[...] totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing and cheating, are conditions of survival.

[...] Perhaps, Nip/Tuck being an American series, this excess can be accounted for in the terms of the difference between Europe and the US. In Europe, the ground floor in a building is counted as 0, so that the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is at street level. In short, Americans start to count with 1, while Europeans know that 1 is already a stand-in for 0. Or, to put it in more historical terms, Europeans are aware that, prior to beginning a count, there has to be a ‘ground’ of tradition, a ground which is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted, while the US, a land with no premodern historical tradition proper, lacks such a ground. Things begin there directly with the self-legislated freedom. The past is erased or transposed onto Europe. [...]

[...] We humans are left with no higher power watching over us, only the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility for the fate of divine creation, and thus for God himself.

The big argument of anti-(death-)penalty advocates is the arrogance of punishing other human beings, or even killing them. What gives us the right to do this? Are we really in a position to judge? The best answer to this is to turn the argument round. What is really arrogant and sinful is to assume the prerogative of mercy. Who among us, ordinary mortals, especially if we are not the culprit’s immediate victim, has the right to erase another’s crime, to treat it with leniency? Only God himself – or, in state terms, the very pinnacle of power, king or president – has, owing to his exceptional position, the prerogative of erasing another’s guilt. Our duty is to act according to the logic of justice and punish crime: not to do so entails the true blasphemy of elevating oneself to the level of God, of acting with his authority.

Second lesson: it is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life. [...] Towards the end of Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive, the innocent persecuted doctor (Harrison Ford) confronts his colleague (Jeroen Krabbé) at a medical convention and accuses him of falsifying medical data on behalf of a large pharmaceutical company. At this precise point, when one would expect a focus on Big Pharma – corporate capital – as the true culprit, Krabbé interrupts and invites Ford to step outside, and then, outside the convention hall, engages Ford in a passionate, violent fight: they beat each other till their faces are red with blood. The scene is telltale in its openly ridiculous character, as if, in order to get out of the ideological mess of playing with anti-capitalism, one has to make a move which renders directly palpable the cracks in the narrative. The bad guy is transformed into a vicious, sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity (which accompanies the dazzling spectacle of the fight) somehow replaces and displaces the anonymous, utterly non-psychological drive of capital.

The same, of course, applies to Nazi Germany, where the spectacle of the brutal annihilation of millions should not deceive us. The characterisation of Hitler which would have him as a bad guy, responsible for the deaths of millions, but none the less a man with balls who pursued his ends with an iron will is not only ethically repulsive, it is also simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ really to change things. All his actions were fundamentally reactions: he acted so that nothing would really change; he acted to prevent the communist threat of a real change. His targeting of the Jews was ultimately an act of displacement in which he avoided the real enemy – the core of capitalist social relations themselves. Hitler staged a spectacle of revolution so that the capitalist order could survive. The irony was that his grand gestures of despising bourgeois self-complacency ultimately enabled this complacency to continue: far from disturbing the much-despised ‘decadent’ bourgeois order, far from awakening the Germans, Nazism was a dream which enabled them to postpone awakening. Germany only really woke up with the defeat of 1945.

[...] to put it in the Nietzschean terms which are appropriate here, the ultimate difference between radical-emancipatory politics and such outbursts of impotent violence is that an authentic political gesture is active, it imposes, enforces a vision, while outbursts of impotent violence are fundamentally reactive, a reaction to some disturbing intruder.