In the previous chapter I investigated the ways in which speech and silence correspond to other polarities which can be seen to structure the Hippolytos and to produce its dense and complex verbal texture. In this chapter I elaborate a tension between speech and silence in the play's discourse on the nature and effects of desire. Some of the most significant theoretical work of this century has been the construction of a theory of desire; I refer of course to Freud, whose writings established the centrality of desire in a theory of the development and structure of the individual subject. Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, argues that accession to desire (through the successful negotiation of the Oedipal crisis) and accession to language are linked parts of that submission to the ‘symbolic order’ that is necessary for the formation of the individual. Here the ‘symbolic order’ is understood as the societal demands and expectations that antedate the subject and determine the subject's existence: ‘even before his birth, the individual is caught up in and completely assimilated into a causal chain of which he can never be any more than an effect’ (Lemaire 1977: 182). The work of Girard is also in large part a theory of desire, specifically of the mimesis of desire that leads to violence. Such violence finds its simultaneous repression and expression in various cultural forms and representations (see further chapter 3). Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse (1978), submitted the workings of desire to a semiotic analysis such as he had already deployed to investigate fashion, cookery and other apparently ‘natural’ practices.