Dominik Finkelde, "Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics" (Columbia UP, 2017)
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What is the central question about acts that expose injustice that frames the episode?
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Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Steven Dozman. How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it's the question of my guest today, Dominic Finkeld. And he is here to discuss it with his book Excessive Subjectivity. Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundation of Ethics from Columbia University Press in 2017. The book looks at these three major thinkers in the ways they saw subjects as being immersed in a particular set of ethical orientations, but also always with a subtle but profound potential to do something beyond what they might have thought possible. Dominic Finkeld is a professor of contemporary political philosophy.
and epistemology at the Munich School of Philosophy, and is also the author of Zizek between Lacan and Hegel and Benjamin Reid's Proust. So Dominic Finkeld, welcome to the New Books Network.
Oh yeah, thanks for having me.
Uh so we always like to kind of have our guests introduce themselves. So could you maybe tell us a bit about who you are and what your main
research interests tend to be? Uh well as you said, I teach here in Munich at uh the Munich School of Philosophy and in the areas of epistemology and contemporary philosophy, especially contemporary political philosophy. Uh I grew up in Berlin and also studied there philosophy and critical theory or uh comparative literature at the university. Then I wrote my PhD in Munich on the topic that you mentioned. Mentioned Benjamin, it's was on Walter Benjamin, it's um was a topic on the philosophy of language of Benjamin and uh I was analysing the way muscle boost had an impact on on Benjamin. And uh well then I wrote my habilitation. So the the the second big book. I uh also published smaller books, the one you mentioned on Z Jek.
Also a little book on the debate on Paul the Apostle and political philosophy. But for me the most important book in the last years uh was Excessive Subjectivity and uh I published this uh several years ago and uh since uh four or five years I'm here professor at the Munich Faculty Um of Philosophy.
Wonderful. So to kick things off, in the beginning of the book you point to a contradiction in Kant's life, where on the one hand he expressed some admiration for those in the French Revolution, but at the same time argued that revolutionaries ought to be universally condemned. You jump off of this to discuss the gap between the thinker's freedom and the subject's duty. Can you speak to this tension a bit in how it sets up your own project here?
Uh yeah, okay. Well thanks for the question because it goes right into the topic of the of the book.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the central question about acts that expose injustice that frames the episode?
0:00–8:43
2
How does Dominik Finkelde introduce Kant’s paradox between admiration for the French Revolution and condemnation of revolutionaries?
8:43–24:39
3
What tension does Kant’s “excessive subjectivity” reveal between moral law and the political status‑quo?
24:39–53:13
4
How does Hegel’s critique of Kant’s autonomy paradox reshape the idea of the split subject?
53:13–1:15:01
Speakers
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