Autonomy

Autonomy, as it appears across these two occurrences, designates the self-legislative capacity of rational subjects: the ability to give oneself the law rather than receive it from an external authority. In the first occurrence (Ruda's reconstruction of Schmid's Kantian moral rationalism), autonomy is one term in a systematic chain — alongside the categorical imperative, respect, and the postulate of God — that together constitute a moral 'splace,' a domain of rational-moral causality inscribed within phenomenal reality. Here autonomy is not simply freedom from determination but the positive, systematic, and rigorous self-legislation of the rational will. The theoretical tension is that pure rational autonomy is both practically necessary and theoretically impossible to fully realize: the natural world resists the moral law, yet the moral law commands unconditionally. This impossible-yet-necessary structure is what drives the entire Kantian architectonic.

In the second occurrence (McGowan on Lynch), autonomy takes on an explicitly Lacanian-ethical charge. Fantasy is identified as the locus of autonomy — the site where the subject's self-given law exceeds the symbolic order and its causal chains. McGowan maps Kant's practical reason onto Lynch's filmmaking to argue that the moral law, precisely because it cannot be accommodated within the world of natural causality, is evidence of "another realm — a realm of freedom." Autonomy here is not the subject's mastery over its desires but its capacity to act from a point that the symbolic order cannot contain — structurally homologous to what Lacan calls the ethical act, which intervenes at the Real rather than merely applying pre-given symbolic rules.

In the-impossible-david-lynch-todd-mcgowan, autonomy functions as a bridge concept between Kant's two Critiques and Lacan's ethics. It is positioned as the counterpart to heteronomy (one of its listed cross-references): where heteronomy means being governed by external law or natural causality, autonomy designates the self-legislative excess that cannot be absorbed into the symbolic order. This connects directly to The Act as canonically defined: the autonomous act is precisely the gesture that "exceeds and retroactively restructures" the symbolic framework rather than operating within it. Autonomy is thus a specification of the Act — the condition of its possibility — and both concepts share the structure of a subject-transforming intervention that touches the Real. The link to the Categorical Imperative is equally direct: autonomy is what the categorical imperative presupposes and enacts; without a self-legislating subject, the unconditional command has no subject to address.

In provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, autonomy is embedded in the Kantian moral-rationalist system as a systematic and rigorous property — both of the rational will and, notably, of the conceptual architecture itself ("they are autonomous and systematic, that is, rigorous and consistent"). This double register — autonomy as a property of the moral agent and autonomy as a property of a theoretical system — reflects the Kantian insight that the form of self-legislation is itself what gives moral philosophy its systematic character. This aligns with the cross-referenced concept of Form: pure practical form (the moral law) is autonomous precisely because it derives its authority from its own rational structure rather than from any content, echoing the Kantian thread in the corpus wherein "pure form" is the site where the Real makes its appearance as surplus over phenomenal determination.

The Impossible David LynchTodd McGowan · 2007 (p.120)

Our ability to give ourselves laws does not fit within the world of causality and proves that another realm—a realm of freedom—necessarily exists.

The phrase "give ourselves laws" names autonomy precisely as self-legislation — the Kantian kernel — while the claim that this capacity "does not fit within the world of causality" is theoretically loaded because it establishes autonomy as a structural excess over the symbolic-causal order, making the "realm of freedom" not an empirical discovery but a necessary (Kantian: praktisch-notwendig) postulate forced by the very impossibility of accommodating autonomy within natural determination.