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JAPARIDZE, Tamar. The Kantian Subject: Senses Communis, Mimesis, Work of Mourning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ix + 168 pp. Cloth, $50.50; paper, $17.95-This interesting book has a double project: One is to show that Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, contains the solution to a deep difficulty apparently posed by the previous Critiques: how can the self-sufficient, autonomous Kantian subject have any relation to an Other, that is, transcend itself? The second project is to show that several twentieth-century philosophers and psychoanalysts, Freud as well as more recent continental and American writers, fall within the "explanatory range" of the third Critique, that Kant is their precursor. This second project, set out in the introduction, suffers a little from the brevity of the exposition, since a reader not familiar with the psychoanalytic literature must rely on summary references to "work of mourning," "mimetic identification," "mouthwork," and such to follow what is probably an excellent way to display the pervasive importance of Kantian thought.
The three chapters that constitute the body of the book, however, concentrate on a reading of the third Critique that anyone who has puzzled over its situation in the critical triad, or on the way it tries to bring sensibility, understanding, and reason together, or on the apparently...