If one disposes of enough information, this disintegration of the big Other can be pinned down to a precise point in time and space; Ryszard Kapuscinski did it in an exemplary way apropos of the Iranian revolution of 1979: the “beginning of the end” of the Shah’s regime took place at a certain Teheran crossroad where a common citizen refused to obey a policeman’s order to go away. The news spread like fire and, all of a sudden, people ceased to “believe in the big Other.” What we have here, of course, is a retroactive reconstruction: the event in question cannot be said simply to “be” the “beginning of the end”; it is rather something that, in view of later events, “will have been” it; yet for all that, it is nonetheless the tiny snowball which set in motion the avalanche: