The Dialectics of Kant’s Duty and de Sade’s Rights

At the turn of the millennium, I felt that an uncomfortable and unsafe time lay ahead of us. Somehow the 20th century - for all its abysses and abysmal depths - still had an alternative concept that contained the idea of egalitarianism, i.e. the universal idea of the equality of all human beings. We were all equal - whether man or woman, queer, diverse, coloured or white, old or young, and everyone had the same rights, which were primarily political. Today, a quarter of a century later, we live in a world scarred by the terrible wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Berlin - the city where I live and work - is full of refugees, and the majority of the areas in the capital’s neighbourhood vote for a fascist or right-wing extremist party. We know that with climate collapse we are heading for a global catastrophe in which most human beings as well as animals and plants will die. We know that huge streams of migrants will intrude from the uninhabitable areas of the earth. But what is happening on the streets of Germany? Everywhere, Green politicians are being brutally beaten up.

Today, the greed of, as the saying goes, neoliberal capitalism celebrates its crazy excesses, and we are told incessantly that there will be no alternative to this all-encompassing development. We, the people of the Global North are exploiting the rest of humanity. We concentrate on the jouissance, the enjoyment and utilisation of the other: Man for man, drop for drop of water, breath for breath, until nothing will be left. As the French philosopher Alain Badiou (2016: 17) stated, capitalism has emerged as the “undisputed form of domination over the entire globe”.

According to Badiou (2016: 31), this process is having a massive impact on the world’s population in the form of shocking inequality. The middle class is trapped between a largely invisible oligarchy and the increasingly visible mass of destitute people who are fleeing from the destroyed zones of colonial