The Big Other, or, Protecting Appearances in the Public Sphere

Abstract

Through examples such as Antigone, Sygne de Coûfontaine, Abraham, the Wobblies song Joe Hill, the political situation in the 1970s in Portugal, the film Brief Encounter, and many other anecdotes and historical coincidences, the article presents a thesis on the big Other, which is not merely an anonymous symbolic field but at the same time an instance necessarily represented by a random individual in a certain situation. In the subject’s relation to the big Other, we are effectively dealing with the closed loop best rendered by Escher’s famous image of two hands drawing each other. The big Other is a virtual order which exists only through subjects “believing” in it; however, if the subject suspends the big Other, the subject itself, its “reality”, disappears.