Kant and the Perversion of the End Matt Waggoner Philosophy, Albertus Magnus College, New Haven, Connecticut, USA Kant’s philosophy treated endings as necessary but necessarily elusive for the moral and political imagination, and he employed irony, among other things, to draw attention to the risks of perverting the figure of the end. Kantian endings, this essay suggests, give rise to two possible orientations which exist in tension with each other: melancholic confrontations with impossibility alongside a more forward-looking, optimistic gaze. I examine the two features of Kantian endings and the affective orientations they inspire under the headings of succession and secession. In addition to the mathematical-logical language of Kant’s writing, however, one also has to be able to appreciate the noirish qualities of Kant’s thought, which is to say, elements of culpability and aversion with respect to figures of transcendence that posit the space within which finite experience takes shape. keywords Kant, endings, presentness, irony, infinite, noir 1 The self-critical tendency of reason upon which Kant based his approach to philosophy caused the mid-twentieth century champion of abstract painting, Clement Greenberg, to call him ‘‘the first real Modernist’’. In the same way that Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, modernism, Greenberg wrote, examined its own fundamental properties, everything that distinguished art’s various subdisciplines according to the specificity of their most defining features. Painting, for example, discovered two-dimensionality, generating a trend towards flatness in the modernist period 1 . Abstraction emerged as a form of self-examination not by reflecting externally on painting, as commentary, but by allowing the surface of the canvas to internally question and express that which comprises its nature as an art form. In the spirit of that same kind of self-criticism, Michel Foucault described Kant as the first to incorporate into his philosophy a self-conscious sense of presentness 2 . In ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’’, Kant 1 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 2 Michel Foucault, ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ in The Foucault Reader , (ed.) Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50. critical horizons, Vol. 15 No. 1, March, 2014, 95–113 ß Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1440991713Z.00000000022