A Poet of the Language Crisis

This chapter argues that Vallejo’s poetry points to a truth that goes beyond all signification. By noting that language can never say everything, Vallejo struggles against language, by approaching the edge, bordering on language with non-language, renaming names, and carrying out operations within language. Through the analysis of key poems, this chapter traces the unnameable as that hole or excess that reveals the inconsistency of the symbolic order, that is, the crisis of a given state of social reality.