Doueihi 1984 Traps of Representation

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Review: Traps of Representation Author(s): Milad Doueihi Review by: Milad Doueihi Source: Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 66-77Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464570Accessed: 22-05-2015 04:16 UTC

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TRAPS OF REPRESENTATION

MILAD DOUEIHI

Louis Marin. LE PORTRAIT DU ROI. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981.

Marc Shell. MONEY, LANGUAGE, AND THOUGHT. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Once inserted into another network, the "same" philosopheme is no longer the same, and besides it never possessed an identity independent of its functioning.

-Jacques Derrida, "Economimesis"

In the opening lines of his most recent study of the relationships between representation and power, more specifically absolute power as manifested and personified by the King in seventeenth century France, Louis Marin tells us that this work is "the sequel and consequence" of his earlier study, La Critique du Discours. Indeed, Le Portrait du Roi can be seen as carrying out the implications of the previous book and applying them to a variety of texts having in common either the fact that they address the issues and problems informing the relationship between political authority, power, and representation, or else that they feature certain rhetorical strategies relevant to the problematic and theoretical limitations of representation. Although the book discusses only seventeenth- century texts, its central thesis lays claim to a larger field of application. It con- tends to have discovered, in the specific example of seventeenth-century French royal power and its representations, a general model on which absolute power is founded. Thus the examination and analysis of the manifestations of Louis XIV's monarchy is to be considered as a contribution to a critique of political power in general. But before embarking on a detailed discussion of the issues raised by Le Portrait du Roi, it is essential to review the main import and the theoretical framework that emerge from the earlier work, La Critique du Discours, and to locate and evaluate its most important conclusions that are of relevance to our purposes in this essay.

La Critique du Discours, as its subtitle indicates, is primarily a reading of the texts of the logicians and grammarians of Port-Royal, and of Pascal's writings. This critical reading finds its point of departure in two curious features of the texts of Port-Royal. Marin sets out to discover what sort of model informs and constitutes the theory of language that emerges from those texts, and the manner in which this model functions in relation to the theoretical construct it makes possible. The first curious feature consists in the fact that, although the Fathers of Port-Royal develop a comprehensive theory of language in their texts, they neglect or fail to discuss or to address the problem of the sign directly and explicitly. Instead, they relegate this important question to the status of a mere example or a simple and unproblematic illustration. One such example is the enunciation of the Eucharist, the hoc est corpus meum. But the Eucharist is not an example among others; it is the basis and the foundation of the theology of Port-Royal. Why then ignore its importance and present it in a way that dissimulates its relevance to the conception of language developed by Port-


Royal? Marin's thesis is that the eucharistic enunciation is the substratum of the theory of representation of Port-Royal, and that its appearance in their texts in the form of an example is a manifestation of the ideological mark of representation at work and, at the same time, the blind spot of the representational model. To find the model of a theory in what is sup- posed to demonstrate it and illustrate it is to operate a radical inversion of positions and to reveal the imposture at the basis of that theory. Moreover, it implies that between a fully developed theory and the model on which it is founded there exists a radical difference, or, more precisely, a divergence that deflects any abstract exposition of that theory from its logical field of application. What is undermined then is the close identification of a model and its products. In order to overcome this difficulty, the Port-Royal theorists move in the direction of surreptitiously covering up and ignoring the status of the Eucharistic enunciation as the foundation of their linguistic theory. In doing so, they develop and expand a general discourse on language. Thus, it is the necessity to forget its founding gesture that constitutes Port-Royal's metadiscourse. And, in general, any theory or metadiscourse is that which forgets that it is a story (a recit), that is to say that it has an origin it cannot accept and account for. Marin's reading, which has obvious affinities with the observations advanced by Jean- Francois Lyotard in texts such as Instructions paiennes, brings out these conclusions with great insightfulness and clarity. He also dwells extensively on this particular dissimulatory aspect of theoretical discourse and formulates some general reflections illuminating the con- nections between the representational theory of language and models of language, and the manner in which representation invites and accommodates its theoretical discourse by enforcing its misrecognition of its origin. Theory, then, through the powers of representation, tends or tries to become absolute, that is to say independent and autonomous, by operating a violent and repressive closure that hides what makes any closure incomplete.

Another feature of the texts of Arnauld and Nicole reproduces the same gesture and points to the same problems in their general theory of language. This time, it is the status and the position of Pascal's discourse as it surfaces, in the forms of a short citation, a simple allu- sion or an evocation, in the Grammaire and the Logique of Port-Royal. As with the eucharistic enunciation, Pascal's name or texts appear rarely, and yet, whenever they do, they divulge the same efforts aimed at hiding the fundamental importance of Pascal's text for Port-Royal's theory of language. Marin's reading is situated between those two gestures, drawing on them and formulating what they repress in the texts of Port-Royal. More than a critical assessment of those texts, Marin's writing turns out to be a rewriting of Port-Royal's texts that reiterates their dominant problematic while situating it in the context of its inherent theoretical limitations and exploiting its differences with its main sources (Pascal). It will suf- fice here, for our present purposes, to treat only the problems raised by the eucharistic enunciation, since the question of Pascal's status and subversive insight will be encountered and dealt with in our discussion of Le Portrait du Roi.

Arnauld and Nicole, in developing their ideas about language, had to try to capture in theoretical terms the unbridgeable distance separating God's word and its representative sign. They had to come up with a formula that would capture God's word in its performance, or rather that would express and present the divine word as the realization of a perfect exchange between spirit and matter, between infinity and finitude, as that exchange is invoked and exemplified by the Eucharist. What they needed, then, was a magic formula that would make it possible for them to support an unthinkable idea, that of a pure and transparent signifier. This perfect signifier would have to be simultaneously (a) visible and material in order to articulate the signified, and (b) invisible and immaterial in order not to obstruct the presence of the signified itself. This double requirement leads the Fathers of Port-Royal to develop their theory of language in the shadow of an inevitable impossibility. The quest for a theory of language that would accommodate this impossibility prompts the theoreticians of Port-Royal to construct a general model of the sign that reveals very clearly the two contradictory and mutually exclusive orientations governing the relation of substitution between the represented thing and the representing sign. It becomes clear then why the eucharistic enunciation is not a mere illustration of Port-Royal's representational model of language. In fact, the eucharistic enunciation, with its overarching theological significance and authority, turns out to be the original prototype of this model of the sign. It can assume this role especially since it performs actively and efficiently the ideal and perfect interchangeability

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between object and sign. Moreover, with its daily enforcement in the ritual of the mass, it is the absolute proof, given by the son of God and the authority of the divine Word, of the possibility of a transparent substitution and exchange between thing and word. Yet, the eucharistic enunciation does not only support and found a theory of representation, it also brings out the inherent imposture and the strategies at its basis. A detailed analysis of the linguistic and grammatical properties of the eucharistic enunciation will help clarify this.

The lhocl or Ithisl is a neuter demonstrative pronoun. It is a pure gesture of indication that points to or draws attention to an object at the precise moment of utterance. Therefore it does not signify; it only shows. On the other hand, as in the case of the Eucharist, Ithisl signifies being (I'etre) in general in the absence of any individual determination. This signifies this, what is here and now, graspable as a moment of privileged presence. Thus Ithisl both signifies and points to something. In Port-Royal's theory of representation the co-existence of these two incompatible aspects that manifest themselves and are produced by Ithisl calls for an assimilation of the object designated to the signified. In this way, the other of language, what cannot be said or represented because it simply exists as a universally present, is to be transformed through representation into a double (into a signified-signifier and not an object of designation) that is easily representable. This doubling is realized through a circularity thanks to which what is exterior to the system of language is accommodated as interior to the linguistic machine. The effect of this circularity is to cancel out the remainder, that which lies outside the field of representation, and to replace it by a representative double. For this whole operation to be feasible, it is necessary that the consciousness seeking to grasp the present moment, the here and now designated by Ithisl, be able to deploy a unified and universal logos that makes that privileged moment intelligible. And it is through this logos that consciousness is able to posit itself as an I, a subject. Thus, in the last analysis, the doubling of representation and the substitution it makes possible achieve the institution of a subject always present as a unifying and synthesizing factor in its speech.

The second problem presented by the eucharistic enunciation is that of the verb 'to be,' in the form of lisl. How is it possible that the neuter Ithisl is the subject of the verb lis/? Ilsl here may take a double value: (1) it can signify "it is" in which litl is a neuter pheme, an indif- ferent and unmarked one where the emergence of Being in general, signified by Ithisl, is manifested; (2) it can also signify lisl as the present of the indicative, as positioning a subject in a referential utterance. In this context-and here is one of the strongest points in Marin's analysis-a double movement of exchange is at work. This movement, in its duplicity, is situated, so to speak, on both sides of language. The proliferation of this exchange between what is an internal product of the linguistic system and an exterior element untransferable to language is the direct result of the double value of lisl. This in turn leads to a situation where Ithisl and /is/ become inversely interchangeable so that Ithisl signifies, in the linguistic system, what lisl indicates and locates outside the limits of language. In other words, when Ithisl is signifying being in general, the here and now, in a referential utterance, lisl is pointing to this same here and now as an object of designation and not signification. The rift in this exchange attests to the failure of the circularity of representation to recuperate efficiently what is its total other. And so it is this failure that maintains the movement through which the "body" (or, in general, the thing or the object) is signified as belonging to a holder, a subject. Therefore, Ithis is! can terminate with /my body/.

Hoc est corpus meum proves to be the foundation of the theoretical model of representation developed by Port-Royal. It also exposes the blind spot of this theory, namely its reliance on a mystical exchange that hides all its contradictions through the authority and the power of the divine Word. And the tremendous power and authority of representation derives from its blindness, from its concealed ignorance of its own limitations and shortcom- ings. Representation, then, is a double activity; on the one hand it is the operation through which an object is represented by a material sign; on the other hand it is that which represents its own operation as the only economically efficient way of relating things and words, thus suppressing the impossibility at its origin by means of a violent misrecognition. This violence surfaces in Port-Royal's discourse at the moment when it seems to be at its strongest. That is to say, at the moment when the mystery of the divine Word of which the eucharistic enunciation is the most important expression invites its assimilation to a function of representation, it instead reveals representation as inadequate and makes impossible the

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totalization it wants to achieve. What returns in this failure of representation to accommodate its founding gesture is that which cannot be represented to representation, the impr6sentable. The achievement of the eucharistic enunciation then is the actual realization, through metaphor, of the transformation of the human body into the divine body. That which escapes representation is the function and the status of the figure as operating a problematic and necessary mediation. For through the figure, being is presented as a partial retreat and is revealed through concealment. The divine body is accessible to man only through the mediation of that which hides it. And it is Pascal's discovery that it is only through the figure- in this case Jesus Christ as a metaphor mediating between God and his people-that being lends itself to knowledge and reveals its nature, albeit in a fragmentary and effacing way. The Hidden God lets itself be known in a partial revelation that the figure conveys. The importance of Pascal's discourse and its repression in the Port-Royal texts require a new reading and invite new evaluation of the representational model of language elaborated by Arnauld and Nicole. Marin's work is situated at this critical juncture in the effort it deploys in order to reveal and exploit the hidden foundation of such a theory of representation. Pascal's text, in Marin's hands, turns out to be the element which disrupts the order legitimated by Port-Royal: a delegitimation that has great impact and that questions radically any effort, be it that of Port-Royal or a modern one, at elaborating a metadiscourse or a general and comprehensive theory of language. The lesson to be learned from Pascal is that of the impossibility and futility of any such project.1

In Le Portrait du Roi Marin examines a set of texts that manifest royal power as absolute, and that simultaneously, through various rhetorical strategies, legitimate and institute this power as absolute. This whole process of dissimulated legitimation is worked out and realized through representation. Thus the examination of these texts has a double purpose. On the one hand it aims at discovering the strategical-tactical devices deployed in order to sustain a valid and economically efficient representation of power. On the other, it tends to reveal this absolute power as an effect, and only an effect, of representation itself. Therefore, it is in this double bind between representation and its products that the legitimating discourse of absolute power is situated. Pellisson's text Projet de I'histoire de Louis XIV offers a compelling illustration of this problematic. Although Marin devotes several chapters to other seventeenth-century texts, it seems reasonable to focus our attention on this part of the work for the simple reason that the discourse on and of the King, as the contemporary mediation between the divine and the human, is crucial to our understanding of all the cultural products of seventeenth-century absolutism. Moreover, as we shall observe later on, the writing of history is a fundamental problem that bears on Marin's own discourse and critical practice in Le Portrait du Roi.

Pellisson's essay, as its title indicates, is only a project, a plan for a history to come, a future history. For this history to be written, this proposed project has to be approved and legitimated by the political power it wants to represent: the King. This is a determining aspect of Pellisson's position that dictates to him certain tactical moves. The notion of history expressed in the Projet is revealing here. Pellisson considers the king to be the sole agent of history. He is the creator and maker of history, and to write the true and universal history is, consequently, to narrate the king's actions. But this reciprocity between the king and history introduces an obstacle that threatens Pellisson's project, for under such conditions only the king is able to write his own history. It is thus the enabling condition of the king's legitimate history that endangers any actual realization of that history. This forces Pellisson to ask for a limited and temporary transfer of power from the king to himself as the narrator of the future history. It is clear that he cannot be the permanent author of that history, because that is the position and the function of the king himself. That is why a Projet is required. Since an imme- diate writing of history is not possible, an agent for the transfer of authority is needed so as to open the way to and legitimate the actualization of the proposed history. The temporary exchange of positions between the king and his historian cannot be total or absolute. For the

1 The last part of La Critique du Discours is devoted to Pascal and deals in detail with the question of metalanguage and its relation to political discourse. A shorter English version of this part of the book appeared in Textual Strategies (Cornell, 1980).

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narrator of the future history of the king has to produce a narrative in which the king is present everywhere and in which his own position is constantly concealed and dissimulated. He has to write in such a way that the reader will read the text as if it were written by the king himself. The history of the king, the story of his actions and achievements, must enact itself in and through the narrative, and must act in the same way as absolute power controls its subjects. In other words, the history of the king must not be perceived by the readers as a written transcription of the monarch's activities. Rather, it must present itself as a direct and unmediated expression of the king's power. That is to say that the history of the king has to subject the reader to the same laws the absolute monarch exercises on his subjects. Thus, the future history of the king can only be a simulation of his absolute power, a simulation that is hidden and concealed through fiction and the rhetorical strategies it displays.

What this fiction conceals is a double simulation. On the one hand it is the inability of the king to write his own history while at the same time being its creator that is dissimulated through the fictitious text of history to be produced by the historian. On the other, the power of the official historian, delegated to him by the king, is presented to the reader as that of the king himself. In this complicity between the king and his historian, which is to remain concealed, we have one of the necessary conditions of absolute power. For, in the same manner that the king's discourse does not recognize any other possible agent of history but the king through the fiction of its narrative, so Pellisson's history, thanks to the temporary transfer of power between him and the king and its simulation in the text, delegitimizes any other possible history of the king. What we have here is a unique substitution: the king is Pellisson in that he is the sole author of his own history, and Pellisson is the king so that he can write the only possible history of the absolute monarch. This complicity is made possible through a model of representation that allows the unproblematic identification between the representer and the represented. But, most importantly, it is this complicity and the fiction and simulation it generates that sustain and support this model of representation.

The substitution and identification between the king and the historian is not totally arbitrary. It is supposedly based on a certain natural sympathy. It is perhaps relevant to point out here that Pellisson's Projet makes use primarily of the figure of litotes. The litotes is a periphrastic combination of emphasis and irony. Irony is not total in the litotes, but graduated. The litotes is a variation of metalepsis. It consists of negating absolutely the oppo- site of that which is to be affirmed. This disguised affirmation is grounded in an implicit and prior understanding of the implied meaning of the litotes. Thus, the litotes is usually understood in its intended meaning on the basis of a pre-established sympathy between the speaker and the addressee. It is on this sympathy that Pellisson founds his project, and the irony displayed in his text shows the relative power of his position as the future historian of the king. So then it is not surprising to find that the proposed project of the future history has already produced all the intended effects of the history to be written. The planned history is a simulacrum of the history to come. It is a simulacrum generated by Pellisson's theoretical discourse on the writing of the history of the king, of his body and his actions, as history itself.

This simulacrum plays a double role. First of all, it simulates, through narrative, the king, the archiactor of history, as the simulacrum of all simulacra. The king, therefore, as a presence in the narrative created by him, is not the real king, but an imaginary dimension that is alone capable of encompassing all the manifold effects of its own history. This is the primary and foundational aspect of all absolute power: the origin and the beginning of the claim to be absolute are dispersed and dissolved into an imaginary position, an imaginary body, which is sustained by and through representation. Consequently, the narrative of history is no longer an actual retelling of the facts of history, but rather a simulated produc-

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tion of the effects of that history. The potential narrative of Pellisson's "Projet" is thus a series of effects generated by the conditions and requirements of this project itself. And here the strategical end of the proposed plan meets the tactical devices deployed in the effort to legitimate its own rhetorical position. We can now see that the authority and the powers of the king invoked in the "Projet" have already been reproduced in simulation in the gesture that seems to be inviting them. Thus, Pellisson, in asking the king to grant him the power necessary to write his "real" history, traps that power into representing its possible effects in his own discourse. What is revealed in this trap is the fact that royal power has always already been the prisoner of its own representation. And it only becomes an absolute power when it forgets, ignores, or suppresses this reality. Absolute power is exclusive of reality because it can only function properly and efficiently in the imaginary representation of that reality. Here we arrive at the second function of history as simulacrum. The narrative of this history has to constitute and to institute its readers as subjects of the absolute power it represents. Once this reading subject is instituted, it can only play the game of simulation and so reads itself in the text of the history of the king as an effect of his creation. The institution of the reader as such is necessary since it makes possible and legitimates the recognition of the absence of the real king, of his presence as an imaginary effect of representation, as the all-powerful monarch, the ruler and originator of all simulations. In this way representation recapitulates in its own mechanisms its imaginary products and thus recuperates its own effects.

It is in this circularity of representation that what is hidden-that is to say, the fact that the real king is absent, that his seat (siege) is empty, and that his absence and this emptiness can only be filled through a concealing and dissimulating imaginary and phantasmatic representation-can be forgotten or at least distorted and covered up. Thus, the reality of representation is the product of a forgotten and concealed imaginary. And as such, the real is that which loses access, once and for all, to its origins and to its foundation. Reality, then, constitutes itself as (or is constituted by) the abolition of its origins, of all its origins. Reality becomes the play or the play-fullness of fiction and simulation. That is why the transfer of power between the king and his historian has to be an exchange without any remainders or leftovers. Because what is left over is that which cannot be said, that which has to remain hidden. And the circularity of representation, as we have noted earlier, supports this exchange by making impossible any access to that which is concealed and buried under its infinite effects.

As with the eucharistic enunciation, the generator of the representative simulacrum has either to be suppressed totally or to be recognized as the product of a divine miracle. For the ultimate achievement of the history to be written by Pellisson is the identification of the royal body with the body of history, of the body of history with the reader-simulacrum, and finally of the real reader with his mannequin.

The absolute power of Louis XIV is revealed, thanks to Marin's penetrating analysis, to be imaginary. This discovery applies to absolute power in general and to all political discourses. Political discourse in general, while claiming to address the issues of reality, produces a set of screens or a series of simulacra that represent and replace that reality and thus force the subject to enter into a domain of representation. Political discourse compensates for the lack of the real, for the impossibility of dealing directly with it, by generating an imaginary construct that is totally cut off from reality and that becomes an excess or a surplus in relation to the lack of the real. In this closed universe where representation functions to delimit access to the real, absolute power exerts itself, unquestioned and unchallenged. And this inviolability constitutes the essential and fundamental requirement of all absolute power.

Another example, coextensive with and stemming from the relationship established between the king and his historian as described earlier, is the question of the royal medals. This issue relates directly to the problems of writing the history of the king, and is worth examining here. To begin with, it is important to remind ourselves of the last sentence of Pellisson's "Projet": "If one does not know how to forge and combine all this together in one solid body, full of variety, force and brilliance, how to paint rather than narrate, to make visible to the imagination all that one puts down on paper, thereby to attract readers and interest them in what is happening, then it is no longer history [Histoire]; it is, quite to the con-

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trary, register or chronicle."2 It is evident that in order to make the History of the king valid and legitimate, the narrator has to make the reader see the facts and the actions, make him believe that he is participating in them as a subject of his king, and thus subject him, surreptitiously, to the monarchic power. The royal medal is the ideal means for accomplishing this purpose. For in the medal, what the subject sees is not the written history, but the inscribed one. The inscription on the medal perfects the work of representation in that it presents the absent monarch as a symbolized presence. Thus, instead of the imaginary absence of the king in his history, the subject perceives and sees his symbolic presence. The main value of the medal is that it functions and presents itself as the memory of the absent monarch. And in doing so, it attains its essential validity not in its limited value as money but rather in the aesthetic relationship it establishes between the king and his subjects. Because the history of the king is unique, and because it is the only history permissible in his (symbolic) presence, the medal on which his trace is inscribed retains a surplus value that constitutes it as the second text of history. Like the eucharistic enunciation, the medal reveals what it hides, and at the same time it is a real presence of the royal power, and thus is complementary to its written history. The medal is, in a sense, the tomb of the king. Its secret is that it is never seen as such. Instead, it is regarded as the real presence of the king's power. In this secret substitution between the king and his power is revealed the most important condition pertaining to the legitimacy of absolute power. The king is recognized as an absolute monarch only in his own absence, and his power can only legitimate itself by denying him real presence and by substituting for it a symbolic presence that validates itself as law. Once again we encounter representation as the producer of the simulacrum that takes the place of the real and institutes and enforces the laws of absolute power.

The History of the king, both the written and the engraved one, is the History of his representation and the representation of his powers in a field delimited by his imaginary and symbolic presences. This representation, instead of writing a real history, produces a sophisticated network of substitutions and exchanges that institute both the king and his subjects as subjects of its own simulacrum. In this fashion, the tyrannical effects of representation enforce and legitimate the absolute power they bring to bear on their simulated subjects of history. And here, it should be noted, it is the king himself who is the first to be the victim of his own imaginary and symbolic powers. For the king has to be always absent, his seat (siege) has to be always empty and vacant, for him to be an absolute monarch. His only possible presence is the inscription on the medal, an inscription that heralds his death while celebrating and commemorating his eternal powers. What representation thus achieves is a sort of "hallucinatory," yet quite efficient, legitimation of absolute power. Pascal, in his Trois Discours sur les conditions des Grands, as well as in his Pensees, offers a penetrating critique of the legitimation of absolute power that makes explicit the secret and hidden transforma- tions and substitutions carried out by representation. For Pascal, tyranny is a violent effort to satisfy "a desire of universal domination outside its order" ("ce desir de domination universel et hors son ordre"). Absolute power is tyrannical in that it tries to achieve its domination by a violent enforcement of its laws. Pascal's question is, what constitutes the authority of the king, and by what is this authority enforced and legitimated? In short, as Marin puts it, Pascal's question is this: "What is a king?" In order to work out an answer to this question, Pascal produces the following fiction:

A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island the inhabitants of which were anxious to find their king who was lost; and bearing a strong resemblance both corporally and facially to this king, he was taken for him and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people. At first he knew not what course to take; but he finally resolved to give himself up to his good fortune. He received all the homage they chose to render, and suffered himself to be treated as king. [Textual Strategies 241]

Pascal's example illustrates quite economically all the elements involved in the legitimation of royal power. First of all, it is clear that the origin of this power is arbitrary. It has no natural

2For a historical study that confirms the general analysis of Marin see Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le Roi Machine (Editions de Minuit, 1981).

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or divine foundation. It relies completely on circumstantial conditions. The castaway knows that he is not a king. And yet, because it happens that he resembles the lost king very closely, he is recognized and instituted as a monarch by the people of the island. Here we have an answer to Pascal's question: a king is a man who is recognized as such by his people. The source of the legitimation of a political power, as in the example of the castaway, is a consensus. This consensus expresses the desire of the people to be subjected to a power. What problematizes the whole question is the radical difference between the castaway and the inhabitants of the island. For the castaway knows that he is not the king. He only resembles the lost king and therefore has at the foundation of his institution as the ruler of the island the fact that he is a portrait of the king. He is only the projection of the representation of the desire of the people. In the last analysis, as Marin quite rightly points out, the determining factor is that the castaway, as a portrait of the king, does not resemble the king, but resembles the portrait of the lost king, since, in the first place, the inhabitants of the island never recognized their king, but only recognized their king as a portrait. It is in this cleavage between what the castaway conceives of himself and what the inhabitants of the island see in him that the sacred transubstantiation of the Eucharist is reproduced. Pascal discovers that the King-Portrait, the infinite representation of power, is nothing but a parody of the Eucharist. A parody, because man can never achieve what only divine power is capable of performing, that is, of transforming bread into body (or the portrait of the king into the King). The truth of political discourse, as Pascal shows, can only be reached by a roundabout way. And that truth is that power is not what it claims to be, that the king is always absent from his seat (siege) because it is his image and his portrait, in short, his figure, that occupy his position. Truth can indeed be found in political discourse, but not where one might think it is. Truth is what is not said, what cannot be said, and the only reason why the discourse of power can lead us to it is that for this discourse it is impossible to forget what it represses, what it does not say. Pascal's analysis of political discourse reveals the ideology of representation as an aporia, an impasse that cannot be recuperated. In the same way that political discourse, as a product of representation, proves its truth to be a lacking and an absent one, so the seat of the king hosts the dead body, a dead body that is not a body, that is the king. What Marin's study shows is the importance of the figure, as both the means of repressing the lack of the real and the only possible way to think what cannot be thought, what cannot be said. And the Eucharist offers a figure par excellence that situates itself on the borderline separating two domains and thus allowing a certain discourse to proliferate. As we have seen, the eucharistic enunciation was not only the prototype of the theory of representation at Port-Royal, it was also transferred to the political discourse in order to carry out the substitution of the portrait of the king for the King himself, thus giving way to an absolute power.

Marin situates and defines his own discourse in Le Portrait du Roi as "a representation of an episode of the history of representation and power." The narrative that Marin produces is a double and ironic repetition of the power of representation. For in Marin's text, what we read is, in a sense, an inverted history of the representation of power that reveals the power of Louis XIV's monarchy as that of its representation. But an inverted history is still a history that relies on certain notions and conceptions of History. In Marin's text there emerges a dominant and problematic category that regulates the narration of this history of representation. This category is that of force. Indeed, the whole book traces, in a specific context, the mechanisms that transform force into power and locates force as the generating element of the proliferations of the representational machine. Here is an early passage in which Marin discusses the operative dynamics of force:



But what is the doing (le faire) of a force? It can be quite clearly grasped in the process of struggle and clash of one force against another, and this process, even if it is a matter of an abstraction that has the value of an ideal-typical model of intelligibility, has no other objective than the annihilation of the adverse force. A force is a force only through annihilation and in this sense every force is in its very essence absolute, since it is such only by annihilating every other force, only by being without an exterior, being incompatible. [11]

Two things must be noted here. First, we encounter the necessary gesture of establishing an ideal model through which an understanding of the larger problems in all their details can be achieved. This move is inevitable because of the structuring requirements of the narrative Marin weaves. As a representation and as a history, his discourse retraces, although on a different level, the same path followed by the apologists of Port-Royal in their reliance on the eucharistic model and re-establishes a theoretical construct similar to the one that permitted the historians of Louis XIV to transfer ideological categories into the political domain. To the eucharistic enunciation there corresponds here a concept of force. What matters, for our present purposes, is simply the necessity of an ideal model that organizes the functioning of the discursive machine and not the perfect correspondence between the two models. Although it is clear that the notion of force advanced by Marin is quite different from that of Port-Royal's Eucharist, it must be remarked that they both function, on a structural level, as grounds for similar schemes. One noticeable and important difference is that Marin explicitly acknowledges the status of force as an organizing model for his history of representation. For Marin's text is a representation that is aware of itself as such and that tries to disrupt and rechannel its own powers. We could think of this text as a description of the traps of representation. But there is always the danger that such revelation of the weak points of representation is the ultimate trap devised by the representational machine. So then the question that has to be answered is whether Marin's text is yet a more sophisticated trap or whether it is an ironic overcoming of the traps of representation. Moreover, we will have to discuss the relevance and the implications of the self-awareness on the part of Marin, as to the effectiveness and conclusions of his analysis in Le Portrait du Roi. It is striking that Marin, in order to justify his history on theoretical grounds, has to refer to the notion of a model. But how does this model function and how does it influence the discourse on/of representation? Here we come to the second important aspect of the passage just quoted. It is clear that Marin presents force as a Hegelian category engaged in a constant struggle reminiscent of the master-slave dialectic. Actually, Marin, throughout the book, makes various references to Hegel's Phenomenology and demonstrates the close relationship between Pascal's analysis of power and Hegel's analysis of absolute monarchy. But beyond this, and more importantly, there is definitely in Marin's texts what could be called the Hegelian moment that is related directly to the generating model of his history of representation. If force is the primary concept informing this history, and if it is understood as sheer annihilation (or perhaps we should say re-presented as such), we are then inclined to think of it as a clear instance of the Hegelian Aufhebung. For what the force, that of royal power for example, tries to annihilate (in Marin's terminology), it tends in fact to neutralize and control. The monarch, instead of totally destroying the power of his Noble subjects, disqualifies and preserves it as subservient to his own power. So that the annihilation of the adverse force is only virtual. What in reality takes place is a negation and a preservation of that which is supposedly annihilated. This movement of negating and at the same time preserving is characteristic of Aufhebung. In its operation, Marin's force, then, takes the form of the Aufhebung.

Marin's text on this point has great affinities with Hegel's analysis of the language of flattery. In Hegelian terms, the language of flattery is the alienation of the power that legitimizes absolute monarchy as the form of the remainder of appearance of that power. In Marin's terminology, flattery is a means for realizing absolute monarchy as the imaginary effect of its own power of representation. What the Hegelian analysis shows is that power (or force), because it is Aufhebung, has, so to speak, to acknowledge and revere that which it controls. The King as the symbolic representation of the power of his monarchy, derives his power from the universal and explicit recognition he receives from his subjects. 74


Now that we have noted the affinity of Marin's concept of force with the Hegelian Aufhebung, we have to draw out the implications of this fact for the structuring of Marin's own discourse. First of all, the history of representation Marin presents us with is dialectical. It is a History that cannot but be an integral and constitutive part of representation, and as such, it confirms the powers of that which it seeks to contain. It derives its authority from the same operations it works to reveal as unfounded. This is assuredly not to say that Marin's text is uncritical or naive. Rather, we are pointing to the apparent displacement of a "concept," Aufhebung in this case, and the side effects it generates in the discourse that operates this displacement. And Marin's main innovation probably consists in this subtle displacement of the problematics of representation and power out of a self-enclosed and self-contained dynamic into an open-ended space. If this is nothing other than another trap of representation, it is doubtless a trap into which Marin falls shrewdly and happily. In doing so, he invites us both to question the generalizations and the potential extensions of his analysis and to become forcefully aware of the powers of representation. The outcome, in the last analysis, is the discovery that the apparently total and complete interpretation of representation is inevitably caught up in the work of representation itself, and that any effort aimed at contain- ing the power of representation has to do so through a certain positioning involving power.

The Hegelian moment in Marin's text prompts us, then, to reflect on the internal organization of a theoretical discourse concerned with power. Or, in more specific terms, it directs our attention toward certain revealing moments in such a discourse that are manifestations of the powerful potential of internalization and recuperation that constitute its most radical aspect. For Marin's discourse turns out to be a staged rehearsal of powerful old discursive "tricks" that derives its power from the theatrical repetition and enactment of that which it tries to unmask. So is, it must of course be noted, our own discourse. A representation of the power of representation is an exhibition of that power and a public display of all its features that have the effect of stripping it of the enigmatic aura surrounding it. So, Marin's engaging theoretical discussion constitutes itself through a double gesture of concealment and revelation. Such a gesture is not unique to Marin's work. Rather, it characterizes much, if not all, of western philosophy.

Plato affords us a critically decisive example with his condemnation of the Sophists, of both their teachings and their practice. Because they levied fees in exchange for their ideas, he charged that they had deprived themselves of the freedom to choose their pupils, and thus made their teachings available to all those willing to pay the price for it. So the first aspect of Plato's condemnation is concerned with the marketing of knowledge and wisdom and the correlation of the realm of ideas to that of monetary exchange. The second, and more revealing aspect of the condemnation is directly related to certain implications of sophistic practice.

One of the main methods of the sophists, antilogike, described by Plato as a rhetorical art of deception, consists of opposing one argument (or logos) to another, and/or showing that such mutually contradictory or exclusive arguments are present in every theoretical statement or state of affairs. The practice of antilogike, in short, drives constantly toward an aporia that is unacceptable to Plato. Actually, the economy of the platonic dialectic is founded on the rejection of the premises of the sophistic movement as such. That is to say that both the suppression of the "social" aspect of sophistics - as degrading to philosophy and as leading to a loss of argumentative control and decision-making capacity on the part of the philosopher- and the dismissal of antilogike as nondialectical and unproductive, make up the constitutive gesture of Platonism and the whole of the tradition that stems from it. Indeed, sophistics, from Plato's point of view, is nothing but the constant and deceiving concealment of truth-a concealment that inaugurates a movement of repetition, that of the undecidability of theoretical discourse, founded on the loss of an absolute origin. For antilogike diverts philosophy from the search for truth and directs it toward a futile and useless wandering and indecision. What is at stake in Plato's double rejection of sophistics is precisely the possibility of directly attaining truth or an original and unadulterated Signifier. As Derrida puts it: "The difference between signifier and signified is no doubt the governing pat- tern with which Platonism institutes itself and determines its opposition to sophistics. In being inaugurated in this manner, philosophy and dialectics are determined in the act of determining their other" [Dissemination 112]. It is, then, the economy of a discourse that



Platonism tries to recuperate and neutralize. Such a move involves necessarily the recognition of the status of the other or the internal assimilation of the repressed.

Marc Shell argues, in his Money, Language, and Thought, that "the upsetting confronta- tion of thought with its own internalization of economic form motivated thought to become the self-critical discourse of philosophy" [2]. The economic form in question here is monetary form. The historical change in the form of money and the subsequent transformation in the ways and methods of exchanging it, constitute the story of the displacement and the movement away from adequation as a regulator. That movement is particularly important to philosophic discourse (as long as philosophy is thought of as the discourse about truth, and truth is understood as a form of homoiosis or adequatio). The old coins derived their values directly from the ingot they were made of, whereas our paper money derives its value from a complex network of factors unrelated to the matter it is made from. Adequation between face and substantial value is no longer the determining factor on the market. The rift between inscription and matter points to and confirms the tremendous generative power of representation. This representation puts the emphasis on the inscription of the money and enforces the power of the issuing authority.3 Shell's thesis is that this representation informs the philosophical dialectical methods. For example, in Hegel's dialectic, the Aufhebung represents the association of some logical procedures with some monetary categories. Shell draws on what he calls "three traditions" [142] that connect Aufhebung to accounting, exchange and interest.

The first of these traditions is that of eighteenth-century practice of accounting in Ger- many. The relevant factor here, from Shell's point of view, is the special way of using equa- tion and reduction to zero in a manner that "the tallies or counters used for working out problems on a board were picked up (aufgehobene) when dealt with, thus if one was picked up from either side, the result that remained was unaffected" [143]. That is to say that the total or the whole remained unchanged despite the cancellation of a part. The possibility of attaining or preserving the unity of the whole via a negative cancellation of the part is here associated with the movement of Aufhebung in Hegelian dialectics. Shell insists on the similarity between the method of accounting and the philosophical category. The second analogy between Aufhebung and monetary exchange relates the former to a cancelled bond that still has a positive value and can be used as a receipt or discharge from debt. Here, Aufhebung is, like the bond, both null and positive. This brings us to the last association. The word Aufhebung, as Shell points out, is sometimes used to mean the collection of interest on a mature bond. In Hegel, the collection of monetary interest is extended to the conceptual level. The interest, then, is the deduction drawn from a hypothesis (or principal sum). Although Shell cautions against direct association and explanation of philosophical categories by some contemporary accounting practice, he thinks that "the modern concept of sublation (Aufhebung) indeed, seems to express the historical fact of interiorization of economic form" [133].

3Pierre Bourdieu in his Ce que parler veut dire (Fayard, 1982) discusses the question of authority and power in language, and how it effects the normalization of conventions. Bourdieu's theory relies on the analogy between the linguistic exchange and the monetary market, although his analysis points to a different direction than the one adopted by Shell.

76


But the economics of Hegelian dialectics is not simply an assimilation of monetary methods of accounting and exchange. Rather, it is a discursive economics that organizes and coordinates the (w)hole of absolute knowledge around a problematic and necessary moment that is the Aufhebung. Shell seems reluctant and ultimately unwilling to extend the field of application of the analogies he draws, and appears uninterested in discussing how the internal structuration of Hegelian dialectics is informed by monetary models. For in Hegel, the Aufhebung is the connecting element between two negative moments that must be neutralized in order for the system to function properly. This process of neutralization makes of the Aufhebung the sustaining principle of the Hegelian structure. That is to say that despite all appearances, the Aufhebung is that upon which the recuperation of the moments that exceed and threaten the structure and the continuity of the Hegelian system is founded. The Aufhebung is the crucial means of conceptual control devised by Hegel. What is lacking in Shell's discussion is the manner in which this vital moment, if it is founded on an economical model, becomes what it is and functions in the specific way it does. Especially since what is radical about the Aufhebung is not simply what it achieves in its Hegelian context but its form. Aufhebung, as Derrida has shown, is the foundation of a restricted economy that is the (back)ground of History. What is essential and productive is the active displacement of Aufhebung in discourse so that it breaks out of the circle of absolute knowledge and opens up new margins of interaction. Shell's work, although it does not try to effect such a displacement, points to its necessity. The force of Marin's discourse in Le Portrait du Roi achieves successfully such a displacement. For the theoretical discourse of Marin is not presented as a neutral and detached meditation on the power of representation. On the con- trary, Marin's strategy derives its effectiveness and power of persuasion from the fact that it understands its own involvement in the traps it discloses. Thus Marin is led to try to test the limits and the limitations of the founding model of representation. Such an effort consists primarily in the reflection on the necessary deviations involved in the act of theorizing. The rehearsal of the elusive moment at the origin of every theory reveals the theoretical discourse as the combination of a set of "conceptual" elements that are borrowed from various practices and put together and presented as a unique and distinct product. The power of theory lies perhaps not in its capacity to account for all the elements of the corpus it is applied to, but rather in the manner in which it makes possible the use and application of certain "conceptual moments" that it integrates. Marin's example reveals Aufhebung as a necessary moment that must be encountered and that necessitates an ironic repetition. It is this repetition that displays the aberration sustaining every theoretical effort.

WORKS CITED Apostolides, Jean-Marie. Le roi-machine, Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris:

Editions de Minuit, 1981. Arnauld, A., and Lancelot, C. Grammaire generale et raisonnee. Paris: 1660. Arnauld, A., and Nicole, P. La logique ou I'art de penser. Paris: 1683. Bourdieu, Pierre. Ce que parler veut dire. Paris: Fayard, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981. Fontanier, Pierre. Les figures du discours. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. London: George Alien and Unwin, 1961. Harari, Josue, ed. Textual Strategies. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1979. Lyotard, Jean-Fran:ois. Instructions paiennes. Paris: Galilee, 1977. Marin, Louis. La critique du discours. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975. Pascal, Blaise. Oeuvres Completes. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963. Pellisson-Fontanier, P. Oeuvres Diverses. Paris: 1735.



Article Contentsp. [66]p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77

Issue Table of ContentsDiacritics, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1984Front Matter [pp. 1 - 1]Review ArticlesProblems in the Theory of Fiction [pp. 2 - 11]Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics [pp. 12 - 23]A Reader like Phaedrus [pp. 24 - 35]America the Scrivener: Economy and Literary History [pp. 36 - 51]Refashioning the Renaissance [pp. 52 - 65]Traps of Representation [pp. 66 - 77]Reading Foucault: Cells, Corridors, Novels [pp. 78 - 89]

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Doueihi 1984 Traps of Representation