Writing ethics: Sublime failures of totalization in Kant and Sade

One of the aspects of Kant's critical philosophy that is shared by Sade's narrative works is the pursuit of totality: like Kant's architectonic of reason, Sade's design to "say everything" tries to attain the saturation of a unified domain. This dissertation tries to show that while Kant and Sade both fail to achieve such a totalization, this failure ends up serving as an aporetic foundation of ethics. The failure of totalization disqualifies the subject as an agent of ethical behavior, but it institutes a praxis that can be called ethical because it escapes empirical determination.The first chapter analyzes the role of economic structures in Sade's treatment of ethics by comparing Justine with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. After contrasting the ethical paradigm of the gift with a Sadian ethics of the theft, the chapter develops the idea of an ethics based on an economy of the legend. This prepares the concept of an ethics of writing that is pursued in the following chapters. Chapter two continues the analysis of ethical economies in a reading of Les 120 Journees de Sodome that draws on Georges Bataille's economic theories. It compares the process of writing documented in Sade's marginal notations to the treatment of ethical themes in the narrative itself. Similarly, the third chapter, a reading of Kant's second critique, begins by analyzing Kant's portrayal of the process of writing the critique, and then goes on to draw a parallel between writing and the structures of moral incentive Kant describes in his analysis of the moral law. The last chapter, on Kant's third critique, analyzes the role of rational formalization in the project of an enlightened ethics. It proposes an alternative to recent readings of the "Analytic of the Sublime" by situating the concept of sublimity in the context of some of Kant's earlier thinking about the teleology of nature.In the course of the individual readings, writing emerges as the privileged paradigm for this form of ethical praxis. Writing appears both as what precipitates the failure of totalization and what revitalizes the attempt to attain it.