ABSTRACT
‘Dark’ writing is an indirect approach to sharing violent experiences that accommodates the ineffable, which may be approached through aesthetics, to help represent these experiences more adequately. This chapter discusses in more detail how ‘dark’ writing operates in the aesthetic realm and in particular with regard to the role of visual representation in expressing trauma. The need for a more developed aesthetic perspective on the problem of the representation of violence has become apparent because factual accuracy – the political mission that is served by the traditional mimetic structure of representation in the west – has increasingly been shown to crowd out the pervasive, ineffable aspects of the experience of violence. The chapter suggests that accommodating the ineffable holds the potential to enable the sharing of experiences of violence and conflict. There are initially ‘invisible’ aspects of the process of representing violence and trauma from which we can infer the ineffable.
