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4:37

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

Thanks to the arrival of the law, the Fall of Man gets a clear narrative, the temporal and therefore supremely human Fall from grace is the absolutely worst imaginable crime against the eternal and therefore divine law. So where is God and wherein lies God’s essence, if not in the will to administer justice and enforce submission by means of the law? The law has proven such a powerful metaphor that even after Nietzsche announces the death of God in the late 19th century, physics continues its manic search for God’s law in nature, as if the law as God was still very much alive. The explanation for this is that the preordained and compelling law has exercised its magic on humans so extensively and for so long that humans can only imagine a Universe without the law’s existence with the greatest difficulty. Enjoyment without pleasure drives the determinist world view. Note that this process continues without human law being able to have any equivalent in nature whatsoever. In spite of everything of course, human law functions because the receivers of the decrees, the people, listen to and understand the recited text and shape and calculate their own behaviour based on the current set of rules. People can either allow themselves to be frightened into obeying the decree, integrate it into what Sigmund Freud calls the superego, or allow themselves to be tempted into enjoyment occasioned by a transgression of the decree – to surrender to the libidinal transgression. In any case, it is man’s ability to engage in and become obsessed with the law that makes him its object.