Kant’s Nothings and Lacan's Empty Object

Guy Le Gaufey’s critical reading of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation has traced the historical course of the invention of Lacan’s object. Lacan’s objet a is not the specular object corresponding to his early concentration on the Imaginary, not the unary traitfrom his transition to the Symbolic, but "an object without a concept” or an object in the Real. It is to make sense of this new object that Lacan draws on Immanuel Kant’s “four nothings ” and, in particular, his nihil negativum or negative nothing which is a nothing without a concept.…