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- In countless of his plays, Shakespeare teaches us that when justice is enchanted, it becomes mercy.
- Procedural legal power is terrifying. To be prosecuted is to be terrorized.
- Kafka is the great theorist of this terror. But there are others. In Shakespeare, we see hints of the modern legalistic state emerging. Certainly we do in Milton’s Paradise Lost. We forget what a shock it must have been for humanity to produce systems that could not change their minds, like even tyrants could. In many ways, a technocratic neoliberal state is like a king without a head — and a king without head cannot have it cut off.
- Forgiveness is the object that the merciful subject produces.
- Oddly, Christianity is a religion that simultaneously encourages forgiveness and mercilessness. Christianity has inspired moral humbleness and moral arrogance; pietists and Calvinists.
- Kant: a good will acts on duty alone. What Kant forgets is: so does an evil, blind, or sick will.
