Of What One Cannot Speak

“After illuminating the work of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, Balthus, and other modern artists, Mieke Bal again demonstrates her extraordinary flair for cultural criticism in taking on the work of Doris Salcedo, exploring the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of this committed political art and the relation between beauty, violence, and memory. A tour de force.”

“Seen against Bal’s magnificent oeuvre, Of What One Cannot Speak is the next innovative and brilliant book that will once again push the field of visual studies into unexplored areas. A fusion of monograph and theoretical essay, the book is best described as a demonstration of Bal teaching. She crucially teaches her audience how to make an encounter with an artwork productive—not by applying theoretical ideas, but by working through the object’s resistance, by allowing the object to speak back to you. Bal does not simply take Doris Salcedo’s work as her starting point, and neither does she argue that the violence of the political is somehow merely ‘reflected’ in it. Instead, she embarks on a much more ambitious and original project—initiating a discourse by allowing a work of art to take the lead.”

“Of What One Cannot Speak offers a brilliant theoretical challenge to our understanding of the political in art after Adorno and after trauma theory. Mieke Bal gives us the most insightful and comprehensive reading to date of the work of Doris Salcedo as a new kind of ‘world art’ that cannot be relegated reductively to local color or to thematic dimensions such as memory and violence. Equally attentive to Salcedo’s materials as to her handling of metaphor and figuration, space and time, Bal’s book stands as a model work on the threshold between art criticism and interpretive analysis—truly interdisciplinary in the best sense.”

“Bal is a leading cultural critic, known for her engaging writing style and clarity, even when dealing with difficult theoretical concepts. Bal also has incredible respect for Salcedo and her work, as this book models a process of investigation akin to a dialogue with art, rather than a clinical dissection of it. Essential.”