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Slavoj Žižek on Law

“The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of law.  Law functions only insofar as its subjects are fooled, insofar as they experience the authority of law as ‘authentic and eternal’ and do not realize ‘the truth about the usurpation’.  That is why Kant is forced, in his Metaphysics of Morals, to forbid any question concerning the origins of legal power: it is by means of precisely such questioning that the stain of this illegitimate violence appears which always soils, like original sin, the purity of the reign of law.”

Slavoj Žižek, “The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis,” from Psychoanalysis and… (Feldstein and Sussman, eds., Routledge 1990).

See also, Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) (“Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: ‘Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.’ After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.” [This refers to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who was rumored to have been an illegitimate son]) and Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution and Other Essays (“[The British monarchy:] Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants.”) and David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Part II, Essay XII “Of the Original Contract” (1758) (“Yet reason tells us, that there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.”)

Pierre Bourdieu – The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State

Link to an interview with Pierre Bourdieu:

“The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State”

 

Bonus quote:

“Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital . . . ?  In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital . . . .”

Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”