THE PARALLAX VIEW: TOWARDS A NEW READING OF KANT

When Jean Laplanche elaborates the impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, he effectively reproduces the precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children were effectively seduced and molested by adults. On the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction scene to the patient’s fantasy. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the “realistic” stance, while those who insist on the reality of seduction end up advocating all kinds of molestations, up to satanic rites and extraterrestrial harassments. Laplanche’s solution is precisely the transcendental one: while “seduction” cannot be reduced merely to the subject’s fantasy, and does refer to a traumatic encounter with the Other’s “enigmatic message,” bearing witness to the Other’s unconscious, it also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and their adults. Seduction is, rather, a kind of transcendental structure—the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted with the impenetrable acts of the Other, who bears witness to the Other’s unconscious. We are never dealing here with simple “facts,” but always with facts located in the space of indeterminacy between “too soon” and “too late”: the child is originally helpless, thrown into the world unable to take care of itself—i.e., their survival skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter with the sexualized Other always, by structural necessity, comes “too soon,” as an unexpected shock that cannot ever be properly symbolized or translated into the universe of meaning.1 The fact of seduction is thus again that of the Kantian transcendental X—a structurally necessary transcendental illusion.image.jpg

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx,2 Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of such an in-between stance, which he calls the “parallax view”: when faced with an antinomic position in the precise Kantian sense, one should