Abstract
This Chapter explores the second section of Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’, in which Lacan summarizes the key arguments of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. As well as unfolding Lacan’s distinct take on Kant’s moral philosophy, Nobus explains Lacan’s critique of the way in which Kant arrives at the categorical imperative, and he elucidates Lacan’s reliance on Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu in his identification of a certain Kantian confusion between analytic and synthetic judgements. The Chapter also clarifies how Lacan’s critique of Kant allows him to argue that the object of the moral law is endlessly receding in Kant’s moral philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
To the best of my knowledge, this German sentence does not appear as such in any of Kant’s works, and can be safely regarded as Lacan’s own construction.
- 2.
In the first sentence of Section 2 (p. 646), Lacan played on a famous phrase by Goethe from the very end of the second part of Faust, in which the Chorus Mysticus proclaims: ‘das Ewig-Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan’—‘The eternal feminine draws us on high’ or, in Stuart Atkins’ translation, ‘Woman, eternally, shows us the way’ (Goethe, 1994, p. 305)—to associate ‘delight in evil’ with a situation in which the ‘eternal feminine’ would no longer draw upwards, elevate and attract. This could in itself be interpreted in at least two different ways: as the ‘eternal feminine’ (the feminine ideal, perfect femininity) becoming threatening and repulsive, or as (erotic) attraction falling under the spell of another, less exalted concept of femininity, such as that of the ‘femme fatale’, which also gained momentum during the nineteenth century. See Dijkstra (1986).
- 3.
See also Lacan (1992, p. 72).
- 4.
Bibliography
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Nobus, D. (2017). Lacan Reads Kant. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_2
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