Paolo, Hegel and Lacan: out-law? The dialectic of the law between theology, philosophy and psychoanalysis

This paper examines the essential and ambivalent role of the law in the Pauline Epistles and Hegel's early writings, particularly referring to Lacanian psychoanalysis. It aims at enlightening possible correspondences among these perspectives, showing that the spirit of the law has to be fulfilled and elevated by another law: the law of the Spirit according to Paul, the category of love and destiny according to young Hegel and by the law of desire according to Lacan. In this sense, Pauline Epistles seem to offer a significant paradigm to understand the necessary but not sufficient role of the law in the experience of the Jewish-Christian believer as well as of the subject as such. Also in Hegel's early writings, the initial assumption of the Kantian supremacy of the moral law is replaced by the commandment of love. In fact, in its abstractness and formality, the law cannot free the subject from the burden of guilt, which has to be recognized and condemned but also overcome in a renewed vision of life in its whole. In the same way, Lacan states the absolute need of the law, namely of the language, for the process of subjectivation. Only through the Symbolic order the subject can experience the impossibility of directly satisfying its incestuous wish and can therefore join a sociolinguistic community. However, the symbolic law should not deny or refuse desire but allow its fundamental acknowledgment and development, becoming the law of desire.