Kant’s Categorical Imperative

Kant’s Categorical Imperative, as interpreted in the book, marks a decisive break in ethical thought: freedom no longer depends on a ready-made prohibition against which a person can define himself, but is bound to a moral Law whose demand cannot be delegated to an external authority. The book’s central criticism is that Kant does not fully accept the consequences of this breakthrough. He treats the unconditional demand of freedom as an ideal that can never be completely achieved, thereby turning an unavoidable ethical imperative into an aspiration. That compromise helps explain why the relation between Law and desire remains unsettled, and why neither a perfectly moral society nor a society without moral limits can provide a workable resolution.

The Imperative and the Problem of Freedom

The book frames Kant’s limitation through Bernard Williams’s distinction between Must and Ought. Must names an injunction experienced as unavoidable: the subject cannot do otherwise. Ought, by contrast, belongs to an ideal toward which one strives but which can never be fully attained. The criticism is that Kant’s formulations of ethical obligation blur these registers. They recast the force of an act that cannot be avoided as an ideal achievement that remains forever out of reach. The result is a misreading of freedom: instead of confronting the Real of an act that happens with the force of necessity, Kantian ethics imagines an impossible standard that the subject can only approach.

This distinction changes how the book understands the familiar formula Du kannst, denn du sollst. It should not be rendered as a claim that a person can act because duty commands it. Its force is more tautological and more unsettling: the subject can act because, at the decisive point, the subject cannot not do it. Freedom is not made comfortable by the assurance that the act conforms to an external ideal. It appears as an abyss without an ontological guarantee, and its unconditional character makes it difficult to absorb into ordinary experience.

The book therefore reverses a familiar account of moral motivation. The central difficulty is not simply that a person who believes he acts from duty may secretly be moved by a self-interested or otherwise pathological motive. Rather, a free act is traumatic precisely because it cannot be securely fitted into a chain of familiar causes. To make the act bearable, the subject may retrospectively experience it as if it had been conditioned by such motives. Kant, in the book’s account, tends to describe the uncertainty of whether an act was truly free; the deeper problem is the difficulty of assuming freedom when the act cannot be comfortably schematized.

Law, Desire, and Transgression

The Categorical Imperative also stands within a conflict between moral Law and desire. The book contrasts the Kantian project with the Marquis de Sade’s effort to abolish the mediation between Law and desire in the opposite direction. If Law is made identical with pure enjoyment, or enjoyment with a law of its own, the space in which a rule can be violated disappears. The argument is not that one pole offers a stable solution: eliminating the gap between moral ideal and positive law also eliminates the possibility of transgression that, paradoxically, helps make social life possible.

In this account, actual societies depend neither on universal obedience nor on the complete absence of moral rules. They occupy a compromise between those extremes. An ideal society in which people had overcome radical evil and experienced moral obligation as fully harmonious with their nature would be as unworkable as a society organized around unrestricted violation. Such a perfected moral order would also be dangerous as an ideal, because the book insists that radical evil cannot simply be abolished. Symbolic norms remain necessary even though they cannot be perfectly followed; their violations are not an accidental feature that can be removed without consequence.

The book further argues that appeals to nature do not settle the conflict. Kant moves between nature as the law-governed field of phenomena and a suprasensible community of ethical beings. The latter risks naturalizing the very excess of freedom that disrupts ordinary causal order. In the Sadeian case, an indifferent nature governed by change is supplemented by a supposedly commanding Nature that appears to demand destruction. The book treats both appeals as ways of backing away from freedom without an ultimate guarantee. In the Sadeian case, the pleasure of violating a prohibition cannot be cleanly separated from the awareness that the act is a violation; innocence and blasphemous transgression remain entangled.

Kant’s Breakthrough and Its Compromise

For Jacques Lacan, as presented in the book, the Kantian overcoming of the traditional Law-and-desire dialectic is a point of no return. Freedom can no longer be secured through reliance on an established prohibition whose transgression would prove one’s independence. Its limits must instead be self-posited. The book connects this shift to the failure of later attempts to restore old values through prohibitions that can no longer command serious belief: such efforts repeat the form of Law without recovering its former authority.

This is why the book rejects the simple claim that Sade is the hidden truth of Kant, as though Sade merely carried Kant’s radicalism further. It argues instead that Sadeian perversion is a symptom of Kant’s compromise: the figure of the obsessive pursuer of enjoyment displays what opens up when Kant does not remain fully faithful to his own ethical revolution. The apparent extremity of that pursuit is therefore not straightforwardly the completion of Kantian freedom. It bears witness to the unresolved gap between the Law and desire, and to the consequences of retreating from that gap rather than confronting it.

The book also identifies a problem in Lacan’s own treatment of this relation. His account moves between the view that prohibition generates the desire to transgress and the more thoroughly Kantian possibility that moral Law is directly identical with pure desire. The difficulty is how to distinguish an ethical act that refuses to reduce life to the service of goods from an immersion in enjoyment that consumes the subject. The proposed resolution is not to posit a substantial source of enjoyment beyond the Symbolic. Enjoyment arises through its own failure to reach a final goal: repetitive circulation around what is missed is the structure of drive. On this reading, the impasse between pure desire and primordial enjoyment is constitutive, not a puzzle that can be eliminated by choosing one side.

Ethical Law and Political Power

The book extends its concern with Law beyond individual ethics, asking how public authority depends on forces that its official rules cannot openly acknowledge. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, it distinguishes political power from direct violence exercised through command in institutions such as the Army, Church, or school. It then complicates that distinction: power relies on an obscene supplement of violence, while apparently nonpolitical relations of subordination themselves embody prior political decisions. Treating such relations as neutral does not remove politics; it can conceal the struggle that sustains them.

This analysis also informs the book’s criticism of humanitarian intervention. It argues that presenting intervention as a purely antipolitical defense of innocent individuals can obscure the positive political and economic order imposed in its name. The United States’ overthrow of Saddam Hussein, justified partly through the suffering of the Iraqi people, also advanced a particular vision of liberal democracy, private property, and integration into the global market. In this example, the language of preventing suffering can restrict the possibility of a collective project of social transformation. The broader ethical issue is not resolved by appealing to a universal moral purpose alone; the political consequences and assumptions carried by that appeal remain at stake.

The discussion of Guantánamo Bay makes the relation between law and its exception especially stark. A defense of the prisoners’ treatment claimed that they had been missed by the bombs and were therefore better off alive than dead. The book argues that this reasoning effectively places them between biological life and legal death: their survival is treated as though it did not restore a legally protected status. The authorities who hold them occupy a corresponding position, acting in a space that remains within law while escaping its ordinary constraints. This is not a direct illustration of the Categorical Imperative, but it sharpens the book’s wider question about what happens when Law is upheld through an exception that its public account cannot acknowledge. Across ethics and politics, the imperative’s significance lies in the demand it makes—and in the unresolved structures that emerge when that demand is converted into an ideal, a prohibition, or a justification for power.