Commentary on Henry E. Allison's
“Autonomy and Spontaneity in Kant’s
Conception of the Self”

WILLIAM J. URBAN

After initially contributing to Kantian scholarship with a major defense of transcendental idealism and arguably his best work, Henry Allison later turned his attention to Kant’s moral philosophy with the publication of Kant’s Theory of Freedom and a collection of essays on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy entitled Idealism and Freedom. (Allison 1990, 1996) As these titles suggest, his overall concern with Kant’s moral philosophy has been to make sense of the bewildering array in which Kant conceived of freedom. More specifically, Allison’s (more implicit) concern in his own later work has largely been to interpret Kant’s practical philosophical writings in light of how freedom is conceived in the first Critique. This is perhaps to be expected from a reviewer who initially entered Kantian discourse through a study of his theoretical philosophy. But we will argue that remaining on this ground has certain negative consequences in terms of understanding the overall picture of Kantian freedom and subjectivity. The essay we examine in this paper, ‘Autonomy and Spontaneity in Kant’s Conception of the Self,’ is symptomatic in this respect. That is, from our point of view, Allison’s essay inadvertently demonstrates how one can overlook the radical (ethical) gesture Kant himself endeavored to articulate through his texts by adhering too strongly to a first Critique perspective.

In the introduction to this essay, after noting that Kant never developed an explicit theory of the self other than a ‘virtual identification of selfhood with freedom,’ Allison sets out to develop the relationship between what he considers to be the two fundamental conceptions of freedom: spontaneity and autonomy. (Allison 1996: 129) His choice of terms in this dichotomy reflects Allison’s larger task of resolving the problematic relation between rational and moral agency, since spontaneity is an ineliminable component of the former, while autonomy is a definitional characteristic of the latter. Thus, by establishing that spontaneity is logically prior to (or presupposed by) autonomy, he can conclude that the foundations for Kant’s conception of freedom and selfhood are grounded in Kant’s general views on rational agency rather than in his specific moral theory of agency – which is the explicit thesis he has set out to establish in his essay. By prioritizing the conceptions of freedom and agency thus so, Allison also takes the opportunity to address a third issue of no small importance: the Kantian doctrine of the overall unity of reason. No doubt a tall order for a mere 14 pages, but the sketch of an answer he does provide us is well organized into three sections: the first dealing with rational agency and spontaneity through a discussion of what he terms the ‘Incorporation Thesis,’ and the second with moral agency and autonomy through the ‘Reciprocity Thesis,’ whereas the third section culminates into a discussion of their connection. We will follow this format, summarizing his findings and commenting on how well Allison’s argumentation is supported by Kant’s texts and what is overlooked. However, in a paper of this length, we are only able to hesitantly point toward an alternative interpretation, one that belies the neat, historically linear solution Allison’s approach underscores.1

The great strength of Allison’s analysis of Kant’s practical philosophy is his emphasis on a particular logic Kant uses to point out how it is that the subject itself is able to play an active part in lawful, causal necessity, something that Allison has christened the ‘Incorporation Thesis.’ He points out that this thesis is most clearly and explicitly stated in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason:

[F]reedom of the power of choice [Willkür] has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive [Triebfeder] except so far as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it into a universal rule for himself, according to which he wills to conduct himself); only in this way can an incentive, whatever it may be, coexist with the absolute spontaneity [transcendental freedom] of the power of choice (of freedom). (Kant 1998: 49; Rel 6:23–24)

Allison wastes no time in pointing out that although this thesis is of immediate significance to morality, it ‘actually amounts to a claim about rational agency in general.’ (Allison 1996: 130) Further, he points out that this thesis helps us distinguish how motives function in such finite agency (arbitrium liberum), in contrast with an arbitrium brutum. To illustrate, we could imagine two subjects who are faced with the same set of given desires. In the latter case, the subject would be causally conditioned to respond to the desire(s) with the highest strength, which is to be thought of as ‘pre-given’ and standing over-above any endorsement coming from the subject himself. The Incorporation Thesis, however, reminds us that the finite rational agent has the capacity for spontaneity and in the final analysis it is he that imbued a certain desire with sufficient motivational force to cause him to act accordingly. Such a rational subject does this by elevating or instituting some Triebfeder as sufficient cause, incorporating it into the maxim that will guide the subject’s action. We thus see here that Kant’s gesture radically disallows the subject to hide behind natural, causal necessity, ultimately impelling him to take up responsibility for each of his actions. That is, he can never legitimately claim his actions were unavoidable because he simply could not resist the overwhelming temptations of his desires, since every passive succumbing to those desires already involves a previous active acceptance of such a passive subjective position toward them.2

Allison’s reading of this crucial passage thus intertwines rational agency with the practical use of reason and again, his essay is an explication of this relationship. To offset the potential charge that the Incorporation Thesis is found only in Kant’s later work, Allison details its occurrence all the way back to the Grounding II, where Kant indicates that only a rational agent has the power to act according to his conception of the law (or subjective principles or maxims). But since such maxims are not simply found but something that are (also) chosen as such, actions based on maxims are thus self-determined and an exercise of spontaneity. Moreover, in keeping with his first Critique bias, he details evidence that suggests Kant held such a view as early as just prior to his critical break. (Allison 1996: 131–2)

To further ground matters in rational agency, Allison notes that in the passage quoted above, Kant hinges such incorporation on absolute spontaneity (or transcendental freedom), as opposed to a relative spontaneity. That is to say, a transcendental idea of freedom would certainly be required to account for the proposed capacity to determine oneself to act independently of natural causality. (Allison 1996: 132) For Allison, there is a parallel to be drawn from the cognitive to the practical domain: just as any complete determination of an object needs an (epistemic) spontaneous act of the understanding onto sensible data, likewise in the practical domain a complete self-determination requires an analogous practical freedom.3 But he suggests that Kant must have held that there is simultaneously a certain kind of disanalogy between epistemic and practical spontaneity, where the former allows for a greater claim for self-certainty because of the necessity surrounding the transcendental unity of apperception, while the latter only allows for, at most, conditional clauses regarding actions taken under the idea of freedom. (Allison 1996: 133) This is an important point for Allison’s argument, as he definitely emphasizes the earlier of the ‘two periods’ of Kant’s work on freedom, a work he ‘insists… [has] a significant discontinuity, with the great divide marked by the introduction of the principle of autonomy in the Groundwork.’ (Allison 1996: 125) We shall see below that Allison considers his own solution for a complete Kantian model of a free self as textually supported only up to that time, and from 1788 onward (with the publication of the second Critique), Kant’s actual text has reversed so much that Allison is compelled to offer up much conjecture and invention in order to maintain his thesis.

For now, but also to prepare for our own conclusion that Allison misunderstands Kant’s true stance from 1788 onward, we will examine a great omission in Allison’s analysis surrounding the Incorporation Thesis as he presents it in this essay. Nowhere here does he deal directly with the obvious question: from where exactly does the subject incorporate the Triebfedern into maxims so that they become proper incentives? Elsewhere, in his Kant’s Theory of Freedom, he tells us that beginning with the publication of the second Critique, Kant provided the answer to this question with his concept of Gesinnung (the disposition or enduring character of a subject), which served as a major corrective to his failure to discuss it in the Grounding – a work whose ‘moral psychology... [thus] remains seriously incomplete.’ (Allison 1990: 136) As Kant writes in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ‘the disposition [Gesinnung], i.e., the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of maxims, can only be one and applies universally to the whole use of freedom.’ (Kant 1998: 50; Rel 6:25) Now, this may not seem like a significant omission in his essay, but if we consider that Allison wants to defend the superiority of Kant’s presumed pre-1788 position, it is rather strategic on Allison’s part since the full Kantian concept of Gesinnung involves consequences Allison has never adequately confronted. The sentence immediately following the one quoted just above reads as follows: ‘Yet this disposition itself must have been adopted by free choice [Willkür], for otherwise it could not be imputed.’ What Kant has thus effectively said is that the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of maxims is a ground that is itself something chosen. It seems that rational agency might somehow be the result of the activity of moral agency – the exact reverse of Allison’s stated efforts to ground moral on rational agency. No wonder he omits any discussion of Gesinnung in this essay, despite his previous extended treatment of the topic.

Regarding his previous treatment of this crucial issue, the conclusions he draws are unfortunately not satisfactory. They largely amount to a whole-sale dismissal of Kant’s position as ‘incoherent.’ Since Gesinnung – a concept that was presumably introduced to ground the rationality of choice and account for action – is itself the result of a free choice, he writes that this leaves us with two equally undesirable possibilities. Either we have ‘an infinite regress or, equally unacceptable, a choice for which no ground or reason is available.’ (Allison 1990: 139) Allison rejects both and with it Kant’s text. A page later he offers his alternative solution, which amounts to substituting Kant’s insistence of the choice of Gesinnung with the former’s own invention of a regulative ‘fundamental maxim.’ However, this only seems to move the issue one degree further away, for are we not now compelled to repeat the same question: does this conception of ground of agency have some eternal permanence or is it free because of its capacity to self-constitute? For Allison, such questions are not directly answerable, nor are passages such as the following one explainable, in which Kant speaks of ‘born villains’ who show such propensity for crime that we cannot but think of them as

‘quite incapable of improvement as far as their cast of mind is concerned; and nevertheless they are so judged of what they do or leave undone that they are censured as guilty of their crimes... [and] despite their hopeless natural constitution of mind ascribed to them, they remained as accountable as any other human being. This could not happen if we did not suppose that whatever arises from one’s choice (as every action intentionally performed undoubtedly does) has as its basis a free causality.’ (Kant 1996: 220; 5:99–100)

Passages like these and others are too frequent throughout Kant’s work to conveniently dismiss as ‘incoherent.’ Rather such paradoxes compel us to ‘resolve’ Kant’s own text with itself via a radical shift of perspective, to ‘read’ Kantian subjectivity quite differently than is usually offered in the literature.

Moving toward such a resolution, we noted above that Allison himself recognizes that transcendental freedom is required to account for the incorporation of some Triebfeder into the maxim that will guide the subject’s actions, independently of natural causality. That is, the model of agency that the Incorporation Thesis articulates is normative and non-empirical. (Allison 1996: 134) Therefore, an ‘infinite regress’ of choice is ruled out. That leaves the remaining possibility – that of a groundless choice – as our only other option. In order to begin to see how this is possible, we need to take into account the empty, purely logical form of Kant’s transcendental I of apperception, a conception of subjectivity that Kant himself greatly obscured in the first Critique by, at times, treating it as if it were a noumenal entity.4 According to Zupančič, Allison overlooks the absolute necessity to make such a distinction in Kant’s practical philosophy in order to account for

‘the difference between what we might call the “thing-in-itself-in-us” (the Gesinnung or disposition of the subject) and the transcendental I which is nothing but the empty place from which the subject ‘chooses’ her Gesinnung. This empty place is not noumenal’ rather, it is an embodiment of the blind spot that sustains the difference between phenomena and noumena. It is because of this “blind spot” that the (acting) subject cannot be transparent to herself, and does not have a direct access to the “think-in-itself-in-her,” to her Gesinnung. (Zupančič 2000: 37)

Thus, through his first Critique bias, a text which is obscure at times in its conception and usage of the transcendental subject, Allison evidently opts to conceive Kant’s I of pure apperception as merely noumenal, thereby overlooking the need for an alternative conception to adequately account for Kant’s position around 1788. However, to better account for the logic above, we must examine how Kant considers autonomy and its link with transcendental freedom. We turn with Allison to the second part of his essay in which he specifically deals with freedom qua autonomy via the so-called Reciprocity Thesis.

In Allison’s introductory remarks, he characteristically contrasts the pre-critical roots of a freedom qua spontaneity with a freedom qua autonomy, the latter of which is only first explicitly formulated in Grounding II. Throughout the remainder of his essay, he will attempt to demonstrate autonomy as a conception of freedom as problematic. Alternatively, we find that the unique self-relating aspect of the logical movement underlying this conception (as opposed to the one in operation under spontaneity) holds the key to understanding how the dispositional ground of rational agency can itself be chosen from an empty place.

We can begin where Allison does, by focusing on the distinction between heteronomy and autonomy as Kant initially defines them. Both of these conceptions concern the formal determination of the will, with the will being determined in a heteronomous fashion via an object in its relation to the will, while the autonomy of the will ‘is the property that the will has of being a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition).’ (Kant 1993: 44-45; 4:440–1) Allison makes an interesting point that if one simply takes autonomy sans the parenthetical clause in the above definition, we move no further than the freedom as expressed in the Incorporation Thesis, since there, maxims are considered self-imposed or self-legislated. (Allison 1996: 134–5) So precisely what does the parenthetical clause add? We can quite easily see what is at stake by reformulating matters in terms of duty as Kant clearly sets it out in the second Critique, where ‘legality’ is action ‘in conformity with duty,’ but an action that is to have ‘moral worth’ must be one that ‘takes place from duty, that is, for the sake of the law alone.’ (Kant 1996: 205; 5:81) As Zupančič reasons, at the level of the legal, both the ‘content’ or ‘matter’ of action, as well as the form of this content, are exhausted in the clause ‘in conformity with duty,’ so that even if the subject fulfils his duty exclusively for the sake of this duty, such an action would be indistinguishable from one done simply in conformity with duty. The significance of acting for the sake of duty alone only comes out with the second level of analysis – the one concerning moral worth – which allows us to see that Kant is endeavoring to conceptualize a certain supplement, a ‘pure form’ of sorts ‘which is no longer the form of anything, of some content or other, yet it is not so much an empty form as a form “outside” content, a form that provides form only for itself... a surplus which at the same time seems to be “pure waste”, something that serves absolutely no purpose.’ (Zupančič 2000: 17) However, if an ethical act is distinguished as lacking any Triebfeder, Kant nevertheless does conceive of that very absence as itself taking on a certain ‘material weight,’ thereby functioning as the echte Triebfeder (genuine drive) of pure practical reason. Otherwise, an absence of incentive could not exert any influence whatsoever on the subject’s action. (Zupančič 2000: 18)

This analysis moves us toward understanding how it is that freedom qua autonomy is not only a necessary condition of the possibility of morality, but a sufficient condition as well. The latter is what Kant endeavored to articulate with his Reciprocity Thesis, which says simply that ‘freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.’ (Kant 1996: 162; 5:29) For Allison, it is questionable whether autonomy serves as either a sufficient or necessary condition and he uses an interesting topological structure to highlight this. He asks us to consider that ‘the introduction of autonomy as a property of the will serves to create the space needed to account for the possibility of moral motivation (the independence condition), but it does not of itself provide anything to fill that space or even to guarantee that it can be filled.’ (Allison 1996: 136) He invokes this image of a self-generated ‘space’ which has no guarantee to be filled by the moral Law and thereby concludes that the two step movement Kant makes - from the capacity of the will to work independently to the conception of freedom qua autonomy, and the latter to the categorical imperative – is ‘highly problematic’ and to be rejected for his own solution (which is based in part, among other inventions, on his notion of fundamental maxims). (Allison 1996: 137)

Does not this image of a self-generated ‘space’ immediately bring to mind Zupančič’s analysis above regarding the moral worth of an action as a ‘pure form,’ of a form whose only ‘content’ is itself qua form? Allison simply misses this point here. For us, this ‘space’ generated by autonomy is the moral Law, since ‘the moral Law qua pure transcendence is no longer [for Kant] an entity that exists independently of its relationship to us; it is nothing but its relationship to us (to the moral subject). (Žižek 1996: 172) From this perspective, it is Allison who still has in mind that the moral Law is some independent entity that should (or ought to) find its way into occupying that space, rather than considering that space as (must) having a certain ‘weight’ that bears down on the subject despite being ‘empty.’ This is precisely what Kant has in mind throughout Chapter III of Part One of the second Critique, where he formulates the singular feeling of respect in different ways, including: ‘respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; instead it is morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive.’ (Kant 1996: 201; 5:76)5 For Allison, the Reciprocity Thesis is largely rejected, since it only presupposes but does not establish autonomy as a necessary and sufficient condition of the categorical imperative. At best, he sees it as merely establishing the inseparability of morality with freedom qua autonomy, which is somehow distinct from spontaneity and transcendental freedom. (Allison 1996: 138) For us, we begin to suspect that all this energy spent in distinguishing the different modes of freedom is somewhat misplaced. There might be a necessity to loosen up that vigor when trying to conceptualize the ‘full picture’ of ethical action, which incidentally might explain why Kant himself was not completely consistent with his usage of these terms. Let us turn to the final section of Allison’s essay, in which he explicitly considers spontaneity and autonomy together in an overall Kantian conception of the self.

Allison’s summary of the link between these two notions of freedom bear the expected stamp of a commentator who clearly favors Kant’s earlier theoretical work. He states that (1) every exercise of rational agency presupposes spontaneity, even the absolute variety (transcendental freedom) and that (2) acting from duty presupposes autonomy as a condition. So he reasons that since acting from duty is a species of rational action, it would follow that (2) presupposes (1), and accordingly the Incorporation Thesis takes primacy over the Reciprocity Thesis. (Allison 1996: 138) Now while this neat solution is held to be operative in Kant throughout the Grounding, a significant change in his position is announced with the publication of the second Critique, signaled by the famous remark in the preface that ‘the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom’ which essentially reverses the logical sequence above. (Kant 1996: 140; 5:5) Kant now argues that were it not for the fact that we are conscious of standing under the moral law (indicated to the subject, of course, by the affectation of respect), we would not be justified in assuming our freedom. So it now seems that (1) presupposes (2). Moreover, for Allison the danger is that Kant has simply stated the unity of reason by filling in the space left vacant by speculative reason with pure, practical reason, rather than having proved it. (Allison 1996: 139)

While generally applauding the increased certitude of freedom in Kant’s later work, he seems to believe that Kant’s argumentation needs help, and this he provides by re-doubling his efforts to more strongly ground matters in rational agency. His counter-argument turns on a rather simple appeal to common sense. He asks us to consider whether it is not more plausible to first be conscious of ourselves as rational agents prior to engaging in a process concerning moral claims. Answering in the affirmative, he proposes we change the mode of freedom which the consciousness of the moral Law serves as the ratio cognoscendi from (absolute) spontaneity (or transcendental freedom) to autonomy. (Allison 1996: 140) This substitution Allison believes no longer obligates us to attribute to Kant the thought that it is only the consciousness of duty which first makes us aware of our (rational) agency, but only our autonomy. Thus, he concludes that the centrality of the Incorporation Thesis and with it, rational agency, is thereby extended into Kant’s later work despite Allison’s own admission that his speculations ‘conflict with much of what Kant says about freedom’ after the Grounding. (Allison 1996: 141)

In our view, Allison is on the wrong track and not simply because he deviates greatly from Kant’s actual text. Superficially, the problem is that by holding onto a strict formal division between rational and moral agency, especially with his predisposed bias toward the former, he is obligated to resolve the reversal he sees announced in the second Critique via a mere re-shuffling of the various types of freedom. One really does get the impression that this is an empty exercise, done in name only. The deeper issue is that his conception of Kantian selfhood is already too ‘substantial.’ He clings to a (rational) agency that is substantially grounded, which prevents him from moving onto a proper conception of Kantian transcendental subjectivity, a subjectivity that is not only intimately involved in Kant’s ethical philosophy, but is actually constituted in the process of its own (ethical) activity.

Allison might suspect as much when noting Kant’s virtual identification of selfhood with freedom and in the concluding paragraph of his essay when he insists that freedom is not so much something we add to our conception of self, as rather its very defining feature. Certainly Kant himself remarks often enough that we can only act under the idea of freedom. But at the same time, he never tires of admonishing us to re-examine our supposed ‘pure’ motivations to uncover the heteronomous incentive which is certain to be hidden there. It seems that for Kant, the subject is defined by a certain split or division in terms of his freedom: he thinks he is free, but is, at the same time, excluded from this very freedom.

On the other hand, the subject of freedom seems to be (also) the result of a lacking Cause of natural (psychological) causality. If the very ground of the subject, its Gesinnung, is itself chosen as Kant insists, we are forced to conclude that the Kantian subject emerges as the coincidence of two lacks: the lack of freedom of the subject, and the fact that the Gesinnung lacks its own substantial ground. What this means is that, as Allison rightly states, there can be no free choice without a subject to make that choice according to his Gesinnung. But what Allison overlooks is that the very emergence of such a ‘subject is already the result of a free act. The “circular” logic of practical reason is to be accounted for with reference to the structure of subjectivity.’ (Zupančič 2000: 41) It is in this way that freedom serves as its own grounding condition and from this perspective, it is really only a secondary, academic concern of how we label the different ‘moments’ of freedom, since the topological structure is the same. It is such an understanding that allows us to see how Kant asserted such things as the overall unity of reason, the primacy of practical over theoretical reason and his repeated insistence that the moral Law is a ‘fact of reason,’ over-against Allison’s difficulty in accounting for such categorical declarations.

From our perspective, Allison’s account falters on remaining on a purely conceptual level, where spontaneity is merely conceived as a normative account of how the subject must conceive itself (in action). (Allison 1996: xiv) He is unable to move to an ‘ontological’ level where the true question that drives the practical efforts of Kant can be readily confronted. This question concerns the above mentioned ‘pure form’ (or Allison’s ‘space’) which is a certain ‘nothing’ qua something the subject must necessarily arrive at via his autonomous self-relating. The paradox here is that if the subject produces this pure remainder only through his activity of separating himself from all heterogeneous motivations, we arrive at the following dilemma: how can the driving force of the ethical be, at the same time, only the result of the ethical? Such a question drives Kant’s practical project and underscores much of the secondary efforts to work through his texts. But by understanding that spontaneity and autonomy are in some sense the very same, self-relating activity (albeit viewed from two different perspectives) of a free subject who only emerges as a result of such activity, the difficulties surrounding a proper conception of Kantian freedom ease considerably.

1 By following Allison’s format and thus revealing how our analysis does not quite ‘fit’ this structure, it is (also) hoped that we thereby highlight the need to radically re-conceptualize the logic Kant actually uses while discussing and deducing the freedom of the (moral) subject.

2 It is interesting to note that this logic still fascinates contemporary philosophers who continually ‘rediscover’ such insight, usually without acknowledging Kant as the first to have explicitly formulated it. Cf. Charles Taylor (1976), whose entire philosophy can actually be seen as deeply indebted to the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, insofar as it is an extended working through of the notion of double-reflexive desire as constitutive of modern (ethical) subjectivity.

3 Cf my (unpublished) paper, “Transcendental Apperception, Transcendental Imagination: Locating the Subject’s ‘Spontaneity’ in the Critique of Pure Reason” for an account of Allison’s location of epistemic spontaneity with the understanding, in contrast to both Heidegger and Žižek who locate it with the imagination (in its reproductive function within sensibility), in its synthetic and ‘pre-synthetic’ capacities, respectively.

4 Cf. my unpublished paper “The Kantian Subject in the Paralogisms: A Lacanian Defense of its Continued Relevance,” where I argue that throughout his discussion of the Paralogisms, Kant must have had in mind a purely logical and necessary apperceptive I strictly analogous to Lacan’s non-substantial subject of the unconscious.

5 For an excellent account of the striking similarity between the psychoanalytic notion of anxiety and Kant’s notion of respect as an indication that the moral Law is nearby, cf. Zupančič (2000: chapter 7). As noted there, Kant actually deals with two notions of respect and often ‘domesticates’ the more traumatic of the two (as that which directly determines the will; a ‘must’) into a respect for the moral Law, which grants the subject some relief from its unbearable nearness by adding a measure of distance via the act of representation. Respect now becomes a (comparatively welcomed) consciousness of free submission of the will to the law (an ‘ought’) and it is on the basis of this version of respect that Allison and most other commentators exclusively focus their analysis.

Bibliography

Allison, Henry E. Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

______. Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. by Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

______. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns), trans. by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993)

______. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. and ed. by Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Taylor, Charles. “Responsibility for Self”, in The Identities of Persons, ed. by A. O. Rorty, pp. 281–99 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)

Urban, William J. “The Kantian Subject in the Paralogisms: A Lacanian Defense of its Continued Relevance” (unpublished)

______. “Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects” (unpublished)

______. “Transcendental Apperception, Transcendental Imagination: Locating the Subject’s “Spontaneity” in the Critique of Pure Reason” (unpublished)

Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996)

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000)