The Unspeakable and Impossible of Writing: Armonía Somers and Clarice Lispector

Abstract

Since psychoanalysis, the shout provides us with a way of approaching our silence, that silence which does not have anything to do with the audible or the inaudible. It is not about isolating the unverbal to elevate the body’s expression to a para-language power, nor about merely detecting in the presence of certain textual elements the absence of the unsaid (the useful blank which is typographically used in poetry, for example). It would be naive to oppose silence to the word in this manner, as if the word were full in itself. Finally, if we add “woman” to the complex hank of the unsaid, the unspeakable and the indescribable, where will that leave silence? Thus, the strangeness phallic can lead women to enter the social order with a distant effectiveness. Armonia Somers and Clarice Lispector stage this inscription through an "abject writing", which looks for an impossible reality outside meaning.