms of silence linked to speech: silences that convey the annihilation of the subject or the incommunicability between human beings, the silence that delivers the subject to the ‘shadows of their being’, the silence that is an interior voyage, the threatening silence of the other that sends back to nothingness, the silence created in order to resist the racket of the world and, of special relevance to us, the silence of reflection and the silences which suggest the inexpressible.
