Unruly bodies: death, discourse and the limits of representation

There are some silences within our culture that defy even description, and some thresholds of which we do not ‐ or feel we cannot ‐ speak. The intensity of human experience can be beyond words and, often, we do not have the tools to reveal the nature or content of these moments. How can we speak of those human experiences which are not 'contained' by discourse? How can we comprehend and make sense of the eruption of the Real? Intimacy, death, pain, maternity: these are all areas of experience and of 'otherness' which evade discourse and are obscured by silence. How can we speak these silences? Samuel Beckett's Footfalls, a bleak representation resonating the processes of mourning and melancholia, might be read as an attempt to physically represent states of 'otherness' and to physicalise absence. Japanese Story, an Australian film directed by Sue Brooks, would seem to be an attempt to explore 'otherness' on a number of levels, to a point where the most intense moments of 'otherness' defy discourse altogether. Central to the discussion of silences, bodily experience, emotional experience and states of 'otherness' are questions of representation, of the nature and placing of these experiences in relation to discourse, and of the tools available to us. What is the relationship between lived experience and the Symbolic? What happens when the Symbolic is no longer adequate? These are the questions, in the light of the representations examined, that this paper finally considers.