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One should bear in [[mind ]] [[Lacan]]'s lesson here: accepting [[guilt ]] is a manoeuvre which delivers us of [[anxiety]], and its [[presence ]] signals that the [[subject ]] compromised his [[desire]]. So when, in a move described by [[Kierkegaard]], one withdraws from the dizziness of [[freedom ]] by seeking a firm support in the [[order ]] of [[finitude]], this [[withdrawal ]] itself is the [[true ]] Fall. More precisely, this withdrawal is the very withdrawal into the constraints of the externally-imposed prohibitory Law, so that the freedom which then arises is the freedom to violate the Law, the freedom caught into the [[vicious cycle ]] of Law and its [[transgression]], where Law engenders the desire to "free oneself" by way of violating it, and "sin" is the temptation inherent to the Law-the ambiguity of attraction and repulsion which characterizes anxiety is now exerted not directly by freedom but by sin. The [[dialectic ]] of Law and its transgression does not reside only in the fact that Law itself solicits its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not "[[natural]]," spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the ([[repression ]] of the) desire to [[transgress ]] it. When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we OBEY the Law, the more we bear [[witness ]] to the fact that, deep in ourselves, we fell the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin. The [[superego ]] [[feeling ]] of guilt is therefore [[right]]: the more we obey the Law, the more we are [[guilty]], because this obedience effectively IS a [[defense ]] against our sinful desire.

* [[Anxiety: Kierkegaard with Lacan]]. ''[[Lacanian ]] Ink''. Volume 26, Fall. pp 102-117. <http://www.lacan.com/frameXXVI5.htm>