The Ineffable Heart of the Expression

Derrida reminds us, in his lecture La différance (1968), that “l’inaudible ouvre à l’entente […].” It is what is inaudible that opens to the condition (to the possibility) of apprehension. The ineffability of difference, therefore, underlies any system of signs as well as any structure, destabilizing their foundations from the origin (if one can say so). Wanting to trace a twentieth-century antecedent this thought of difference, which is so familiar first of all with Heidegger’s philosophy, but also with negative theology and medieval mysticism (not to mention other equally illustrious antecedents: Saussurian reflection on language), has given rise to a reflection on the trace, some findings of which are echoed within postcolonial theories (I am thinking, here, particularly of the Antillan inflection of postcolonial theory, for example in the work of Édouard Glissant). In light of these theorizations, we are offered the possibility of thinking the ineffable through another kind of experience: the negative experience of the abyss of abjection characteristic of the diasporic condition – such as that engendered by the Atlantic slave trade. The radical difficulty of communication among the slaves themselves, and between them and their oppressors (cf. the linguistic-communicative experience in the Lager, which Primo Levi also discusses in If This is a Man), opens the way for a rethinking of the ineffable grounded in an extreme experience of pain and suffering. And perhaps this rethinking allows us to reconsider the polemical-pathosophical foundation (for pathosophy, see Aesch., Ag., vv. 177 ff.) of artistic expression (or more broadly, of the aesthetic in its multifaceted totality) as a “representation” of the ineffability of existence.