for the sake of duty (that is, in obedience to a command, and not for the sake of
a natural inclination) was able to penetrate into ethics and impose itself there,
this is only because the Church, by means of a centuries-long praxis and theo-
rization, had elaborated duty or office as a model of the highest human activity,
embodied in the office of the priest and, even before that, in the priesthood of
Christ. The “duty of virtue” is not, in this sense, anything but the definition
of the devout life that Kant had assimilated by means of his pietistic education.
א In his Directive to Live Reasonably (1744) Crusius had defined the concept of a duty of virtue in this way: “the foundation of moral necessity lies in a law and in our
responsibility to observe it: moreover we call the corresponding duty a duty of virtue
[ Pflicht der Tugend ]” (Crusius, 201).
15. If in office the guarantee of the effectiveness of the liturgical action ex
opere operato is in Christ, what takes the place of Christ as guarantee of the
effectiveness of duty in Kant is the law. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, duty is in fact defined as “the necessity of an action from respect for the law” (Kant 2, 400/55). The essential connection between duty and law is constantly repeated by Kant: “The concept of duty stands in immediate relation to a
law” (Kant 1, 388/520); it is resolved, however, into “an obligation [ Nöthingung]
or constraint [ Zwang] of free choice through the law” (ibid., 379/512).
Since the constraint that is in question in the moral law is not, as in juridical
law, an external force but an autoconstraint ( Selbstzwang), which must overcome
the resistance of natural inclinations, Kant has need for an apparatus that would
render the autoconstraint of moral duty operative. This apparatus is “respect”
( Achtung, reverentia), the same bond that, according to Suárez, immediately unites the human being with God in religio.
When Kant introduces the concept of respect in the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, defining it as the subjective counterpart of the law, he
must have felt so unsure of it that he accompanied it with a long note, in which
he is anxious to forestall possible objections against this “obscure feeling,” whose
provenance in the theological sphere must have been familiar to him in any case:
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“It could be objected,” he writes, “that I only seek refuge, behind the word re-
spect, in an obscure feeling, instead of distinctly resolving the question by means of a concept of reason” (Kant 2, 402/56, footnote). The rational explanations
that he supplies at this point, however, risk being even more obscure than the
“feeling” that they are supposed to clarify. In fact it is not, by contrast with the
other feelings that can be traced back to an inclination or to fear, “a feeling
received by means of influence” (that is, a pathological feeling), but is “a feel-
ing self-wrought by means of a rational concept” (ibid.). The Critique of Practical Reason repeats this anomalous origin, proposing that respect for the moral
law “is a feeling that is produced by an intellectual principle” and that it is,
moreover, the only feeling “that we can cognize completely a priori” (Kant 3,
73/199–200). Such an a priori feeling is not, in reality, a feeling but “signifies
merely consciousness of the subordination of my will to a law” (Kant 2, 402/56,
footnote). It is in fact nothing but the recognition and the effect of subjection
to a command, which defines the very form of the law: “Only what is connected
with my will merely as ground and never as effect, what does not serve my in-
clination but outweighs it or at least excludes it altogether from calculations in
making a choice—hence the mere law for itself—can be an object of respect and
so a command” (ibid., 400/55); “What I cognize immediately as a law for me I
cognize with respect. . . . Immediate determination of the will by means of the
law and consciousness of this is called respect, so that this is regarded as the effect of the law on the subject and not the cause of the law” (ibid., 402/56, note b).
Like reverentia in Suárez, which is not owed to a concrete norm ( praeceptum
personae excellentis) but to the excellence of the person as such ( persona excellens), respect does not refer to a specific command but to the law in general, conformity with which must become the only motive for the action: “Since I have
deprived the will of every impulse that could arise for it from obeying some law,
nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law . . . ,
which is that I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (ibid., 402/56–57).
16. In the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant defines the nature of the
command and duty stemming from the law in terms of an external constraint
and immediately afterward transfers this definition to morality in the form of
autoconstraint ( Selbstzwang). The structure of the imperative and of duty cited
in the definition—the constraint of free will by means of a law—nonetheless
remains the same, independent of whether it comes from the outside (juridical
constraint) or from the inside (ethical constraint) (Kant 1, 379/512).
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The paradox of autoconstraint, which renders necessary the determinate
introduction of the concept of will, is that it must have the objective form of
constraint and, at the same time, the subjective form of an impulse ( Triebfeder):
“But since the human being is still a free (moral) being, when the concept of duty concerns the internal determination of his will (the impulse), the constraint that
the concept of duty contains can be only self-constraint (through the representa-
tion of the law alone); for only so can that necessitation [ Nöthigung] (even if it is external) be united with the freedom of his choice. Hence in this case the concept
of duty will be an ethical one” (ibid., 380/512–13). In the Critique ethical duty (the
“duty of virtue”) is defined as that duty which, owing to respect, presents itself at
the same time as an impulse: “The concept of duty, therefore, requires of the ac-
tion objective accord with the law but requires of the maxim of the action subjective respect for the law, as the sole way of determining the will by the law” (Kant 3, 81/205). Precisely for this reason, however, Kant is constrained—so as to be able
to define the monstrum of a duty that is also an impulse and of a will that can be freely determined by the law—to conjugate the modal verbs in a paradoxical way
among one another: the human being “must judge that he can do [ können] what the law tells him unconditionally that he ought to do [ dass er thun soll ]” (Kant 1, 380/513). Ethical duty is “to be able to do what one must.” In the Groundwork
this paradoxical conjugation reaches its extreme form: if all imperatives, juridical
as much as moral, are expressions of a duty ( Sollen), that duty will be truly ethical which has the form of a “one must be able to will [ man muss wollen können]”:
“We must be able to will that a maxim of our action become a universal law: this
is the canon of moral appraisal of action in general” (Kant 2, 424/75). The verb
to be able to ( potere), which expresses the possibility of an action, a power to do, is subordinated
in a contradictory way to a “having to do” and has as its object
not a doing but a “willing”: and it is this empty, unintelligible interweaving of
the modal categories that defines the paradigm of the command of the moral law.
Tied up together in this formula, the modal verbs sustain and annul each other.
When one considers the centrality of the notion of will in Kant, one must not
forget that it has its foundation in this paradoxical interweaving.
17. When he seeks in the Critique to give an emotional content to this empty
feeling (which consists, so to speak, solely in the elimination of all emotional
content and all inclinations), Kant finds nothing but the “negative effect” of
humiliation (Kant 3, 78/203): “the effect of this law on feeling is merely humil-
iation, which we can thus discern a priori though we cannot cognize in it the
force of the pure practical law as incentive but only the resistance to incentives of
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sensibility” (ibid.). That is to say, respect is the feeling—purely negative and in it-
self devoid of all pleasure—of subjection to a command: “As submission to a law,
that is, as a command (indicating constraint for the sensibly affected subject), it
therefore contains in it no pleasure but instead, so far, displeasure in the action”
(ibid., 80/205). Respect is, then, the degree zero of feeling, or that feeling (or that
displeasure) which remains when all natural inclinations and all “pathological”
(or passive) feelings have been excluded as motives for the action.
At his point Kant can join respect ( Achtung) and duty ( Pflicht) together. The action carried out only for the sake of respect for the law is in fact named “duty”:
“The consciousness of a free submission of the will to the law combined with an
unavoidable constraint put on all inclinations though only by one’s own reason,
is respect for the law. . . . An action that is objectively practical in accordance
with this law, with the exclusion of every determining ground of inclination,
is called duty, which, because of that exclusion, contains in its concept necessitation, that is, determination to actions however reluctantly they may be done”
(ibid., 80/204–5).
It is not surprising that Kant has to confess that the feeling of respect thus
defined remains, despite the explanations that he has supplied for it and the de-
cisive function it develops in ethics, “impenetrable for speculative reason,” and
he refers, in the last analysis, to an artificial statement that is as simple as it is
improbable: “one cannot wonder,” he writes in the Critique of Practical Reason,
“at finding this influence of a mere intellectual idea on feeling quite impenetra-
ble [ unergründlich] for speculative reason and at having to be satisfied that one
can yet see a priori this much: that such a feeling is inseparably connected with
the representation of the moral law in every finite rational being” (ibid., 80/204).
If the origin of respect remains, even in the Metaphysics of Morals, “inscruta-
ble” ( unerforschliche Ursprung; Kant 1, 400/529), this is because respect, exactly like duty, has no content other than subjection to the command of the law. For
this reason Kant must insist on the precedence of respect over duty and be on
guard against the vicious circle that would otherwise be verified between respect
and duty: “A duty to have respect would thus amount to being put under obli-
gation to duties [ zur Pflicht verpflichet]” (ibid., 255). As an empty or zero-degree feeling, respect is only the shadow that duty—that is, compulsion before the
command of the law—throws on the subject.
א In a celebrated 1963 essay, Jacques Lacan proposed a parallel reading of Kant and
Sade (Lacan, passim) in which the object of the law and the object of repressed desire
were identified. We can ask ourselves whether, as Gilles Deleuze was to suggest five years later, the subversion of the Kantian law had not been accomplished more effectively by
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Sacher-Masoch than by Sade. The virtuous Kantian and the masochist indeed coincide
precisely in the fact that both find their proper element solely in duty and humiliation, that is, in the execution of a command. In this sense Kantian ethics—and, with it, a great part of modern ethics—is essentially masochistic. At first glance, however, the masochist differs from the virtuous Kantian, because while for the latter the command contains no pleasure,
the former finds its pleasure in humiliation. It is not sufficient to say, however, that the masochist finds pleasure in being humiliated by the command of the law. It is necessary to add that the masochist finds pleasure in the fact that the law finds pleasure in humiliating him. The masochist does not find pleasure in pain and humiliation, but in procuring for
the sadist a pleasure that consists in inflicting pain and humiliation. The masochist—the
subtlety of his strategy consists in this—causes the law (embodied by the sadist) to get off and only achieves pleasure in this way. The law is maintained and its command is executed
with zeal, but it no longer has anything respectable in itself, because its command contains pleasure. While the operation of the Sadean turns immediately against the law as such,
the masochist’s operation is turned against respect, which it undermines at its base and
destroys. It is an ephemeral victory, however, because—as the modern masochistic masses,
who do not respect the leader they acclaim, effectively show—they certainly cannot for this reason be called more free. The downfall of the leader, which reveals to them the possibility of contempt, is also the sanction of their servitude.
18. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger asserts that the process that
leads to the separation between being ( Sein) and having-to-be ( Sollen) finds its completion in Kant (Heidegger 3, 151/212). The having-to-be that is in question
in this separation is not, however, something “that is assigned and referred to
being from who knows where”; rather, it comes from being itself (ibid., 150/211).
The moment has come to attempt to interrogate, from the perspective of the
archaeology of duty or office that interests us here, the ontological sense and
the historical-philosophical strategies implicit in this separation, which is also,
and to the same extent, an articulation. What in Kant reaches completion in the
form of having-to-be is the ontology of operativity, whose fundamental outlines
we have sought to reconstruct. In this ontology, as we have seen, being and
acting are indeterminated and contracted onto one another, and being becomes
something that does not simply exist but has to be brought about. It is not possible, however, to understand the nature and the proper characteristics of the
ontology of operativity if one does not understand that it is, from the very be-
ginning and to the same extent, an ontology of command. That contraction of
being and having-to-be has the form of a command, is essentially and literally an
“imperative.” Having-to-be is not, in this sense, a juridical or religious concept
that is added to being from the outside: it implies and defines an ontology, which
is progressively affirmed and is historically set up as the ontology of modernity.
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Let us consider the linguistic form of the imperative, which we have evoked
several times before. Meillet has observed t
hat in Indo-European languages, it
usually coincides with the verb’s root and suggests that it could therefore represent
the “essential” form of the verb (Meillet, 191). What defines the imperative from
the semantic point of view is, however, that it does not refer denotatively to the
world, does not describe or declare a state of things: it is limited to commanding
and demanding (as a rule, someone else’s action). Not even the action of the one
who obeys the command can be considered as the semantic content of the imper-
ative. As Kelsen has noted, “If an individual by his acts expresses a will directed at
a certain behavior of another . . . then the meaning of his acts cannot be described
by the statement that the individual will (future tense) behave in that way, but
only that he ought to [ soll] behave in that way” (Kelsen 1, 13/5). Aquinas did not express anything different, saying that the command does not have the action of
the other as object, but his free will. The imperative presupposes as its foundation
and, at the same time, as its object not a being but a willing.
If the ontology of the tradition of classical philosophy has a substantial char-
acter, in the sense the being implies a denotative connection between words and
things, the imperative, as the primitive form of the verb, presupposes another
ontology, which claims to refer not to the world “as it is” but to how it “has to
be.” In this sense, despite the identity between the two forms “you walk” and
“walk!,” from the ontological point of view esti and estō are—or at least claim to be—essentially heterogeneous.
It is significant, then, that the imperative defines the verbal mode proper to
law and religion. Not only are the laws of the Twelve Tables ( sacer esto, paricidas
esto, aeterna auctoritas esto) and the formulas of juridical transactions ( emptor esto, heres esto) in the imperative, but the oath, perhaps the oldest of the juridical-religious institutions, also implies a verb in the imperative ( martys estō, istō
Zeus). And it is superfluous to recall that in the monotheistic religions God is a being who speaks in the imperative and to whom one speaks in the same verbal
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