Marcus Döller presents a working paper on ‚What does it mean to resist against the law as law?‘

In the 13. Chapter of the dissertation I am going to show in four steps why Hegel makes an internal connection between the logic of the negative-infinite judgement and the Philosophy of Law. My thesis is, that it is crucial to understand the internal connection between the negative-infinite judgement on the one side and the modern form of the law on the other side in order to think a radical form of non-legal resistance. With non-legal resistance I am going to conceptualise a resistance beyond the law. In this line of thought I distinguish resistance that cannot be punished and resistance that can be punished. The act of the hero cannot be punished because the hero creates a new law. To be a hero means to be a law-giver. Heroes are only possible in antiquity. The act of the criminal, in contrast, can be punished, because the criminal presupposes a law already running up.

Every hero in modernity is in the position of the criminal in transgressing the law. Starting from this distinction, I will show that we have to think non-legal resistance differently in order to understand liberation in social struggles. Because resistance in modernity can just reproduce an order of domination and injustice, if resistance is not able to found an autonomous order of equal participation within social practices. Non-legal resistance takes places if the subject is able to justify action guiding rules only by itself. But the very act of justification of action guiding rules presupposes law like rules and overcomes them at the same time. This conceptualisation allows me to think a non-legal resistance which not just reiterates an order of social domination in the very form of resistance.