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Law
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Zižek 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. 129). 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. 264).
But, beyond this, the law itself possesses a certain obscene, unap-
peasable, 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 aggressiv-
ity. On the other hand, there is law in its superego dimension, that is,
law qua "irrational" pressure, the force of culpability, totally incom-
mensurable with our actual responsibility' (p. 157). 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. 127).
==def==
In Lacan’s theory of childhood development, the traumatic moment of entry into the symbolic is not simply a spontaneous act on the part of the infant. It is also the originary advent of the law as an effect of the father’s interdiction. In the infant’s experience of his mother’s body as a site of enjoyment (producing warmth, food, comfort, etc.), he or she perceives this enjoyment as an integral part of the order of things as they are ambiguously organised through imaginary identifications. At some point, however, the infant becomes aware of the fact that the father has some degree of precedence over the infant’s right to enjoy the mother. Classically termed the Oedipus complex, this moment is part and parcel of the infant’s entry into the symbolic order, as this apprehension of the father’s precedence is conveyed as an originary verbal prohibition of access to the mother’s body which forces the infant to devise a compensatory presence, the symbol of the absent mother (the "da!" of the Freudian fort/da binary). This inaugural paternal interdiction is thus essential to the symbolic order and makes of it the very fibre of the law itself:
