ABSTRACT
In his 1984, George Orwell imagines a language, called Newspeak, which forbids the utterance of deviant statements. Fortunately, no such language exists, probably because the relation between signifiers and their meaning cannot be easily controlled. As stated by Stalin-another credible expert in totalitarianism-language is not, in itself, ideological (Stalin 1951). Discourse is. But what is the nature of the frontier between what can and cannot be said in an ideology? Several answers have been given to this question. None of them, I would argue, is fully satisfying. Ideological correctness is neither a matter of logical consistency with a doctrine, nor the result of a discursive system largely similar to that of language. Nor is the line dividing what can and cannot be said according to an ideology, the same as that dividing what can and cannot be conceived of in the conceptual system of an ideology.
