Society wants that cops are perfect instruments of the law. All their conduct gets taken as inherently necessary. Yet the resentment that drives one to be a police officer on one hand, and the enjoyment that they get in being the perverse instruments of law on the other, mean that their conduct is excessive and will continually aim to transgress the boundaries of the very formal law they’re supposed to be applying. To be the law is a matter of breaking rules of conduct in plain view of a camera and getting away with it.
The resentment that drives them to be cops in the first place means they cannot escape the desire for violence in addressing society. They become instruments of a law, but that law is the one that moves in excess of what is formalized.
The law they obey above what is formal is the aw of power and might makes right. Whoever “earns” or defeats society in claiming this position has free rein within the boundaries of its necessary violence. They become driven to beat and violate those they target.
The law itself, even as formal, needs such administration. There is no law that can function outside human relations and against it. It is administered by sexually-charged humans.
To be human and instrument at once is to find pleasure in such a thing, and that pleasure always becomes excessive. A formal law apart from humans could keep itself in rigid administration, if not for the human agents, who can only be contained by the reward of surplus enjoyment.
There is no administration of law without that surplus, and so that surplus is the law. The law is in power’s narcissistic pleasure of itself, that paradoxically controls and outlaws polymorphous, auto-erotic pleasure from the human field of desire and experience.
Power becomes the only thing that can enjoy itself in this auto-erotic manner, against humans, but also only through them. Any human agent that would administer it can not bear to be an empty shell with no will.
For humans to become law, there must be excess pleasure in the facilitation of law. A cop will not become a cop unless declaring victory against the public in the game of law allows them to maim and mutilate.
And all law does this, on behalf of its officers, and for the ruling class that owns the means of production, which in turn purchase escape from the law.
People are willing to become instruments as cops or fascists because a system lets the redirect resentments to the space of excess in meting out law. There is no society on earth that could do otherwise with such forms of state and bureaucracy.
Power is auto-erotic. It is a force against us, that moves through us. It conditions classes of people who aim for the pleasure of being unrestrained, by either law or the social symbolic field. That comes only in mastering a law that they will simultaneously disavow and enforce.
No different from a cop is Peter Thiel, or the low-level fascist on this site. All of these types find social meaning in controlling the space of desire against others, mastering the law over that desire in the process. That is all that can prevent confrontation with castration.
It allows them the auto-erotic when they fully commit to power, which means never having to obey law other than subjecting others to it. The height of their imagination is to use law and symbolic shared meaning against others, so they are no longer subject to it.
The rules pre-exist all of us, and you can only escape them by enforcing them, but then this is castration admitting to itself unknowingly. It is only castration and its disavowal that can lead one to needing mastery over the law.
The cop needs the law in defense against the social Other, who they fear may escape the parameters of the same social symbolic they can’t see beyond. This mastery is always a repressed desire for unconditional love.
They therefore can’t give up authority, even as authority turns into the evil father. They end up begging for love in this violence, and from the most ferocious force, that can do no better than deferring that love.
They are the cat perpetually dragging in the dead mouse to its owner. All these rules conditioning our perverse kingdom are ultimately the product of reified life in capitalist society. We can make these rules and practices disappear.
To make alienation disappear would be to accept reasonability for social authority, as something shared between us, and not over us.
Alienation of humanity from its labor and from itself conditions a split, that makes power auto-erotic, and renders humans only able to find fulfillment by chasing desire through commodity society’s mazes. Alienation and commodified desire must go.
The state and the police must go, too. Any authority, “socialist” or otherwise, resting above society through alienated means would again center this perversion of social relations as what structures society.
Forces At Work 