The Transcendental Subject and its Dawider

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to provide an answer to the question of knowing whether it is possible to find in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a figure of the subject that would not be solely reduced to a function in the constitution of the object. Is Kant’s “Copernican turn” truly a turn towards the subject or is it rather simply a detailed elaboration of the theory of the object, a theory with two voids: the void of the transcendental subject and the void of the transcendental object? The answer elaborated in this essay is the following: in the first Critique there is indeed a figure of the subject that is not solely the subject of the object, but is rather the subject for which the object is not only a vis-à-vis but also a part thereof, although a constitutively subtracted part. While this curious object, which the author proposes to call a trans-empirical, makes the constitution of the subject possible, it remains for the latter something that is radically Dawider.