Abstract

This dissertation argues that performances of silence redefine logos, shift the relationship between subject and object, and disrupt authorial agency. My historical arc suggests repetitions within two moments and four examples: the practices of the Religious Society of Friends in seventeenth-century England, and the philosophical and artistic engagements with silence soon after World War II in the work of Martin Heidegger, John Cage, and Samuel Beckett. Within this historical mapping, affinities point towards enlightenment emerging out of political and social chaos. In these performances of silence, a gathering leads to excessive, embodied vibration, and a passive waiting leads to absence paradoxically marked by fullness. Such findings validate comparative, historical approaches within performance studies; furthermore, a performative lens demonstrates the importance of embodiment within philosophical definitions of logos. ;In the first chapter, I read primary texts by and about nascent Friends to reveal the gathered group's presencing of the awareness of fullness within absence. I trace a movement from listening and waiting, to an embodied fullness, to a grand tonality of silence as logos. Chapter two investigates the writings of Heidegger from the mid-1940s through the late 1950s. Heidegger's ideas on the "ringing of stillness" and the notion of logos as "gathering" suggest important affinities with earlier Protestant radicalism. John Cage's silent performances exemplify his definition of silence not as absence, but as heightened listening. I ask if Cage's decision not to practice seated Buddhist meditation may have led him to oversimplify his otherwise complex and paradoxical understanding of silence. Finally, I do a gendered analysis of the female characters of Beckett's later plays to affirm that silent performance reconstitutes the subject/object binary in a more complex way. Throughout, I include direct and indirect links among my examples, in an argument that proceeds allusively and sequentially. The project suggests a possible hearing of silence and religiosity in the ensuing literature on poststructuralist theory and performance