The Rhetoric of the Unsayable

The paradox of the ‘sayability’ of the unsayable is a characteristic trait of texts belonging to literature facing the extreme, especially camp literature. It determines its language problem and is part of its discourse as well as of the discourse of its interpreters. Bearing in mind the general idea of the unsayability, the authors who decided to spell it out reflect upon their language and its insufficiency for conveying what they want to tell. The concept of the unsayable includes that of unrepresentability on the one hand and that of incomprehensibility on the other. In other words, the paradox means that a negativity is deployed in a positivity of perceivable signs, in a plenitude of positive signs. What is at stake is the paradox itself, which I would like to study within its theoretical frame and its ‘dissolution’ in texts of the extreme.