> >For Lacan, there is no Other of the Other.
> Appeal to authority?
What, in my reference to Lacan? No, not really. But it isn't just a perspective either.
> Kant says in _The Metaphysics of Morals_: "The law of
punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who
crawls through the windings of eudaemonism in order to
discover something that releases the criminal from
punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantage it
promises...".
And if you follow through with my re-reading of Kant, punishment becomes impossible because the law isn't fully disclosed itself (being an unconscious law). So without full disclosure of the law - the punishment can *never* fit the crime. Hence, no punishment. Kant wrote some nasty stuff, I'm not defending that. I'm simply defending a contemporary version of Kant's categorical imperative based on a Lacanian reading of Kant avec Sade - with reveals two sides to his work - the Sadean side (as Horkheimer and Adorno note, which talks about punishment) and the side that forbids Sadism (as Zizek, Zupancic, and Lacan note).
> The form of the categorical imperative expresses
the principle of exchanging 'equivalent for equivalent,' in
other words, bourgeois normalcy; and bourgeois normalcy
demands the authoritarian control of the relative surplus
population. Meanings lie in forms, not just in content.
So you are opposed to ethics or moral philosophy in all forms? And, following this, all types of legality and social contract? and, moving right along, justification, verification, rationality, and enlightenment?
The *meaning* of the tautological and empty categorical imperative is going to be different for each relation. Yes, it was born out of bourgeois german idealism. I'm not leaving it there.
> In any case, no moral principle, full or empty, can
prevent what you call 'authoritarianism.' If anything,
trying to apply a moral principle consistently in a world
riven by contradictions & antagonisms is likely to
encourage the abuse of power.
First, it isn't a *moral* principle in the sense of a normative and binding rule. The categorical imperative simply forbids irresponsibility - and grounds moral consciousness in finitude and radical contingency.
off to lecture on Machiavelli (Pulp Fiction) and Hobbes (A Few Good Men), ken