Ten Commandments

The Decalogue is presented as a law whose significance lies not only in the rules it states but in the kind of relation it establishes among law, desire, freedom, and transgression. The book sets it against the fantasy of a society in which moral law and human nature would finally coincide: neither perfect obedience nor the abolition of moral limits offers a workable social order. Its distinctive force, in this account, is that its proclamation does not rely on the hidden, obscene supplement that ordinarily makes public norms function.

Law and Transgression

The Decalogue enters an argument about a tension that cannot simply be resolved by choosing law over desire, or desire over law. The book draws on Saint Paul’s formulation that without law there would be no knowledge of sin, and on Jacques Lacan’s observation that society is possible because people break its commandments. Transgression is therefore not merely an external assault on an otherwise complete law. The possibility of violating a rule belongs to the social field the rule organizes; remove that space altogether, and the relation between law and desire changes in a way that threatens society itself.

The point is not that every violation is harmless or that rules are dispensable. Rather, the book describes actually existing societies as compromises between two dangerous extremes: complete ignorance of moral rules and the complete absence of their violation. A society that realized the latter extreme would leave no room for the transgressive relation through which its norms are lived. In this framework, the Decalogue’s ethical problem cannot be solved by imagining either a world without prohibitions or a world in which prohibition and human nature finally fit without friction.

The book compares this deadlock with the opposed ethical projects associated with Kant and Marquis de Sade. Both, it argues, seek to break with the ordinary dialectic between law and desire: one risks turning law into an absolute source of enjoyment, the other turning enjoyment into a law. These are not stable solutions to the tension. The comparison makes the Decalogue’s setting significant: its rules operate within a social world where violation remains possible, rather than abolishing that possibility through a perfect reconciliation of moral demand and human nature.

The Limits of Moral Perfection

The imagined Kantian ideal of a society in which people overcome radical evil and obey the moral law without experiencing it as painful is no more workable, in the book’s account, than the thoroughly immoral society Marquis de Sade outlines. The difficulty is structural, not simply a matter of people failing to behave well enough. The book insists that radical evil cannot be abolished; a new human nature fully harmonized with ethical demands is therefore not a credible social destination, but a potentially dangerous angelic ideal.

The treatment of nature sharpens this criticism. In the account given here, both Kant and Marquis de Sade invoke nature in ways that are not straightforwardly neutral. Kant’s nature can mean the lawful whole of phenomenal reality, but also a supersensible community ordered toward ethical ends. Marquis de Sade’s nature can mean indifferent matter in ceaseless change, but also appear as a command to pursue destruction. These competing senses disclose an unresolved ambiguity rather than a secure foundation for ethics. In both cases, the appeal to nature risks covering over the abyss of freedom without an ontological guarantee.

That abyss also clarifies why the Decalogue is not described simply as a mechanism for producing obedient subjects. The book’s wider account of freedom emphasizes that a free act can be difficult to assimilate into ordinary experience; it may be experienced as if it were caused by a personal inclination, even when that explanation cannot capture the act’s freedom. A law that demanded effortless harmony between ethical duty and natural inclination would erase precisely the conflict through which ethical choice becomes consequential.

Freedom and the Negative Act

The Decalogue also appears in the discussion of the negative act: the free gesture of stopping an impulse rather than simply carrying it through. The book illustrates this idea through Freud’s reading of Michelangelo’s Moses, who is represented at the instant of restraining the act of breaking the tablets of the Decalogue. The example makes the law present not only as a command to obey, but as the point at which an intended action can be arrested.

In this account, freedom is not just permission to follow one’s inclinations without an external constraint. It can consist in thwarting the spontaneous realization of an impulse, even when doing so is contrary to what the agent immediately wants. The Decalogue’s tablets thus serve as the object around which the act of restraint is imagined: what matters is the interruption, the capacity not to complete a decision already in motion. This negative conception of freedom helps explain why a frictionless society, where moral demands would no longer be experienced as a challenge to egotism, would not simply represent ethical progress.

Proclamation Without an Obscene Supplement

The book gives the Decalogue a further significance in its account of ideology. Public rules are often sustained by an unspoken shadow of hints, prohibitions, and practices that qualify how the stated norms are actually observed. Its example of socialist democracy describes an explicit official ideal accompanied by an unwritten set of instructions about how not to take that ideal literally. A strategy of dissidence could expose this gap by insisting on the declared norm rather than obeying its tacit qualifications.

Against that background, the proclamation of the Decalogue is characterized as unusual: its revolutionary novelty lies not in the content of its rules but in the absence of an accompanying virtual texture of obscene support. A note to the discussion makes the same distinction directly, describing the Decalogue as a law deprived of obscene fantasmatic support. It is therefore not treated as an ordinary case in which an official command conceals the informal practices that enable it to operate. The contrast shifts attention from changing the wording of a law to changing the hidden practices and assumptions that surround it.

The book extends this distinction to explicit social norms accompanied by contrary, tacit practices. In a soldiers’ community, for example, explicit homophobia may coexist with a dense, implicit world of innuendo and obscene practices. Merely repeating the public rule or trying to purify it of every contradiction would miss the underground domain that sustains it. The proposed critical intervention is to transform that implicit domain. The Decalogue matters in this argument as the counterexample: a law whose proclamation, as the book understands it, is not propped up by such an obscene supplement.

Social and Ethical Significance

Taken together, these arguments place the Decalogue between two inadequate ideals: a society with no moral rules and a society in which rules have become indistinguishable from human nature. The first loses the normative structure through which social life is organized; the second imagines away the conflict, freedom, and possibility of transgression that the book treats as inescapable. The Decalogue’s ethical significance is consequently not reducible to a checklist of commands or to the promise of a perfectly obedient community.

Its place in the book’s argument is also deliberately double. The commandments belong to a law whose violations help make society possible, yet their proclamation is presented as novel because it lacks the covert support typical of ideological norms. The law’s force and the conditions under which it operates are not identical: a stated rule may coexist with tacit exceptions, while the Decalogue is invoked as an instance that breaks with that usual arrangement. This tension makes it a point of reference for thinking about how freedom, social norms, and the hidden practices supporting public authority fit together without being reconciled into a seamless order.