Let us now focus on Kant. Lacan believes that, despite its structural impasse,
Kantian ethics represents a historic preliminary step toward Freud’s conclusion that
there is no Sovereign Good. For Lacan, the kernel of Kant’s ethics consists in di-
rectly applying the Sovereign Good to everyday life through the categorical imper-
ative: given that, from this perspective, the good can only be identified with the
Sovereign Good, there is no longer any hierarchy of goods, “morality becomes a
pure and simple application of the universal maxim.”^173 In other words, Kantian
ethics refutes the servicing of (pathological) goods, the traditional position of
Western morality: Lacan points out that this morality is founded on “modesty,
temperateness... the middle path we see articulated so remarkably in Aristotle,”
and “concerns itself with what one is supposed to do ‘insofar as it is possible.’”^174
Kantian ethics, on the contrary, revolves around an impossibility insofar as the
“moral imperative is not concerned with what may or may not be done”;^175 the
strict application of the unconditional “Thou shalt” causes a void to surface at
the place which was earlier occupied by the servicing of goods: as I shall explain
later, psychoanalysis should make such a void overlap with pure desire.^176
In order to follow Lacan’s interpretation of the Critique of Practical Reasoncorrectly,
it is essential to emphasize here that the elimination of the gap between the Sov-
ereign Good and the positive moral law in Kant also entails the obliteration of
the space for inherent transgression coextensive with any morality; as Lacan
repeatedly points out, without such a space—the ambiguous field of the Real-
of-the-Symbolic—society is simply impossible:“We spend our time breaking the
ten commandments, and that is why society is possible.”^177 So what, after all, was
Kant’s project? Lacan’s ingenious answer is: founding a new nature—“note that he
[Kant] affirms the laws of a nature,not of a society... .”^178 In Kant, the moral law
elevated to the function of the universal maxim is ultimately aimed at the impos-
sible task of refounding Nature, the Thing. It is also in this sense that Lacan can state
that, in Kant, “morality becomes a pure and simple object”:^179 morality is the Sov-
ereign Good tout courtwhich, in turn, should perfectly correspond to the refoun-
dation of the Thing, the recovery of the object which was always-already lost. On
this basis, the link between the first two Critiques becomes clear: if, on the one
hand, The Critique of Pure Reasonshould primarily be considered in terms of an enor-
mous deconstructive task in which the Real is ultimately questioned in vain—
noumenaare as dumb as das Ding—on the other, The Critique of Practical Reasoncompen-
sates for this silence with the commanding voice of the categorical imperative,
with an exasperation of the superego which is, literally, meant to real-ize the Sym-
bolic to the detriment of the dialectic between desire and the law. To recapitulate:
Lacan believes that the ultimate impossible aim of Kant’s philosophy as a whole is
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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