Homo Kantius

Abstract

One of fundamental insights of Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution is discovery of an essentially legislative, law-giving aspect of not only our practical relationship to world, but of our knowing relation to objects. Such legislative dimension, and justification it requires, has recently been highlighted as requiring paradoxical space of illegitimacy in Giorgio Agamben's account of state of exception. In this essay I will argue that by extending Agamben's description of paradoxes of sovereignty to Kant's of Pure Reason, we are able to articulate new understanding of sovereignty of transcendental subject. I do so by showing that there is zone of indistinction between interiority and exteriority that grounds Kant's analytic in such way that paradox of sovereignty is at work at two limits of transcendental project: transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. These correlate concepts and dualism they produce are not an evasion of those paradoxes and flight into subjective sovereignty, but rather an explication of state of exception upon which Kantian law is itself erected. I will argue that Kant's attempt to secure legality of Reason's self-critique is only arrived at through detour into careful articulation of paradoxes of limits of law and state of exception. In order to do so, I will first justify extension of Agamben's analysis of law to Kant's first critique, and then turn to way paradoxical space of illegitimacy opens up respectively in Kant's account of transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. I conclude by suggesting that Kant's project of self-legislation or self-grounding is an attentive response to such paradoxical and difficult zones of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. This conclusion opens up third option of interpreting sovereign law in Kant against dominant though contradictory criticisms of Kant, namely, that Kantian subject is not sovereign enough and that it is too sovereign and despotic. Quaestio Juris What right (quid juris) could one possibly have in extending juridical concepts of sovereignty and state of exception to analytic of Kant's of Pure Reason! Of course, Agamben himself claims that these concepts are not merely juridical, but extend to very being of politics and its relation to Ufe.1 But it is one thing to extend them to political ontology, and yet another to text that is primarily about relationship between rational finite cognition and its objects of knowledge. One possible justification might be found in fact that main sources of Agamben's analysis, namely, Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence, are themselves engaged with and against Neo-Kantian interpretations of same concepts. Beyond fact that Benjamin's text cites Hermann Cohen's work on ethics of pure will,2 it is also written few years after he claimed that the central task of coming philosophy will be to take deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to Kantian system.3 Alternatively, Schmitt's text is an attack on Hans Kelsen's Kantian attempt to base all legal points of ascription on one fundamental Grundnorm.4 These contacts with Neo-Kantianism may well help explain why certain Kantian themes surreptitiously appear in Agamben's analysis, but do they justify their extension to supposed epistemological problems of first Critique? Since we do not want to justify this extension by appealing to facts and possibly mistaking quid facti for quid juris, legitimacy must rest on Kant's own text. That of Pure Reason is teeming with juridical metaphors can hardly be overlooked. In preface, Kant calls book a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims. …