The so-called “French invasion” of 1966 that took place in Baltimore at John Hopkins University Humanities Center was comprised of an array of French thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, René Girard and Jacques Lacan. The event was a conference on post-structuralism, “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”. Lacan’s contribution was “Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever”.

Overlooking the city in the pre-dawn light as he wrote from a desk in his room at the landmark Belvedere Hotel,¹ noting the movement of traffic and the flashing of neon signs, Lacan caught a glimmer of the subject as he had defined it––evanescent, intermittent, fading. “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning”.²

It was during the same “little talk” that Lacan recounted his encounter with the beau idéal of the American injunction to enjoy, “When I came here this evening I saw on the little neon sign the motto ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola.’”³ Visible to him in the window of a diner or coffee shop, the sign lit my way for the cover of “American Lacan”. I imagined a Coca-Cola-red colored masthead, issue title and surrounding text superimposed on a black-and-white 1960s-era photograph of the sign in situ. I looked online. I contacted the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce, the Coca-Cola Collectors Club and the Coca-Cola Corporation. Unlike Lacan, who found the subject as a lost object, I could not locate, despite considerable effort, my lost object, a contemporaneous image of the infamous sign. I reconceived the cover: the recognizable white “dynamic ribbon” bisecting a Coca-Cola-red field. The ribbon was part of a graphic re-design campaign in 1969, three years after but close enough in spirit to Lacan’s address and still recognizable today. Aware of potential copyright infringement, I submitted my mock-up design to the Coca-Cola legal department. Their response: “The request was denied because the brand team feels it looks like a Coca-Cola publication. We still use the dynamic ribbon device today.”

The managing editor and I discussed using a detail of an art work of mine, “Through the Night That”, a 2012 sculpture that incorporates a U.S. flag that I hand-dyed black––stars and stripes fading, barely legible, vague. But in a later conversation with the editor it was agreed the issue was not a wake for Lacan in America but an awakening to him. Our idea was to use the colors shared by the French and U.S. flags.

The close-up image I took in response––exposing the red/blue divide, stitch and weave, an imminent fraying––is of the military flag that was placed on my grandfather’s coffin in February 1978. I wanted to bring this flag to life, to make use of it.

“If the living being is something at all thinkable, it will be above all as subject of the jouissance.”⁴ Enjoy TLR!

1. Located in Baltimore's fashionable Mount-Vernon-Belvedere-Mount Royal neighborhood at the southeast corner of North Charles Street, facing north on East Charles Street, the Belvedere Hotel was converted into condominiums in 1991. My attempts to identify the room Lacan resided in have yet to meet with success.

2. Jacques Lacan, "Of Structure as the Inmmixing of an Otherness to Any Subject Whatever", https://www.;acan.com/hotel.htm, January 15, 2022

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid

Robert Buck © 2022

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