Kant, sober Enlightenment thinker and philosopher's philosopher, seems the very antithesis of Lacan, the "wild theorist" of psychoanalysis. But, drawing on a wide range of writers from Sophocles to de Sade, Alenka Zupancic here demonstrates that the two thinkers stake everything on a similar ethical enterprise. For both, ethics is a necessary impossibility -- impossible because of the infinite and inhuman demands it makes on us. Moreover, both are thinkers of desire, of the ethics of desire and the desire for ethics.