W. von Humboldt introduit une pensée romantique du langage, s’éloignant ainsi des interprétations nées chez les philosophes grecs. La langue est considérée digne d’une étude philosophique sérieuse.Plus tard, les courants contemporains du langage élaborent de nouveaux rapports entre langue et réalité. La tradition herméneutique et, principalement, le tournant linguistique donnent une clé de compréhension des philosophes du vingtième siècle. En outre, la lecture constructiviste de Derrida est aussi considérée mais ses atouts sont finalement contestés en estimant l’argumentation de Marion.Dans ce cadre, les philosophies de Heidegger, Lévinas et Wittgenstein sont abordées, d’abord dans une étude du rapport entre langue et être et ensuite dans des problématiques discrètes qui illuminent le sujet.Au fil du texte, la question sur l’indicible et sur les limites du langage est toujours présente et guide le récit.Les analyses faites sur des œuvres principales des trois philosophes ainsi que des critiques faites à ce propos signalent tant le rejet de l’héritage métaphysique traditionnel et de sa conception du langage que des nouvelles façons de considérer le rôle du langage dans la philosophie contemporaine. Pour chaque philosophe, en dépit des différences, la langue devient centrale et sa source se trouve en elle-même.Ces analyses mènent à l’affirmation qu’il n y a pas de place pour un indicible proprement dit dans leurs pensées. Au contraire, le tournant vers le langage a pris le chemin vers une dicibilité totale. / W. von Humboldt introduced a romantic approach to language, far from the interpretations which originated with the Greek philosophers. Language is considered worthy of serious philosophical study.Later, new relationships between language and reality would develop from contemporary thought about language. The hermeneutics tradition and, mainly, the linguistic turn provide a key to understanding the philosophers of the twentieth century. The text also considers a constructivist reading of Derrida but such a reading is ultimately weakened by Marion’s argumentation.In this context, the philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas and Wittgenstein are discussed, first in a study of the relationship between language and being, then in terms of more specific issues which help to throw light on the subject.In the course of the text, the question of the unsayable and of the limits of language is always present and guides the discourse.Analyses of major works of the three philosophers and their critics show a rejection of inherited metaphysical conceptions and the consequent views of language as well as new ways of looking at the role of language in contemporary philosophy. For every philosopher, despite their differences, language becomes central and its source is found in itself.These analyses lead to the assertion that there is no place for a proper unsayable in the thought of the three philosophers. On the contrary, the turn towards language has forged a path to a full sayability.

This thesis uses four works by the contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson (born 1950) to argue that it is in the embracing of failure and difficulty that modern poetics may negotiate formal erosion and the limits of language. The introduction addresses Carson’s divisive reputation, and uses two separate criticisms of her poetic skill to delineate her liminal position in the modern poetic landscape, and therefore demonstrate her potential as a valuable framework for discussing innovative form. Via an examination of the criticisms of Robert Potts and David Solway, I argue that Carson is neither high priestess of postmodernism nor a collagist of poorly produced forms. This illuminates two points: one, that she occupies a space outside several modern ideologies of poetic authenticity, expression and form, and two, that this position can be effectively used to interrogate those ideologies and investigate new possibilities for poetic creativity. In Chapter 1, Nox, Carson’s elegy for her brother Michael, is argued to experiment with traditional elegy form – but not in a mode that wholly follows Jahan Ramazani’s famous framing of 20th century elegy form as traumatically fractured. Nox is shown not to be merely subversive, but also interrogative of its own formal tradition, embracing the inherent contradiction within elegy: that absence could be rendered as presence, that a living, flawed language could make the dead speak. From this contradiction, I argue, Nox creates a solution: it occupies a position of formal non-forming, a return to the state of poesis, refusing to emerge as a completed poem or retreat into fragmentation but instead occupying a liminal space of continual creation. In the second chapter, this preoccupation with elegy’s paradox is shown to be part of a greater theme within Carson’s work. The failures of language in Carson are elucidated with reference to the sceptical 19th-century theorist Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner is argued to be the best theorist for the thesis’s framework because of his belief in the possibilities of language’s resurrection as a valid communicative medium. Through three texts, “By Chance The Cycladic People”, The Glass Essay and Just For The Thrill, Carson’s interrogation of this hope is shown to produce creativity from difficulty, creating monstrous form-combinations to render the silence beyond language’s limits as poetically productive. Carson’s texts, in their struggle with failure and their obsessive doubt, can be used to construct several means of negotiating the limits of form and the inherent fallibility of language. The conflict between the drive for authentic expression and the perceived failure of expressive mediums is one of the defining features of both Carson’s work and modern poetry in general. However, it is by inhabiting and challenging the fraught areas at the edge of meaning that poetry of the 21st century can, in the words of Carson’s influence Samuel Beckett, try again, fail again, fail better. Synopsis: The Traitor’s Symphony is an experimental novel in three voices, set in an unspecified totalitarian state known only as the Regime at some point in the twentieth century. It follows the career of David, a young composer who rises from tortured outcast to celebrated Regime talent through scheming, moral ambiguity, and a deal with the Professor, a translator and populist radio pundit. David trades the sexual attentions of Dion, a beautiful but brain-damaged boy, for the Professor’s help in rising through the ranks of the Regime’s musical system. The voices of the Professor and his doctor wife Anne, who have just lost their newborn son, alternate with David’s as the bargain binds them together in disaster. The narrative is inspired by the lives of collaborationist composers in various 20th century states, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Carl Orff, but is not focussed on any one figure. Instead, it takes various elements of their experience - the state apparatus of approval, the minute observation of ‘doctrine’ in musical content, and the humiliation and blacklisting of composers who did not produce acceptable content - as the starting point for a narrative exploring the complex relationship between art, artists and the modern totalitarian state. Research in this area was shaped by Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: listening to the twentieth century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and the work of Michael Kater, most notably Composers of the Nazi era: eight portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and supplemented by archival work in the Stasimuseum and Bundesbeauftragten in Berlin. More broadly, the novel focusses on the difficulties of grief, love and survival in totalitarian environments. Its setting, the Regime, was created by combining elements of daily life under the Stalinist Terror, The Democratic Republic Of North Korea, and Nazi and Stasi Germany, drawing on sources including Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and Chol-Hwan Kang’s The Aquariums Of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001). The Regime’s embedded paranoia, hyper-vigilance, rigorous propaganda, regulated femininity, cult-like leader worship and brutal reprisal for non-conforming citizens are constructed from these historical precedents. Each of the three voices is stylised as a poetic form, as a method of expressing the repression of the individual and the culture of fear in the Regime’s system. This formal dimension draws on modernist literature in its use of language as expression of identity, but also on Wittgensteinian doubt that true communication could ever exist between such personal webs of meaning. Both David and Anne must actively suppress their private pain, he the agony of torture and burden of being labelled a traitor, she the disorienting grief of her son’s death and the loss of her husband’s love. Their inner emotional states are reflected in the forms of their vocals: David’s fractured voice, with its distressed percussive rhythm, is the voice of a musician physically and mentally smashed, while Anne’s blank, frantic segments express the dislocation of her foreignness and the gulf that grief has created in her marriage. The Professor, in contrast, begins the novel in supreme command of language, with brief breaks into sensual chaos as the only manifestation of his hidden mourning. The vocal shifts reflect and form the narrative progression.

[pt] Esta dissertação investiga o uso de discursos apofáticos como ferramentas epistemológicas nas situações em que a linguagem parece alcançar seus limites, com ênfase especial no contexto místico-religioso. Como falar de Deus, compreender a natureza última da realidade ou conceber o que havia “antes” da origem do universo? Tanto místicos, religiosos e poetas quanto filósofos, físicos e cosmólogos lidam com questões como essas há bastante tempo. Ao longo da história, a linguagem catafática (afirmativa) pareceu a muitos destes não dar conta de respondê-las; e, percebendo-a como insuficiente, as grandes religiões, em especial, adotaram um tipo de discurso que veio a ser conhecido como discurso apofático, ou via negativa. A fim de examinar algumas técnicas de negação empregadas por místicos e contemplativos diante das dificuldades que encontram para falar sobre o inefável, esta dissertação contrasta as obras de duas figuras centrais em suas respectivas tradições religiosas: Teologia Mística, do cristão Dionísio Areopagita, e Fundamentos do Caminho do meio, do budista Nagarjuna - textos conhecidos por levarem a negação ao extremo. Por meio dessa comparação, e apoiando-se, principalmente, nos comentadores Denys Turner, Eric Perl e Giuseppe Ferraro, este estudo aponta e discute diferenças significativas entre as linguagens negativas empregadas nas duas obras. Discute por fim, de modo pontual, como esses discursos se relacionam com contrapartes e paralelos contemporâneos, como o pensamento filosófico de Jacques Derrida e as descobertas da física moderna no início do século XX. / [en] This dissertation seeks to investigate the use of apophatic discourses as epistemological tools in situations where language seems to reach its limits, with special emphasis on the mystical-religious context. How to talk about God, understand the ultimate nature of reality or conceive what was before the origin of the universe? Mystics, religious people and poets, as well as philosophers, physicists and cosmologists have been dealing with issues like these for a long time. Throughout history, catapathic (affirmative) language has seemed, to many of them, to be unable to answer these questions; and, perceiving it as insufficient, the great religions, in particular, adopted a type of discourse that came to be known as apophatic discourse, or via negativa. In order to examine some techniques of negation employed by mystics and contemplatives in the face of the difficulties they encounter in talking about the ineffable, this dissertation contrasts the works of two central figures in their respective religious traditions: Mystical Theology, by the Christian Dionysius, the Areopagite, and The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, by the Buddhist Nagarjuna - texts known for taking denial to the extreme. Through this comparison, and relying mainly on the commentators Denys Turner, Eric Perl and Giuseppe Ferraro, this study points out and discusses significant differences between the negative languages used in the two works. Finally, it discusses, briefly, how these discourses relate to contemporary counterparts and parallels, such as the philosophical thought of Jacques Derrida and the discoveries of modern physics in the early 20th century.

This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.