Mongoose, Macherey

Everything is this particular article relates back to one simple word: silence. Silence in the sense of saying nothing at all and also silence being the key contributor to what is said. The first point drawn by Macherey is that every book which has ever been written in actually incomplete and it must in fact be incomplete in order for anything else to be said. By this he means that the book is not complete until the criticism and reactions from outside sources have had their chance to expand on the written words. He goes on the say that “This silence gives it life”(16) and “the book is not self-sufficient; it is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence”(16); which I take to mean that the discourse and criticism about the book is actually what brings the book to life and it is made possible by the ‘silence’, or incompleteness, of the book.
Taking the concept of silence a step further, he continues on that silence not only shapes all books, it actually “shapes all speech” (17). So how in the world could silence possibly shape speech? Macherey goes back to work of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the ‘unconscious’ to explain this. Freud’s work determined that “in order to say anything, there are things which must not be said” (17). Basically what he is getting at is that our mind’s have a built-in filter which processes every thought that comes into our mind and helps us determine what we should say and what we shouldn’t. Every word that we speak has gone through this filter and been allowed to pass through our unconscious to our conscious. In order for there to be spoken words, there must also be words which are not spoken. This can be very important in situations where we bite our tongues and do not say certain things which we would later regret.