Summary of text [comment] page 22
[What about today? Let me paint a bold picture.
The French Revolution’s liberation of the empty Bastille compares to the apostle’s discovery of Christ’s empty tomb as infrasovereign compares to suprasovereign religion.
Consider: What did each take from their respective empty space?
The apostles took the news – or suspicion – of the Risen Christ.
The French mob took unguarded armaments.
Christianity lets sovereign power descend from heaven.
The French Revolution seized sovereign power in an uprising.
The relation between the person and the Risen Christ is beyond any symbolic order. In Lacanian terms, the Risen Christ is a buttonhole. Any button that apparently fits the buttonhole yields a symbolic order, then a social construction, that then finds itself slipping from the buttonhole and in need of renewal. There is no solution to Christ. Christ is the solution. Jesus is the object that brings us all into relation. A host of buttons (organizations) can be held by the buttonhole (of Christ’s interpellation).
In contrast, three “organizational objects”, defined the symbolic order in the French Revolution: freedom (from the king), fraternity (of the mob) and equality (of expropriated properties).
But those objects were not enough. Sovereign power was necessary to make the citizens subject to thinkpro-object. The armaments in the Bastille were needed to bring down the king, the nobles, the priests, the shop-keepers … okay … anyone who the mob did not like. Guns were needed to achieve “equality”. To resist was to “be against freedom, fraternity and equality”. To resist was to thinkroyal_noble_churchy_greedy. To resist was to be declared thinkbourgouise. Even if you just happened to be in the wrong place, you could get branded, with decapitating consequences.
Oh, if you think that belongs to history and not to 2013, see Ann Coulter’s well-researched book Mugged.]