Off-shooting ethics onto the state means we never learn to cultivate empathy for suffering

Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is exchanged for more, but ‘legal’ suffering, because these relations are no longer regulated by the “culture of the heart” [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the “legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by legal power.” (CV 238) The individual is not to take law in his own hands; no conflict should be susceptible of being solved without the direct intervention of law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law throughout the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility of forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the ‘right of mercy’. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the others is now delegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal) vengeance exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am no longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presence would demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his otherness is equaled to that of every possible other. The Other becomes faceless, making it all too easy for me to ignore his demands of justice, and even to exert on him violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the state’s survival. Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian institutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self- preserving vengeance. The undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own population.22 From now on, my responsibility towards the Other is taken from me, at the price of my own existence being constantly threatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate offence. In this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state violence – the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.