Law

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 369:

Žižek is concerned to show the secret transgression that underpins and makes possible the symbolic law: '"At the beginning" of law, there is a transgression, a certain reality of violence, which coincides with the very act of the establishment of law' (p. 120). Or, as he will say about the seemingly illicit rituals that appear to overturn the law: 'They are a satire on legal institutions, an inversion of public Power, yet they are a transgression that consolidates what it transgresses' (p. 270). But, beyond this, the law itself possesses a certain obscene, unappeasable, superegoic dimension: 'On the one hand, there is Law qua symbolic Ego-Ideal, that is, Law in its pacifying function ... qua the intermediary Third that dissolves the impasse of imaginary aggressivity. On the other hand, there is law in its superego dimension, that is, law qua "irrational" pressure, the force of culpability, totally incommensurable with our actual responsibility' (p. 146). In other words, law itself is its own transgression, and it is just this circularity that Žižek seeks to dissolve or overcome. As he says, repeating at once the problem and the solution: 'The most appropriate form to indicate this curve of the point de capiton, of the "negation of negation," in ordinary language is, paradoxically, that of the tautology: "law is law"' (p. 119).