Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic of Desire: Between the Barred Subject and Barred Other

ABSTRACT Kant was a thinker of dualisms, so much so that he left us with a subject split in two. The Kantian subject is fractured, unable to know her own unity, and epistemologically divided between noumenal and phenomenal. For Kant, the split subject emerges at a metaphysical and ontological crossroads, caught between a metaphysics of morals and a metaphysics of nature. Through an analysis of the Kantian subject and the logic of illusions necessary to subjectivity, the following paper joins psychoanalysis and German idealism by showing how the Transcendental Dialectic is a dialectic of desire emanating from a divided and barred subject and Other. This article argues that the Kantian subject is a subject of the unconscious, emerging and disintegrating through a dialectic of desire in the abyss of the Real between two metaphysical realities, nature and freedom, ceaselessly seeking the unity of the subject and reality.