Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan

Drawing on a wide range of writers from Sophocles to de Sade, the author shows that Kant and Lacan stake everything on a similar ethical enterprise. For both, ethics is a necessary impossibility - impossible because of the infinite and inhuman demands it makes on us. Kant, sober Enlightenment thinker and philosophers philosopher, seems the very antithesis of Lacan, the wild theorist of psychoanalysis. But, drawing on a wide range of writers from Sophocles to de Sade, Alenka Zupancic here demonstrates that the two thinkers stake everything on a similar ethical enterprise. For both, ethics is a necessary impossibility -- impossible because of the infinite and inhuman demands it makes on us. Moreover, both are thinkers of desire, of the ethics of desire and the desire for ethics.