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In Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, there is a strange discrepancy between the figure of Mona Lisa and the complex, almost Gothic, background of trees, rocks, etc. It is as if, effectively, Mona Lisa stands in front of a painted background , not in a real environs: the painted background stands for the void which is filled in with painting. Does this same discrepancy not account also for the strange attraction of the old Hollywood films from 30s and 40s in which actors are so obviously acting in front of a projected background? Recall the systematic use of this device in Hitchcock: Ingrid Bergman skiing down a mountain slope in front of a ridiculously discrepant snowy background in Spellbound; Bergman again, driving a car in a studio with the uncoordinated background of a night landscape passing by in Notorious ; and exemplary cases from the late Hitchcock of the dining car table conversation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, with a Hudson Bay background in which we pass three times the same barn in North by Northwest , and of Tippi Hedren riding a horse in Marnie. Although it is easy to project a conscious strategy into what may have been Hitchcock’s simple sloppiness, it is difficult to deny the psychological resonance of these shots, as if the very discord between figure and background renders a key message about the depicted person’s subjectivity. It was above all Orson Welles who perfected the expressive use of this technique: one of his standard shots is the American shot of the hero too close to the camera, with the blurred background which, even if it is a “true” background, nonetheless generates the effect of something artificial, acquiring a spectral dimension , as if the hero is not moving in a real world, but in a phantasmagoric virtual universe. . . . And does the same not go for modern subjectivity? Perhaps it is a crucial fact that Mona Lisa was painted at the dawn of modernity: this irreducible gap between the subject and its “background ,” the fact that a subject never fully fits its environs, is never fully embedded in it, defines subjectivity. It is this structural discrepancy constitutive of subjectivity that is at the very core of Adrian Johnston’s book. And since it was Immanuel Kant who fully articulated this discrepancy, the book cannot but be focused on Kant’s philosophy. The predominant reference to Kant in contemporary philosophy is Foreword: A Parallax View on Drives xiii not a very promising one. The latest ethical “crisis” apropos biogenetics created the need for what one is fully justified in calling a “state philosophy ”: a philosophy that would, on the one hand, condone scientific research and technical process, and, on the other hand, contain its full socio-symbolic impact, that is, prevent it from posing a threat to the existing theologico-ethical constellation. No wonder those who come closest to meeting these demands are neo-Kantians (from Habermas in Germany to Luc Ferry in France, who is now effectively a state functionary, a minister of education!): Kant himself already dealt with the problem of guaranteeing , while fully taking into account the Newtonian science, that there is a space of ethical responsibility exempted from the reach of science. That is, as Kant himself put it, he limited the scope of knowledge to create the space for faith and morality. And are today’s state philosophers not facing the same task? Is their effort not focused on how, through different versions of transcendental reflection, to restrict science to its preordained horizon of meaning and thus to denounce as “illegitimate” its consequences for the ethico-religious sphere? It is deeply significant that the main challenge to this predominant use of Kant is coming from philosophers who rely on psychoanalysis, especially in its Lacanian version—apart from Johnston himself, one should mention at least three more names, all of them women: Alenka Zupančič, Joan Copjec, and Monique David-Ménard. The specific twist that Johnston gives to this topic is his focus on temporality as the ultimate horizon of the Freudian notion of drive. The central role of temporality was elaborated already by Jean Laplanche who, in his reading of the impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, effectively reproduces the precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On the one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of the parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children effectively were seduced and molested by adults; on the...

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