Real socialism collapsed, but dissent did not win - the two sank together. But dissent disappeared structurally as well, for its function had ceased. When the powerful Soviet state, with its huge nuclear arsenal, prohibited photocopies and saw a free photocopier as much more lethal weapon than a Kalashnikov, it was actually giving disproportionate importance to speech, and thus to the intellectual articulating it. When Khomeini issued a death sentence against Salman Rushdie, he elevated the writer to a dizzying height, likened him to the Earth's mighty ones, compared the book to the Word, the novel to the Koran. The sound emitted by intellectuals is literally muffled by too much noise.
Societies continue to be silenced.
But today it is the silence in which the deaf man lives, no longer the silence to which the mute is constrained. It is the consequence of too much surrounding noise. The number of noises produced by society is so high that they create only a cacophony, an inarticulate buzzing. Today, in the OECD countries, no one would ever dream of sentencing a novelist to death, but this is merely because the novel is irrelevant in the modern world. In this case, the fatigue is the weariness of non-sense, of losing one's way around the map of social roles.