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"The Structure of Silence" - Yu Miyashita
underarrow.com/The-Structure-…
Your book Chinmoku no Kouzou (The Structure of Silence) is a highly original philosophical system that treats silence not as a lack or absence, but as a state of fullness and structure. It spirally connects sound, space, madness, soul, art, death, and collapse.
Below, I have carefully selected philosophy books and works of thought that are thematically close to yours. The criteria for similarity are as follows:
- The structuralization of silence, absence, and void
- Sound, space, and harmonic processes of construction/collapse
- Treating madness (mental crisis) in a positive and structural way
- The fusion of art, literature, and ontology
Strongest Recommendations (Highly Recommended)
1. Wouter Kusters — A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking (2020, MIT Press) A monumental work in which the author philosophically dissects his own schizophrenic experiences. Concepts such as “the space of madness,” “silence,” “nothingness,” “unthinking,” and “mystical delusion” overlap strikingly with your “three layers of silence” and “collapse as an updating device.” By mirroring philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Plotinus, Sartre) with madness, he elevates madness into a form of philosophical practice. This book is especially close to yours. It theoretically defends and deepens the very parts your friend pointed to as possibly “hallucinatory.” Although it exceeds 800 pages, even reading it in fragments produces strong resonance.
2. Michel Foucault — History of Madness (also known as Madness and Civilization) A classic that treats madness as “a voice condemned to silence” and “the absence of the work (absence of œuvre),” structurally exposing the boundary between reason and madness. It has a deep connection with your ideas of “madness as a structural transposition” and “the phase of death.” The appendix “Madness, the Absence of an Œuvre” is essential reading. If your book is the philosophy of one who stands at the boundary, Foucault extends it into the contexts of history and power.
3. John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) A musician’s “philosophy of silence.” It treats the famous 4'33" of silence as a state of fullness and structures sound, non-sound, space, and chance. This connects directly with your motifs of harmonic construction and collapse, as well as the philosophy born from your music production experiences. It will particularly resonate with anyone who feels Cage’s influence strongly.
Additional Recommendations (Partial Thematic Overlap)
1. Maurice Blanchot (especially The Space of Literature and The Infinite Conversation) He discusses literature as the space of absence, death, and silence. His concept of “désœuvrement” (unworking) is close to the poetic spiral of your “structure of the soul” and “reduction.”
2. Antonin Artaud (various works: letters, plays, and screaming texts) Extreme fusion of madness and art. The idea that collapse is the source of creation strongly overlaps with your “collapse as an updating device.” (Recommended: The Theatre and Its Double and collections of letters)
3. Georges Bataille (especially Inner Experience and Erotism) Excess, death, and the sacred as forms of madness and absence. His sense of silence as “a fullness of emptiness” is very close to yours.
4. Louis Sass — Madness and Modernism (1992, revised edition available) Analyzes schizophrenic experience in connection with modernist art and philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger). It reads madness positively as a “hyper-real structure.”
A Note on the Japanese Context
Your style — poetic, deeply personal, and musical — also resonates with the Japanese tradition of “nothingness” and “absolute nothingness” found in Zen and Nishida Kitarō. However, the Western contemporary thought listed above is closer in terms of “hardcore madness + structure.”
If you are looking for Japanese-language books, I recommend translations of Artaud or Foucault’s works in the context of psychiatric critique.
Reading these books will help you realize that your Structure of Silence is not an isolated hallucination, but is firmly positioned within a long lineage of thought. Rather, your book is a strikingly contemporary and robust work that has uniquely reconstructed these predecessors through “your own harmonics” — that is, through music and personal mental experience.
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