Prosecuting the Nomos: Q&A
Q: Can you help me understand why prosecuting the nomos is so dangerous? It seems obvious why blood vendettas are dangerous on one side but where does one draw the line between a conflict over some piece of the social order that can be adjudicated by Thirdness and something that threatens the nomos itself?
A: An attack on the nomos involves bringing a charge the only remedy for which is the removal of the accused from his place in the distribution. You do this enough times, and directed at positions high enough, and you have civil war.
Putting the nomos "on trial" is essentially revolution. It's also lawfare, which works in a more piecemeal way. The model here is putting the king on trial, which one can only do if one believes oneself to occupy a higher legal position, legitimated by God, the people, or some other supposed occupant of the center. But your questions regarding how to determine what accounts as an attack on the nomos are important ones and, having come to this part of the overall concept more recently, I haven't explained much here.
But I'm starting with the assumption that territory is always acquired through conquest, which includes the distribution of the territory amongst essential members of the team, as determined by the head of the conquering force (who becomes king). Every form and instance of ownership can be traced back to that originary distribution, whether this involves further divisions or the creation of new forms of property out of the existing forms. So, anything you own can be traced back to that distribution, which includes all the legal traditions that have been created in adjudicating disputes between property owners. (Your ownership of anything, i.e., all titles, can also be traced back through the records of the settlements of all disputes.) So, an attack on the nomos itself is an attempt to redistribute property without reference to that history of transmissions and settlements. This would be a higher-order vendetta, a vendetta pursued through the law itself.
So, your question is, how can we say when this has occurred or is occurring?
It's ultimately going to be a judgment call, like determining where the threshold above which allowing private retribution reintroduces the vendetta, but I think we can say it's when the state, or the occupant of the center, itself becomes a party to the dispute, which is to say is mobilized by one of the parties, thereby leaving no arbiter.
This is why anti-discrimination law is such a good example: the majority or "unmarked" part of the population is made inherently suspect, or criminalized. It may be that, short of revolution, i.e., literally putting the head of state on trial for being "inherently" illegitimate, anti-discrimination law is the fount of all attacks on the nomos and even narrower forms of lawfare—even the prosecutions against Trump ultimately attack his presumptuousness in daring to challenge the organization of the state around anti-discrimination protocols.
But it may be possible to argue that more, maybe all of the modern state is involved in dismantling the nomos, including, e.g., inflationary monetary policy and debt financing. I suppose the organization of the state around the rotation at the center—the solution of the problem of the "outside option" (someone who could be put forward as a more legitimate king) by turning the state into an oscillation between different articulations of debt-forgiveness and debt-enforcement aimed at protecting the "outside spread" (the lender of last resort) is nothing but a machinery for demolishing the nomos—a machinery that doesn't always work at the same speed, effectiveness or comprehensiveness.
"Social justice" is really the exemplary anti-nomos position, as it demands vengeance against the justice system itself. But then I realized that there is a word, with more religious connotations, which I actually used for this purpose briefly a long time ago and it might be usefully provocative: antinomic.