Žižek in Russia August 21, 2012 Also take a look in Žižek’s Less than Nothing starting on page 295
Here is another link within
Hegel’s Coincidence of the Opposites:
quote from GK Chesterton, from Orthodoxy [Install a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers] Philosophical policmen discover fro a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. Karl Popper, Levinas, Adorno would agree with this. The philosophical notion of totality founds and grounds the notion to political totalitarianism. ž thinks this is crazy. Popper reads a book of Plato’s Dialogues that a Totalitarian crime will be committed in the future.
Chesterton is here almost Hegelian. He sees clearly that an ordinary criminal is much more moral than a radical philosopher. Take a thief and compare him to a radical revolutionary. A thief still respects property. He just wants to change it a little bit, you have it I want to have it. While a philosopher says NO property. A bigamist wants 2 wives and keep family intact. Chesterton is not radical enough. Ordinary crime remains essentially moral, this is the limit of Chesterton. Ordinary crime is essentially moral. What he doesn’t see is that the opposite also holds: Morality is also essentially criminal. And this is what Hegel sees.
When Hegel develops in his Phil of Right. The dialectic of law: legal order and its criminal transgression, he is not only saying that crime is part of the dialectical movement of law, law negated in crime and then the negation of the negation punishment and the rule of law is established. What Hegel clearly implies is that UNIVERSAL law is crime elevated to the ABSOLUTE. That the difference between law and crime is that law is crime in opposition to other crimes, is crime elevated to universality. A nice example of this is Proudhon who said PROPERTY IS THEFT. In our ordinary approach theft violates property, and external negation of property, you have a purse, I take it from you, that is theft. But for Proudhon there is a dimension of theft inscribed into the very core of property as such. Property as such already has a dimension of theft. This reversal from an external negation of a notion, to a notion that is its own violation is a Hegelian move.
From LTN: This is how the Christian “supplement” to the Book should be conceived: as a properly Hegelian “negation of negation,” which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, that is, to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon’s dialectical motto “property is theft”: the “negation of negation” is here the shift from theft as a distortion (“negation,” violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own the means of production; they are by nature inherently collective, so every claim “this is mine” is illegitimate).
It’s not enough to say don’t commit adultery sleep only with your wife. If you sleep with your wife but don’t love her that is worse than adultery. Adultery is just an external negation of marriage. But if you don’t love your wife, you ruin from within the very concept of marriage. This is a much stronger destruction of the very concept of marriage.
It’s not enough to say “don’t steal what belongs to another” Even if you have legally something more needed by others, it is worse than stealing, it is already a crime.
What is the Hegelian radical move is this move from the external negation of a notion (property, marriage) to the imminent negation that is already within the notion itself.
Pussy Riot has the full right to say “What are we as a modest external provocation to the law compared to the extreme provocation which is today’s law and order in Russia.”