A problem with Plato is how dense each book is. Without summarizing what happened throughout the series of volumes, I set on the importance of secret affairs of civilian private lives (Book VIII: 841e). In this segment, the Athenian wishes to direct the private lives of citizens in the imagined Cretan colony.
What I found interesting in this portion wasn’t the push for the specific conditions of marital intimacy but the hidden exception to the rules: “he [transgress] without any other man or woman getting to know about [his transgression].” The concealment of the supposed legal vice has an interesting interaction with what Plato is considering with “natural law.” He seems to recognize that a natural man would feel the urge to break a stricter rule. Therefore, within the law itself, the act of breaking it is anticipated.
This idea reminds me of Žižek’s work, particularly “The Inherent Transgression.” In this piece, Žižek examines how the emergence of certain values, which serve as points of ideological identification, inherently rely on their transgression. He argues that ideology depends upon the ‘gap’ produced by the symbolic order between itself and the subject, an effect of bringing the latter into being as a subject of language [https://philpapers.org/rec/ZIZTIT].
I see a similarity then between Žižek’s work and Plato’s laws, where the expectation of secret transgressions serves to reinforce the authority of the law itself. By acknowledging the inevitability of such transgressions, the legal framework incorporates them, thus maintaining its overarching control.