Janez Janša and Beyond
synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism, from Antiquity, it took slavery, from feudalism, it took relations of domination, from capitalism, it took exploitation, and from socialism, it took the name…” Does not the same hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation, from capitalists, it took exploitation, from lawyers, it took legal trickery, from corrupt journalists, it took media manipulation, from the poor, it took indifference towards washing one’s body, from sexual libertines it took promiscuity, and from the Jews it took the name. Or take the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws: from the foreign immigrants, it took the threat to small-town daily life, from natural catastrophes, it took their blind destructive rage, from big capital, it took the ravaging effects of an unknown cause on the daily lives of ordinary people, and from the shark it took its image. In all these cases, the “signifier falls into the signified” in the precise sense that the name is included in the object it designates – the signifier has to intervene into the signified to enact the unity of meaning. What united a multitude of features-properties into a single object is ultimately its name. (In a strictly homologous way, for Badiou, an Event includes its name in its definition.) This is why every name is ultimately tautological: a “rose” designates an object with a series of properties, but what holds all these properties together, what makes them the properties of the same One, is ultimately the name itself. Imagine a confused situation of social disintegration in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which again stabilizes the situation and makes it readable. The university discourse which then elaborates the network of Knowledge which sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content – he merely adds a signifier which all of a sudden turns disorder into order, into “new harmony,” as Rimbaud 114