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Our contemporary societies live at the pace of the noisy modernity of a globalized world which associates silence with breakdown, secrecy and horrors, such as language fails to describe them. In these societies in search for absolute transparency and truths whose self-evidence is reassuring, it is necessary to speak not in order to live but to exist. Thus, where rhetoric is the precondition sine qua non of social existence, silence calls matters into doubt. By shifting the thresholds of perception, thereby suspending the significations for questioning our presence in the world, silence reveals what we do not hear and underlines the unstable equilibrium of a reality of which all we perceive is an image. As the figure of an irrealism that is apparently of little relevance in societies where it is necessary to find reasons and to explain facts, silence produces a gap, that is to say the possibility of doing things differently. Historically and culturally constituted, it is a dialectic of experience raising the question of human becoming.