Introduction: Words and Other Fragments

Summary

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Michel Foucault.

What I seek in speech is the response of the other.

Jacques Lacan.

What do we mean when we speak of the unspeakable? From the ineffable glories of the divine, plunging down to the murky depths of the ‘unspeakable sin’, some things cannot be put into words – but these are often, paradoxically, those things about which there is an abundance of discourse. Alongside everything that is spoken (or written) there also exists an unspoken: as Pierre Macherey insists, a text will inevitably expose its ideological crises, and say what it does not say. For medievalists, the failure of communication often takes a material aspect, for along with the textual evidence there is a textual void: the missing, damaged, incomplete or lost manuscripts that expose the fragmentary nature of medieval records, and whose exploration delves into the spaces between the fragments, looking for the unknown, the unsaid, the silenced and the unspeakable. As Foucault and Lacan suggest, such silence may be calculating, or inviting; the unspeakable may be gruesome or awesome, and often, those acts described as ‘unspeakable’ in contemporary reports are also those described as ‘medieval’. In this book, I examine the idea of the unspeakable in the Middle Ages as an important concept with respect to medieval texts in general, and in constructions of medieval gender and sexuality in particular. Who gets to speak, and why, and how? And who doesn't, and why, and how?

The unspeakable and the unsayable have become prominent in contemporary theory, particularly in the work of Giorgio Agamben, who (in common with many medievalists) draws on Foucault for the philosophical basis of his best-known and most controversial work, Homo Sacer, and William Franke, who builds a philosophy of apophatic language that addresses negative theology through an encounter with Hegelian and Platonic debates. For Franke, the limit of language is the crucial philosophical question of the age; for Agamben, too, the question of humanness and the political condition of living, of being permitted to live, is intimately bound up with the question of language.