Conclusion: After Words

Summary

When we speak of the unspeakable today, it is often with a sense of distance and disbelief: at bombings, mass shootings, torture, war crimes and, in particular, terrorism. Unspeakable acts are those committed by other people, they are what the ‘other’ does. For this reason, Naomi Mandel writes specifically ‘against the unspeakable’, since to call something unspeakable is to take a moral high ground that is ‘not a thoughtful response to atrocity, horror, trauma, and pain’ but instead ‘an exculpatory mechanism’. She argues that it is in the interest of the literary critic to resist the ‘seductive eloquence’ of the unspeakable and recognise that ‘all of us […] are the producers and the products of our cultures and hence always already complicit in the ugliest aspects of our histories’. To cleave to the unspeakable is to endorse a sense of ‘we’ and ‘they’ or ‘now’ and ‘then’. It also risks passing over the ways in which ‘speakable’ or legitimated legal processes, social conventions and institutional powers render the behaviour and testimony of marginalised groups unmentionable or inexpressible. Silence in the face of violence (when it serves a specific set of values), ignored or rewritten testimony, and the persistence of codes and euphemism, still collude to obstruct the voices of women, people identifying as non-heterosexual or non-cisgender, people with disabilities, people of colour. The insistence that something is unspeakable and should not be mentioned reinforces both the non-speaker's power and the target's lack of power and lack of speech. Yet the unspeakable and unsayable also collapse binaries, and make clear the impossibility of their ever having obtained in the first place. To show who the unspeakable works for and who it works on brings the margins to the centre and the silent into the conversation; it also shows how the authority that vocalises what is unspeakable is also stymied by the paradoxes of the unspeakable, that are likewise constituted in language that has no guarantees for its users. Turning inside and outside, within and without in on themselves, the unspeakable challenges the voiceless to overcome silence.