LUHMANN, Niklas and FUCHS, Peter, 1997. Reden und Schweigen. Suhrkamp.
Whenever a subject is exposed to the light, flip sides get out of sight. If one talks about talking, one easily forgets about Silence. If one turns to the phenomenon of communication, what its counter term denotes eludes one: Incommunicability. The sociological stock of knowledge related to it may rightly be called meager. The usual recourse is to sayability/unsayability as if communication could be fixed in its limits by linguisticity or non-linguisticity, as if it could be reduced to an organ of correct communication about the psychic. The formally more essayistic essays of the present book, on the other hand, relate incommunicability strictly to communication. They pursue the assumption that in the functional complex of communication there are starting points for its self-blockade, the case that something that happens communicatively, because it happens communicatively, cannot happen communicatively. This denotes a paradox which can be assumed to be reversed, to be made invisible, if communication catastrophes are to be avoided. The intention reflected in the playing out of this thesis is directed at expanding a too narrow view of what has been called the unity of the social: Communication.