Resistant Causality: Lacan’s Reinterpretation of Kantian Subjectivity

This paper examines Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of Kantian causality through a close reading of Kant’s early essay Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy. It argues that Kant’s account of real opposition reveals a structural gap within causal relations that resists full conceptualisation, a gap later stabilised by the transcendental category of causality in the Critiques, a problem which, according to Lacan, is not fully resolved. Drawing on Lacan’s reading of this tension, the paper shows how the irreducible remainder excluded by transcendental synthesis is relocated from the structure of judgement into the structure of subjectivity itself. Causality thus emerges not as a fully intelligible relation, but as a resistant function whose failure of synthesis provides the formal condition for Lacan’s reconstruction of the Freudian unconscious.