A paragraph in Lacan’s écrit “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism” (1959) summarizes the basic gist of what he sees as entailed by the Freudian concept-term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. As usual, when the topic of affect is at stake, Lacan appeals to Freud’s papers on metapsychology from 1915 in particular:
Freud’s conception—developed and published in 1915 in the Internationale Zeitschrift, in the three articles on drives and their avatars, repression, and the unconscious—leaves no room for ambiguity on this point: it is the signifier that is repressed, there being no other meaning that can be given in these texts to the word Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. As for affects, Freud expressly formulates that they are not repressed; they can only be said to be repressed by indulgence. As simple Ansätze or appendices of the repressed, signals equivalent to hysterical fits [accès] established in the species, Freud articulates that affects are simply displaced, as is evidenced by the fundamental fact—and it can be seen that someone is an analyst if he realizes this fact—by which the subject is bound to “understand” his affects all the more the less they are really justified.34
Nearly everything Lacan pronounces apropos Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen in Freudian metapsychology over the course of seminars ranging from 1958 through 1971 is contained in this passage. Before turning to the issues involved in translating Freud’s German word into both English and (French) Lacanese—these issues will be gotten at through examining relevant moments in le Séminaire running from the sixth through the eighteenth seminars—a few remarks on this quotation are in order. First of all, Lacan clearly asserts that his Saussure-inspired notion of the signifier is synonymous with Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.35 (As I already indicated, and as I will maintain subsequently, this alleged terminological equivalence is debatable.) Secondly, the implied delegitimization of any theses regarding unconscious affects looks to be in danger of resting on the erroneous assumption that repression is the sole defense mechanism by virtue of which psychical things are barred from explicit conscious self-awareness. (As Lacan well knows, for the later Freud especially, there are a number of defense mechanisms besides repression—and this apart from the fact that what is meant by “repression” [Verdrängung] in Freud’s texts is far from simple and straightforward in the way hinted at by Lacan here.) Third, in tandem with emphasizing the displacement of affects within the sphere of consciousness following repression, Lacan indicates that these mere “signals”—in a session of the seventh seminar, he again contrasts affects as signals with Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen as signifiers36—are fixed, natural attributes of the human animal (i.e., “signals … established in the species”). That is to say, emotions and feelings themselves don’t distinguish speaking beings from other living beings. Rather, only the web-like network systems of ideational nodes into which affects are routed, and within which they are shuttled about through drifting displacements, mark the denaturalized human psyche as distinct from other animals’ nature-governed minds. Put differently, affective phenomena on their own, as signals, are purportedly no different in kind from the stereotyped repertoire of invariant reactions characteristic of any animal species. Finally, Lacan, presuming that affects remain conscious in the wake of repression (albeit thereafter reattached to other representations-as-signifiers in what Freud deems “false connections”), insists that a properly analytic stance vis-à-vis affects is to call into question the pseudoexplanatory rationalizations people construct in response to seemingly excessive displaced sentiments whose “true” ideational bases have been rendered unconscious.
In the sixth seminar, Lacan reiterates much of this apropos the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.37 The following academic year, he returns to discussing this term several times. Lacan starts with the first half of this compound German word, namely, the word Vorstellung (usually rendered in English by Freud’s translators as “idea”; thus, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz could be translated into English as “representative of an idea” or “representative of an ideational representation”). Lacan situates these ideas “between perception and consciousness,”38 thus suggesting, along accepted and established Freudian lines, that Vorstellungen, although they are ideational representations registered by the psychical apparatus, aren’t necessarily registered in the mode of being attended to by the awareness of directed conscious attention. However, when it comes to the unconscious, Lacan is careful to clarify that its fabric is woven not of Vorstellungen as freestanding, atomic units of mental content, but instead of differentially codetermining, cross-resonating relations between multiple representations. This is taken as further justification for his psychoanalytic recourse to a modified Saussurian theory of the signifier à la structural linguistics, a theory including the stipulation that signifiers as such exist only in sets of two or more signifiers.39 (A signifier without another signifier isn’t a signifier to begin with; for there to be an S1, there must be, at a minimum, an S2.) This, he claims, is the significance of Freud’s mention of Vorstellungen in connection with Repräsentanzen in his paper on “The Unconscious.” The concept-term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz “turns Vorstellung into an associative and combinatory element. In that way the world of Vorstellung is already organized according to the possibilities of the signifier as such.”40 For Freudian psychoanalysis as conceptualized by Lacan, everything in psychical life (affects included) is “flocculated” through the sieve-like matrices of interlinked signifiers, with these signifiers mutually shaping and influencing one another in complex dynamics defying description in the languages proffered by any sort of psychological atomism of primitive, irreducible mental contents.41 (In the contemporaneous talk “Discours aux catholiques,” he relates the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz to a “principle of permutation” in which the possibility of displacements and substitutions is the rule.)42 Lacan reads Vorstellung and Repräsentanz both as equivalent to what he refers to under the rubric of the signifier, with one signifier (the S1 Vorstellung—really, Freud’s Repräsentanz) represented by another signifier (the S2 Repräsentanz—really, Freud’s Vorstellung).
This becomes even clearer a few years later. Jacques-Alain Miller entitles the opening subsection of the session from June 3, 1964, of Lacan’s deservedly celebrated eleventh seminar “The Question of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.” Lacan gets his lecture underway by again stressing the importance of this term in Freud’s discourse.43 He ties it to the Freudian metapsychological account of repression, including this account’s purported denial and dismissal of the possibility of affects being rendered unconscious.44 Moreover, auditors are reminded of the correct Lacanian translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: not “the representative representation (le représentant représentatif)”45 but instead “the representative (le représentant)—I translated literally—of the representation (de la représentation).”46 Or, as he quickly proceeds to formulate it, “The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the representative representative (le représentant représentatif), let us say.”47
Lacan’s point, here and elsewhere,48 is that a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is not the psychoanalytic name for a single, special piece of ideational content in the psychical apparatus. It isn’t as though a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is one individual item of representational material. Rather, according to Lacan, it designates the co-determining rapport between two (or more) ideational representations wherein one representation (the repressed S1) is represented by another representation (the nonrepressed S2, different from, but associationally linked in a chain with, the repressed S1).49 In this vein, he goes on to claim, “The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier”50 (and this in the context of elaborations concerning the now-famous Lacanian conception of “alienation,” elaborations too elaborate to deal with at the moment). In the next session, this is restated: “this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz … is … the signifying S2 of the dyad.”51 A few years later, in the fifteenth seminar, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, as the “representative of representation” (représentant de
la représentation), is similarly linked to the notion of a “combinatorial” (combinatoire).52 In the sixteenth seminar, he warns against equivocating between the terms “representative” (représentant) and “representation” (représentation).53 These terms are distinct from one another insofar as representation is a function coming into operation between two or more representatives. (In terms of the psychoanalytic Vorstellungsrepräsentanz involved with repression, this interval is the connection between, on the one hand, the repressed S1 Repräsentanz and, on the other hand, the nonrepressed S2 Vorstellung as both that which contributes to triggering retroactively the repression of the S1 Repräsentanz and, at the same time, the associative or signifying return of this same repressed.) Hence, the function of representation isn’t reducible to one given representative as an isolated, self-defined atomic unit constituting a single element of discrete content lodged within the psychical apparatus.54
What Lacan means when he claims that the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, accurately translated and understood, is the “representative of the representation” is the following:55 In the aftermath of repression constituting the unconscious in the strict psychoanalytic sense (with the unconscious being the proper object of psychoanalysis as a discipline), certain repressed signifiers (remembering that, for Lacan, only ideas or representations qua signifiers can be subjected to the fate of repression) are represented by other, nonrepressed signifiers associated in various ways with those that are repressed. In the restricted, circumscribed domains of self-consciousness and the ego, the Lacanian “subject of the unconscious” manages to make itself heard and felt (or, perhaps, misheard and misfelt) through the S1-S2 signifying chains that Lacan equates with Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, with these chains bearing witness to significant “effects of truth” (effets de vérité)56 having to do with the repressed. (This also helps to explain why Lacan maintains that “repression and the return of the repressed are the same thing.”)57 These claims about the place of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen in the vicissitudes of repression are reiterated in subsequent seminars after 1964 too.58
What, if anything, is problematic in Lacan’s glosses on Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz? Arguably, difficulties arise as soon as Lacan (again in the June 3 session of the eleventh seminar) proceeds further to flesh out the sense in which he uses the word “representation” with respect to Freudian metapsychology:
We mean by representatives what we understand when we use the phrase, for example, the representative of France. What do diplomats do when they address one another? They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene. When diplomats are addressing one another, they are supposed to represent something whose signification, while constantly changing, is, beyond their own persons, France, Britain, etc. In the very exchange of views, each must record only what the other transmits in his pure function as signifier, he must not take into account what the other is, qua presence, as a man who is likable to a greater or lesser degree. Inter-psychology is an impurity in this exchange.59
He continues: “The term Repräsentanz is to be taken in this sense. The signifier has to be understood in this way, it is at the opposite pole from signification. Signification, on the other hand, comes into play in the Vorstellung.”60
There are (at least) two ways to read this invocation of the figure of the diplomat: one, so to speak, more diplomatic (i.e., charitable) than the other. The less charitable reading, for which there is support here and elsewhere in Lacan’s oeuvre, is that Lacan completely neglects the fact that, according to Freud, the repressed portions of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz configurations or constellations are not “pure” (à la the “pure function as signifier”) qua functionally independent of affective and libidinal investments. In fact, for Freud and much of psychoanalysis after him, intrapsychical defense mechanisms, repression included, are motivated and driven by the recurrently pressing demands of affect-regulation within the psychical apparatus (primarily fending off and tamping down unpleasurable negative affects). Additionally, for Freud in particular, the repressed drive representatives (Triebrepräsentanzen) constituting the nuclei of the unconscious are saturated with cathexes (Besetzungen), with the potent “energies” of emotions and impulses. Such electrified representatives, laden and twitching with turbulent passions, are anything but bloodless diplomatic functionaries, cool, calm, and collected representatives (Repräsentanzen) able to conduct negotiations with other representatives (Vorstellungen) in a reasonable, sober-minded manner.
The more charitable reading of Lacan’s invocation in 1964 of the figure of the diplomat in specifying the meaning of “representative” at work in Freudian psychoanalysis involves further elucidating what lies behind this figure. Lacan is sensible enough to realize that the flesh-and-blood human beings charged with the status of being diplomatic representatives are, as all too human, influenced by their particular interests, motives, reactions, tastes, and the like (i.e., their peculiar “psychologies”). And yet, as diplomatic representatives, they can and do conduct their business with others in ways that put to the side and disregard these idiosyncrasies of theirs as irrelevant to the matters at stake in their negotiations. But, the states these representatives represent frequently are far from being as dispassionate as their diplomats. In 1915, Freud, responding to the outbreak of the First World War, is quick to note, with a sigh of discouragement he proceeds to analyze, just how emotionally discombobulated and irrationally stirred up whole countries can become, even the most “civilized” of nations;61 the essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is from the same period as the papers on metapsychology upon which Lacan relies in his downplaying of the importance of affect in psychoanalysis. And, to render Lacan’s reading of Freud’s metapsychology of affect even more suspect, Freud’s war-inspired reflections emphasize the top-to-bottom dominance of affects in the mental life of humanity, in relation to which the intellect is quite frail and feeble.62
Considering this fact about the relation between diplomats and the nation-states they represent, a sympathetic and productive way to read Lacan here (in the eleventh seminar) is to interpret the processes unfolding at the level of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen (qua representational or signifying materials) as set in motion by something other than such Symbolic “stuff.” Starting in the seventh seminar, the Lacanian register of the Real consistently plays the part of that which drives the kinetic concatenations of signifiers without itself being reducible to or delineable within the order of the signifier. However, once set in motion, these representational or signifying materials help shape subsequent psychical-subjective trajectories in fashions not entirely determined by their originary non-Symbolic catalysts (just as diplomats are dispatched at the behest of their country’s whims, although, once caught up in the intricacies of negotiations, these representatives can and do contribute an effective influence of their own on events). As regards a metapsychology of affective life, this would mean that fusions of energy and structure (i.e., Repräsentanzen, as analogous to nation-states qua combinations of collective will, with all its passions and sentiments, and sociosymbolic edifices) mobilize and push along signifier-like representational networks (i.e., Vorstellungen, as analogous to diplomatic representatives of nation-states licensed to speak on their behalf), with these networks taking on a relative autonomy of their own that comes to exercise a reciprocal, countervailing influence over that which propels them forward (or, sometimes, drags them backward).63
Fink rightly observes that the concept of representation in Freudian-Lacanian theory is very much in need of further clarification.64 As I will argue at regular intervals in what follows, such much-needed clarifications lead to revisions of or deviations from Lacan’s signifier-centered version of Freud’s metapsychology of affect and repression. But, in the meantime, certain things should be articulated apropos Lacan’s more nuanced pronouncements concerning affective life, pron
ouncements located in the tenth and seventeenth seminars in particular. The first session of the tenth seminar, a seminar devoted to the topic of anxiety, closes with Lacan rapidly enumerating a series of points bearing upon the psychoanalysis of affects. (Considering that this seminar’s treatment of anxiety has been gone over at length by others, my focus will be highly selective and partial.) To begin with, here and in the next session, Lacan insists that anxiety is indeed an affect.65 Few people, whether analysts or not, would disagree with this seemingly banal observation. But, Lacan proceeds to clarify his relationship to affect as a psychoanalytic thinker: “Those who follow the movements of affinity or of aversion of my discourse, frequently letting themselves be taken in by appearances, undoubtedly think that I am less interested in affects than in anything else. This is absurd. I have tried on occasion to say what affect is not. It is not being [l’être] given in its immediacy, nor is it the subject in some brute, raw form. It is not, in any case, protopathic. My occasional remarks on affect mean nothing other than this.”66 He adds: “what I have said of affect is that it is not repressed. Freud says this just like me. It is unfastened [désarrimé]; it goes with the drift. One finds it displaced, mad, inverted, metabolized, but it is not repressed. What are repressed are the signifiers that moor it.”67
Lacan’s comments betray a palpable awareness of charges indicting him for negligence with respect to affects, accusations with damning force in many clinical psychoanalytic circles. (Several years later, starting in the late 1960s, various so-called poststructuralists in France, including many nonclinicians, started to noisily repeat this long-standing refrain of complaint about Lacanian theory, which continues today.) At the very start of the tenth seminar, he lays the foundations for what becomes a repeated line of defensive self-exculpation: I, Lacan, devoted a whole year of my seminar to the topic of anxiety; therefore, I am not guilty of neglecting affect, as I’m so often accused of doing.68 Of course, critics might be tempted to respond by pointing out that one academic year out of twenty-seven (not even including the mountain of other texts) isn’t all that much time for a psychoanalyst to spend addressing affects. (Even if the titles of Lacan’s seminars indicate that, for instance, the analytically crucial topic of transference too is the focus of only one academic year, this is misleading; to stick with this example, transference, unlike affect, is repeatedly treated at length by Lacan across the full span of his teachings.) Lacan himself admits that his “remarks on affect” are “occasional.” What’s more, as he goes on to say in the closing moments of this inaugural session of the tenth seminar, he has no plans to elaborate a “general theory of affects” (at least not prior to an exploration of anxiety as one specific affect of momentous significance for psychoanalysis), an elaboration derided as a nonpsychoanalytic endeavor for mere psychologists.69
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