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Modal Aspects of the Unconscious Conscious Darstellung and Repressed Vertretung Vertretung, the peculiar representation of labor-power, amounts to the paradoxical secular manifestation of the presecular mode of representation , which makes its appearance only after “free” laborers emerge and offer their labor-power against a certain cost. In the presecular mode of representation, as Foucault reminds us, “language” is “a thing in nature” whose “words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered,” for, due to their divine organic links, there is a continuity between words and things, so that words are concept-things, just as things are thingconcepts (Foucault 1970, 35).1 Vertretung is such a language-thing, except that, unlike in the past, now it emerges against the background of sheer Darstellung, a world that is represented through binary signs that are determined in purely arbitrary differential and synchronic relations. Thus, the similitudes that bind the word to the thing in Vertretung are no longer guaranteed by divinity but by that which transcends synchronicity : history insofar as it transcends systematicity and its laws. It is such contingent moral, cultural, and other historical judgments that bind organically or apodictically the thing-concept of labor-power to its cost, which, thus, is a not an arbitrary sign but a Mark (with capital letter, by analogy to the Word). Vertretung bestows on labor-power the Mark of its remuneration, which is organically bound to it and, thus, redoubles its nature as an in-itself-for-itself: labor-power is a concept-thing because it bears on itself its organic Mark and because, as the power of its self-actualization, it is a concept that is itself the thing for which it stands. Nevertheless, the contingent character of the similitudes does not in the list diminish the absolute (divine) authority of the bond between labor-power and its Mark, for their combination constitutes, recalling 117 118 / Being, Time, Bios Sartre, “the impossible synthesis of the for-itself [potential] and the initself [actual],” which “preserve[s] within it the necessary translucency of consciousness [concept] along with the coincidence with itself of being-in-itself [thing]”—in short, “God” (140 and 139). In other words, like surplus-value, labor-power is a historical modulation of the attributes of substance or surplus within capitalism—God, understood as “human reality itself as totality” (Sartre, 139). There would be no friction between these two modulations of surplus—surplus-value and labor-power—no rift in its unity, if it were not for their difference in kinds of representation. For the entire universe of the empirical manifestations of surplus-value, including its two temporalities of production and circulation, is represented through Darstellung—the secular system of representation with its binary sign—while labor-power is represented through Vertretung—a presecular system of representation in the midst of a secular universe. It is for this reason that biopolitics is constituted as the tension between the expression of Vertretung, required by labor-power, and its suppression, demanded by surplus-value. The interests, so to speak, of the two capitalist modulations of surplus collide, and their battlefield is biopolitics. A further distinction between surplus-value and labor-power can now become clear. True, they are both modulations of surplus, but in essentially different ways. Surplus-value is a modulation of the attributes of substance (in-itself and for-itself) insofar as it is the cause and effect of both; labor-power, by contrast, is a modulation of the attributes of substance because it is the potential of the for-itself to actualize itself as in-itself. Surplus-value is self-caused insofar as it is the cause (and effect) of what it presupposes (use-values and exchange-values); labor-power is self-caused because it is the direct power of its self-actualization, without the mediation of any presupposition, not even presuppositions of which it itself is the cause. In short, it can be said that surplus-value is a potentiality, but only quantitatively: the potentiality of the for-itself to generate more of itself as, again and again, for-itself—which is why, even though it presupposes the in-itself, it ends up repressing it. Laborpower , on the other hand is qualitatively potential: the potential of the ontological leap from the for-itself to the in-itself—which is why it requires the expression of both attributes. This does not automatically entail that labor-power is a modulation of surplus better or closer to it than surplus-value is...

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