Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus is a Latin phrase. It means: “Let there be justice, though the world perish.”
Hegel’s (and Lacan’s, incidentally) point is that it is possible to move ‘beyond Good and Evil’, beyond the horizon of the Law and constitutive guilt, into drive …
Hegel’s implicit thesis is that
diabolical Evil is another name for the Good itself; for the concept ‘in itself’, the two are indistinguishable, the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view of the perceiving subject.
In short ‘diabolical evil’ is simply Kant’s name for what Freud [calls] the death drive.
I become aware of my freedom only through the experience of how, on behalf of the moral law, I am able to withstand the pressure of the pathological motivations which tie me to innerworldly phenomenal causality.
the pure moral act is impossible, of how one can never be sure that one is acting solely out of consideration for duty, is the far more uncanny fact that the moral act, precisely as impossible, is simultaneously unavoidable, that which is in a way impossible to transgress.
it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (in a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness). 230
true evil involves precisely the blurring of distinctions between Good and Evil — that is, the elevation of Evil into a consistent ethical Principle. A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament. … … such an ‘ethical evil’ is the true diabolical Evil, much worse than the evil of simple egotistical baseness: the cleaner you are (the more your motives are selfless-humanitarian), the greater your evil. 234-235