Another example from cinema history is provided by one of its great mysteries: the sudden eclipse of the Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer lies in the fact that, at the same moment, space opera emerged as a genre―so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of the Western in the late 1950s. The dialectical point here is that the Western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre “adventure.” Rather, we should shift the perspective and start only with the Western―in the course of its development, the Western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to “reinvent” itself as space opera ―space opera is thus structurally a subspecies of the Western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction is a subspecies of documentary.
A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. 363
Every species contains a subspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is “a Western at the level of its notion” and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which generates another species as its own subspecies, and
true (“concrete”) universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species. 364
This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples ― since no single example really fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples.
A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example.
Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma’s injection, etc.), each time providing a new interpretation? The materialist example is thus a universal Singular: a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations.l