A Philosophy of the Unsayable

A PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNSAYABLE

WILLIAM FRANKE

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2014 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-07977-2

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For Maddalena Cerqui

Oltre la spera che più larga gira . . .

CONTENTS

Pre-face

Part I. Philosophy and Literature

One. Invitatory: Varieties and Valences of Unsayability

Two. In the Hollow of Pan’s Pipe: Unsayability and the Experience of Truth and Totality

Three. The Writing of Silence in the Post-Holocaust Poetry of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan

Part II. Philosophy and Theology

Four. Apophasis and the Predicament of Philosophy of Religion Today: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negations of Theology

Five. Radical Orthodoxy’s Critique of Transcendental Philosophy and Its Mistaken Mistrust of Negative Theology

Six. Apophatic Thought as the Missing Mean between Radically Secular and Radically Orthodox Theology

Inconclusion

Notes

PRE-FACE

The present volume sketches a distinctive philosophical outlook that emerges irrepressibly from the predicament of philosophy today. It interprets what are widespread intimations of thinking in the current milieu of critical reflection across disciplines in the arts and sciences and beyond into technical and professional fields and culture generally. We are in an age in which discourse becomes acutely conscious of its intrinsic limits and is dominated by what it cannot say. Especially the last two and a half centuries have abounded in new and radical currents of thinking about the limits of language and what may or may not lie beyond them. The pace of such thinking seems to have greatly accelerated in the initial decades of the twenty-first century. This thinking is rooted, however, in millenary discourses of mysticism and negative theology that can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition. A kind of perennial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos has resisted its claims throughout the history of Western thought.

There is, in fact, an amorphous but immense sea of discourse concerned with the ways that discourse has of doubting and denying itself. This type of reflection arises when language runs up against the limits of what it is able to say. Certain discourses concentrate on these limits and on how language necessarily speaks from and out of them. This generates counter-discourses to every powerful explanatory paradigm that makes positive claims to comprehend reality, to say what really is. The counter-discourses typically emphasize that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said. They shift attention away from what discourse is saying to what it is not saying and cannot say—even though this involves, paradoxically, an even more intense focus precisely on language, on its limited capabilities, its borders, its beyond.

These counter-discourses can even take a more aggressive stance. They can position themselves not only at the limits and margins of normative discourse but as infiltrating it through and through. All discourse in this perspective, which I call apophatic, shows up as necessarily preceded by and predicated on what cannot be said. This entails a claim to a yet more powerful comprehensiveness, though one at first purely negative in nature, evoking a power beyond discourse, a potential that words release but cannot master. Metaphysics, monotheisms, and mysticisms, as well as philosophies of existence and poetics of revelation, can be understood in their deeper, driving motivations only from this perspective, which nevertheless all too easily slips from view because it eludes logical articulation and defies discursive expression.

Ineffability was once a leading theme of the Neoplatonists (particularly Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Damascius) and of their heirs in the monotheistic traditions of Christian mysticism (Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena), of the Kabbalah, of Sufism, and again of certain post-Scholastics (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus). Baroque mystics such as John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, and Silesius Angelus share this same obsession with Romantic thinkers like Kierkegaard and the late Schelling, as well as with imaginative writers such as Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, and Kafka. The expressiveness of silence, the void, nothingness has been explored equally in modern music (Schoenberg, Cage), in painting (Malevich, Kandinsky), and in architecture (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind) in tandem with the apophatic philosophical reflections of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Franz Rosenzweig. These major monuments of modern apophatic culture were announced by apocalyptic prophecies of the collapse of language and civilization altogether, emblematically around the fin de siècle in the Vienna of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, and Freud.

Similar accents and thematics were hauntingly echoed, furthermore, in assimilating the Holocaust and its aftermath, by philosophical critics such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as by poets like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès. And the unsayable has again become the keynote of innumerable expressions of contemporary culture. These range from the widely diffused use of deconstructive critique—inspired especially by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Blanchot—in all sorts of theoretical discourses to the clamor of silence heard so frequently in fiction and poetry, influentially in the writings of Louis-René Des Forêts or Samuel Beckett or Yukio Mishima.

These references are obviously far-flung and move across widely disparate spheres of culture. Still, in every case, they flag an attitude toward words that is at once skeptical and fideistic—unconvinced by the pretended adequacy of words, yet acutely attuned to what they must miss grasping and passionately open to what they cannot say. The unsayable is what repels language, yet it requires language of some kind in order to be descried, so as to register at all. Such discourse or counter-discourse, moreover, traverses a whole spectrum of different disciplines and can be surprised in the most diverse sorts of guises. However, these various manifestations of unsayability all pivot on the fact that discourse has a self-reflexive, self-critical ability to call itself into question and to withdraw, leaving what it cannot say in its wake. This trajectory, which is produced by the movement of thought and speech vis-à-vis what it cannot comprehend and therefore recoils from, constitutes the trace of the unsayable. The unsayable cannot be made manifest at all, except in terms of this trace that it leaves in the speech that fails to say it.

As is inevitably the case with whatever philosophy, the significance and force of what it says depends to a high degree on how it refracts other philosophies—on how it funnels currents familiar from elsewhere, whether historical or contemporaneous ways of thinking, into forms of presentation that are efficacious and revealing. Hence these widespread allusions to what can be conceived of as a loosely coherent tradition of discourse about (or from or out of) what cannot be said. This perennial philosophy of the unsayable, moreover, has close affinities with literature—indeed, it is a philosophy in which philosophical and literary thinking coalesce inextricably.

Accordingly, this philosophical vision hinging on unsayability can be illuminated—and is best complemented—by literary-critical and theoretical reflection. Such reflection is proposed here in the form of an interpretive essay (chapter 3) that places in parallel two provocative contemporary poets as writers of the unsayable. Together they display how what can be learned especially from ancient and medieval rhetorics of silence translates into the currency of a contemporary language or anti-language of unsaying. The other main literary-critical excursus (chapter 1) is offered by way of introduction or invitation to the leading philosophical meditation on unsayability in my second essay (chapter 2).

While I refer to my chapters as essays, this book is not a congeries of separate compositions. The essays interlock and fit together in an architectonic that adumbrates (were it only possible) a critique of apophatic reason. More exactly, philosophical critique, as the rational examination of first principles, is overtaken and transforms itself into a literary hermeneutics or poetics and into religious reflection. The first I understand as elucidation of certain rhetorical conditions, such as figuration and narration, that make meaningful discourse possible, while the second—the tying-back reflections of re-ligion—I understand as cultivated awareness of relation to an infinite, never exhaustively specifiable context of relations. Poetic and religious theory are thus deployed critically to illuminate the conditions of possibility of meaning—and therewith also of being—in the unsayable.

Beyond describing the general logic of the unsayable—or rather its subversion of logical generalities—this book aspires to illustrate its workings and finds them perhaps most powerfully operative in literary texts. Hence, crucial to my approach is the conviction that any verbal expression of the unsayable cannot but share in the gratuitous, creative nature of literary expression, or, in other words, that philosophy at this point necessarily becomes literary. A fourth essay then situates the question of the unsayable, as it arises in philosophy and literature today, historically with reference especially to Neoplatonic negative theology. This negative turn in philosophy is traced all the way forward to postmodern negations of theology. Therewith, another of the book’s overarching aims is declared: namely, to show how literary exploration of language as infinitely open points language—eminently, the language of philosophy—in a direction which is best understood as theological.

However, an endeavor to (un)define and (de)situate the theological also lies at the heart of this philosophy of the unsayable. It maintains that a religious moment in language and thought is found simply in the irreducibility of our experience and being to words and thoughts. This does not directly warrant positing transcendent realities or Being or God, but it does illuminate the necessity from which such conceptions spring. Pursuant to deconstructive and other types of critique (such as Richard Rorty’s pragmatic anti-foundationalism), we may have to forego any directly realist language in religion. But the very same arguments have undermined realist language as an authoritative disclosure of truth in any domain whatsoever. Indeed, theology, particularly negative theology, has long tended to question and to relativize the capabilities of human language to truly convey the real. And yet realist language is not necessarily shown thereby to be simply erroneous, or even outmoded. Language remains, after all, expressive of an orientation to a real world within which it effectively works and articulates and objectifies all things, including itself. But the sense of that reality is affected: it becomes a relation to something else beyond itself that language cannot encompass.

Viewed from the perspective opened by these reflections on the unsayable, theological language suddenly begins to make another kind of sense than it did when it was judged as merely another object-oriented language. Yet neither am I claiming that theological language is essentially different from any other language, including ordinary language. Rather, language as such shows up as estranged in light of the theological adumbrations that hover over and glance across all our language: this shadowy half-light makes what is enigmatic about language in general show up in relief.

From this theological perspective, which is worked out in relation to competing contemporary philosophies of religion in my fifth and sixth essays, the book proposes a general philosophy, indeed, an original philosophy of the unsayable. A word of explanation, however, is in order concerning this claim: it is a claim above all to be an original enactment of what is discerned as a perennial type of trans-philosophical thinking.¹ This is not exactly a matter of saying something new, some new thing. It cannot be reduced to a thesis. It is the saying itself that is original, that strives to draw directly from the origin of apophatic thinking—and therewith of all thinking—in the bottomless abyss of the unsayable that is marked only by the never exhausted streams of discourse that issue out of it. In that depth absconds the namelessness of whatever or whoever speaks in the silent night of luminous darkness.

A certain dimension of literary performance is as crucial for this act of ventriloquism (of lending voice to the unspeakable) as are its conceptual contents. Its method is less that of scholarly research and documentation of exactly what has been written on the myriad aspects of this topic, with minute discrimination of what belongs to this author or to that one, than of reaching out toward the intention of apophatic discourse broadly considered. It sets out, by means of the word loosened from its usual moorings, in search of what exceeds all academic definitions. It does not eschew painstaking scholarly work—there is that here, too—but such honest labor is not sufficient for addressing what refuses to yield itself fully to scientific research and demands rather something of the order of personal witness.

With regard to the performative language demanded by this project, I beg the reader’s indulgence for a certain poetic license exercised from the very first word of the book by my breaking its integrity as a word and writing Pre-face. A book on the unsayable necessarily begins at a preverbal point before words and prefaces and before any face or figure that can be given to or conferred by discourse. This admittedly, but designedly, awkward inscription corresponds to another at the other end of the Contents, with the eliding of a space by running two words together in Inconclusion. Both anomalies are animations of the unruly energy of the unsayable and embody the central message of the book, which concerns the space between and within words: I argue that understanding cannot be just a matter of taking ready-made significances of words and combining them. The words themselves break open or flow together in the creation and de-creation of sense in ways that may prove unfathomable or even vertiginous. Discerning such action in and behind words opens vision into the unlimited relatedness of all with all, which words tend, by their artificial segmentation and separation, as well as by their fictive unity, to mask. In this manner, the vision inspiring the work spills out over and breaks its frame: it reformulates the very frame of the book, which cannot contain or tame its contents. This gesture calls for rethinking some of the elementary automatisms of our reading, which is continually at risk of degenerating into mere consumption of standardized intellectual commodities.

In this spirit, then, the vast traditions of learning on this subject are worked with and played upon and troped in order to produce a philosophy of the unsayable that is original in the specified sense. The aim is more to experience the essential motivations for this distinctive style of thought and language than to announce some particular new point to be made about it, something that seems a little different and thus original with respect to what X, Y, and Z have written. The question is not so much one of what I say and its specific difference from what other authors have said as one of where any of these discourses come from. Can we reach somehow to their generative sources and touch their originating motives? This I conceive as a matter not so much of choosing precisely the right philosophy to which to adhere as of realizing more translucently than ever before the common possibility from which they all spring. This arguably universal aspiration of philosophical reflection can be realized in an unrestricted openness of thinking such as can be enacted most intensively of all—at least in my experience—through a philosophy of the unsayable.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A preliminary version of chapter 1 was published as Varieties and Valences of Unsayability in Literature, Philosophy and Literature 29, no. 2 (2005): 489–97.

A fragment of section i of chapter 2 appeared as A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Apophasis and the Experience of Truth and Totality, Analecta Husserliana: Imaginatio Creatrix 83 (2004): 65–83. Section iii was presented at the University of Bochum in the Faculty for Evangelical Theology at the invitation of Günter Thomas and Markus Höfner and is forthcoming in their edited volume Ende oder Umbau einer Erlösungsreligion? (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

Material from section i of chapter 3 was delivered extemporaneously at the International Phenomenological Symposium Singularity—Subjectivity—The Other in Perugia, Italy, on July 17, 2001, for which I thank particularly Uwe Bernhardt. The article The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Post-Holocaust Poetry of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan was subsequently published in New Literary History 36, no. 4 (2005): 621–38. A version of section ii appears in French as Le nom de Dieu comme vanité du langage au fond de tout mot selon Edmond Jabès, in Edmond Jabès: L’éclosion des énigmes, edited by Daniel Lançon and Catherine Mayaux (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2008), and a related piece in English as Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God, Literature and Theology (2007): 1–16. I am grateful to Daniel Lançon and to Catherine Mayaux for the opportunity to participate in the colloquium on Jabès at CERISY, Centre Culturel International, in August 2003. My text on Jabès profited especially from discussions with Geoffrey Obin. The Celan section (iii) informed my presentation at the International Advanced Research Seminar on Trauma at the University of Macao in August 2012 and is scheduled to appear in a special issue of The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies.

Some material drawn from chapter 4 was presented to the Society for the Contemporary Assessment of Platonism in San Francisco in March 2003 under the title Negative Theology in the Neoplatonic Parmenides-Commentary Tradition and as Revived in Contemporary Apophatic Forms of Thinking. I thank John Rose for this invitation. Some of the ground covered by the first section of chapter 4 was broached in an article on Apophasis and the Turn of Philosophy to Religion: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negation of Theology, which appeared in Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, edited by Eugene Long, special issue of International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60, nos. 1–3 (2006): 61–76. Further elaborations of this work were presented in French at the CERISY colloquium Philosophie et mystique: Autour de Stanislas Breton in August 2011, organized by Jean Greisch, Jérôme de Gramont, and Marie-Odile Métral.

The concluding movement (section vi) of chapter 5 subsumes the last section of my article "Praising the Unsayable: An Apophatic Defense of Metaphysics Based on the Neoplatonic Parmenides Commentaries," Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2006): 143–73.

Chapter 6 owes thanks to Heinrich Bedford-Strohm for the invitation to a conference on Public Theology at the University of Bamberg in June 2011. The resulting article The Paramount Importance of What Cannot Be Said in Public Theological Discourse will be part of Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology, edited by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Florian Höhne, and Tobias Reitmeier (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2014). This chapter also draws from my Apophasis as the Common Root of Radically Secular and Radically Orthodox Theology, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 73, no. 1 (2013): 57–76.

I thank all the publishers concerned for permission to adapt and reprint. Throughout the book, where no English editions are cited, I have provided translations myself, juxtaposing them with the originals, although the originals, where judged unnecessary or cumbersome by current publishing standards, have sometimes been suppressed.

Part I

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE

Chapter One

INVITATORY

Varieties and Valences of Unsayability in Literature

Ce qui n’est pas ineffable n’a aucune importance.

(That which is not ineffable has no importance.)

—Paul Valéry, Mon Faust

Paul Valéry’s famous statement concerning the paramount, indeed the unique importance of the ineffable receives an unlikely and unwitting confirmation from the character of Bottom the Weaver in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was.—Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had,—But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene i)

As is typical of those who speak about what cannot be said, Bottom cannot keep it short. He stammers on. He says over and over again . . . what he cannot say. Since he cannot really say what he feels compelled to try and say, he keeps on trying. In so doing, he reflects indirectly on what fascinates him by reflecting directly on his own incapacities and foolishness, as brought out by the experience of being checked in his attempt to express what he cannot. There is endlessly much to say about this experience of inadequacy vis-à-vis the unsayable and miraculous, and precisely this verbiage constitutes perhaps its only possible expression. Bottom speaks from the bottom end of what can also be the most elevated of all discursive modes—as Longinus appreciated and as can be illustrated by contrasting Bottom’s comic voice and its ludicrous malapropisms with Valéry’s rather superb, perhaps even supercilious, tone. Nevertheless, Bottom’s words are indicative of an important direction in the drift across the centuries of discourse on what cannot be said. This drifting is precisely what severe moralists, such as Augustine and Wittgenstein, have wished to put a stop to by enjoining silence. While in principle the Unsayable would seem to demand silence as the only appropriate response, in practice endless discourses are engendered by this ostensibly most forbidding and unapproachable of topics.

This predicament of prolix speechlessness is found over and over again in literature of all kinds, especially at its dramatic climaxes of revelatory disclosure or epiphany. Another especially poignant instance in familiar literature of how precisely the issue of the unsayable, the nameless, emerges eloquently as the secret key to all meaning and mystery is Ishmael’s consternation vis-à-vis the whiteness of the White Whale in Moby Dick. This color, or rather visible absence of color, speaks by its very unspeakability: it is a dumb blankness, full of meaning, says Ishmael, and yet so mystical and well-nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.¹

The terror of the Unnameable expressed in these lines suggests another register, besides those of Bottom and Valéry, of the limitless range of tones resorted to by speakers face to face with what cannot be said. It is a register familiar also from Kurtz’s last words—the exclamation The horror! The horror!—as narrated by Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novel is a further example of a fiction hovering obsessively around something unsayable as its generating source, something that the narrator despairs of being able to retell:

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . .

He was silent for a while.

. . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream, alone. . . .²

Although such experience is so unique as to be ineffable, it is nevertheless rather prevalent, presumably in life as well as in literature, as these brief examples already suffice to suggest. These samples indeed serve to adumbrate an unlimited field. It is, after all, hard to expressly exclude any discourse whatever, where the criterion for inclusion is nothing . . . that can be said. But then the question arises: What, if anything, do all these different discourses, which we can bring together as discourses on what cannot be said, share in common? Of course, the unsayable and indefinable, in every instance, can only be incomparable. And any answer that can be said is, by that very fact, not an answer.

To get around this difficulty, we can begin by asking: What are the narrative structures and strategies that enable this type of discourse about what is in principle intractable to narration and discourse? Bruce Kawain develops an interesting theory about how secondary first-person narrators—in telling about someone else’s experience of the absolute—provide more intellectual and verbal energy, less purely physical and heroic force, that serves to follow and record the paths of the primary protagonists into the ineffable core of experience of essential mystery, the heart of darkness. Marlow serves precisely this function for Kurtz. And Marlow’s narration is itself framed by that of the narrator of Heart of Darkness, so that from Kurtz (whose name pronounced in German means, not just incidentally, short—kurz), to Marlow, to the narrator of the story, there is a scale of increasing verbal skill or readiness to speak correlated with decreasing intensity of attunement to the inexpressible or transcendent power of the unsayable. As Kawain cogently explains, If this were not so, and if it were possible to communicate the heart of darkness itself, directly, in words, then both Marlow and the narrator would be as shaken as Kurtz. Indeed, each successive relation dilutes the primary experience. In this way the unrelatable material is reduced to relatable terms. Something similar can be said again for the nearly negligible narrator Sam, who transcribes the incredible monologue of Watt in Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt. Or again, Carlos, the narrator of Carlos Castaneda’s initiatory novels, performs a similar function with respect to don Juan, the mysterious Yaqui Indian sorcerer.³

Thanks, then, to these diluting devices, that which ultimately defeats all efforts of articulation remains nevertheless the object-elect, the darling, of copious discourses. In Marlow’s narration, it is the privacy of the individual’s own experience or unique life-sensation that turns out to be incommunicable. This constitutes, in effect, a Neo-Romantic interpretation of the mystery that apophatic, literally negative, discourse intimates and yet leaves undefined. What this private, individual core of experience might be cannot be said, and such a private meaning is perhaps not even a coherent concept (as Wittgenstein argues in Philosophical Investigations I, 243–314). So we are left with only the self-denying, self-subverting linguistic form for . . . what cannot be said. And then all verbal interpretations are only guesses—conjectures, in the vocabulary that Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464) developed for apophatic or self-unsaying discourse. Such a postulation of the self as a secret, inexpressible core of mystery is questioned and yields to a variety of other interpretations of the sources of unsayability in modern authors such as Virginia Woolf.⁴ Louis-René Des Forêts’s bavard sustains his compulsive talking precisely on the basis of having nothing to say.⁵ Another paradoxically telling example can be found in Henry James’s later fictions, which witness to the author’s increasing doubts about and distancing of himself from language.⁶

In James, the space of the unspeakable oftentimes may be interpreted interchangeably in terms of metaphysical sublimities, sexual secrets, or social banalities. Such a layered interpretation of the Inexpressible is elaborated by James in his novel The Sacred Fount (1901). Here it may be some special insight, a nameless idea, or the narrator’s theory about his companions, that remains beyond the threshold of speech and communication in a realm that is unspoken and untouched, unspeakable and untouchable.⁷ Or it may be quite common experiences that are transfigured by the rhetoric of unsayability, which permeates the novel, so as to take on mysterious, quasi-mystical connotations. This may happen, for instance, in the collective experience of a piano recital:

The whole scene was as composed as if there were scarce one of us but had a secret thirst for the infinite to be quenched. And it was the infinite that, for the hour the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our receptive attitudes and faces. Each of us, I think, now wore the expression—or confessed at least to the suggestion—of some indescribable thought; which might well, it was true, have been nothing more unmentionable than the simple sense of how the posture of deference to this noble art has always a certain personal grace to contribute. (Sacred Fount, p. 166)

James titillates us with the possibility that this extraordinary transport, which cannot be described, may be about nothing extraordinary after all, since, in any case, there is no telling what it is that subjectively excites such rapture in correspondence with the infinite, inexpressible desire of each listener. Nevertheless, in all these cases—in the sacred fount as also in the white whale and the heart of darkness—something mythic and transcendent is hinted at precisely by a declared shortcoming of language, something which, however, provokes a scarcely containable abundance of discourse. It is difficult, even impossible, to contain discourse when we do not and indeed cannot know or say what it is about.

The case study from James collapses the distance between ordinary experience and extreme experiences at the outer limits, where no language can suffice. Indeed, the most provocative hypothesis concerning this apophatic dimension of the unsayable is that it is necessarily present everywhere in language. The extreme or liminal experiences, in that case, would only make more starkly evident something that is perhaps always indiscernibly there, even in the most mediocre transactions involving language. And that includes, in some sense, all human experience. All our expressions harbor and are punctuated by silences. Even very banal forms of silence may, after all, be akin to absolute silence and participate in the pregnant pauses characteristic of apophasis—and thereby point to an ultimate impotence of the word.

If this is true, then the investigation of the topos of unsayability in some of its more dramatic and spectacular forms might be expected to illuminate a pervasive dimension of all experience and consciousness in language. What is awesomely manifest in the heroes of metaphysical quests and in protagonists responding to supernatural vocations or divine visions is perhaps, albeit to a lesser degree, true for all of us and true even at the level of our collective endeavors. The impossible quest to articulate the ineffable may be found as always already there implicitly, in some form, in any articulation whatever that breaks the silence.

There are, of course, innumerable different motives for inexpressibility. Many of these motives seem to fight shy of the intrinsic unsayability commonly attributed to the mystical and transcendent. But there are also strong tendencies and temptations to blur these boundaries wherever we really do not and, for whatever reasons, cannot know or say exactly what we are talking about. The scatological, the morally indecent, the religiously blasphemous, and the ritually abject are all either socially unavowable or, in various ways, subjectively or psychologically inadmissible and so liable to shrink back from express verbalization.⁸ All can become avenues leading to rupture with any and all systems of communication establishing normative sense. They can thus lead to experience that is beyond the net of language and, as such, removed to a transgressive or, indistinguishably, so far as words are concerned, a transcendent zone.

Such apparently circumstantial motives for silence dominate even in the case of Cassandra, the prophetess who foretells Troy’s doom but is effectively silenced because no one will believe what she says. In Christa Wolf’s rewriting of the myth, building on Aeschylus’s character, who is isolated and condemned to silence by her inexpressible visions, this fall from grace is due to the curse of Apollo, who was not sexually gratified as promised in exchange for granting her the power of prophecy. Cassandra says: Now I understood what the god had devised: You speak the truth but no one will believe you.⁹ Confronted with disbelief, Cassandra feels herself trapped within a ring of silence (ein Ring des Schweigens). Being right isolates her, and she feels herself grow dumb (verstummen) in a society bent on wrong and having ears only for what is false. Nevertheless, she discovers a unique, incomparable kind of power in this very impotence of enforced silence. It becomes her essential form of expression. In time, she learns to wield silence itself as a weapon: I learned in that I observed the ways of being silent. Only much later did I myself learn to be silent—and what a useful weapon it is.¹⁰ This suggests how even external, circumstantial silence can be revealed as a sign of deeper, more intrinsic silence, where alone all true being and power are gathered in secret and hiding. It is only at this level of what cannot be said that some fugitive sort of unity of comprehension and a semblance of apprehension of the absolutely true is possible, if at all.

The most banal reasons for silence communicate in myriad ways with its most deeply metaphysical grounds in a great range of literature. The strong transcendental drive of literature in German, from Meister Eckhart through Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, and continuing in novels, notably Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, with their attempts to exceed (and even to destroy) language, must be ranged alongside the oftentimes deflationary approaches characteristic of Louis-René Des Forêts’s Le bavard or Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, as well as of contemporary theatre by playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Nathalie Sarraute.¹¹ The ambiguities, however, can be traced all the way back in literary tradition. In ancient Greek tragedy, emblematic cases are plentiful. Aeschylus’s Niobe (in his Niobe Fragment) famously introduces the principle of patheis-matheis—learning by suffering silently what cannot possibly be said (see, further, Prometheus Bound, 105–6). In a similar vein, Sophocles’s Electra recalls Niobe’s eternal mourning that can never be expressed (Electra, lines 150ff.). And the dangerous silence of Creon’s queen, Eurydice, signifies her own imminent extinction by anticipating an absolute cessation of all expression through suicide (Antigone, lines 1251–55).

In more modern tragedy, the drama of silence is played out loquaciously in Spanish Baroque theatre, particularly that of Calderón, with its speculative penchant for the explicitly transcendental. Shakespeare, on the other hand, makes even everyday language, when it touches upon silence, tremble with metaphysical resonances. Cordelia’s motto Love, and be silent, her saying nothing in response to her father’s demand for words of love, is a poignant instance. Unhappy that I am, she says, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth, and yet she is not so miserable as one who does not love, for, I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue (King Lear, I, i, 93–94, 79–80). It is impossible for her to say anything sincere after her sisters, vying in lies, have so debased the currency of the word. The king himself, reduced in the course of the tragedy from his pompous self-importance, becomes beggar enough by the end to follow her example: No, I will be the pattern of all patience, I will say nothing (III, ii, 38).¹²

These select illustrations must suffice to suggest the uncircumscribable diversity of motives for unsayability. The question is whether they all have anything in common. When something cannot be said because of politeness or obscenity or deceit or strategy, does this have anything to do with the metaphysical motives for unsayability? The former things are not per se unsayable but only conditionally so—or in certain circumstances. However, the problem is that any way of distinguishing accidental from essential unsayability is itself circumstantial. An essential unsayability must necessarily remain, precisely, unsayable because any supposedly essential distinction that might be proposed to qualify it could only be itself unsayable. This does not mean that there is no distinction—it suggests rather the opposite. But still, the distinction cannot be made explicit without becoming arbitrary with respect to what is really unsayable and, therefore, strictly indefinable.

The compelling interest of this problem lies in what it reveals, for example, about the very logic of essence and accident, to take just one instance of a classical philosophical dichotomy. The idea of essence has come to be treated as plainly erroneous and illusory in much critical discourse since postmodernism. The locution essentialist is currently used as a term of abuse and for disqualification and automatic dismissal of what is so designated. But to condemn all attributions of essence as illusory and false is just another way of rigidifying an important insight concerning the inherent instability and contingency of every definable essence into a general, formulaic skepticism that can apply its own principle with presumed assurance and authority. What needs to be acknowledged, rather, is that any purported essences can be adequately stated only in the accidental terms of some contingent, arbitrary language. What is unsayable on intrinsic grounds cannot be separated by any fully explicit criterion from what is unsayable for only extrinsic reasons. Any definition of the unsayable introduces linguistic factors and their contingencies that do not and cannot belong to unsayability per se. If an essential definition were possible, its object would not be unsayable, much less unsayability itself.

Of course, the idea that there is anything such as unsayability per se may itself be a verbal mirage, but it is a necessary illusion because language cannot exhaustively account for itself: that there is language at all cannot be explained in language, any more than language can explain, among all the facts it can state about the world, the fact that there is a world. What language shows by its logical form, enabling it to represent the world, is unsayable in language (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 4.12). What lends power of purchase to our language about the world remains itself unsayable. This is the unsayable or inexpressible (das Unaussprechliche) that Wittgenstein calls the mystical (das Mystische, 6.522).¹³

The apophatic, as expressed in literature, gestures beyond all casual motives for unsayability to what cannot under any circumstances be said and yet holds our attention rapt to its specific, indefinable mystery. There will always be some element in the mystery of the unsayable that escapes exhaustive definition in every supposedly definitive statement. To admit this is to recognize an economy of the unsayable and the sayable as the basis of every possible language, every system of saying and defining. Any language capable of making determinate statements pivots on an internal distinction between that in it which, under any circumstances, remains unsayable versus that which it is able to articulate. Yet the mechanism of this pivot remains generally invisible because it is itself below the threshold of the articulable.

It is not hard to see that the import of this issue of the unsayable extends throughout the whole of philosophical discourse, for something unsayable lies in the crease between the extrinsic and the intrinsic, the essential and the accidental, the necessary and the contingent, and every other fundamental philosophical distinction. The distinction between abstract and concrete as well depends on some sort of blind transaction between what can and cannot be said. The concrete as such is infinitely dense and is never adequately expressed. Only its relatively abstract form can be stated in language. And such distinctions are all conceptual creations that purport to be based on realities. The real, however, stripped of all conceptual determination, cannot as such be grasped or said. In the end we make discriminations, such as that between abstract and concrete, on the basis of a judgment that can never be fully justified in words.

Everything in philosophy depends on how these sorts of conceptual demarcations are negotiated. Such negotiations, however, take place behind the scenes by means of silent, pragmatic pacts and tacit understandings that can never be completely articulated or explained but are simply embedded in the conventions of the language we use, and so are implicitly accepted and in effect obeyed. Any lexical terms and syntactical conditions of sense that can be expressly stipulated and so made explicit presuppose others that are not explicit but are necessarily assumed as self-evident. We always need to assume terms and apply rules even at the level of a meta-communication, so as to determine and validate the very rules and most basic vocabulary of our communications. Language always makes sense, then, on the basis of what it does not and, in the end, cannot say.

The classical problems of philosophy, hinging