Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology

Discourse, or the Symptom of the Repressed, and Language

Discourse, or the Symptom of the Repressed, and Language Therefore, Vertretung, the function that transforms Darstellung or the network of the signifier into speech, relates to what Lacan calls “discourse,” as opposed to “language.” As Lacan puts it, drawing on Saussure: Firstly, there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse. One cannot but give discourse a certain direction in time, a direction that is defined in a linear manner. . . . It is basically true that there is no discourse without a certain temporal order, and consequently without a certain concrete succession, even if it is a virtual one. . . . But it is not quite exact to say that it is a simple line, it is more probably a set of several lines, a stave. It is in this diachronism that discourse is set up. (1993, 54) Beyond the synchronic system of language, in which signs constitute themselves in their differential relations (“groups of opposition”) to one another, there is the “diachronism” of discourse, which, albeit “linear,” should be conceived not as “a simple line” but as “several lines,” insofar as even the most determinist conception of historical causation or genealogy is always much more complicated of, say, the behaviorist model of stimulus and response. To return to our example from the chapter “Historical Time” in part 1, even the most traditional historian (i.e., one who takes historical genealogy at face value) would not reduce the cause of Nazism to any single past event in German or world history—be 125 126 / Being, Time, Bios it the failure of the 1848 revolution, the late formation of the German nation-state in 1871, the failure of the First World War, or what have you—and would admit that each such event in itself could have propelled a different course of history if it had not been accompanied by other events, whose overall combination alone could produce the circumstances that eventually led to Nazism. It is, therefore discourse (Vertretung), and not language (Darstellung ), that bestows meaning to historical events (this meaning being, of course, always imaginary/ideological). In Lacan’s words: “There is indeed a relationship between meaning and the signifier, it is what the structure of discourse supplies” (1993, 155). Moreover, “meaning is by nature imaginary,” and, yet, “real,” insofar as by the latter we mean, as we said about the meta-phenomenological fact of the (ideological) MasterSignifier , something “impossible,” yet necessary in order to account for its effects that are real (1993, 54; 1981, 111).1 Here we have arrived at an insight that will eventually turn out to be crucial to the mechanisms of biopolitics. We recall that the potentiality of labor-power is represented by Vertretung, yet Vertretung—this interpolation of money into the world of capital, as the remuneration of labor-power—is what Darstellung, the dominant mode of representation in capitalist modernity, perpetually represses. What emerges in the place of the repressed Vertretung is discourse itself, that is, the official representation of history qua diachrony (the very temporality that is inscribed in Vertretung), but a diachrony divested of its contingent forces and masqueraded as teleology or finality. The teleological representation of history (discourse) is the symptom of the repression of the proper representation of the remuneration of labor-power (Vertretung). Discourse is the symptom of repressed Vertretung. Similarly, as we shall presently see, Darstellung is the other, corollary , symptom of the repression of Vertretung. To clarify this point, let us turn to Lacan’s attempt to formulate a theory of ethics in his seventh seminar. In his extensive reading of Sophocles’ Antigone offered at that seminar, Lacan takes recourse to the distinction between discourse and language in order to differentiate King Creon’s (and the city’s) position from Antigone’s, who persists, against Creon’s decree, on burying her brother, Polynices, regardless of the fact that he has committed treason and fratricide. Recall, on the one hand, that Antigone and Polynices, as well as his brother and victim, Eteocles, and their sister, Ismene, are the children of Oedipus, as well as, on the other hand, that the actions of Discourse, or the Symptom of the Repressed, and Language / 127 the characters, as in any Greek tragedy, are motivated not by the qualities of some interior subjectivity but by their moira which, more often than...