not only you cannot use your pathological longings as an excuse why you can’t do your duty, for example you cannot say “This is my duty but I will not do it because it may hurt my friend”, you also cannot use duty itself as an excuse do your duty. You cannot say to your friend: “Listen, I must drop you now because it is my ethical duty. I know it hurts you but this is my duty.” Because in this way you already objectify yourself, it is not you. Kant means that duty itself is not an excuse to do your duty. You are fully responsible to formulate what your duty is. This is how I read the categorical imperative — it has the structure of what Kant calls aesthetic judgment. Lyotard developed this very nicely: An aesthetic judgment is not simply an application of pre–existing norms to the situation, in the aesthetic judgment you posit the norms yourself and it is your responsibility. Apropos of a particular situation, you have to reinvent the universality which covers the situation, and as such you are fully responsible for it. When you say: “That is my duty”, you cannot say: “What can I do, it’s my duty.” You fully have to stand behind what your duty is. Now, going back to the materiality of the act. Of course, this definition of the authentic act has an aspect of being almost non–historical, I agree with that. But believe me I am an old–fashioned Marxist, so what I claim is that this notion of act is of special actuality today in our so–called post–modern era, where the predominant ethic, across the entire spectrum of ethical positions, from narcissistic hedonism to neo–fundamentalism or whatever, is an ethic precisely against the ethical act. All these problems of ethical committees, of ethical rules, are always about how to prevent an excess which is precisely the excess of the act. In this sense I claim that it is only today, in today’s so–called permissive society, that society is regulated as no society in history ever was, that such notion of an act was ever elaborated.

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