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Kant’s critique of Descartes is concentrated in his “Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality” in his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' (1781/1787). He argues there that Descartes is at once an empirical idealist and a transcendental realist. Descartes’ transcendental realism resides in his mistakenly positing an absolute reality of things-in-themselves that exists independent of thought. This leads to an erroneous empirical idealism that undermines the certainty of outward appearances. The transcendental illusion that plagues Cartesian idealism gives rise to an epistemological error that consists in mistaking the problematic concept of a noumenal reality of things-in-themselves for an actual or transcendently real object domain that exists independent of thought. By way of contrast, Kant claims that his own critical philosophy couples transcendental idealism with empirical realism. The empirical realist does not posit a transcendent reality of things-in-themselves outside of appearances, but instead considers the material universe to be nothing more than appearances for our phenomenal understanding. Accordingly, the reality of appearances cannot be doubted in relation to some [[Noumenon|noumenal]] order of things as they really are, for reality, at least as we know it, really is restricted to the domain of appearances. Therefore, it follows that the reality of external appearances is no less certain than the internal reality of the cogito. Kant does not actually argue against such a noumenal order of things-in-themselves, but instead contends that whether such a noumenal reality exists independently of appearances is really no business of reason at all. More importantly, the proper business of rational philosophy consists in taking cognisance of the business that is in fact proper to it, which in this case means acknowledging the material reality of appearances and the transcendental ideality of the same.
Žižek begins the first chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Th inks”Thinks”, by returning to the locus of this debate between Descartes and Kant concerning the ontological status of the ''cogito''. For Kant, the ''cogito'' is equated with the “I think” of transcendental apperception, and thus serves as the condition of possibility for all experience. But Kant resists the Cartesian manoeuvre of “hypostasizing” this transcendental function of the imagination into a noumenal thing. This is because, for Kant, such a substantializing manoeuvre moves beyond the realm of appearances to posit a substantial entity (call it the cogito, the soul or the ego) that exists outside of its transcendental functionality within the field of experience. Žižek aligns Lacan with Kant against Descartes, and he does so by making reference to Lacan’s formula of fantasy, which reads: “‘I think’ only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal Thing which thinks” (''TN'': 14). Stated otherwise, the subject of thought is only in so far as it is inaccessible to itself as the “Thing which thinks”. In fact, the lack of intuited content for the “I think” is constitutive of transcendental apperception in its formal resiliency to phenomenal comprehension, which explains the title for the first part of Žižek’s book, “The Cogito: The Void Called Subject”. What Lacan adds to this debate is that the fantastic itinerary of the subject of desire is to heal the wound introduced by the advent of the signifier, and by doing so, somehow to reclaim or fill the void that lies at its extimate centre. Th e “Thing which thinks” is thus the condition of possibility for all of my experience, but it is at the same time inaccessible to me as an agent of desire, and this very lack of being constitutes me as the subject that I am.
According to Žižek’s Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s transcendental reformulation of the Cartesian ''cogito'', the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' occupies the structural gap in the symbolic matrix of desire. The ''objet petit a'' accordingly takes on an ambivalent resonance: on the one hand, it is the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization; on the other hand, it is nothing more than a fantasy of plenitude that is engendered by the void introduced by symbolization. Or, rather, it is both at one and the same time: it thus serves as a transcendental object that holds the place of lack, but only when this lack engenders the illusion of a plenitude that desire forever falls short of or fails to achieve. A leitmotif of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' is that limitation precedes transcendence, at least from the dialectical (Hegelian) point of view of the Lacanian subject. Žižek accordingly writes that the main point of Lacan’s reading of Kant is that “the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier” (''TN'': 37). Thus, every object that is destined to fill the place of the lack in the subject is only another hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the first in the sublime and sublimated series of which the first is nothing other than the “thinking thing” secured by Descartes’ doubtful meditations, a cogitative role model Kant was only too quick to replicate, whether as a transcendental function of apperception or as the spontaneous agent of freedom. Indeed, in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek endorses [[Martin Heidegger]]’s criticisms of Kant, for in this later book Žižek reads Kant as belonging to the same tradition of modern subjectivity initiated by Descartes. Ultimately, Žižek will find that Heidegger followed Kant’s lead and abandoned the question of being, for his post-Kehre focus on the piety of thought and the dignity of the thinking being suggests that he too “recoiled” from the abyss of the transcendental imagination.
