In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant takes onto himself the task ofworking on the problem of ethics in order to present a statement capable to baseand guide human action. The categorical imperative comes to incarnate that whichis the heart of an ethics called by Kant the ethics of duty, based on reason and onan allegedly pure will, disentailed of all the so called pathological inclinations, inwhich the individual would find pleasure and happiness. About a century later,Freud, stating that the Ego is not the master of its own house, throws the rationalsubject in a baffling place, with very little control of its action and decisions.Unlike Kant, Freud does not believe that the subject is inclined to pleasure andhappiness. That which is beyond the Pleasure Principle is a basic Freudian notion,retaken by Lacan in 1959, the seventh year of his seminary, in order to deal withthe ethics of psychoanalysis. Pure will, formulated by Kant to think the ethics ofduty, becomes, hence, a major reference in what Lacan comes to call pure desire.Coming close to that which in the subject seems to point beyond the pleasureprinciple, Lacan, in an unexpected movement, sends the Kantian ethicalproposition to the libertine philosophy of Sade, believing that Sade may help inhis attempt of explicitating the subject's division, present yet veiled in Kant. Thatwhich points beyond the pleasure principle is, thus, fundamental for Lacan tobuild an ethics that places desire in the foreground. It is also what brings a seriousproblem to the ethics of psychoanalysis: its tragic dimension. SophoclesAntigone helps Lacan to demonstrate what can one come to when pure desire istaken to its extreme.In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant takes onto himself the task ofworking on the problem ...