Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Metaphysics: Kristeva, Primary Identification

French

- Metaphysics, I say, has slipped into material existence … As a child, I believe, one still knows something of this stratum – with the dim knowledge children have of such things.
T.W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems

- Love involves a sizeable aufhebung of narcissism.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love

Martin Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics includes, amid a penetrating and controversial interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a prescient reflection on the relation between philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. These remarks presage the concomitant influential lure and critical aversion that follow Heidegger’s metaphysical speculations.
Within the domain of Anthropology in general, under the rubric “science of man”, Heidegger organizes heterogeneous disciplines that consider the human being by referring to the somatic, biological, and psychological -- “Characterology, Psychoanalysis, Ethnology, Pedagogical Psychology, Cultural Morphology, and the Typology of World-Views.” At a moment in time so dear to the publication of Being and Time – in the preface to the 1929 first edition Heidegger mentions that his interpretation of Kant’s first Critique arose in connection with the working-out of Part Two of Being and Time - a bold reading of Kant’s metaphysics as the attempt to lay the ground of metaphysics is perhaps far from staggering. The question of the meaning of Being not withstanding, Heidegger remains apparently cognizant of contemporaneous “sciences of man”, and above all, their relation to metaphysics:
No time has known so much and such a variety about mankind as is the case today. No time has been able to present its knowledge of mankind so urgently and in so captivating a manner as is the case today. No time has previously been able to offer this knowledge as quickly and easily as today. But also, no time has known less about what man is than today. In no other time has man become as questionable as in ours.

These speculations are hardly a marginal concern within the larger scope of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s metaphysical project. Rather, Heidegger suggests that it is Kant’s metaphysical questioning, a “disentangling” (analytic) of our finite knowledge into its elements as a “natural human tendency” that spotlights, in Kant’s own words, “a study of our [human] inner nature.” This kind of ground-laying for metaphysics in terms of a critique of human pure reason that attempts to comprehensively make manifest the three disciplines of Metaphysica Specialis – Cosmology, Theology, Psychology – in terms of a “natural human tendency” (145) has an explicit anthropological focus. Ultimately, according to Heidegger, such (transcendental) “analytic” questioning itself becomes questionable.
Kant’s endeavor to retrieve the ground-laying of metaphysics in the innermost essence of man leads Kant to “shrink back” from his own questioning, to fall-away-from, as a “not-going-to-the-end”, or as I will contend in a psychoanalytic vain, a not-going-to-the-beginning. Heidegger suggests, “Inquiring into the subjectivity of the subject leads us into darkness.” Kant’s authentic philosophy lies not in what he says, but in what he does: “shrinking-back” from the abyss of metaphysics. Kant “falls-away-from” the transcendental power of the imagination, that “indispensable function of the soul”, as the unveiled metaphysical ground in order to preserve the philosophical foundation of human pure reason. “Kant himself undermines the floor upon which he initially placed the Critique.”
Accompanying Kristeva’s psychoanalytic inquiries further into the abyss or nothingness at the “root” of our human-psyche or “being” than either Heidegger or Kant unearths the stakes with which Kantian metaphysics is gesturing toward without sufficiently exploring. Kristeva’s own “analytic” of subjectivity bursts asunder strict Kantian dualisms erected upon a notion of a non-empirical or formally transcendental separated subject that purportedly “grounds” the possibility of objectivity entirely from within itself.
In this sense, Kristeva reveals Kantian metaphysics, going beyond even Heidegger’s interpretation, as the “shrinking-back” from an (embodied) imagination at the frontier of the psychic and corporeal, of the intra-symbolic and the affective – an amorous immediate identification not based on the specular - in order to remain allegiant to a metaphysics of knowledge based on specular representation. My claim is not that Kristeva renders the project of metaphysics itself untenable; rather, she deepens the “ground-laying” by following Kant’s lead into the root of our psyche, exposing Kant’s metaphysics of knowledge through a transcendental subject as a narcissistic “shrinking-back”. Kristeva’s own “analytic” of subjectivity inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis mounts a serious criticism of Kant’s metaphysical “grounding” through a separated subject as narcissistic.
Ultimately, Kristeva opens the Kantian question of the possibility of experience to new possibilities, that is, a less abstract transcendental account based on knowledge. I would like to suggest in conclusion, with an excursion into Hegel’s philosophy and his concern with “immediacy”, that Kristeva’s notion of primary identification frees a conception of the transcendental from narcissistic metaphysics and thereby examines the drive dimension of our inter-affective experience with others (both mother and father) always already there that takes account of the whole gamut of our sensuous experience. Kant thus “falls-back” from a notion of the imagination that affectively binds human beings to one another.
The Freudian notion of narcissism, caught in a play of almost ubiquitous rebounds within Freud’s own corpus according to Kristeva’s reading, might appear at first to be merely originary mimetism. Kristeva, however, claims that the notion of narcissism is not only far from being originary, but the mimetic play of narcissism constitutive of psychic identities – Ego/object – reveals itself to be a screen over emptiness. This intrinsic emptiness is situated at the very advent of the symbolic function appearing between what is not yet an Ego and what is not yet an object. On this account, Kristeva maintains that narcissism is a supplemental action added to the autoerotic drives, the drives being there from the very first for Freud.
With the introduction of the notion of narcissism in On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914) as a “new psychical action” supplementing the original mother-child dyad, Freud has all but cast aside an essential point concerning the origin of sexuality elaborated in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Antedating the psychoanalytic notion of narcissism, Freud’s conception of “autoerotism” also shares the fate of a kind of scattered recurrence within Freud’s texts, right alongside the introduction of the rebounding notion of narcissism in On Narcissism. In Freud’s second of Three Essays, “Infantile Sexuality”, the autoerotic drives appear to be derivative in the sense that they mark a separation from the dyad relation. But how could such a separation - or the absence of an object as the basis of autoerotism’s turning upon oneself - be effected without a consideration of the intra-symbolic function or cognitive development of the autoerotic infant? And yet, the separation constitutive of autoerotism in this essay omits just this kind of consideration. The appropriate question would be whether the infant could even recognize a “sexual object” outside oneself to turn away from as the constitutive moment of early sexual eroticism. The confusion that hovers around Freud’s early essay on “Infantile Sexuality” and the introduction of “autoerotism” is brought on by the failure to consider, alongside the revolutionary thesis of early infantile sexual emergence, the intra-symbolic or cognitive development of the infant in relation to “external” objects. The kind of separation characteristic of the “object-less” infant construed in this early phase of Freud’s thinking is not the keynote of his early thinking on sexuality. The notion of narcissism in 1914 fills in this gap in Freud’s early theory. Freud is more concerned in his early theory with subverting the popular conception of sexuality then with the implicative relations between such an early emergence of sexuality and the cognitive development of the infant.
With narcissism, Freud posits a “new psychical action” supplementing the autoerotic drives; in this case, the autoerotic drives, while indeed “object-less”, are not merely so because the infant has simply turned upon oneself as an eroto-genic zone; the infant’s “objectless-ness” is still harbored within a dyadic relation in which a “new psychical action” of intra-symbolic functioning portends the onset of a separation that is not simply a detachment of the drives.
According to Kristeva, this intra-symbolic status of narcissism, preceding the Oedipal triad, is dependent nonetheless on a third figure – the Imaginary Father. Taking a clue from Lacan here, with the important proviso that such a relation chronologically and logically antedates the “mirror stage”: “the human ego begins to establish itself on the basis of an imaginary relation.” Kristeva attributes, paying homage to both Freud and Lacan, a new aim to contemporary psychoanalysis, taking the “analysis” of symptom into linguistic theory and language learning, and might I add transcendental philosophy:
Now, and thanks to Lacan, one analyzes the symptom as a screen through which one detects the workings of signifiance (the process of formation and de-formation of meaning and the subject); these coextend with the speaking being as such and, consequently, they cut through not only “normal” and “pathological” states but also psychoanalytic symptomatology.

Narcissism is thus a protection against this elementary separation from the mother through the vehicle of a third figure that protects the infant from the early ravaging of chaos, the dissolution of its fragile borders threatening to sweep away any possibility of distinction, trace, and symbolization. Solidarity of narcissism and emptiness under the guise of this “new psychical action” prevails so that the limits of the body are not confused. In this early zone, according to Kristeva, the child “signifies itself as child” where narcissism and emptiness uphold one another. This “imaginary relation” as the initial movement of the dyad is poised between the affective and the intra-symbolic as a protective shelter from chaotic dyadic-dismemberment. This “imaginary relation” as the zero degree of the imagination motivates the earliest efforts of representation.
This provocative glimpse at the conditions of an imagination – at the frontier of the psyche-soma - as a possible form of defensive representation deserves much more detail. For the moment, however, let us pause to consider a possible motive behind Kant’s “shrinking-away” from the abyss of metaphysics: namely, what Heidegger labels the transcendental power of the imagination.
In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, “The Idea of A Division of a Special Science, Under the Title ‘Critique of Pure Reason’,” Kant delimits his special science to a precise examination not to be understood as an attempted extension of pure reason. As a “critique” of pure reason, Kant suggests his task is a propaedeutic clarification of pure reason, for perhaps the future system of pure reason where reason itself may be extended. In this delimitation, Kant offers a concise definition of how he will go on to use the concept “transcendental”:
I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is possible a priori. A14/B27-8

Determining the conditions for the possibility of our knowledge of objects is the scope of transcendental philosophy. For Kant, however, and this is truly what determines Heidegger’s reading of Kant as an exploration into finite knowledge, examining these conditions, broadly speaking, amounts to uncovering the conditions of “two stems of knowledge.” A “critique of pure reason” that is occupied with the mode of our knowledge is not merely interested in the faculty of the understanding, or the capacity to judge, but has as its interpretive duty an examination of the conditions of sensibility, for it plays a vital role in our knowledge of objects. Heidegger insists that Kant pursues a radically new interpretation of knowledge as finite, and that this must be “hammered-in” for any adequate understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. Before launching into the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, Kant closes the Introduction with a few anticipatory remarks about knowledge: “By way of introduction and anticipation we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root” (61). The limits of Kant’s propaedeutic, along with the novelty of Kant’s conception of finite knowledge, become perspicuous where the “root” of the two stems of knowledge is not made manifest, but remains “unknown.” To leave the “root” unexamined is to leave suspended in a psychic space of narcissistic emptiness crucial Kantian distinctions that depend on the character of this “root”. Without an uncovering of the “root”, Kant’s transcendental “analytic” remains incomplete and insufficient.
If Kant’s transcendental examination is to take into account our distinctively human mode of knowledge, how could such an inquiry gloss this “unknown root”? Rigid Kantian distinctions, not only between the “two stems of knowledge” themselves, but also the a priori and the empirical, appear to rely on this “root” as unknown. Kant’s notion of a priori is not “from what comes before” knowledge in the order of existence, but rather a “from what comes before” empirical knowledge that falls squarely under the species of “representation” and not prior to the scope of representational knowledge itself. Following an examination of the “unknown root” may perhaps reveal a sense of the a priori in terms of “from what comes before knowledge” in the sense of signifiance, the early workings of the formation and de-formation of representational meaning centered on an imaginary relation with “affective” roots. Kant “falls-back” from the unknown root in order to secure and maintain the strict distinctions he needs for the purposes of metaphysics and human pure reason. The abyss of metaphysics must be covered over in the interest of human reason.
The power of the imagination, in the Critique of Pure Reason, is officially introduced as an “indispensable function of the soul” (A42/B181). If the laying of the ground of metaphysics is to be achieved through an examination of the innermost essence of human nature, then Kant must face off and determine with a certain precision this function of the soul. Heidegger proposes that Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View should provide us with information concerning the power of the imagination. Yet, Heidegger concludes quite rightly, after recalling the empirical powers of the imagination, the Anthropology does not concern the question of the ground-laying of metaphysics in terms of the “indispensable function of the soul,” although such a function must be implicitly ubiquitous throughout. The Anthropology does not pose the question of transcendence. “The Anthropology shows that the productive power of the imagination as well is still dependent upon the representation of the senses.” As Kant makes apparent throughout the Critique the question of the possibility of knowledge is independent of any empirical derivation. It is with the Critique, however, that the transcendental power of the imagination forms the “pure look of objectivity.” The horizon of objectivity makes the experience of objects possible through this spontaneous or creative forming by the pure power of the imagination.
One might put the question to Kant: given that finite knowledge consists of two stems, sensibility and understanding, neatly corresponding to the division of the examination in the Critique into a ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and ‘Transcendental Logic’, where does the transcendental power of the imagination belong? As if directly contradicting the thesis of the two stems of finite knowledge, Kant opens the A-edition of the transcendental deduction with the following:
There are three subjective sources of knowledge upon which rests the possibility of experience in general and of knowledge of objects – sense, imagination, and apperception. Each of these can be viewed as empirical, namely, in its application to given appearances. But all of them are likewise a priori elements or foundations. A115

Heidegger’s provocative thesis is that the imagination is the “common root” of both sensibility and the understanding, and the unifying power of transcendence: for what other reason would Kant first officially introduce the “power of the imagination” as a “blind indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious” (A78/B103)? The transcendental power of the imagination is the “unknown root” from which springs forth the stems of knowledge. This would give a plausible explanation of Kant’s statement at the beginning of the A-deduction including the imagination as one of the three “sources” of knowledge. The laying of the ground of metaphysics as the possibility of knowledge as transcendental turns out to have the character of a “root”, where the imagination undermines the foundation of metaphysics as pure reason.
The “root” that remains unknown in the Critique re-surfaces in the psycho-analytic notion of primary identification, Freud’s Einfühlung. This archaic identification, to which we owe Kristeva for fully explicating (Freud had left the notion undeveloped), is an assimilation of non-objectal feelings, neither a priori, empirical, or representational in the strictly Kantian sense, as I will try to demonstrate.
I identify not with an object, but with what offers itself to me as a model. That enigmatic apprehending of a pattern to be imitated, one that is not yet an object to be libidinally cathected, leads us to wonder whether the loving state is a state without object …

This archaic loving identification, as characteristic of the oral phase of the libido’s organization, is not simply at the level of “having”, but is “at once on the level of being-like” (“se situe d’emblée dans <<l’être-comme>>”). This apprehending of a pattern or model on the level of feeling takes place through the incorporation of the speech of the other, the non-object of amatory identification. This is the most primitive affective binding that sets up “being-like” at once (d’emblée), for in Kristeva’s account, language is the essential substratum of man’s being, although one might add, language with an affective underbelly. In Heidegger’s terms, human sensibility as finite sensibility “exists in the midst of beings that already are, beings to which it has been delivered over.” In order for said organs of sensibility to be properly human sensible organs as finite, a “taking-in-stride” or the possibility of a “receiving” that takes-in-stride what is already there, namely, the speech of an other, those sense organs must be necessary for the “possible relaying of the announcement.” The sense organs of the baby must be able to “take-in-stride” or “receive” the language of the other. The psychoanalytic notion of amatory identification opens up the question of the transcendental character of sensibility in terms of the possibility of “receiving” as an assimilation of feelings in the form of pre-objectal words already there on the level of the unconscious imaginary between the infant and mother-father conglomerate, a kind of love announcement in the form of exchange, to love and to be loved. Kristeva’s zero degree of the imagination is a transcendental power of the imagination permeated with the give-and-take of love.
The unconscious imaginary, what Lacan had posited as the relation that establishes the human Ego, borders affectivity and symbolism, between the psyche and the body. Primary identification depends on restraining the libido from devouring: such energy must be displaced to the psychic. Primary identification splits the maternal-child dyad and establishes the psyche through a re-direction of the drives toward the symbolic assimilation of the pre-object, the Imaginary father. Kristeva refers to this “splitting” as primal repression: splitting “bends the drive toward the symbolic of an other.”
One should note, however, the question that begins to emerge concerning the transcendental character of sensibility, the “taking-in-stride” or “receiving” as the possible announcement or horizon of the objective or “pure look of objectivity”, does not concern merely the internal receptive and spontaneous character of a subject that synthesizes objects either productively or reproductively as in the Kantian story. For deeper reasons than just the obvious feature that psychoanalytic accounts of the pre-oedipal infant are not dealing with presupposed subjects already endowed with the reflective capacity of “I think” without a developmental and complicated history. Rather, that formative (pre-) history is itself bound up with early “autoerotic” relations with the mother, and with respect to Kristeva’s elaboration of Freud’s primary identification, an Imaginary Father. In other words, the “receiving” or “taking-in-stride” that encompasses human finitude in the sense of a transcendental examination of the conditions for sensibility includes an affective dimension of the infant announcing the possibility of love of that which is already beside us from the beginning. This transcendental dimension of sensibility, although bound up with the intra-symbolic from the start, is not merely grounded in the subject alone. It is in fact based on love-relations between human agents assisting in the formation of the subject.
Consider Kristeva’s account of the difference between the loving mother who has an object of desire in the form of a Third Party and the clinging mother, overly protective, “laying on it the request that originates in her own request as confused neoteinic and hysteric in want of love, the chances are that neither love nor psychic life will ever hatch from such an egg.” The intra-symbolic life of the infant is inherently and intimately linked with a libidinal force from the beginning that is itself, dependent upon a loving mother’s speaking “diversion” to another loving life.
“Isn’t he beautiful,” or “I am proud of you,” and so forth, are statements of maternal love because they involve a Third Party; it is in the eyes of a Third Party that the baby the mother speaks to becomes a he, it is with respect to others that “I am proud of you,” and so forth.

As Kristeva admits, the Imaginary father as magnet of primary identification is tenable only if one already conceives of identification “as always already within the symbolic orbit, under the sway of language.” The pre-oedipal mother indicates to her infant through language, already within the symbolic orbit, that her desires are not simply relegated to the requests of the infant. The mother has other desires. Identifying with that desire (for the Imaginary Father) is immediate, suggesting a “receiving” of a desire directed at an other that is painfully “Not-I”. This is the place of separation and emptiness, correlative with the movement or transference to (from) the Imaginary Father. L’amorce of the symbolic function, this emptiness, or separation of the mother, spurs an investment in the whole gamut of imagery and representations that help protect the not-yet subject from the chaos of the abyss he or she feels.
Primary identification takes place on the frontier of the psychic and the bodily as a movement toward the discernible, from the autoerotic motility characteristic of the dyadic relation, toward the establishment of the subject as subject. Kristeva refers to this movement by reference to Aristotle’s epiphora: “a generic term for the metaphorical motility previous to any objectivation of a figurative meaning …” Kristeva brings life to the notion of primary identification scarcely elaborated by Freud himself. This identification takes place “immediately” and “directly” with the “father in pre-history.” The father in pre-history as the metaphorical object, “a strange object if there ever was one” says Kristeva, antedating any concentration on an object, also precedes any recognition of sexual difference. The very existence of the Imaginary Father provides the barely separated infant of primal maternal satisfaction an opportunity for idealization. Kristeva counters the common sense, empirical objection that the love-object of young infants appears to be directed at the mother. The objection, however, neglects the diversion the loving mother provides through her own desire of an Other. Freud, thus links the psychic idealization of primary identification not to the dyadic relation between mother and infant. Rather, the Other, or the Imaginary Father, has a relation to the mother in which the infant is the loved-go-between.
Kristeva proposes an interesting exploration on the Freudian notion of primary identification, specifically as “direct” and “immediate”, by interpolating Hegel’s speculative philosophy. As Kristeva notes, the presence of the Absolute in knowing for Hegel is “immediate”, “as that which never left him” (38). Turning to Heidegger’s essay “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” Kristeva suggests that Heidegger attempts to reveal the a priori or arbitrariness of this “immediate” presence of the Absolute. The “immediate”, according to Heidegger’s reading, as the parousia of the Absolute, is that which severs the self from object-relations: “It frees, acquits itself of the one-sided dependence upon its objects, and of the sheer representing of these. Unconditioned self-certainty thus is its own absolution. The unity of absolving (detachment from the relation), its completion (the achievement of full detachment), and absolution (the freeing acquittal on the strength of full detachment), are what characterize the absoluteness of the absolute. All these elements have the character of representation.” Kristeva, following Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s Absolute, summarizes: “In other words, the presence of the Absolute in knowing is immediately revealed to the subject.” And in support of this, Kristeva appeals to Hegel’s Introduction in Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel introduces the immanence of the Absolute to consciousness: “The absolute is from the outset in and for itself beside us and wants to be beside us.” The foray into speculative philosophy Kristeva invites as a way to approach the psychoanalytic notion of “direct” and “immediate” primary identification, however, overlooks Hegel’s critique of Kant’s epistemological privilege of representation as fundamental to human experience. For Hegel, Kant’s reliance on representation stems from a “natural assumption” underlying modern theories of knowledge and their half-hearted skepticism that the world is indeed metaphysically separated: a subject of cognition on one side and an object (Kant’s thing-in-itself) on the other. To counter what engenders such a skeptical or unknowable ding an sich conclusion, the world metaphysically divided between the phenomena and the noumena, Hegel postulates or “assumes” an Absolute always already immediately “beside us” and “wants to be beside us.” The Absolute as “immediate” is the aufhebung of the narcissistic metaphysics of subjectivity separated from the world of others or the Absolute, what constitutes according to Hegel, the “empty appearance of knowing” (§ 76). Just as Kristeva presents a notion of the transcendental as an immanent and imaginary love-relation, Hegel seeks to counter the empty and separate internal transcendence of subjectivity.
Heidegger presents Hegel’s “immediate” presence of the Absolute as consistent with the terra firma of modern philosophy in which the “true is that which is known in unconditioned self-awareness.” Truth in the modern sense grounds representation not on the adequatio rei et intellectus, but on intellectual representation itself “insofar as the intellect represents itself, and assumes itself of itself as representation.” The act of knowing, in this sense, retreats from particularized representations of objects. Heidegger, by illicitly situating Hegel within the modern epistemological tradition, fails to grasp the critical upshot of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute as arising not from without or externally, as if metaphysically distinct, but rather from a determinate negation of that tradition that privileges the autonomous subject of representation and leads the subject into a state of metaphysical skepticism concerning the noumena that underlies our representations of objects. Hegel attempts to render the Absolute as “immediate” not as something external and separate, but fully immanent to consciousness itself.
The “immediacy” at the heart of primary identification, the imaginary relation to the father through maternal desire, is “received” by the infant not as something “external”, or from some external place, but from the mother who offers it. The internal and external are still in the process of becoming. Such an offering takes place within the final moments of the autoerotic dyad in which the separation begins to take place. Kristeva notes, the “maternal desire” for the father comes as a “godsend”. Without the disposition to “receive”, or as Heidegger would suggest, the conditions of human sensibility as finite, a “taking-in-stride” of what is already “beside us” in the form of the language of the other, the pre-objectal loving speech, the child and the mother do not yet constitute two. This kind of pre-objectal “beside us” that wants to be beside us following Hegel’s conception, or loves us following psychoanalysis, is not an imaginary relation based on specular representation. The affective imagination, rather, corresponds “to the whole gamut of perceptions, especially the sonorous ones,” incorporating the language of the other while the mother of autoerotism is abjected. Emptiness pervades the epiphora of primary identification. Narcissism allows the infant to invest in the imaginative relation in such a way as to calm the chaos of emptiness and separation, a potential soothing for the infant by offering a model of idealization through signs, representations, and meaning. The always-already there of the father, or the “not-I” of maternal desire is not the satisfaction-providing presence of “autoerotism”. The imaginary father is always already in the speech and feelings of the mother, “beside us”, beside both the mother and the infant, a third party immanent before the infant’s borders are stable, spurring the intra-symbolic to new heights. The immanent father is an opportunity to love and be loved as a subject.
Kant’s “shrinking-away” from the abyss of metaphysics is subtended by his modern epistemological “natural assumption” about a given subjectivity from the beginning that is hardly the beginning. Kant, thus, falls short of pursuing an imagination both affective and intra-symbolic as an indispensable function of the soul, “without which there could hardly be knowledge.” Although Heidegger may be right to claim that Kant is the first to inquire into an ontology of finite sensibility, Kant surely did not go all the way with such an “analytic”, as Kristeva and psychoanalysis make plain enough.

Charles Snyder