Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
.. the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. That is to say, it is not possilbe to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific siutation from the moral Law itself —
which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. 221
The fact that the Subject is a Universal Being means that, precisely, he cannot simply rely on some determinate substantial content (‘universal’ as it may be) which would fix the co-ordinates of his ethical activity in advance, but that the only way for him to arrive at Universality is to accept the objective indeterminacy of his situation — I become ‘universal’ only through the violent effort of disengaging myself from the particularity of my situation: through conceiving this situation as contingent and limiting, through opening up in it the gap of indeterminacy filled in by my act. 222
Subjectivity and universality are thus strictly correlative: the dimension of universality becomes ‘for itself’ only through the ‘individualist’ negation of the particular context which forms the subject’s specific background.
… compels us to reject any reference to ‘duty’ as an excuse: “I know this is difficult, and might be painful, but what can I do? It’s my duty…” … The reference to duty as the excuse for doing our duty should be rejected a hypocritical … The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated from what I am doing: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others in the full awareness that I’m not responsible for it, that I am merely fulfilling the Other’s Will … this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. 221-222
The Kantian law is thus not merely an empty form applied to a random empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the critieria of ethical adequacy— rather, the empty form of the Law functions as the promise of an absent content (never) to come. … the form is not only a kind of neutral universal mould of the pluality of different empirical contents; the autonomy of the Form, rather, bears witness to the uncertainty which persists with regard to the content of our acts — we never know if the determinate content which accounts for the specificity of our acts is the right one: that is, if we have really acted in accordance with the Law and have not been guided by some hidden pathological motive. … the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is — a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject is thus a priori, by virtue of his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what he is guilty of (and for that very reason guilty), infringing the law without knowing its exact regulations.
What we have here is, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the assertion of the Law as unconscious: the experience of Form without content is always the index of a repressed content — the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more traumatic the repressed content becomes. 226