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Freedom qua Spontaneity:

The Lacanian Subject in the Critique of Pure Reason

WILLIAM J. URBAN

Part I: Kant’s Lacanian Subject in the Paralogisms

Opening Remarks

If there is one key element that binds together contemporary academic theory and philosophy, it is certainly its negative relation to Cartesian subjectivity. As Slavoj Žižek writes in the introduction of The Ticklish Subject – his ‘manifesto’ on Lacanian subjectivity – these ‘academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre.’ From the New Age Obscurantist and Deep Ecologist who blame cogito for the exploitation of nature and hope to supersede it by a more holistic approach; the Post-Marxist who reads freedom in the thinking subject as an illusion rooted in class division; the Habermasian argument of a need to move away from a monological to a discursive intersubjectivity; to the Feminist stance of treating the alleged sexless cogito as really a male patriarchal formation – academia seems united in its common disavowal of its own subjective grounding gesture. Even today’s (Cognitive) Scientist argues against any centralized control structure, opting to explain Self as a result or bricolage of multiple agents collaborating in parallel, interacting networks. But perhaps in no other academic arena is this contempt for Cartesian cogito stronger than in Post-modern Deconstructionism which holds that in today’s multicultural ‘identity politics,’ with its attendant multiple forms of subjectivity, we need to assert our own particularity in opposition to the discursive fiction of the (transcendent) Subject. While all these philosophical schools of thought rightly reject cogito inasmuch as it has predominately been considered in modern thought (ie, as a pacifying, self-transparent thinking subject), it is argued here that there is an unacknowledged, excessive obverse to cogito which these schools have necessarily disavowed in order to maintain their cohesiveness and assume their place within academic knowledge.

This excessive gesture of cogito, first detected by Descartes and who, in doing so, is considered to have given birth to modern philosophy, can be conceived as ‘a crack in the ontologically consistent universe.’ However, Descartes immediately patched up this crack, reducing cogito to res cogitans. (Žižek 1993: 12) Hume, of course, goes a long way in showing how cogito is immaterial, but it was Kant who first articulated the cogito ‘for-itself,’ endeavoring to bring it out fully in its proper notion (whereas Descartes was only able to indicate the cogito ‘in-itself’). In this paper, it is argued that to arrive at such a ‘proper notion’ today, a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of Kant’s notion of subjectivity is in order, a reading which ultimately explodes philosophy from within. Such a reading is not a naive psychoanalyzing of philosophy, since psychoanalysis must never be conceived as a mere branch of psychology. Rather, we should endeavor to retranslate psychoanalytic propositions back into philosophy. By doing so, ‘one is able to discern the ex-timate philosophical kernel of philosophy’ that is Lacan’s radical ‘subject of the unconscious’, or none other than the Cartesian cogito. (Žižek 1998: 2, 4) Thus, in Part I of this paper, we focus on a Lacanian reading of Kant’s critique of rational psychology, a ‘science’ which Kant himself reads as a deeply flawed systematic extension of the Cartesian project.

We will limit ourselves to a discussion surrounding the first three Paralogisms of Pure Reason in the first (A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. While of course Kant discusses subjectivity elsewhere, it is here that we find a sustained critique of ‘rational psychology’ and its argument that from the ‘I think’ (the ‘sole text’ of this science, as Kant puts it [A343/B402]1), one is supposedly able to demonstrate that the soul is a simple, immaterial and enduring substance.2 Kant’s discussion of the Paralogisms has direct affinities to contemporary debates on the philosophy of subjectivity and thus the term ‘rational psychology’ could legitimately characterize many sides of those debates. However, we should bear in mind that Kant’s objections to the Paralogisms are of a ‘critical’ nature (ie, directed against the proposed proofs of the propositions) as opposed to both ‘dogmatic’ and ‘skeptical’ objections (ie, directed against the propositions with a presumed insight into the ‘true’ nature of the subject). (Allison 2004: 500)This means that, although we will not find a ‘final,’ self-contained word on cogito in the Paralogisms section, a much more complete understanding of Kant’s thinking on its nature is provided when this section is examined together with other critical concepts Kant develops elsewhere in the Critique. While in Part II below we will examine the subject’s freedom as formulated in the Analytic, we will here (also) directly analyze the Paralogisms against other interrelated concepts found in the Dialectic, namely the transcendental idea and the transcendental illusion. It will be argued that it is only through such broader notions, which have conceptual counterparts in psychoanalysis, that the full force of Kant’s critique of rational psychology can be appreciated with respect to its utility for current research on the structure of subjectivity.

We will examine each of the three Paralogisms in a separate section, though it should be noted that not all three are treated the same. Much of the analysis applicable to all three Paralogisms will be introduced with respect to the First. The Third will also be dealt with at some length, since it has considerable intrinsic interest to our thesis (it is the Paralogism of Personality, after all). The section dealing with the Second will thus be comparatively brief.

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