SILENCE AND SPEECH AGAINST THE EXCESSES OF COMMUNICATION

Against the excesses of communication, the French anthropologist reflects on the respective virtues of silence and speech. In Le Breton's work on human health, silence occupies a decisive place because of its capacity to bring meaning. To speak of interiority and silence in the contemporary world, the author argues, is to introduce a double astonishment, and probably a double repulsion, and therefore the appeal is to sustain an intimate resistance against a world increasingly reduced to signs and less and less to meaning.

DAVID LE BRETON (born 26 October 1953) is a professor at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and a researcher at the Laboratory of Cultures and Societies in Europe. He is particularly interested in the anthropology of the body, to which he has devoted numerous essays.