Freedom qua Spontaneity:
The Lacanian Subject in the Critique of Pure Reason
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Closing remarks
The foregoing discussion has been driven by the implicit question raised by Žižek of how exactly should one specify the spontaneous nature of Lacanian subjectivity in those terms as found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Is the void of the I of pure apperception itself ‘produced’ through the very same synthetic gesture that produces the unity of apperception, or is it more proper to locate such self-affective activity in the transcendental power of imagination? Clearly, Žižek opts for the later solution. For him, there is a crucial aspect to the Kantian power of imagination that has been previously left unexamined, but is now revealed thanks to a retroactive reading from a Lacanian-inspired Hegelian perspective. The synthetic activity of imagination opens up an abyss that can be characterized as a radical self-withdrawal, a purely negative space which must be thought as logically preceding any synthesis proper. He criticizes Heidegger for passing over this crucial pre-synthetic gesture of subjectivity through the latter’s exclusive analytic focus on the temporal nature of the pure synthesis of imagination. Moreover, had Heidegger examined the logic surrounding the Antinomies arguments, he may well have reached the correct insight of reading the Sublime as the impossible schema of the Ideas of Reason, which would have revealed to him how the very failure of synthesis of the power of imagination is a secondary covering-over of the pre-synthetic abyss first opened up by that power. From the perspective of both these interpreters, Allison’s approach appears as a patch-work of arguments strung together to make sense of Kant’s confusion as to the proper status of imagination between the two editions of the Critique. Furthermore, the fact that Allison’s account remains somewhat unpersuasive may very well gesture toward the disavowed truth of his own position, one that is much closer to Žižek and Heidegger’s reading which places a greater emphasis on faculties associated with intuition rather than with concepts. For Žižek, it is precisely such textual distortions found in Kant and his subsequent commentators which indicate that the primordially repressed pre-synthetic gesture of imagination continues to haunt and disrupt their work.
However, despite the fact that this spontaneous subjective gesture remains unarticulated at a formal, notional level, Žižek does argue that it appears in various guises throughout the Critique. Although a detailed examination of these areas have fallen outside the scope of this paper, we can briefly note three. First, Kant is to be lauded in opening up the abyss of the ‘night of the world’ through his distinction between negative and indefinite judgments as found in the Metaphysical Deduction. Second, Žižek finds that the logic specific to the Antinomies in the Transcendental Dialectic scandalously breaks with traditional thought by bringing into play the transcendental dimension to delimit the irreducible. Lastly, this same radical dimension is briefly rendered visible with Kant’s discussion of the objects (of Nothing) of indefinite judgment found on the last page of the Transcendental Analytic. (Žižek 1993: 108–14) Thus, although Kant does overlook attributing the subjective gesture of spontaneity to the transcendental power of imagination – and here it is quite understandable that Žižek does not further his analysis in this respect – there are other areas in the Critique where Kant’s analysis has indeed breached this empty, unimaginable space of subjectivity. Accordingly, these areas of Kantian thought should be explored whenever one considers issues of subjectivity in the first Critique. Otherwise, one will fail to recognize how Kant was the first philosopher to bring the conception of subjectivity to its full and proper (Lacanian) notion. Furthermore, by examining this phantasmatic ‘night of the world’ as it appears (or should appear) in this work prior to a subsequent examination of Kant’s practical philosophy, it better prepares us to appreciate the radical break of Kant’s thinking on ethicality. But as well, this positions us to better appreciate Lacan’s own ethical revolution, as Kant is the key precursor to Lacan. For this phantasmatic space – first hesitantly formulated by Kant in the first Critique – forms the core to Lacan’s resuscitation of cogito as the only notion of subjectivity which can radically confront the contemporary rejection of a human subjectivity that is forever marked by (transcendental) freedom, autonomy and a self-affecting spontaneity.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
