Languageless Places and Poetic Language: The Boundless Desire of Cannibal Clément X

Abstract

Free from borders and limits, languageless places are imagined in the Western tradition either as sub-human, nightmarish spaces of chaos or divine points of origin and destination. A good example of this phenomenon appears in the works of Hesiod, who will allow me to set up the relationship between cannibalism and poetic language. Recall that, in Hesiod’s Theogony, poetic language is itself presented as the medium through which the languageless past and future may be represented and ordered. Before they grant the gift of making poetry to shepherds, the muses call them “mere bellies”.1 But Hesiod tells what happened when the muses “breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime.”2 It is through his transformation from a mere belly to a mortal with a divine voice that Hesiod captures the essence of the relationship between poetic language and the languageless place, whether it be the nearly divine Golden Age of the Works and Days or the hollow caves of the Theogony in which monstrous, hyper-animal creatures eat raw flesh. My paper explores the elemental passion for the languageless place in two distinct ways: 1) In the realm of representation, as an inherent feature of poetic language; and 2) Beyond the realm of representation, as an attribute of the psychopathological cannibal. By looking at the differences between represented and enacted desires for languagelessness, I hope to show how the figurative word, or what we might call poetic language, becomes the fragile marker of humanness. Poetic language in this sense comes to condense and reflect upon the central role that language in general plays in the psychical and intellectual fulfillment, as well as the social concord, of human beings.