“The unspeakable is, of course, not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity, a boundary located at least one step beyond the forbidden (and the forbidden, by definition — no? — must be speakable if its proscriptive power is to function). If we pursue the boundary as such, it will recede before us as a limit of mists and vapors. Certainly it is not a line drawn in any absolute way across speech or writing. It is not a fixed and locatable point of transgression that glows hotter and brighter as we approach it till, as we cross it, its searing heat burns away all possibility of further articulation. Rather it is a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of (or written about) in general; in particular, it comprises the endlessly specialized tropes (of analysis, of apology, of aesthetic distance) required to speak or write about various topics at various anomalous places in our complex social geography — places where such topics are specifically not usually (or ever) spoken of: What is speakable between client and accountant is unspeakable between newly introduced acquaintances at a formal dinner party. […] What is speakable between a magazine essayist and an audience concerned with art and analysis is unspeakable between a popular journalist and an audience concerned with “everyday” news.”
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