From Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006), pp. 253-4:
What happens to objet a when we pass to the other side of modernity, from capitalist dynamics to modern state power? Jean-Claude Milner has attempted to elaborate on this; his starting point is that democracy is based on a short circuit between majority and the All: the winner takes all, has all the power, even if his majority is merely a couple of hundred votes among millions, as was the case in the 2000 US elections in Florida: "the majority counts as all." In The History of the VKP(b), the Stalinist bible, there is a unique paradox when Stalin (who ghost-wrote the book) describes the outcome of the voting at a Party congress in the late 1920's: "With a large majority, the delegates unanimously approved the resolution proposed by the Central Committee--if the vote was unanimous, where did the minority disappear to? Far from betraying some perverse "totalitarian" twist, this identification is constitutive of democracy as such.
This paradoxical status of the minority as "something that counts as nothing" enables us to discern in what precise sense the demos to which democracy refers "incessantly oscillates between the all and the nonall/pastout": "either the language of the limited Alls encounters a figure of the unlimited, or the unlimited encounters a figure of limit." That is to say, a structural ambiguity is inscribed in the very notion of demos: it designates either the non-All of an unlimited set (everyone is included in it, there are no exceptions, just an inconsistent multitude) or the One of the People which has to be delimited from its enemies. Grosso modo, the predominance of one or the other aspect defines the opposition between American and European democracy: "In the democracy in America, majority exists, but it does not speak (the silent majority) and if it speaks, it becomes a particular form of minority." In the USA, democracy is perceived as the field of the interplay of multiple agents, none of which embodies the All--that is to say, which are all "minoritarian"; in Europe, democracy traditionally referred to the rule of the One-People. However, Milner draws from this an elegant conclusion as to what is going on today: in contrast to the USA, which is predominantly "non-All" as a society--in its economy, culture, ideology--Europe is now going much further toward constituting itself as an unlimited political (non-)All through the process of European unification, in which there is room for everyone regardless of geography or culture, right up to Cyprus and Turkey. Such a unified Europe, however, can constitute itself only on condition of the progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations: consequently, the unified Europe is based on the erasure of history, of historical memory.
Recent phenomena like Holocaust revisionism, the moral equalization of all victims of the Second World War (the Germans suffered under the Allied bombardments no less than the Russians and the English; the fate of the Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war is comparable to that of the victims of the Nazi genocide, and so on), are the logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And--this is what Milner is aiming at all along--this Europe, in its very advocacy of unlimited openness and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the "Jew" as a structural obstacle to this drive toward unlimited unification; today's anti-Semitism, however, is no longer the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus is displaced from the Jews as an ethnic group to the State of Israel: "in the program of the Europe of the twenty-first century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the position that the name 'Jew' occupied in the Europe before the cut of 39-45." In this way, today's anti-Semitism can present itself as an anti-anti-Semitism, full of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual dissolution of all limits, of the fluidization of all traditions, the Jews wanted to build their own clearly delimited Nation-State.
Thus the paradoxes of the non-All provide the coordinates for the vicissitudes of modern anti-Semitism [....]
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