“And he never spoke again”: the third margin of the self as self-government

Abstract

In this text, we discuss silence-of-the-self as a form of self-government. Our goal is to understand how in the short story “The third bank of the river”, by Guimarães Rosa, there are vestiges of resistance to the fascist injunction to say, in the way the character “father” is built. We will also observe how, through the founding silence, the father remains in the silence-of-the-self and how that silence is signified in the story, from the gestures of interpretation of the other characters. For this, we deal with silence as a specific materiality, where subject and meaning move widely, from the lens of Materialistic Discourse Analysis. We use authors such as Pêcheux, Orlandi, Foucault and Dinouart for the constitution of our gestures of interpretation. We believe the founding silence admits the permanence in not saying as a way of objecting the Identity, the (impersonal) self; which is why it can express self-government. We take advantage of the Foucauldian reflection on the government of self and others, through the silence-of-the-self.