Law, Desire and Liberty. Notes on Lacan and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

The subversion of tradition of ethics carried out by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason is, according to Lacan, the intelligibility background on which it is possible a science of the subject as developed by Freud. This would be shown up in a particularly effective way if comparing Kant's moral theory with Sade's anti-moral one. It is not difficult to show the formal-structural identity of the state of affairs established by inconditionality of law in both theoretical systems, and thus expose the possibility of that anti-moral as a kind of Kantian variation. Moreover, Lacan holds, it is necessary to recognize in Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom the truth of Critique of Practical Reason. Our study proposes an examination of this well-known Lacanian thesis. On the one hand, we seek to establish the exact content of this thesis and the diagnosis of the relationship that it involves between Kant and Freud (between Enlightenment and psychoanalysis). On the other hand, we seek to confront that diagnosis with the reconstruction of the specific terms of the practical subject question in Kant's philosophy. The ultimate aim is at least to raise a question about the place of the concept of "Reason" in psychoanalysis, that is, about the margin that the truth of the subject discovered by this theory leaves for making the difference (at least de iure) between the weight of reason and the illusions of moral masochism, and about the very conditions of psychoanalysis as a theory.