a dualism (res extensa–res cogitans), a radical disjunction between the dimensions of
physics and ethics (which also means between physics and metaphysics). Further-
more, this move paves the way for the later assumption that the Thing is in itself an
unknowable x.
( 4 ) Modern science—epitomized by Newton’s law of gravity—fully assumes Des-
cartes’s conclusions, and proceeds to a systematization of the reversal of the rela-
tionship between sky and earth operated by Galileo.^182
( 5 ) Kant is dissatisfied with Cartesian science, and attempts to supplement it by
means of an ethics at the heart of which the real Thing is to be reinstalled. As I said
above, he intends to refound nature through the categorical imperative. This is why
Lacan can affirm that the crisis of morality which occurs at the end of the eigh-
teenth century is in strict relation to the fact that, at that time, the world of mod-
ern physics (the world of phenomena)—based as it was on Descartes’s expedient, his
separation of the Thing from the Sovereign Good—appears to be “completely
sealed, blind and enigmatic.”^183
In other words, Kant reassesses the epistemological gap opened by the crisis of
Aristotelian science in order to provide some definitive answers. More specifically,
Lacan’s reading of Kant presupposes that Kant completely rejects Descartes’s du-
alism in favor of the thesis—shared by Lacan himself—according to which “the
moral law is articulated [only] in relation to the real as such” (to be understood as
both phenomenal reality and the unconscious Real-of-the-Symbolic).^184 As a con-
sequence, the opacity of phenomena(“what does the Thing in itself look like beyond
appearances?”) was, for Kant, necessarily to be related to a thorough questioning
of all positive moral laws. If we accept Lacan’s suggestion that the phenomenal Real
is, after all, “the guarantee of the Thing”^185 —the Thing is indeed a retroactive cre-
ation of the Symbolic^186 —it is easy to understand how, confronted with the opac-
ity of the guarantor, the only possible way in which Kant could secure the Thing
quaSovereign Good was through its “precipitation” by means of an equation be-
tween the positive moral law and its universal form. This is also why we would
be incorrect to consider Kant’s move as a nostalgic return to the Aristotelian iden-
tification of the Thing with the Sovereign Good: one may argue, rather, that the
utmost paradox of Kant’s philosophy is to effect a sort of “Galileanization,” a move-
ment from sky to earth, of such an identification....
( 6 ) After Kant’s desperate effort, Freud finally acknowledges the impossibility of
positively reuniting the Thing with the Sovereign Good: the former is unknowable
and always-already lost, the latter is forbidden and inaccessible per se.The assump-
tion of these conclusions is a preliminary condition for the elaboration of any pos-
sible ethics.