It is this reversal of meaning that we also have in Zizek's other examples of the master-signifier in For They Know Not, which is that book of his where he deals most extensively, as he says, 'on the One' (TK, 7-60). The first is the notorious Dreyfus Affair, which in 1898 saw an innocent Jewish captain of the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, sent to Devil's Island for being part of a plot to overthrow the government of the day. It is an episode that even now has its effects: the separation of Church and State in modern democracies, Socialist collaboration in reformist governments, the birth of both Zionism and right-wing populist political movements. The decisive incident of the whole affair, argues Zizek, did not occur when we might at first think, during that moment when Dreyfus was initially accused and then vigorously defended by the writer Zola, when the facts were weighed up and appeals made to the rule of law. Rather, the turning point came later, when all was seemingly lost for the anti-Dreyfus forces, when the evidence seemed most stacked against them. It was the episode in which the Chief of French Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Henry, who had just been arrested for forging documents implicating Dreyfus, committed suicide in his cell. Of course, to an unbiased observer, this could not but look like an admission of guilt. Nevertheless, it was at this point that the decisive intervention occurred. It was that of the little-known journalist Charles Maurras who, outwitting his better credentialled opponents, argued that this action by Henry was not evidence against the plot in which Dreyfus was implicated but evidence for. That is, looked at in the right way - and here the connection with Hitchcock's notion of the 'gaze' - Henry's forgery and suicide were not an admission of guilt but, on the contrary, the heroic actions of a man who, knowing the judiciary and press were corrupt, made a last desperate attempt to get his message out to the people in a way they could not prevent. As Zizek says of Maurras' masterstroke: 'It looked at things in a way no one had thought or dared to look' (TK, 28) - and, we might even say, what Maurras added, like Hitchcock, is just this look itself; what he makes us see is that Henry's actions were meant for our look and cannot be explained outside of it.
We find the same sudden reversal of meaning - the same turning of defeat into victory - in our next example from For They Know Not. It is that of St Paul, the founder of the Christian Church. How is it, we might ask, that St Paul was able to 'institutionalize' Christianity, give it its 'definitive contours' (TK, 78), when so many others had tried and failed before him? What is it that he did to ensure that Christ's Word endured, would not be lost and in a way could not be lost? As Zizek writes, in a passage that should remind us of what we said in our Introduction about how the messages of our great philosophers cannot be superseded or distorted:
He (St Paul) did not add any new content to the already-existing dogmas - all he did was to re-mark as the greatest triumph, as the fulfilment of Christ's supreme mission (reconciliation of God with mankind), what was before experienced as traumatic loss (the defeat of Christ's mundane mission, his infamous death on the cross) . . . 'Reconciliation' does not convey any kind of miraculous healing of the wound of scission; it consists solely in a reversal of perspective by means of which we perceive how the scission is already in itself reconciliation. To accomplish 'reconciliation' we do not have to 'overcome' the scission, we just have to re-mark it. (TK, 78)
We might say that, if St Paul discovers or institutes the word of Christ here, it is in its properly Symbolic sense. For what he brings about is a situation in which the arguments used against Christ (the failure of His mission, His miserable death on the cross) are now reasons for Him (the sign of His love and sacrifice for us). Again, as opposed to the many competing prophets of the time, who sought to adduce evidence of miracles, and so on, it is no extra dimension that St Paul provides (that in fact Christ succeeded here on earth, proof of the afterlife). Rather, he shows that our very ability to take account of these defeats already implies a kind of miracle, already is a kind of miracle. Defeat here, as understood through the mediation of Christ's love, is precisely not a sign of a victory to come but already a form of victory. St Paul doubles what is through the addition of an empty signifier - Christ's worldly mission - so that henceforth the very lack of success is success, the failure of proof is proof. Through this 're-mark', the very fact that this defeat is seen means that it is intended to be seen, that a lesson or strength is sought to be gained from it. This gaze on to events becomes part of these events themselves. It is what Lacan in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis calls the 'point of view of the Last Judgement' (S7, 294). And in this would lie the 'superiority' of Christianity over both atheism (St Paul) and Jewishness (Maurras). Exactly like the figure of the king for Hegel, through Christ we are able to bring together the highest and the lowest, the Son of God and the poorest and most abject of men (TK, 85). Indeed, this is what Hegel means by dialectical sublation - or this is what allows dialectical sublation - not the gradual coming-together of two things, but a kind of immediate doubling and reversal of a thing into its opposite. Seen from another hitherto excluded perspective, the one already is the other, already is 'reconciled' to the other (although, as we have seen, it is also this that allows us to think their separation, what cannot be taken up or sublated).