Languages of War, Class and National History: David Malouf's Fly A way Peter

In an historical analysis of language and the ideologies which underwrite it, Michel Pecheux argues that all perception and value arise from a relationship of contradictions between and within various discourses, since 'thought exists only within a determination which imposes edges, separations and limits on it, in other words ... "thought" is determined in its "forms" and its "contents" by the unthought . . . [In any discourse] the unasserted precedes and dominates the assertion'.1 In other words, various discourses can be identified not only by what is said but also by what is unsaid within them, and so 'culture' itself becomes 'a complex of competing narratives of which one or other is, for the time being, dominant'. 2