Saying what we truly think can be risky, words change everything and everything changes words. To name something or someone is to give possibility to its existence, it is also to fix it, determine it or limit it: engrave it in stone. An increasing number of people find themselves in trouble with family, friends or at work for speaking their minds—especially regarding their political orientation. Many journalists, writers and activists are murdered for speaking out, or because they are suspected of doing so. Our own words have lost their freedom, and are now governed more by what those in power dictate than by any dictionary from the language academies. One example, among a hundred, the autobiography of Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher, entitled
The Absolved Language
, begins with a disconcerting passage that describes what is at stake, from the perspective of a child: “My most remote memory is bathed Red. I go out through a door in the arms of a girl, before me the floor is red and to the left an equally red staircase descends. In front of us, at the same height, a door opens and a smiling man appears and comes friendly towards me. He comes very close to me, stops, and tells me: 'Show your language!' I stick out my tongue, he feels in his pocket, pulls out a razor, opens it and bringing the blade next to my tongue says: 'Now we'll cut off his tongue.' I don't dare remove my tongue, he gets closer and closer until he brushes it with the blade. At the last moment he withdraws the knife and says: 'Not today yet, tomorrow.' He closes the knife and puts it in his pocket.” The one who utters the threat, constantly deferred and reactivated, and which leads to silence, is the babysitter's boyfriend. It had an effect: little Elias remained silent for years, but, at the time, the warning had the same consequences as if it had been cut off.
The Greek heroine who comes to mind as Canetti's mythical precursor is Philomela, whose tongue was mutilated for speaking (feminine) truth to (masculine) power, as told by Ovid. After her brother-in-law raped her, and then cut out her tongue so she wouldn't tell, she still managed to betray him—and overthrow him as king of Thrace—by weaving the tale of her humiliation into a tapestry. Taking a risk and saying something dangerous is an indication of parrhesia, etymologically “saying everything.” Whoever promulgates it says what he has in mind, he does not hide anything - he opens his heart and his mind through his speech -. It is linked to bravery in the face of danger: you risk, even dying, to tell the truth. In his reflections on the Greek notion of parrhesia, philosopher Michel Foucault states: “Breaking silence when speaking is a particularly urgent political act in the face of what is inconceivable and inadmissible on the symbolic level.”
The problem of language is manifested everywhere, but it is of particular relevance in psychoanalysis, where language, as the seat of instincts, finds the framework for the representation of its drama. When one enters into analysis, the only commitment is to speak: the experience develops through words—which requires the floating and attentive listening of the psychoanalyst. The word is an act that constitutes the subject. According to the psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe, language is not so much a means of communication, but a resource to consolidate identity: “You are the mother of, the daughter of, the father of, the son of…”, and the denial of language is pernicious because it causes the collapse of exteriority and alterity. The effect of the subjugated word is devastating: the suppressed words, the silenced screams become knotted in the body and can make it a terrible knot.
But what about the unnameable? Between what can be said and what cannot be said, there is a real and uncrossable border. The speaking subject, who believes himself to be the source and origin of his own saying and doing, is the executor of an order that escapes him. The words we use do not capture exactly what we want to say or, on the contrary, they express more than we expect. Sometimes we feel like we lack the words to say something; Other times, we are caught by surprise by the fact that we have said something we didn't want to say. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva puts it this way: “I thought my language was my own, but it turns out to be foreign, different from me in me. Am I its author or its product?”
Saying everything is impossible. When one bumps against the limits of language, and words fail us, “it is through this same impossibility that the truth clings to the real,” says psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The impossible to say is precisely what keeps us talking, in the hope of finally expressing what we cannot say. We are hostages to language, but our words are released in interlocution. The approach outlined by Freud for his patients, we know, was “not to give up words because you end up giving up things.”
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