The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years-- and the term "sublime" is to be conceived here in the strictest Kantian sense-- was undoubtedly the unique picture from the time of the violent overthrow of Ceauşsescu in Romania: the rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its center. It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the"open" character of a historical situation"in its becoming," as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one. The sublime enthusiasm this picture bears witness to is in no way affected by the fact that we now know how the events were actually manipulated (ultimately it had to do with a coup of Securitate, the Communist secret police, against itself, against its own signifier; that is, the old apparatus survived by casting off its symbolic clothing): for us as well as for most of the participants themselves, all this became visible in retrospect, and what really matters is that the masses who poured into the streets of Bucharest "experienced" the situation as "open," that they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project; all ideological appropriations (from the nationalistic to the liberal-democratic) entered the stage afterwards and endeavored to"kidnap" the process which originally was not their own. At this point, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the masses and the attitude of a critical intellectual overlap for a brief moment. And the duty of the critical intellectual-- if, in today's"postmodern" universe, this syntagm has any meaning left-- is precisely to occupy all the time, even when the new order (the"new harmony") stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as such, the place of this hole, i.e., to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier. In this precise sense, Lacan points out that, in the passage from one discourse (social link) to another, the"discourse of the analyst" always emerges for a brief moment: the aim of this discourse is precisely to"produce" the Master-Signifier, that is to say, to render visible its "produced," artificial, contingent character. [1]
This maintaining of a distance with regard to the Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy. It is no accident that Lacan, in his Seminar on Transference, refers to Socrates,"the first philosopher," as the paradigm of the analyst: in Plato's Symposium, Socrates refuses to be identified with agalma, the hidden treasure in himself, with the unknown ingredient responsible for the Master's charisma, and persists in the void filled out by agalma. [2] It is against this background that we have to locate the "amazement" that marks the origins of philosophy: philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!", etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this"step back" from actuality into possibility-- the attitude best rendered by Adorno's and Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson:"Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists." [3] Nothing is more antiphilosophical than the well-known anecdote about Diogenes the cynic who, when confronted with the Eleatic proofs of the nonexistence and inherent impossibility of movement, answered by simply standing up and taking a walk. (As Hegel points out, the standard version of this anecdote passes over in silence its denouement: Diogenes soundly thrashed his pupil who applauded the Master's gesture, punishing him for accepting the reference to a pretheoretical factum brutum as a proof.) Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental"conditions of possibility"-- theory as such, by definition, requires the suspension of the Master-Signifier.
[1] There is also an opposite way to undermine the domination of a Master-Signifier. Monuments are usually "phallic": towers, spires, something that protrudes and "stands out." For that reason, the monument at the university campus in Mexico City is unique: a large jagged ring of concrete encircles the formless black undulating surface of lava. What we have here is a true monument to the Thing, to coagulated jouissance, substance of enjoyment -- the reverse of the hole in the flag which sets in motion our sublime enthusiasm. Insofar as what we perceive through the hole in the flag is the empty sky, we might say that the relationship between the hole in the flag and the coagulated lava points toward the Heideggerian antagonism of Earth and Sky. [2] See chapter II of Jacques Lacan, Le séninaire, book 8: Le transfert ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991). [3] See Fredric Jameson, "The Existence of Italy," in "Signatures of the Visible" ( New York: Routledge, 1990).
