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§12 Kant’s Anthropology and the Splitting of the Subject In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the precritical Kant explores , among other things, the topic of human madness. Speaking of madness in general, Kant contrasts reason with “unreason.” As reason provides a matrix of regulative ideas through which the intuited world is rendered intelligible to the cognizing subject, so unreason frames the experiential universe of the madman: I have doubts whether there is a distinction between general lunacy (delirium generale) and that which is fixed upon a definite object (delirium circa objectum). Unreason (which is something positive and not just a lack of reason) is like reason, a mere form to which objects can be adapted; and both reason and unreason, therefore, concern themselves with the general. However, what first comes into the mind at the (usually sudden) outbreak of a crazy disposition (the accidentally encountered subject matter about which the person will rave later) will be from then on the insane person’s chief concern, since it is, because of the novelty of the impression, more firmly fixed in his mind than anything else occurring afterward. (Kant 1978, 116) Mental pathologies, insofar as they function as manifestations of particular forms of unreason, are “something positive and not just a lack of reason .” The laws of reason concern themselves with providing a coherent, systematically unified reality through the employment of the concepts of the understanding in relation to the manifold of (empirical) intuition— and, of course, also through the extension of the concepts of the underKant and the Conditions of Possibility for the Psychoanalytic Subject 79 4 standing beyond the bounds of intuition. Likewise, after suffering as a result of an “accidentally encountered subject matter”—Kant could be construed as speaking here about the tuché of a traumatic encounter, and Lacan himself sees causality as the primary link between his analytic theory and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason1 —the “insane person” constructs an idiosyncratic framework of ideas, concepts, and/or maxims. This framework endeavors to (re)construct a meaningful, integrated unity around the contingent, pathological material introduced by the chance encounter with “the novelty of the impression.” (As regards this “novelty,” Freud similarly defines trauma as an event for which the subject is unprepared in terms of prior anticipation.) As both the later Lacan and Žižek assert, the automaton of unconscious reason continually reconstructs and reshapes itself around the intrusion of the Real. For Kant, this “suturing” of the pseudo-universal matrix of unreason by the pathological-contingent event is one of the essential definitions of madness per se. Cutrofello’s reading of Kant and Lacan, in Imagining Otherwise, contends that the unconscious can be defined as a body of analytic a posteriori judgments. Consequently, the unconscious is the very seat of unreason . But, as Kant himself notes, unreason functions almost identically to the faculty of reason, and thus is not merely the absence of rationality. Why is this the case? If unreason is defined as the suturing of the universal laws combining both intuition and the understanding into a systematic whole by an accidental, chance intuition, then any a posteriori judgments (those with reference to the manifold of perception) elevated to an analytic status (to being immutable, nonempirical judgments functioning as essential components of subjective cognition) are, by definition, unrational .2 However, since both reason and unreason consist of regulative ideas—and not constitutive ones that could easily be tested like empirically verifiable assertions—Cutrofello notes that Kant has no means by which to decisively differentiate between rational and unrational subjects: A deranged subject could well hold to a particular set of beliefs even in the face of what a ‘normal’ person would call sufficient disconfirming evidence. How are we to explain such behavior? It is precisely here, of course, that the specificity of psychoanalytic questioning arises—and Kant clearly sees himself as a ‘normal’ subject capable of psychoanalyzing ‘abnormal’ subjects. But Kant sidesteps the prior question of how I, the critical subject, can tell whether I am a normal or an abnormal subject . At issue is the question that Descartes poses in his first Meditation: How do I know that I myself am not mad? In principle, transcendental philosophy should not be exempt from this challenge, but Kant has very little to say on the topic . . . The question that eventually emerges from 80 T I M E D R I V E N [18.117.152.251] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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