Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000. pp. 94-95.
This is why we have to maintain that it is only the act which opens up a universal horizon or posits the universal, not that the latter, being already established, allows us to ‘guess’ what our duty is, and delivers a guarantee against misconceiving it. At the same time, this theoretical stance has the advantage of making it impossible for the subject to assume the perverse attiude we discussed in Chapter 3: the subject can not hide behind her duty – she is responsible for what she refers to as her duty. 94
This brings us back to the indistinguishability of good and evil. What exactly can this mean? Le us start with what it does not mean. It does not refer to the incertitude as to whether an act is (or was) ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
It refers to the fact that the vcry structure of the act is foreign to the register constituted by the couplet good/bad – that it is neither good nor bad. We can situate this discussion in yet another perspective. The indistinguishability of good and evil here simply indicates that any act worthy of the name is by definition ‘evil ‘ or ‘bad ‘ (or will be seen as such), for it always represents a certain ‘overstepping of boundaries’, a change in ‘what is’, a ‘transgression’ of the limits of the given symbolic order (or community). This is clear in Kant’s discussion of the execution of Louis XVI . It is also clear in the case of Antigone.If Kant shrinks from this conclusion, it is nevertheless true that he implicitly endorses it, and that he was the first to push things far enough for this to be brought to light in all its rigour.
In addition, the fact that Kant ‘falls back’ on the logic of the ‘bad infinity’ which implies a radical impossibility of accomplishing an act must not induce us to reject his conception of the act. In other words, the real problem is not that Kant demands the ‘impossible’, and that for this reason we can avoid ‘evil’ only if we refrain from acting.
To reject the Kantian conception of the act would be to resign oneself to the ‘necessary’, that is, to the ‘possible’ — it would be ‘grist to the mill’ of the ‘ethical ideology’ which systematically avoids this aspect of Kantian philosophy, the aspect which aims precisely at the ‘impossible’.
This ‘ethical ideology’ avoids this aspect of Kant because it insists upon what it calls Kant’s ‘non-metaphysical humanism’, whereas the Kantian conception of the act is ‘anti-humanist’ (or nonhumanist) in the strictest sense of the word.
This is why we propose to maintain the concept of the act developed by Kant, and to link it to the thematic of ‘overstepping of boundaries,’ of ‘transgression’, to the question of evil. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that any (ethical) act, precisely in so far as it is an act, is necessarily ‘evil ‘.
We must specify, however, what is meant here by ‘ evil ‘ . This is the evil that belongs to the very structure of the act, to the fact that the latter always implies a ‘transgression’ , a change in ‘what is’. It is not a matter of some ’empirical ‘ evil, it is the very logic of the act which is denounced as ‘radically evil’ in every ideology. 95
the current saturation of the social field by ‘ethical dilemmas ‘(bioethics, environmental ethics, cultural ethics, medical ethics . . . ) is strictly correlative to the ‘repression’ of ethics, that is, to an incapacity to think ethics in its dimension of the Real, an incapacity to conceive of ethics other than simply as a set of restrictions intended to prevent greater evil.
This constellation is related to yet another aspect of ‘modern society’: to the ‘depression’ which seems to have became the ‘social illness’ of our time and to set the tone of the resigned attitude of the ‘(post) modern man’ of the ‘end of history’.
In relation to this, it would be interesting to reaffirm Lacan’s thesis according to which depression ‘isn’t a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness’. It is against this moral weakness or cowardice [lâcheté morale] that we must affirm the ethical dimension proper. 96