All the potential resources of ordinary language are used to create the impression that there exists a necessary link between all signifiers and that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is established solely through the mediation of the system of philosophical concepts, ‘technical’ words which are ennobled forms of ordinary words (Entdeckung, discovery or uncovering, Entdeckheit, discoveredness or uncoveredness), traditional notions (Dasein, a word used in common by Heidegger, Jaspers and some others) which are used in a way that implies a slight discrepancy, destined to mark an allegorical deviation (ontological, metaphysical, etc.), neologisms recast to constitute purportedly unpremeditated distinctions or at least to produce an impression of radical overcoming (existentiel and existential; zeitlich, timely, and temporal, temporal - an opposition which moreover plays no effective role in Being and Time).
The imposition of form produces the illusion of systematicity and, by virtue of this and the break between specialized and ordinary language which it brings about, it produces the illusion of the
autonomy of the system. By being inserted into the network of words that are both morphologically similar and etymologically related, and being woven thereby into the tissue of the Heideggerian vocabulary, the word Fursorge (solicitude) is divested of its primary meaning, which is unambiguously conveyed in the expression SoziaF fursorge (social welfare). Once transformed and transfigured in this way, the word loses its social identity and its ordinary meaning in order to assume a distorted meaning (which might be rendered more or less by the word ‘procuration’, taken in its etymological sense). Thus the social phantasm of (social) assistance, symbolic of the 'welfare state’ or the 'insurance state’ denounced by Carl Schmitt or Ernst Junger in a less euphemized language, can manifest itself in legitimate discourse (Sorge and Fursorge are central to the theory of temporality), but in a form such that it does not appear to be there, such that effectively it is not there.
It is the incorporation of a word into the system of philosophical language that brings about the negation of its primary meaning, that is the meaning which the tabooed word assumes with reference to the system of ordinary language and which, although officially banished from the overt system, continues to lead a clandestine existence. This negation is the source of the duplicity authorized by the dual message registered in each element of discourse, always defined by belonging simultaneously to two systems, the overt system of the philosophical idiolect and the latent system of ordinary language.
If one wishes to prise the expressive interest away from the unsayable and the unnameable, and subject it to the transformation necessary for it to accede to the order of what is sayable in a given field, then one must do more than simply substitute one word for another, an acceptable one for a censored one. This elementary form of cuphemization hides another much more subtle one which uses the essential property of language - the primacy of relations over elements, of form over substance, according to (he opposition established by Saussure - to conceal the repressed elements by integrating them into a network of relations which modify their value without modifying their 'substance'.6 It is only in the case of specialized languages, produced by specialists with an explicitly systematizing intention, that the effect of concealment through the imposition of form is fully exercised. In this case, as in all cases of camouflage through form and in all due form, as it is analysed by Gestalttheorie, the tabooed meanings, though recognizable in theory, remain misrecognized in practice; though present as subst*
ance they are absent as form, like a face hidden in the bush. The role of this kind of expression is to mask the primitive experiences of the social world and the social phantasms which are its source, as much as to reveal them; to allow them to speak, while using a mode of expression which suggests that they are not being said. These specialized languages can articulate such experience only in forms of expression which render it misrecognizable, because the specialist is unable to recognize the fact that he is articulating it. Subject to the tacit or explicit norms of a particular field, the primitive substance is. as it were, dissolved in the form; through the imposition of form and the observance of formalities it becomes form. This imposition of form is both a transformation and a transubstantiation: the substance signified is the signifying form in which it is realized.
