“It is a matter of trusting the promise of the moral law [Er ist ein Vertrauen auf die Verheißung des moralischen Gesetzes],” Kant tells us, although not one “contained in the moral law, but one that I put into it” (Critique of the Power of Judgement 335-36). A trembling undecidability lodged in the genitive case of this promise: the abyssal promise of myself by myself proffered by the absent object of the moral law.
Celan’s “Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen” becomes Kant’s “Das Moralgesetz ist fort, ich muß sein Versprechen tragen”: a transcendental melancholia, the infinite protest of the moral law against the good conscience of forgetting.
the gift (vicious circularity)
In Given Time (1992), Derrida identified a ‘quasi-transcendental illusion’ in the ‘gap’ separating gift and exchange animating Marcel Mauss’ anthropology. For Mauss, Derrida explains, the gift carries with it an obliging force at the origin of sociality, a demand that it ought to return to its origin, to render equilibrium in the asymmetric social relation that it institutes, thus closing the figurative circle of reciprocity. The gift therefore offers Mauss an explanatory normative imperative that might be called ‘quasi-transcendental,’ if not wholly transcendental: the force of a binding, interpersonal obligation that institutes society as such.
Yet, this reciprocity immediately renders the gift-relation into an economic exchange whereby the gift is annulled as a gift – that is, as asymmetrical and unreciprocated in its nature (13). Moreover, the self-annulling, ‘self-destructive’ circularity of exchange belongs to its enabling conditions: the spatio-temporal interval or ‘spacing’ in which giving takes place alongside the recognition of the gift by the recipient, even if unconsciously, set in motion the circularity of economy in which the asymmetric gift-relation is negated (15)
For there to be a gift at all, Derrida contends that it must therefore be subject to an ‘absolute forgetting’ in the register of the Heideggerian ontological oblivion of Being, “the condition of Being and the truth of Being”: the gift therefore figures as the ‘unconditional’ or ‘another name of the impossible’ (17-29). In Kantian terms, the aporia of the gift-relation ‘vacillates’ between the order of the unschematized transcendental ideas (‘thought, language, and desire’) and the order of appearances given through the pure intuitions of time and space (‘knowledge, language, science, and the order of presence’). The gap separating these orders, Derrida claims, “is not present anywhere, it resembles an empty word or a transcendental illusion,” an abyss or an ‘incalculable gulf.’ He continues:
it also gives to this structure or to this logic a form analogous to Kant’s transcendental dialectic, as relation between thinking and knowing, the noumenal and the phenomenal […] The effort of thinking or rethinking a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift should not be a simple reproduction of Kant’s critical machinery (according to the opposition between thinking and knowing, and so forth). But neither is it a matter of rejecting that machinery as old-fashioned. In any case, we are implicated in it, in particular because of that which communicates, in this dialectic, with the problem of time on one side, that of the moral law and of practical reason on the other side.
So, the aporia of the gift, like the transcendental illusion, communicates on the one side with ‘time’ as the empirical condition of the succession of appearances in which the pure gift is entangled – even if self-destructively so – and, on the other, the ‘moral law’ as the pure principle of practical reason insofar as the gift carries the semblance of a quasi-categorical, if not categorical, ‘obliging imperative’ to return to its origin (a structural homology with the example of analogy offered in the Prolegomena, where the transcendental jus talionis of normative right mirrors the mechanical law of action and reaction in nature). One might even substitute the gift for any of Derrida’s other figures of aporia and find a similarly quasi-transcendental dialectic at play. Derrida continues,
But the effort to think the groundless ground of this quasi-“transcendental illusion” should not be either—if it is going to be matter of thinking—a sort of adoring and faithful abdication, a simple movement of faith in the face of that which exceeds the limits of experience, knowledge, science, economy—and even philosophy. On the contrary, it is a matter—desire beyond desire—of responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible both to the injunction or the order of the gift (“give” [“donne“]) as well as to the injunction or the order of meaning (presence, science, knowledge). (1992 29-30)
the quasi-transcendental Illusion
The programmatic definition of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ is given in Limited Inc. (1988): the quasi-transcendental status of a concept indicates its belonging “without belonging to the class of concepts of which it must render an accounting, to the theoretical space that it organizes” (127). This formulation is nuanced further in Glas (1989) during the discussion of the place of Antigone in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
And what if what cannot be assimilated, the absolute indigestible, played a fundamental role in the system, an abyssal role rather, the abyss playing a quasi-tran […] scendental role. Isn’t there always an element excluded from the system that assures the system’s space of possibility? The transcendental has always been, strictly, a transcategorial, what could be received, formed, terminated in none of the categories intrinsic to the system. The system’s vomit. (151-162)
This passage is interrupted by ten pages, performing the very quasi-transcendental mise-en-abyme that it delimits. In Economimesis (1981), Derrida employs a similar image to describe parergonality in Kant’s third Critique: “vomit lends its form to this whole system, beginning with its specific parergonal overflow. It must therefore be shown that the scheme of vomiting, as the experience of disgust, is not merely one excluded term among others” (21).
Both formulations concur on the status of the quasi-transcendental as formative of a conceptual order, class, or system to which it nevertheless cannot be full appropriated, thus pointing to conditions of possibility always in excess of what they condition. In the transcendental dialectic of the first Critique, Kant had sought to close reason’s infinite prosyllogistic regress and the resulting impasse of the antinomies by partitioning the transcendental from the empirical, thus presuming to save the idea of pure reason in the former register by the regulative analogy. However, the self-active causality of ‘noumenal freedom’ in the second Critique becomes the hinge between the suprasensible ideas of metaphysics and the suprasensible in nature, without being fully accounted for by either register.
On Derrida’s reasoning, this closure of the transcendental is thus only ever almost transcendental, since it is given precisely through the chiasmic circularity of analogy over the ‘chasm’ of the suprasensible in nature: the jettisoning of conditions by the retroactive closure of the conditioned previously demarcated as the ‘ultra-transcendental’ (1998 61). This chasm is opened by the displacement, deferral, and inadequation-to-self engendered by the former, vicious circularity – what Derrida elsewhere terms ‘différance’ as a “becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (1982 8). The amphiboly of significations in the ‘pseudo-empirical’ cosmological illusion plays precisely this role, returning at the major junctures of the subsequent Critiques to displace – all the while enabling – Kant’s programmatic conceptual architectonic. The transcendental is thus only ever an illusion of itself in lieu of the ‘incalculable gulf’ on which it rests. Therefore a ‘quasi-transcendental illusion,’ the simulacrum of a mise-en-abyme tendered on the pure analogy that sutured the antimonies of pure reason alongside the very difference between the regulative and the constitutive – themselves being exactly two genres of analogy according to their operative definition in the transcendental aesthetic (297-98).
Yet, even if the transcendental were never ‘anything but a simulacrum,’
[…] one must still render an account of the possibility of this simulacrum and of the desire that impels toward this simulacrum. And one must also render an account of the desire to render an account. This cannot be done against or without the principle of reason (principium reddendae rationis), even if the latter finds there its limit as well as its resource. (1992 30)
We must not seek to amortize the vicious circularity of the dialectic which threatens ruination to the very transcendentality that it proffers. Rather, “one must engage oneself in this thinking, commit oneself to it, give it tokens of faith, and with one’s person, risk entering into its destructive circle. One must promise and swear” (1992 29). The architectonic ‘principle of reason’ demands that we engage the quasi-transcendental dialectic initiated by the gift, one that we can only relate to by an equally “quasi-transcendental illusion” but that we must nevertheless affirm because without it, there would be nothing to think, to engage or to respond to in the first place.
One could read Kant’s many attempts to cross the abyssal ‘exteriority’ of reason’s architectonic exposed by the ‘chasm’ of the suprasensible in nature – by way of the regulative idea, the causa noumenon or the faculty of reflecting judgement – as so many attempts to seal this threatening exteriority: by variously jettisoning it into an ‘ineffably transcendent’ and unknowable noumenon or by rendering into a merely regulative principle coterminous with the limits of reason alone, thus presuming to fix the proper borders of reason and suprasensible exteriority. However, on another reading, Kantian transcendental critique is precisely an attempt to engage this abyssal exteriority and to affirm the thinking of the unconditioned against the ‘euthanasia of pure reason’ (1998 460) which threatens to collapse all unconditionality to the immanence of appearances. The protest of pure reason’s ‘autoimmune teleology’ (“Faith and Knowledge” 88): transcendental critique as auto-resistance.
‘a matter of trusting the promise of the moral law’
In an idiosyncratic footnote from the Appendix to the Critique of Teleological Judgement, under the section ‘On the kind of affirmation produced by means of a practical faith,’ Kant tells us that “it is a matter of trusting the promise of the moral law [Er ist ein Vertrauen auf die Verheißung des moralischen Gesetzes; presumably in the subjective genitive]” (2000 cf. 335). Yet, Kant adds the following clarification in the second edition:
It is not a promise that is contained in the moral law, but one that I put into it, and indeed on a morally adequate basis. For a final end [the promise of the highest good] cannot be commanded by any law of reason without reason simultaneously [given reason’s position outside time] promising its attainability, even if uncertainly [given the precarity of reason’s causality in time], and hereby also justifying the affirmation of the only conditions under which our reason can conceive this [conditions which reason uniquely gives to itself] (Critique of the Power of Judgement fn. 335-336)
This addition is prescient: for it is no longer ‘a matter of trusting the promise of the moral law’ in the subjective genitive, as a promise proffered to us by the moral law that Kant claims we must trust, a pledge made by the one to the other presuming the existence, even the coherent identity, of both the pledger (the moral law) and the pledgee (finite practical reason, or reason itself). Rather, with Kant’s subsequent addition, it becomes ‘a matter of trusting the promise of the moral law’ in the objective genitive, the moral law becoming what is promised, indeed what is proffered by our trust, our pledge insuring by practically constituting the fidelity of what it pledges: namely, the moral law. The moral law is distant, gone, absent, fort at the very moment outside time of this promise ‘that I put into it.’ Moreover, the moral law’s very absence from the world demands our pledge, our faithful promise to bring the law into the world. I must faithfully take responsibility for the ‘as if’ of the categorical imperative precisely because of the tantamount absence of the moral law and the world of ends determined by it.
Without the “free affirmation” of this promise, “the moral way of thinking has no way to persevere in its collision with theoretical reason’s demand for a proof […] but vacillates between practical commands and theoretical doubts” (336). What is at stake in the ‘free [self-sufficient, unconditioned, but also groundless, abyssal] affirmation’ of this promise is precisely the threat of ‘theoretical reason’ – as the excessive teleology of the transcendental dialectic, tearing “down all boundary posts […] taking away [all] limits” (Critique of Pure Reason 385-86) – sending ‘practical reason’ – as reason proper, in its proper use – into another antinomial paralogism, spurred by the insatiable demand for the empirical unconditioned rather than the rational demand for the unconditioned of practical morality.
Kant ends by commenting on the origin of the word ‘fides’, observing that Christianity had arrived at the moral concept before philosophy. Where Kant “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (1998 117), he did so by restricting faith itself to the limits of reason alone, developing an ostensibly rational faith that prepared the ground for contemporary secularism (2009). As Derrida claims, “pure reason, in a process of autoimmune indemnification, could only oppose religion as such to a religion, or pure faith to this or that faith” (2002 88), thereby sacrificing particular communities of faith under the pseudo-universality of a certain protestant Christianity. However, a certain valence of Kantian the “free affirmation” of/in faith comes much closer to deconstruction.
With this ‘free affirmation’, the ‘as if’ of the categorical imperative becomes the ‘as if’ of practical reason’s infinite promise of the moral law – not strictly unrealizable, since Kant reminds us that the law’s penultimate realization or its tantamount unrealizability is beyond our imperfect and actually finite capacities, hence its infinite demand of our finite commitment (1997a 70). Moreover, in pledging oneself the promise of the moral law, one promises the principle of one’s own moral existence, without which the ‘determining ground’ of freedom would fall away (1997a 27). Since practical reason just is another proper name for reason as such, morality serving as the ground of possibility for the self, the loss of its ‘determining ground’ effectively results in the groundlessness of the self’s existence: and, from the other side, this ‘determining ground’ is itself first secured by the ‘free,’ groundless affirmation of an unconditional promise. The promise to realize that which is effectively beyond our finite nature. Repetition of the mise-en-abyme, the obligation of revenance.
Order imposed on my soul to bring back my body, to oblige it to the service of presence [ordre imposé à mon âme de ramener mon corps, de l’astreindre au service de présence] (Edmond Gilliard, “Revenance de l’Outre” in Hymne terrestre).
It would then be ‘a matter of trusting the promise of practical reason’, the genitive case lodged undecidedly between the subjective and objective: in trusting the promise of practical reason (subjective genitive) to bear the moral law, reason promises itself in the determining principle of its freedom, thereby placing trust in the promise of practical reason (objective genitive) proffered by the moral law and grounded in freedom. At the risk of aping Derrida, an abyssal, if not destructive, circularity is opened by this promise, vacillating between the objective and subjective genitive, the performative and constative, the constitutive and the regulative, traversing the whole of reason’s architectonic.
Where Paul Celan had previously written “Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen,” one could paraphrase Kant-cum-Derrida writing “Das Moralische Gesetz ist fort, ich muß es tragen” (the Moral Law is gone, I must carry it), “Das Moralgesetz ist fort, ich muß sein Versprechen tragen” (the Moral Law is gone, I must carry its promise): since the moral law is presently absent, an infinitely distant “focus imaginarius” on reason’s architectonic horizon, I must promise to realize it, I must interminably and irredeemably (without any substantial, ‘messianic’ promise of expiation) act as if my participation in the moral law brings it into being, even if I could never instantiate it as such in the world. In so promising the moral law to myself, I promise myself in the moral law.
I really constitute myself as a promise of/to the Other à venir, above the vertiginous abyss/excess marked by the transcendental object = x.
the melancholia of the moral law
Where Derrida has read Kant’s moral law through the Freudian death drive, another reading is disclosed of Kant-cum-Freud as the melancholic of the moral law, parallel to Derrida’s own reading of Celan. Insofar as the suprasensible object of the moral law – the cathetic object of a certain transcendental desire, the ‘pure’ desire of/for morality – is arrived at by means of an analogy and a promise which leaves only an empty marker, we are condemned to the perpetual failure of interiorizing and idealizing this law. All the more since the moral law, as Kant tells us, is the determining ground of freedom and therefore of practical reason (1997 27): hence, the absent Freudian object of over-identification which, as unconditioned suprasensible, belies complete interiorization or appropriation.
A transcendental indigestion of the moral law, or the transcendental itself as the ‘the absolute indigestible of the system’: the indigestible as the noumenal core of the subject, refusing incorporation and idealization.
Against the normal work of mourning, Kant sustains a transcendental melancholia as the indefinite frustration of this idealizing introjection (1957 243-258). The question of the infinite respect due to the ‘humanity in our person’ and proffered by the moral law (109-10), pace Derrida, becomes the responsibility for “a certain melancholy [that] must still protest against normal mourning” (2005 160). A protest against the ego’s narcissistic cannibalization of that other hyperbolically indicated by the moral law, in the name of their chasmic-chiasmic memory at the beating heart of the self.
a (non)practice in theoretical training 