This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian
link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a
necessary step in the moral progress of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian
terms: "Fall" is the very renunciation of my radical ethical
autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is
experience as imposed on me from the outside, i.e., the finitude in which I
search for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the
external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides the difficulty of being a
Kantian. Every parent knows that the child’s provocations, wild and
"transgressive" as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a
demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to draw a
line which means "This far and no further!", thus enabling the child
to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And
does the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is
what the analyst refuses to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic –
paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is
the very absence of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is
why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implication is
precisely that there is nobody outside, no external agent of "natural
authority", who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself
have to pose a limit to my natural "unruliness." Although Kant famously
wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us:
what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in
contrast to animals whose behavioural patterns are grounded in their inherited
instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed
on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant’s true aim is
rather to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive
lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his
own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly
enlightened "mature" human being is a subject who no longer needs a
master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations.
This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by
Chesterton: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire
action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of
self-sacrifice."
(Slavoj Žižek, “Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida,
Foucault and then Lacan,” http://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html,
Lacan.com 2007; accessed 3/12/2012. The Chesterton quote is from Orthodoxy,
FQ Publishing, 2004. The passage is also found in Mythology,
Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism; Markus Gabriel and
Slavoj Žižek, Continuum 2009, p. 98.)
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