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On finding the words that work

From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139, with my emphasis added:

In all the profusion of words and more words, we lack the words that work. (Not what linguistics calls performatives, but words that can affect the economy of being because they come from the workings of this economy.) …. The right word is not the same thing as a correct word, and it is certainly not about someone “being right” (or not); it is not simply the word that conveys, for example, the factual truth of what is going on. This is not about “efficiency” either. It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way. It is not a correct description of a reality; it introduces a new reality. When Marx wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” this is was not a description of social history that was more accurate than other descriptions. The concept of the class struggle is an example of a “new signifier,” one that reveals a hitherto invisible dimension of social reality, and gives us tools to think it. It does so because it names the point where the impossibility of social justice gets disentangled from the necessity to repeat this impossibility

From Philosopher Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence. This stillness contrasts with the noisy Gerede in which we fill the world with expressions of our selves and our purposes. … The danger comes from the fact that so much can be retrieved from the gray zone of repression and forgetfulness. There are also resentments and hatreds and dreams of omnipotence and revenge, and they can be released by their own appropriate words of power. Hitler was a world-historical genius in only one respect, but that was in finding dark words of power, sayings that could capture and elevate the fears, longings and hatreds of a people into something demonic.

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