Language of Silence: Heidegger, Blanchot, and Linguistic Withdrawal in the Opening Scene of Ballyturk

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Document Type : Research Paper

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1 Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

2 Associate professor of Modern Irish Literature, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract

By drawing on a Heideggerian-Blanchotian account of silence, withdrawal, and non-phenomenality in Enda Walsh’s experimental Irish play, Ballyturk (2014), the politics of encounter is recast in terms of linguistic excess, narrative opacity, and existential stasis. Instead of interpreting the endlessness of the play’s speech, narrative fragmentation, and theatrical enclosure as emblematic of a failed communication or an attenuation to the absurdity of human psychology, there is a site where language is read as dramatizing itself at its limit point. Further buttressing this interpretation and following a Heideggerian conception of silence (Schweigen) as an originary mode of disclosure as well as a radical account of silence in Blanchot’s the natural (neuter), according to which language runs up against its own impossibility in that horizon, one would approach the play less in terms of an expression than withdrawal. The central question, therefore, concerns how, in situations where language speaks without saying, a dramatic text proposes an unpronounced presence cleft from meaning. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, the analysis reinvents structural conditions of meaning rather than their rejection, from which the play offers a reprieve as suspension during which signification is allowed only by virtue of withdrawal, suspension, or non-coincidence.

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 09 June 2026

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