In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

SILENCE VS. NOISE 321
that true sexual fulfillment comes not from sharing physical satisfaction
with her male counterpart but, on the contrary, from being systematically
denied the culminating moment of her own sexual pleasure.
Lawrence associates the willing and "good" acceptance of this subjecterasing
denial on the woman's side with "the silence of the men"
(Lawrence, 349). [see Male vs Female] The insistence (construed as
"bad") on female desire and on the female orgasm is marked by women's
crying out in ecstasy: "When, in their love, it came back on her, the
seething, electric, female ecstasy, which knows such spasms of delirium,
[Cipriano] recoiled from her. It was what she used to call her 'satisfaction.'
She had loved [her former husband] for this, that again, and again,
and again he could give her this orgiastic 'satisfaction,' in spasms that
made her cry aloud ... [Cipriano], in his dark, hot silence would bring
her back to the new, soft, heavy, hot flow, when she was like a fountain
gushing noiseless and with urgent softness from the volcanic deeps. Then
she was open to him soft and hot, yet gushing with a noiseless soft
power" (451-452).
What appears here idealized as a hyperbolic mode of subjecthood and
dignified with an aura of Silence is nothing less than a complicity with
physical violence which does not even begin to address the victim as a
subject. If, in a sexual relationship, a partner's consent to this erasure of
subjecthood may sometimes produce a peculiar form of subjectivity,
military procedure uses the same refusal to acknowledge others' subjecthood
as a means of facilitating their extinction. In one of the few
episodes where the first-person narrator of Ernst Junger's Feuer und Blut
is critical of himself, he measures his own behavior against exactly this
standard. He has talked to an enemy instead of silently shooting him
down. He has failed to confront himself and the enemy with what is
stronger than subjecthood-namely, with death: "Cautiously I draw my
pistol and aim at the English soldier who stands below me. Then I shout:
'Come here, hands up!' He jumps up, gazes at me as if I were an
apparition, and disappears with a leap into the dark mouth of the tunnel.
I am irritated with myself. I should have simply shot him instead of
talking idly" (Junger, 149) [seeImmanence = Transcendence (Death)] On
the side of the aggressor, Silence becomes the condition for unconditional
use of violence. On the side of the victim, in contrast, speech is repressed
by fright. In Federico Garda Lorca's Romance de la Guardia Civil
espanola (Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard), the aggressors' Silence