Metaleptic Substitution

Metaleptic Substitution names the narrative-rhetorical operation by which one figure is suspended and replaced by another in an ongoing chain of figurative displacements — a process that never arrives at a stable literal ground but instead keeps substituting one tropological stand-in for the next. In the context of Capital as read by Kornbluh, this operation is not merely a stylistic ornament but a structural analogue to the logic of capital itself: just as capital is a value-form that perpetually displaces and sublates its own embodiments (commodity → money → capital → interest, and so on), so Marx's prose enacts a restless succession of figures, each one "suspending" its predecessor without ever reaching an originary, non-figurative bedrock. The aesthetic form of the text thereby becomes the medium through which the analysis is performed, not merely communicated.

Metalepsis classically names a trope in which a cause is substituted for an effect or a remote sign is substituted for a proximate one, collapsing narrative levels and temporal distances in a single rhetorical gesture. Kornbluh's deployment of "metaleptic substitution" extends this to describe the rhythmic, recursive texture of Capital's narrative: the text loops backward and forward (anticipating the après-coup logic of retroactive signification) while simultaneously replacing each figural position with the next, producing a formal enactment of the very circulation it theorizes. The "suspension" of one figure by another mirrors the way capital suspends the use-value of a commodity in the abstraction of exchange-value — a real abstraction that operates not only in theory but in the very movement of the prose.

This concept appears once, in kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for (p. 129), as part of an argument that Capital's literary form enacts its theoretical content. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonicals. Most directly, it extends the logic of Automaton: just as automaton names the signifying chain's mechanical insistence and return — figures circling without landing on a real encounter — metaleptic substitution names the textual surface of that same compulsion at the level of rhetoric. Each figural substitution is another loop of the automaton, perpetually deferring the tuché (the irreducible real of capital's violence) it commemorates. The concept also articulates with Abstract and Alienation: the succession of figures formally reproduces the movement of real abstraction, in which use-value is suspended for exchange-value and concrete labor is alienated into abstract labor. No single figure is the "concrete" ground; all are abstractions that displace one another.

The concept further resonates with Après-coup: the retroactive loops built into Capital's narrative texture — where later chapters rewrite the meaning of earlier ones — are the temporal analogue of metaleptic substitution's spatial displacement of figures. And it connects to Condensation (though without a full synthesis provided here): as in the dreamwork, multiple figures are compressed and superimposed in the chain of substitutions, concentrating meaning at the junction of the tropes. Finally, Drive (Trieb) is the underlying motor: the limitless, objectless circulation of the drive is what metaleptic substitution formally mimes — each figure is abandoned for the next not because a goal is reached but because the movement itself is the point, just as drive circles its object without ever attaining it. Metaleptic substitution is thus simultaneously a rhetorical concept, a formal-aesthetic diagnosis, and an index of capital's — and the drive's — structural restlessness.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (p.129)

The dynamism of this imagery finds its narrative analogue in the rhythmic shifts of the narrative that perform metalepsis, the suspension of one figure by another, the succession of figurative substitutions.

The phrase "suspension of one figure by another" is theoretically loaded because it captures a non-dialectical displacement: unlike sublation (Aufhebung), which preserves and elevates what it cancels, "suspension" implies a temporary holding-in-abeyance that is immediately overwritten by "succession" — the chain keeps moving without synthesis. The word "rhythmic" is equally important: it aligns the textual operation with the automaton's mechanical, cyclical return, suggesting that the prose's formal pulsation is itself a mode of enacting capital's drive-like circulation rather than merely describing it.