Metalepsis

Metalepsis, as deployed across Kornbluh's Realizing Capital, is a rhetorical-logical operation designating the substitution of one figure (or trope) for another with which it is closely related — most characteristically, the substitution of effect for cause, or of a derived, constructed figure for the originary structural condition it conceals. Borrowing from classical rhetoric (Quintilian), Genette's narratology, and Bloom's theory of reading, Kornbluh mobilizes metalepsis as the master-trope of a double ideological movement: Victorian financial discourse performed metalepsis by transposing the structural contradictions of fictitious capital onto the psychological interiority of the investor-subject, such that panics and crises — which were effects of capital's figurative, self-positing structure — came to appear as causes arising from individual libidinal excess. Metalepsis thus names the rhetorical engine of ideology in the specific domain of political economy: it produces a groundless "ground," constructing psychological causality out of what is in fact an effect of structural-economic forces.

The concept carries a further, and positive, critical valence in Kornbluh's reading of Marx and Freud. Both Capital and Freud's metapsychology enact metalepsis in a different key: they formally perform the leap-structure of capital and drive — the substitution of one figure (commodity) for another (gold, as figure of abstract value) — not in order to naturalize this operation but to expose its groundlessness and irreducibly figurative character. This "critical metalepsis" parallels the structure of drive (which circles its object without grounding itself in biological aim) and constitutes, for Kornbluh, the point at which literary-rhetorical analysis and structural critique converge: in naming the trope, Marx and Freud defamiliarize what ideology presents as natural ground.

Metalepsis appears exclusively in Kornbluh's Realizing Capital (source slug: kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for) and functions as the book's central rhetorical-analytical hinge. It bridges the cross-referenced canonical concepts in the following ways. As an operation of Ideology, metalepsis is the specific trope through which ideology in the domain of political economy works: it sutures antagonism by replacing structural cause (fictitious capital, the groundlessness of finance) with psychological effect (the investor-subject's desires and fears), thereby naturalizing capital's instabilities as expressions of interiority. This aligns with the Lacanian-ideological insight that ideology is not false consciousness but a structural operation — here carried out at the level of figuration itself. In relation to Fictitious Capital, metalepsis is the formal mechanism that both produces and occludes it: fictitious capital is itself an irreducibly figurative, metaleptic operation (the future posited as present, effect before cause), and Victorian psychologism performed a second-order metalepsis to suppress this insight. In relation to Psychic Economy, metalepsis names the founding trope by which "economy" migrated from structural description to psychological ground — a migration the novel and Marxian critique resist by exposing it as constructed rather than given. Finally, in relation to Metaphor (in the Lacanian sense), metalepsis is a species of substitutive operation: where Lacanian metaphor produces a new signified through the crossing of the bar (a creative spark), metalepsis in Kornbluh's usage produces ideological mystification — or, in Marx's and Freud's critical hands, its exposure. Metalepsis is thus both a symptom of the ideological work performed by Victorian discourse and a name for the rhetorical-formal method capable of diagnosing that work.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (page unknown)

In describing this logical maneuver as a trope and specifically naming that trope 'metalepsis,' I draw upon a tradition of thought first introduced by the rhetorician Quintilian and more recently associated with Gérard Genette's narratology and Harold Bloom's theory of reading.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it anchors metalepsis simultaneously in classical rhetoric (Quintilian), structuralist narratology (Genette), and post-structuralist reading theory (Bloom), explicitly framing the concept as a transhistorical trope of substitution rather than a local stylistic device — this triple lineage licenses Kornbluh's move to apply metalepsis as a structural-critical category across Victorian political economy, Marx, and Freud, rather than treating it as merely a figure of speech. The phrase "logical maneuver as a trope" is especially loaded: it collapses the distinction between formal rhetoric and ideological-logical operations, which is the methodological core of Kornbluh's "financial formalism."

This is a 9-occurrence concept; the corpus extractions did not surface a curated illustrative example. See the source page(s) above for the surrounding argument and the cross-referenced canonical concepts for their cited examples.

This is a 9-occurrence concept; intra-corpus tensions and cross-framework comparative analysis are reserved for canonical-level coverage. See the cross-referenced canonical concepts for those layers.