Kant: the subject out of joint 
Slavoj Žižek 
»1 or he or it (the thing) which thinks« 
What Kant's »transcendental turn« renders manifest is the impossibility of locating the subject into the »great chain of being«, into the universe as 
a harmonious Whole in which every element has its own place: the subject is 
in the most radical sense »out of joint«. In Descartes, this »out of joint« state is 
still concealed: he as it were patches up the wound he cut into the texture of 
reality. The Cartesian universe stays within the confines of what Foucault, in 
Les mots et les choses, called »classical episteme«, that epistemological field 
regulated by the problematic of representations - their causal enchainment, 
their clarity and evidence, the connection between representation and 
represented content, etc. Upon reaching the point of absolute certainty in 
cogito ergo sum, Descartes does not yet conceive of the cogito as correlative to 
the whole of reality, i.e. as the point external to reality, exempted from it, 
which delineates reality's horizon (in the sense of Wittgenstein's well-known 
Tractatus metaphor on the eye that can never be part of the seen reality). 
Rather then the autonomous agent which »spontaneously« constitutes the 
objective world opposed to itself, the Cartesian cogito is a representation 
which, by following the inherent notional enchainment, leads us to other, 
superior representations. 
What, then, marks the break between Descartes' cogito and Kant's »1« of 
transcendental apperception? According to Kant, Descartes falls prey to the 
»subreption of the hypostasized consciousness«: he wrongly concludes that, in 
the empty »1 think« which accompanies every representation of an object, we 
get hold of a positive phenomenal entity, res cogitans, (a »small piece of the 
world«, as Husserl put it) which thinks and is transparent to itself in its 
capacity to think. In other words, self-consciousness renders self-transparent 
the »thing« in me which thinks. What is lost thereby is the topological discord 
between the form »1 think« and the substance which thinks, i.e. the distinction 
between the analytical proposition on the identity of the logical subject of 
thought, contained in »1 think«, and the synthetical proposition on the identity 
of a person qua thinking thing-substance.(CPR, A 354-3561) 
The gap which separates the empirical I's self-experience from the I of 
transcendental apperception coincides with the distinction between existence 
1. All quotes from Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) are from Norman Kemp Smith's translation, 
London: MacMillan 1992. 
234 Slavo j Žižek 
qua experiential reality and existence qua logical construction, i.e. existence in 
the mathematical sense (»there exists an X which...«). The status of Kant's I of 
transcendental apperception is that of a necessary and simultaneously 
impossible logical construction (»impossible« in the precise sense that its 
notion can never be filled out with intuited experiential reality): Descartes' 
error was precisely to confuse experiential reality with logical construction qua 
the real-impossible (in the Lacanian sense).2 
The act of »1 think« is trans-phenomenal, it is not an object of inner 
experience or intuition; yet for all that, it is not a noumenal Thing, but rather 
the void of its lack: it is not sufficient to say about the I of pure apperception 
that »of it, apart from them /the thoughts which are its predicates/, we cannot 
have any concept whatsoever«(CPR, A 346); one has to add that this lack of 
intuited content is constitutive of the I - the inaccessibility to the I of its own 
»kernel of being« makes it an I? (This is what Kant himself was not quite clear 
about, which is why he again and again yielded to the temptation of conceiving 
of the relationship between the I of pure apperception and the I of 
self-experience as the relationship between a Thing-in-itself and an 
experiential phenomenon.) The act of self-consciousness precludes the access 
to myself qua thinking substance: »Through this I or he or it (the thing) which 
thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the 
thoughts = X . It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, 
and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever«(CPR, A 
346). The paradox of self-consciousness is that it is possible only against the 
background of its own impossibility: I am conscious of myself only insofar as I 
am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being (»1 or he or it (the 
thing) which thinks«). I cannot acquire consciousness of myself in my capacity 
of the »Thing which thinks«. The very notion of self-consciousness implies the 
subject's self-decenterment which is far more radical than the opposition 
2 . The same paradox could also be formulated by way of the ambiguous ontological status of 
possibility which, in its very opposition to actuality, possesses an actuality of its own: the 
Kantian transcendental apperception designates a pure possibility of self-consciousness 
which, qua possibility, determines the actual status of the subject. Once this possibility is 
actualized, we are not dealing anymore with the self-consciousness of the pure I, but with the 
empirical consciousness of the Self qua phenomenon, part of reality... - Another way to 
formulate this difference is via the gap that separates »1« from »me«: the Kantian 
transcendental apperception designates the I of »1 think«, whereas Descartes surreptitiously 
substantializes the »je pense (I think)« into »moi qui pense (me who thinks)«. 
3 . Which is why the expression »self-in-itself« used by some interpreters of Kant (J.N. Findlay, 
for example - see his Kant and the Transcendental Object, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981), 
seems inherently nonsensical: insofsar as we conceive Self as an intelligible Thing, it loses the 
very feature that defines it, namely the transcendental »spontaneity« and autonomy which 
belong to it only within the horizon of finitude, i.e. of the split between intelligible and 
intuitive. (This is ultimately confirmed by Kant himself who always insisted on leaving open 
the possibility that free human activity is actually regulated by some inaccessible intelligible 
Nature - God's Providence, for example - which makes use of us for the realization of its 
unfathomable plan.) 
Kant: the subject out of joint 235 
between subject and object. This is what Kant's theory of metaphysics 
ultimately is about: metaphysics endeavours to heal the wound of the 
»primordial repression« (the inaccessibility of the »Thing which thinks«) by 
allocating to the subject a place in the »great chain of being«. What 
metaphysics fails to notice is the price to be paid for this allocation: the loss of 
the very capacity it wanted to account for, i.e. the human freedom. Kant 
himself commits an error when, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he 
conceives of freedom (the postulate of practical reason) as a noumenal Thing: 
what gets obfuscated thereby is his fundamental insight according to which I 
retain my capacity of a spontaneous-autonomous agent precisely and only 
insofar as I am not accessible to myself as a Thing. 
On closer examination, what makes up the inconsistencies which emerge when 
the I of pure apperception is identified with the noumenal Self (the »Thing 
which thinks«)? As Henry Allison puts it in his perspicuous summary of 
Strawson's critique of Kant4, in the case of this identification, the phenomenal 
I (the empirical subject) has to be conceived of simultaneously as 
somethingwhich (in the guise of an object of experience) appears to the 
noumenal subject and as the appearance of the noumenal subject. That is to 
say, everything that appears as part of the constituted reality appears to the 
transcendental subject (which is here conceived as identical with the noumenal 
subject); on the other hand, the empirical subject is, as is the case with every 
intuited reality, a phenomenal appearance of some noumenal entity, in this 
case, of the noumenal subject. This doubling, however, is a nonsensical, 
self-cancelling short-circuit: if the noumenal subject appears to itself, the 
distance that separates appearance from noumena falls away. The agency 
which perceives something as an appearance cannot itself be an appearance. In 
such a case, we find ourselves in the nonsensical vicious circle described by 
Alphonse Allais, where two appearances mutually recognize themselves as 
appearances (Raoul and Marguerite make an appointment at a masked ball; in 
a secret corner, they both take off their masks and utter a cry of surprise -
Raoul, since his partner is not Marguerite, and Marguerite, since her partner is 
not Raoul). Thus, the only way out of this impasse is to distinguish between 
the I of pure apperception and the Thing-which-thinks: what I experience, 
what is given to me phenomenally in my intuition, the content of my person 
(the object of empirical psychology), is, of course, as with every phenomenon, 
the appearing of a Thing (in this case of the Thing-which-thinks), but this 
Thing cannot be the I of pure apperception, the transcendental subject to 
whom the »Thing which thinks« appears as the empirical I.5 
4 . Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, New Haven: Yale University Press 1986, p. 
289. 
5 . In a supreme twist of irony, the title of the subdivision in which Kant articulates this unique 
status of the pure I of apperception as neither a phenomenon nor a noumenon is »Of the 
Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena«. 
236 Slavo j Žižek 
With this crucial point in mind, we can give a precise account of the 
difference between the inaccessibility of the noumenal Self and of any object 
of perception. When Kant says that the transcendental subject »is known only 
through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we 
cannot have any concept whatsoever«(CPR, A 346), does not the same also 
hold true for the table in front of me, for example? The table is also known 
only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, 
we cannot have any concept whatsoever... However, due to the 
above-described self-referential doubling of the appearing in the case of the I, 
»1 think« must also remain empty on the phenomenal level - the I's 
apperception is by definition devoid of any intuitional content, it is an empty 
representation which carves a hole into the field of representations. To put it 
concisely: Kant is compelled to define the I of transcendental apperception as 
neither phenomenal nor noumenal because of the paradox of auto-affection -
if I were given to myself phenomenally, as an object of experience, I would 
simultaneously have to be given to myself noumenally. 
Another way to arrive at the same result is via the duality of discursive and 
intuitive intellect: on account of his finitude, the subject disposes only of 
discursive intellect. He is affected by things-in-themselves, and he makes use 
of the discursive intellect (the network of formal transcendental categories) to 
structure the multitude of formless affects into objective reality: this 
structuring is his own »spontaneous«, autonomous act. If the subject were to 
possess intuitive intellect, it would fill out the abyss which separates intellect 
from intuition and would thus gain access to things as they are in themselves. 
However, »while I can coherently, if vacuously, claim that if I had an intuitive 
instead of a discursive intellect, I could know other things (objects) as they are 
in themselves I cannot similarly claim that I could know myself as object in my 
capacity as a spontaneous, thinking subject.«6 Why not? If I were to possess an 
intuition of myself qua »Thing which thinks«, i.e. if I were to have an access 
to my noumenal Self, I would thereby lose the very feature which makes me 
an I of pure apperception - I would cease to be the spontaneous transcendental 
agent that constitutes reality.7 
The crack in the universal 
This constitutively empty character of the pure I thus opens up a crack in the 
universal »chain of being«. It may seem paradoxical to evoke a crack in the 
universal apropos of Kant: was Kant not obsessed by the Universal, was not his 
6 . Allison, op. cit., p. 289-290. 
7 . Towards the end of the Part One of Critique of Practical Reason, the same logic reemerges 
at the ethical level: if I were to have a direct insight into God's nature, this would abrogate 
the very notion of ethical activity. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New 
York: MacMillan 1956, p. 151-153: »Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to 
His Practical Vocation«. 
Kant: the subject out of joint 237 
fundamental aim to establish the universal form (constitutive) of knowledge, 
does his ethics not propose the universal form of the rule which regulates our 
activity as the sole criterion of morality, etc.? Yet as soon as the 
Thing-in-itself is posited as unattainable, every universal is potentially 
suspended, every universal implies a point of exception at which its validity is 
cancelled; or, to put it in the language of contemporary physics, it implies a 
point of singularity. This »singularity« is ultimately the Kantian subject 
himself, namely the empty subject of the transcendental apperception. On 
account of this singularity, each of Kant's three critiques »stumbles« against 
universalization. In »pure reason«, antinomies emerge when, in the use of 
categories, we reach beyond our finite experience and endeavour to apply 
them to the totality of the universe: if we endeavour to conceive the universe 
as a Whole, it appears simultaneously as finite and infinite, as an all-embracing 
causal nexus and containing free beings... In »practical reason«, the »crack« is 
introduced by the possibility of »radical Evil«, of an Evil which, as to its form, 
coincides with the Good (the free will qua will which follows universal 
self-posited rules can choose to be »evil« out of principle, not on account of 
»pathological«, empirical impulses). In the »capacity of judging« qua 
»synthesis« of pure and practical reason, we have the opposition of aesthetics 
and teleology, the two poles which, together, do not form a harmonious 
Whole. Beauty is »purposefulness without purpose«: a product of man's 
conscious activity, it bears the mark of purposefulness, yet an object appears as 
»beautiful« only insofar as it is experienced as something which serves no 
definite purpose, which is here without reason or end. In other words, Beauty 
designates the paradoxical point at which human activity (which is otherwise 
instrumental, directed at realizing conscious aims) starts to function as a 
spontaneous natural force: a true work of art never proceeds from a conscious 
plan, it must »grow out spontaneously«... Teleology, on the other hand, deals 
with discerning hidden purposes at work in a nature submitted to blind 
mechanical laws, i.e. ontologically constituted as »objective reality« by means 
of transcendental categories among which there is no place for purposefulness.8 
The sublime is to be conceived precisely as the index of the failed »synthesis« 
of Beauty and Purpose - or, to use elementary mathematical language, as the 
intersection of the two sets,the set of what is »beautiful« and the set of what is 
»purposeful« - a negative intersection, to be sure, i.e. an intersection 
containing elements which are neither beautiful nor purposeful. Sublime 
phenomena (more precisely, phenomena which arouse in the subject the 
sentiment of the Sublime) are in no way beautiful, they are chaotic, formless, 
the very opposite of a harmonious form, and they also serve no purpose, i.e. 
they are the very opposite of those features that bear witness to a hidden 
purposefulness in nature (they are monstruous in the sense of the 
8 . See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991. 
238 Slavo j Žižek 
inexpediently excessive, overblown, character of an organ or an object). As 
such, the Sublime is the site of the inscription of pure subjectivity whose abyss 
both Beauty and Teleology endeavour to conceal by way of the appearance of 
Harmony. 
How then, on a closer look, is the sublime related to the two sets of Beauty 
and Teleology whose intersection it is? As to the relationship between the 
Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant, as is well known, conceives of beauty as the 
symbol of the Good; at the same time, he points out that what is truly sublime 
is not the object which arouses the feeling of sublimity but the moral law in us, 
our suprasensible nature. Are then beauty and sublimity simply to be 
conceived as two different symbols of the Good? Or is it not, on the contrary, 
that this duality points towards a certain chasm which must pertain to the 
moral Law itself? Lacan draws a line of demarcation between the two facets 
of law: on the one hand, law qua symbolic Ego-Ideal - i.e. Law in its pacifying 
function, Law qua guarantee of the social pact, qua the intermediating Third 
which dissolves the impasse of imaginary aggressivity; on the other hand, law 
in its superego dimension - i.e. law qua »irrational« pressure, the force of 
culpabilitization totally incommensurable with our actual responsibility, the 
agency in whose eyes we are a priori guilty and which gives body to the 
impossible imperative of enjoyment. It is this distinction between Ego-Ideal 
and superego which enables us to specify how Beauty and Sublimity are 
differently related to the domain of ethics. Beauty is the symbol of the Good, 
i.e. of the moral Law as the pacifying agency which reins in our egotism and 
renders possible harmonious social co-existence. In contrast, the dynamical 
sublime - volcanic eruptions, stormy seas, mountain precipices, etc. - by its 
very failure to symbolize (to represent symbolically) the suprasensible moral 
Law evokes its superego dimension. The logic at work in the experience of the 
dynamical sublime is therefore: true, I may be a tiny particle of dust thrown 
around by wind and sea, powerless in face of the raging forces of nature, - yet 
all this fury of nature pales in comparison with the absolute pressure exerted 
on me by the superego, which humiliates me and compels me to act against my 
fundamental interests! (What we encounter here is the basic paradox of the 
Kantian autonomy: I am a free and autonomous subject, delivered from the 
constraints of my pathological nature, precisely and only insofar as my feeling 
of self-esteem is crushed down by the humiliating pressure of the moral Law.) 
Therein consists also the superego dimension of the Jewish God evoked by the 
high priest Abner in Racine's Athaliah: »Je crains Dieu et n'ai point d'autre 
crainte...« - the fear of raging nature and of the pain other men can inflict on 
me converts into sublime peace not simply by my becoming aware of the 
suprasensible nature in me beyond the reach of the forces of nature but by my 
realizing how the pressure of the moral law is stronger than even the mightiest 
of natural forces. 
Kant: the subject out of joint 239 
So, if Beauty is the symbol of the Good, the Sublime evokes - what? There is 
only one answer possible: the non-pathological, ethical, suprasensible 
dimension, for sure, but the suprasensible, the ethical stance, insofar as it 
eludes the domain of the Good - in short: radical Evil, Evil as an ethical 
attitude. In today's popular ideology, this paradox of the Kantian Sublime is 
what perhaps enables us to detect the roots of the public fascination with 
figures like Hanibal Lecter, the cannibal serial killer from Thomas Harris' 
novels: what this fascination ultimately bears witness to is a deep longing for a 
Lacanian psychoanalyst. That is to say, Hannibal Lecter is a sublime figure in 
the strict Kantian sense: a desperate, ultimately failed attempt of the popular 
imagination to represent to itself the idea of a Lacanian analyst. The 
correlation between Lecter and the Lacanian analyst corresponds perfectly to 
the relation which, according to Kant, defines the experience of the »dynamic 
sublime«: the relation between wild, chaotic, untamed, raging nature and the 
suprasensible Idea of Reason beyond any natural constraints. True, Lecter's 
evil - he not only kills his victims, but then goes on to eat parts of their 
entrails - strains to its limits our capacity to imagine the horrors we can inflict 
on our fellow-creatures; yet even the utmost effort to represent to ourselves 
Lecter's cruelty fails to capture the true dimension of the act of the analyst: 
by bringing about la traversée du fantasme (the crossing of our fundamental 
fantasy), he literally »steals the kernel of our being«, the object small a, the 
secret treasure, agalma, what we consider most precious in ourselves, 
denouncing it as a mere semblance. Lacan defines the object small a as the 
fantasmatic »stuff of the 1«, as that which confers on the $, on the fissure in 
the symbolic order, on the ontological void that we call »subject«, the 
ontological consistency of a »person«, the semblance of a fullness of being -
and it is precisely this »stuff« that the analyst pulverizes, »swallows«. This is 
the reason for the unexpected »eucharistic« element at work in Lacan's 
definition of the analyst, namely his repeated ironic allusion to Heidegger: 
»Mange ton Daseink - »Eat your being-there!« Therein resides the power of 
fascination that pertains to the figure of Hannibal Lecter: by its very failure 
to attain the absolute limit of what Lacan calls »subjective destitution«, this 
figure enables us to get a presentiment of the Idea of the analyst. So, in The 
Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is truly cannibalistic not in relation to his victims 
but in relation to Clarice Sterling: their relationship is a mocking imitation of 
the analytic situation, since in exchange for his helping her to capture 
»Buffalo Bill«, he wants her to confide in him - what? Precisely what the 
analysand confides to the analyst, the kernel of her being, her fundamental 
fantasy (the crying of the lambs). The quid pro quo proposed by Lecter to 
Clarice is therefore: »I'll help you if you let me eat your Dasein/« The 
inversion of the proper analytic relation turns on the fact that Lecter 
compensates Clarice by helping her track down »Buffalo Bill«. Thus, he is not 
240 Slavo j Žižek 
cruel enough to be a Lacanian analyst, since in psychoanalysis, we must pay 
the analyst so that he allows us to offer him our Dasein on a plate... 
If, consequently, the sublime is opposed to the Beautiful with regard to the 
two sides of the moral law (the pacifying Ego-Ideal versus the ferocious 
superego), how are we to distinguish it from its counterpole in the Critique of 
Judgement, from teleology in nature? The Sublime designates nature in its 
purposeless raging, in the expenditure of its forces which does not serve 
anything (Lacans's definition of enjoyment from the first pages of Encore), 
whereas the teleological observation discovers in nature a presupposed (merely 
reflexive, not constitutive) knowledge, i.e. the regulative hypothesis of 
teleology is that »nature knows« (the flow of events does not follow »blind« 
mechanic causality, it is guided by some conscious purposefulness). In the 
Sublime, nature does not know - and where »it doesn't know«, it enjoys (we 
are thereby again at the superego qua law which enjoys, qua the agency of law 
permeated with obscene enjoyment).' The secret connection between such an 
outburst of the »enjoyment of nature« and the superego is the key to John 
Ford's The Hurricane (1937), the story of a sandbar, once an island paradise 
run by the French governor DeLaage (Raymond Massey) who denies mercy to 
Terangi, an aborigine condemned for hitting back at a Frenchman. When 
Terangi escapes from the prison to rejoin his wife, De Laage pursues him 
mercilessly until a hurricane destroys everything. De Laage, of course, is an 
irrational law-and-order extremist, infested with myopic arrogance - in short, 
a superego figure if there ever was one. From this perspective, the function of 
the hurricane should be to teach De Laage that there are things more 
important than the penal code: when de Laage is confronted by the ruination 
caused by the hurricane, he humbly grants Terangi his freedom. Yet the 
paradox is that the hurricane destroys the native dwellings and their island 
paradise, while De Laage is spared - so the hurricane must rather be conceived 
as a manifestation of De Laage's patriarchal-superego wrath! In other words, 
what sobers De Laage is his confrontation with the destructive nature of the 
fury which dwells in him - the hurricane makes him aware of the wild, 
untamed enjoyment that pertains to his fanatical devotion to the Law. He is 
able to grant amnesty to Terangi not because he gained an insight into the 
nullity of human laws in comparison with the immensity of the forces of 
nature as they manifest themselves in the hurricane, but because he realized 
that the hidden reverse of what he perceived as his moral rectitude is radical 
Evil whose destructive power overshadows even the ferocity of the hurricane... 
The radical Evil 
The problem of »radical Evil« was first articulated in Kant's Religion within 
the Limits of Reason Aloné0. According to Kant, the ultimate proof of the 
9 . See Alenka Zupančič, »Sublimno«, in Filozofski vestnik 91/2, SAZU: Ljubljana, p. 108. 
10. See Book One in Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, New York: 
Harper and Row 1960. 
Kant: the subject out of joint 241 
presence, in man, of a positive counterforce to his tendency towards Good is 
the fact that the subject experiences moral Law in himself as an unbearable 
traumatic pressure which humiliates his self-esteem and self-love - so there 
must be something in the very nature of the Self which resists the moral Law, 
i.e. which gives preference to the egotistical, »pathological« leanings over 
following the moral Law. Kant emphasizes the apriori character of this 
propensity towards Evil (the moment which was later developed by Schelling): 
insofar as I am a free being, I cannot simply objectify that which in me resists 
the Good (by saying, for example, that it is part of my nature for which I am 
not responsible). The very fact that I feel morally responsible for my evil bears 
witness to the fact that, in a timeless transcendental act, I had to choose freely 
my eternal character by giving preference to Evil over Good. This is how Kant 
conceives »radical Evil«: as an a priori, not just an empirical-contingent 
propensity of human nature towards Evil. However, by rejecting the 
hypothesis of »diabolical Evil«, Kant recoils from the ultimate paradox of 
radical Evil, from the uncanny domain of those acts which, although »evil« as 
to their content, thoroughly fulfill the formal criteria of an ethical act - they 
are not motivated by any pathological considerations, i.e. their sole motivating 
ground is Evil as a principle, which is why they can involve the radical 
abrogation of one's pathological interests, up to the sacrifice of one's life. 
Let us recall Mozart's Don Giovanni: when, in the final confrontation with the 
statue of the Commendatore, don Giovanni refuses to repent, to renounce his 
sinful past, he accomplishes something the only proper designation of which is 
a radical ethical stance. It is as if his tenacity mockingly reverses Kant's own 
example from the Critique of Practical Reason where the libertine is quickly 
prepared to renounce the satisfaction of his passion as soon as he learns that 
the price to be paid for it is the gallows": don Giovanni persists in his libertine 
attitude at the very moment when he knows verywell that what awaits him is 
only the gallows and none of the satisfactions. That is to say, from the 
standpoint of pathological interests, the thing to do would be accomplish the 
formal gesture of penitence: don Giovanni knows that death is close, so that by 
atoning for his deeds he stands to lose nothing, only to gain (i.e. to save 
himself from posthumous torments), and yet »on principle« he chooses to 
persist in his defiant stance of the libertine. How can one avoid experiencing 
don Giovanni's unyielding »No!« to the statue, to this living dead, as the model 
of an intransigent ethical attitude, notwithstanding its »evil« content? 
If we accept the possibility of such an »evil« ethical act, then it is not 
sufficient to conceive radical Evil as something that pertains to the very notion 
of subjectivity on a par with a disposition toward Good; one is compelled to 
accomplish a step further and to conceive radical Evil as something that 
ontologically precedes Good by way of opening up the space for it. That is to 
11. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: MacMillan 1956, p. 30. 
242 Slavo j Žižek 
say, in what, precisely, consists Evil? Evil is another name for the 
»death-drive«, for the fixation on some Thing which derails our customary 
life-circuit. By way of Evil, man wrests himself from the animal instinctual 
rhythm, i.e. Evil introduces the radical reversal of the »natural« relationship.12 
Here, therefore, Kant's and Schelling's standard formula (the possibility of 
Evil is founded in man's freedom of choice on account of which he can invert 
the »normal« relationship between universal principles of Reason and his 
pathological nature by way of subordinating his suprasensible nature to his 
egotistical inclinations) reveals its insufficiency; Hegel who, in his Lectures on 
the Philosophy of Religion, conceives the very act of becoming-human, of 
passage of animal into man, as the Fall into sin, is here more penetrating: the 
possible space for Good is opened up by the original choice of radical Evil 
which disrupts the pattern of the organic substantial Whole.13 
The thesis according to which the possibility to choose Evil pertains to the 
very notion of subjectivity has therefore to be radicalized by a kind of 
self-reflective inversion: the status of the subject as such is evil, i.e. insofar as 
we are »human«, in a sense we always-already have chosen Evil. The choice 
between Good and Evil is not the true, original choice: the truly first choice is 
the choice between (what will later be perceived as) yielding to one's 
pathological leanings and radical Evil, an act of suicidal egoism which »makes 
place« for the Good, i.e. which overcomes the domination of pathological 
natural impulses, by way of a purely negative gesture of suspending the 
life-circuit. Or, to refer to Kierkegaard's terms, Evil is Good itself »in the 
mode of becoming«, it »becomes« as a radical disruption of the life-circuit; the 
difference between them concerns a purely formal conversion from the mode 
of »becoming« into the mode of »being«.14 This is how »only the spear that 
smote you can heal the wound«: the wound ishealed when the place of Evil is 
filled out by a »good« content. Good qua »the mask of the Thing (i.e. of the 
radical Evil)« (Lacan) is thus an ontologically secondary, supplementary 
attempt to reestablish the lost balance - its ultimate paradigm in the social 
sphere is the corporatist endeavour to (re)construct society as a harmonious, 
organic, non-antagonistic edifice... Suffice it to recall Thomas More, the 
12. In this sense, the femme fatale who, in the film noir universe, derails man's daily routine, is 
one of the personifications of Evil: the sexual relationship becomes impossible the moment 
woman is elevated to the dignity of the Thing. 
13. See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Berkeley: University of California 
Press 1987. 
14. We must be careful here to avoid the trap of retroactive projection: Milton's Satan in his 
Paradise Lost is not yet the Kantian radical Evil - it appeared as such only to the Romantic 
gaze of Shelley and Blake. When Satan says »Evil, be thou my Good«, this is not yet the 
radical Evil, but remains simply a case of wrongly putting some Evil at the place of Good. 
The logic of radical Evil consists rather in its exact opposite, i.e. in saying »Good, be thou 
my Evil« - in filling out the place of Evil, of the Thing, of the traumatic element which 
derails the closed circuit of organic life, by some (secondary) Good. 
Kant: the subject out of joint 243 
Catholic saint who resisted the pressure of Henry VIII to approve of his 
divorce: it is easy for us today to eulogize him as a »man for all seasons«, to 
admire his inexorable sense of rectitude, his perseverance in his convictions 
although the price to be paid for it was his life. What is far more difficult to 
imagine is the way his stubborn perseverance must have struck the majority of 
his contemporaries: from a »communitarian« point of view, his rectitude was 
as an »irrational« self-destructive gesture which was »evil« in the sense that it 
cut into the texture of the social body, threatening the stability of the Crown 
and thereby of the entire social order. So, although the motivations of Thomas 
More were undoubtedly »good«, the very formal structure of his act was 
»radically evil«: his was an act of radical defiance which disregarded the Good 
of community. 
Why, then, does Kant hold back from bringing out all the consequences of the 
thesis on radical Evil? The answer is here clear, albeit paradoxical: what 
prevents him is the very logic which compelled him to articulate the thesis on 
radical Evil in the first place, namely the logic of »real opposition« which, as 
suggested by Monique David-M6nard, constitutes a kind of ultimate 
fantasy-frame of Kant's thought15. By conceiving Good and Evil as contraries, 
as two opposed positive forces, Kant aims to undermine the traditional notion 
of Evil as something that lacks positive ontological consistency, i.e. as a mere 
absence of Good (the last great proponent of this notion was Leibniz). If Good 
and Evil are contraries, then what opposes Good must be some positive 
counterforce, not just our ignorance, our lack of insight into the true nature of 
Good; the proof of the existence of this counterforce is the fact that I 
experience the moral law in myself as a traumatic agency which exterts an 
unbearable pressure on the very kernel of my self-identity and thus utterly 
humiliates my self-esteem - so there must be in the very nature of the I 
something which resists moral law: the conceit which gives preference to 
»pathological« interests over the moral law. This »radical Evil« expresses itself 
in three forms, degrees, which all hinge on a kind of subject's self-deceit: 
- The first, the mildest, form of Evil is to make an appeal to the »weakness of 
the human nature«: I know what my duty is, I fully acknowledge it, but I 
cannot gather enough strength to follow its call and not to succumb to 
»pathological« temptations... The falsity of it, of course, consists in the 
underlying gesture of self-objectivization: the feebleness of my character is not 
part of my given nature, I have no right to assume the position of 
metalanguage, of an objective observer of myself, and to ascertain what my 
nature allows. My »natural dispositions« determine my behaviour only insofar 
as I qua free, autonomous being acknowledge them, so I am fully responsible 
for them - it is this responsibility that the first form of Evil evades. 
15. See Monique David-Ménard, La folie dans la raison pure, Paris: Vrin 1991. 
244 Slavo j Žižek 
- The second form, incomparably more dangerous, inverts the first one: in the 
first form of Evil, the subject, while retaining the adequate notion of what its 
duty is, professes its inability to act accordingly; here, it claims to act for the 
sake of duty, to be motivated solely by ethical concerns, whereas it is truly led 
by pathological motivations. An exemplary case of it is a severe teacher who 
believes that he torments the children in behalf of their own moral upbringing, 
whereas he is actually satisfying his sadistic impulses... the self-deception is 
here deeper than in the first case, since the subject misperceives the very 
contours of duty. 
- The third form, the worst, is for the subject to totally lose the inner sense, 
the inner relationship towards duty qua specific moral agency, and to perceive 
morality as a simple external set of rules, of obstacles that society puts up in 
order to restrain the pursuit of my egotistical »pathological« interests. This 
way, the very notions of »right« and »wrong« lose their meaning, if I do follow 
moral rules, it is simply in order to avoid painful consequences, but if I can 
»bend the law« without getting caught, all the better for me... The standard 
excuse of the subject with this attitude, when it is reproached for doing 
something cruel or immoral, is »1 didn't break any laws, so get off my back!« 
There is, however, a fourth possibility, excluded by Kant, the possibility of 
what he refers to as »diabolical Evil«: the moment of the Hegelian 
contradiction when Evil assumes the form of its opposite, i.e. when it is not 
anymore externally opposed to Good but becomes the content of the latter's 
form. We must be careful here not to confuse this »diabolical Evil« with the 
second Kantian form: there, also, Evil assumes the form of Good; however, 
what we have to do with is a simple case of a pathological motivation which, 
by way of self-deceit, misperceives itself as fulfilling one's duty, whereas in 
the case of »diabolical Evil«, the impetus of my activity actually is 
»non-pathological« and runs against my egotistical interests. The example that 
comes to mind here is the difference between corrupted authoritarian regimes 
and totalitarian regimes: in the case of authoritarian regimes, nobody is duped, 
everybody knows that behind all the patriotic rhetorics there is a simple greed 
for power and wealth, whereas the problem with totalitarians is that it is 
wrong to dismiss them as a case of masking selfish interests in virtue's clothes 
- they really act for the sake of what they perceive as virtue, they are 
prepared to stake everything, inclusive of their life, for it. The irony, of 
course, is that the first exemplary case of it was the Jacobinical »dictature of 
virtue«; although Kant opposed them in politics, he laid the foundations for 
them in his moral philosophy (it was already Hegel who detected this terrorist 
potential of the Kantian ethics). Kant had therefore good reasons for 
excluding »diabolical Evil«: within the parameters of his philosophy, it is 
indistinguishable from the Good! 
Kant: the subject out of joint 245 
The proof that what Kant calls »diabolical Evil« (evil as an ethical principle) 
is a necessary consequence of Kant's notion of »radical Evil«, i.e. the proof 
that Kant, when he rejects the hypothesis of »diabolical Evil«, shirks the 
consequences of his own discovery, is provided by Kant himself. In his 
Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant points out how, apropos of 
some really evil person, we can see that Evil pertains to his very eternal 
character: this person did not yield to evil under the influence of bad 
circumstances, Evil lies in his very »nature«. At the same time, of course, he is 
- as every human being - radically responsible for his character. The 
necessary implication of it is that, in an »eternal«, timeless, transcenental act, 
he must have chosen Evil as the basic feature of his being. The transcendental, 
a priori, character of this act means that it could not have been motivated by 
pathological circumstances - the original choice of Evil had to be a purely 
ethical act, the act of elevating Evil into an ethical principle. 
The object of the indefinite judgement 
The diabolical Evil, the »unthought« of Kant, is stricto sensu irrepresentable: 
it entails the breakdown of the logic of representation, i.e. the radical 
incommensurability between the field of representation and the 
unrepresentable Thing. This space where such monstruous apparitions can 
emerge, is opened up already in the Critique of Pure Reason by the distinction 
between negative and indefinite judgement. The very example used by Kant to 
illustrate this distinction is tell-tale: the positive judgement by means of which 
a predicate is ascribed to the (logical) subject - »The soul is mortal«; the 
negative judgement by means of which a predicate is denied to the subject -
»The soul is not mortal«; the indefinite judgement by means of which, instead 
of negating a predicate (i.e. the copula which ascribes it to the subject), we 
affirm a certain non-predicate - »The soul is not-mortal«. (In German also, 
the difference is solely a matter of punctuation: »Die Seele ist nicht sterbliche« 
- »Die Seele ist nichtsterbliche«; Kant enigmatically does not use the standard 
»unsterbliche«. See CPR, A 72-73.) - This distinction, hair-splitting as it may 
appear, nevertheless plays a crucial role in Kant's concept of the noumena. 
That is to say, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant 
introduces the distinction between positive and negative meanings of 
»noumenon«: in the positive meaning of the term, noumenon is »an object of a 
nonsensible intuition«, whereas in the negative meaning, it is »a thing insofar 
as it is not an object of our sensible intuition«(CPR, B 307). The grammatical 
form should not deceive us here: the positive meaning is expressed by the 
negative judgement and the negative meaning by the indefinite judgement. In 
other words, when one determines the Thing as »an object of a nonsensible 
intuition«, one immediately negates the positive judgement which determines 
the Thing as »an object of a sensible intuition«: one accepts intuition as the 
unquestioned base or genus; against this background, one opposes its two 
246 Slavo j Žižek 
species, sensible and nonsensible intuition. Negative judgement is thus not only 
limiting, it also delineates a domain beyond phenomena where it locates the 
Thing - the domain of the nonsensible intuition whereas in the case of the 
negative determination, the Thing is excluded from the domain of our sensible 
intuition, without being posited in an implicit way as the object of a 
nonsensible intuition; by leaving in suspense the positive status of the Thing, 
negative determination saps the very genus common to affirmation and 
negation of the predicate. 
Therein consists also the difference between »is not mortal« and »is 
not-mortal«: what we have in the first case is a simple negation, whereas in the 
second case, a non-predicate is affirmed. The only »legitimate« definition of 
the noumenon is that it is »not an object of our sensible intuition«, i.e. a 
wholly negative definition which excludes it from the phenomenal domain; 
this judgement is »infinite« since it does not imply any conclusions as to 
where, in the infinite space of what remains outside the phenomenal domain, 
the noumenon is located. What Kant calls »transcendental illusion« ultimately 
consists in the very (mis)reading of infinite judgement as negative judgement: 
when we conceive the noumenon as an »object of a nonsensible intuition«, the 
subject of the judgement remains the same (the »object of an intuition«), what 
changes is only the character (nonsensible instead of sensible) of this intuition, 
so that a minimal »commensurability« between the subject and the predicate 
(i.e., in this case, between the noumenon and its phenomenal determinations) 
is still maintained. »Suprasensible objects (objects of suprasensible intuition)« 
belong to the chimerical »topsy-turvy world«, they are nothing but an inverted 
presentation, projection, of the very content of sensible intuition in the form 
of another, nonsensible intuition - or, to recall Marx's ironic critique of 
Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy: »Instead of the ordinary individual 
with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have nothing but this 
ordinary manner purely and simply - without the individual.«16 This is what 
the chimera of »nonsensible intuition« is about: instead of ordinary objects of 
sensible intuition, we get the same ordinary objects of intuition, without their 
sensible character. 
This subtle difference between negative and indefinite judgement is at work in 
a certain type of witticism where the second part does not immediately invert 
the first part by negating its predicate but repeats it with the negation 
displaced onto the subject. The judgement »He is an individual full of idiotic 
features«, for example, can be negated in a standard mirror way, i.e. replaced 
by its contrary »He is an individual with no idiotic features«; yet its negation 
can also be given the form of »He is full of idiotic features without being an 
individual«. This displacement of the negation from the predicate onto the 
16. Karl Marx, »The Poverty of Philosophy«, in Karl Marx / Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 
Volume 6, New York: International Publishers 1976, p. 163. 
Kant: the subject out of joint 247 
subject provides the logical matrix of what is often the unforeseen result of 
our educational efforts to liberate the pupil from the constraint of prejudices 
and cliches: not a person capable of expressing himself in a relaxed, 
unconstrained way, but an automatized bundle of (new) cliches behind which 
we no longer sense the presence of a »real person«. Let us just recall the usual 
outcome of psychological training intended to deliver the individual from the 
constraints of his everyday frame of mind and to set free his »true self«, its 
authentic creative potentials (transcendental meditation, etc.): once he gets rid 
of the old cliches which were still able to sustain the dialectical tension 
between themselves and the »personality« behind them, what take their place 
are new cliches which abrogate the very »depth« of personality behind them... 
in short, he becomes a true monster, a kind of »living dead«. Samuel Goldwyn, 
the old Hollywood mogul, was right: what we need are indeed some new, 
original cliches... 
The mention of the »living dead« is by no means accidental here: in our 
ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgements precisely when we 
endeavour to comprehend those borderline phenomena which undermine 
established differences like that between living and being dead: in the texts of 
popular culture, the uncanny creatures which are neither alive nor dead, the 
»living dead« (vampires, etc.), are referred to as »the undead« - although they 
are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us, ordinary mortals. The 
judgement »he is undead« is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgement in the 
precise sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the 
domain of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domain of 
the living (as in the case of the simple negation »he is not dead«). The fact 
that vampires and other »living dead« are usually referred to as »things« has to 
be rendered with its full Kantian meaning: a vampire is a Thing which looks 
and acts like us, yet it is not one of us... In short, the difference between the 
vampire and the living person is that between indefinite and negative 
judgement: a dead person loses the predicates of a living being, yet he remains 
the same person; an undead, on the contrary, retains all the predicates of a 
living being without being one - as in the above-quoted Marxian joke, what 
we get with the vampire is »the ordinary manner of speaking and thinking 
purely and simply - without the individual«. 
One is tempted to affirm that this logic of infinite judgement contains in nuce 
Kant's entire philosophical revolution: it delineates transcendentally 
constituted reality from the uncanny, prohibited/impossible, real, domain of 
the Thing which had to remain unthought since in it Good overlaps with 
radical Evil. In short, Kant replaced the traditional philosophical opposition of 
appearance and essence with the opposition of phenomenal reality and the 
noumenal Thing which follows a radically different logic: what appears as 
»essential« (moral law in ourselves) is possible and thinkable only within 
248 Slavo j Žižek 
the horizon of our finitude, of our limitation to the domain of phenomenal 
reality - if it were possible for us to trespass this limitation and to gain a direct 
insight into noumenal Thing, we would lose the very capacity which enables us 
to transcend the limits of sensible experience (moral dignity and freedom).