Maria Teresa Alvarez

Silence is reserved for what cannot be verbally expressed. The well-known Wittgensteinian quote summarizes an established understanding of the relationship between language and silence: because language is not enough to account for reality and thinking, it must be transcended by other means of expression, like music or silence. But what if the opposite is the case and silence is not the extension but the precondition of language, the ultimate source of meaning? This paper explores how this is the phenomenological and Derridean philosophical framework of Coetzee’s novels, a literary universe created from the will to signify and build singular meanings.

Edith Stein´s philosophical work was largely devoted to the synthesis of the phenomenological thought of her master Edmund Husserl with thomistic scholasticism. This work tries to continue the motivation of that Steinian synthesis project in relation to one of the notions dealt with in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that may help to clarify the phenomenological analysis about imagination and image consciousness: namely the idea of virtuality. It will be argued that this notion of “virtuality” used by Thomas Aquinas can characterize the mode of being of some components of pictorial images.