SILENZIO: NEGAZIONE E RESISTENZA

This paper approaches silence not as the absence of speech but as an internal, deliberate and meaningful modulation of language, capable of becoming a political act. Drawing on Vercors’s Le Silence de la mer, it traces the narrative transformation of silence from submission to resistance. Silence is first imposed and resigned (/not-being-able-to-say/, /not-wanting-to-say/); it ends as strategic and oppositional (/wanting-to-say-nothing/, /being-able-to-say-nothing/). This transformation is formalised through a modal semiotic square and read, from a tensive perspective, as a hyperbolic concessive intensification: a silence “more silent than silence”. The analysis is set against Paolo Virno’s reflection on negation, Hannah Arendt’s notion of mute violence and Primo Levi’s testimony, especially the figure of Hurbinek. Following Alonso Aldama’s semiotics of the political, the paper argues that negation is constitutive of both narrative and political discourse. In this sense, silence emerges as a form of resistance and of ethical responsibility.