[marron]Summary[/marron]

This forward to the new French edition of Les Constructions de l’universel (Paris: PUF, 2009) outlines the author’s questioning of the strict separation between the conditioned and the unconditional, the empirical and the transcendental, found at the basis of Kantian morality. This questioning, which distances it self from Nietzsche and Lacan’s critiques of Kant, takes as its point of departure the observation, both in philosophical texts and the psychoanalytic clinic, of the process of substitution of libidinal objects. That is, of the difficult process of losing and replacing our first love objects, through our romantic relationships, artistic and scientific creations, or dreams. David-Ménard suggests that something subtler than the concepts of symbolization and universalisation can account for is at play in this process; something that could help us avoid the disjunctive choice between the rigidity of a formalist ethics and the blandness of a moral relativism.

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