Kant typically entered his classroom armed with very few notes. One student recounted that “In many classes he did not even once use a notebook, instead he had a few things marked in the margins of his textbooks to serve as an outline.” Kant was known for an engaging teaching style, one that aimed at getting students to think for themselves. He was required in most classes to use a textbook as the basis for his lectures, but he usually used the textbook as a sounding board and even when presenting the author's views evaluated them from his own perspective. In his lectures on ethics he was said tomove his students to tears with his exhortations to duty.We don't know whether students shed any tears in Kant's course on Natural Right, but we do know that he wrote his notes for this course in a textbook. His personal note-filled copy of the second volume of Gottfried Achenwall's Jus Naturae survived into the twentieth century and served as the core for the section of the Academy edition for Kant's Reflections on the Philosophy of Right. It was lost after the Second World War. Kant wrote in the margins of this text but did not go the lengths that he did for other textbooks which he had bound with interleaved blank pages so that he would have a full blank space opposite every page of text. The number of pages of Reflections gleaned from Kant's copy of Achenwall is further reduced by the fact that Kant's copy of the other half of Achenwall's text, which Kant must have owned given the extensive use of that volume in the Feyerabend course transcript, has been unaccounted for since Kant's death.

The basic history of the production of the Academy edition of the Reflections is explained in the General introduction to this volume of translations. Erich Adickes, the editor of part three of the Academy edition dedicated to Kant's handwritten but unpublished writings left after his death, had created an elaborate system for dividing the writings into distinct Reflections and dating each (14:xxxv–xliii).

Loses Blatt C 07 (1792–August 1793). Loses Blatt C 07 is composed of unrelated notes that appear in different volumes of the Academy edition. The first page consists of a discussion of the cosmological argument, which flows into a discussion of the ontological argument and the nature of reality and was printed in Volume 18 as R6324 (18:643–47). This is followed in C 07 by material identified as drafts for “Theory and Practice,”which Adickes planned to include in Volume 23 (18:643, note). As it turns out, Adickes's successor as editor of Volume 23, Gerhard Lehmann, failed to include the first few paragraphs of this material from page one when he presented other material from C 07 in Volume 23. Werner Stark included this overlooked material in Nachforschungen zu Briefen und Handschriften Immanuel Kants (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993) pp. 244–45. The selection below, then, begins with the initial portion of C 07 on Theory and Practice using the pagination in Stark, Nachforschungen, and continues immediately with the remainder of C 07 from Volume 23.

[first page]

The principles of freedom, equality, and independence for each member of the state hold by themselves and do not depend at all on old contracts or unilateral taking possession, thus not on empirical conditions whose actuality and conformity with right cannot be proven by identifying the first rightful acts. Yet the constitution in accordance with these principles, one that specifies how everyone's mine and yours ought to be determined and protected, does depend on empirical grounds, namely the receptivity that human beings have to such a first arrangement. Now those principles cannot in any way be rejected and denied as illusory (metaphysically) and unfeasible, indeed they cannot even once be curtailed, because they are duties that stem from reason and they must thus also be assumed to be unavoidable as a basis for action, and so the originally subjective temporary arrangements of convenience are valid until all enter into the condition in which these principles can be fulfilled. This fulfillment must itself lie as the germ of the existing state constitution and so it cannot be thrown out to establish another, because this kind of forceful activity would be contrary to right.

One principle lying behind the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant is consistency of translation across volumes. The particular relation between some of the materials in this volume – the drafts of Theory and Practice, Towards Perpetual Peace, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Conflict of the Faculties – and the translations of their published versions in the Cambridge volume Practical Philosophy by Mary Gregor made consistency particularly important for this volume. We have tried to retain as much of Gregor's terminology as possible while still allowing for occasional differences when context or clarity warranted a different term. Gregor's translations are a model of elegance and accuracy; she captures Kant's style extremely well while conveying the philosophical content accurately. Our rendering of the drafts in the stages nearest to publication attempt to reflect this combination but cannot match the level of excellence she was able to achieve. Our focus on consistency of terminology and clarity of philosophical content should enable the reader to discern the most important similarities and differences between these drafts and the published works in Gregor's volume.

The other material in this volume is less directly related to Gregor's translations. The Reflections themselves were written in a direct tone given that Kant generally intended them as notes for his lectures or as sketches of arguments; in this material our policy naturally favored a more literal rather than ornate style. The other material translated in this volume was not even penned by Kant but by a student reproducing Kant's course lecture; the style of the translations follows suit, with very direct discussions of specific points and few rhetorical flourishes.We of course maintained consistency of terminology across all these different types of material.

The key term Naturrecht rarely appears in the material Gregor translated but figures prominently both in the lecture and in Kant's notes for it.We translate it as “natural right” in part to link it to the term Recht, which is itself best rendered as “right” as Gregor notes in her remarks on the terminology she used in her translation.

Kant first mentioned his plan to write “Metaphysical Foundations of Practical Philosophy” in a letter to Johann Heinrich Lambert on New Year's Eve, 1765. This work, for which Kant claimed to have already thought out the contents, would appear alongside a parallel “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Philosophy.” Both were to function as introductions to Kant's newly devised “proper method of metaphysics” by providing “examples to show in concreto what the proper procedure should be.” Only after these “little essays” were published would Kant publish the denser work on method, which would then “not have to be burdened excessively with detailed and yet inadequate examples” (10:56).

As it turned out, not only did Kant abandon the plan to publish the illustrative works in practical and natural philosophy before the systematic work on method in metaphysics, spending much of the following decade and a half formulating that proper method and transforming the project until its culmination in the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, he also wrote and published eight books and over a dozen essays – nearly the whole of his critical scholarly production – before finally returning to the work on a metaphysical foundations of practical philosophy over thirty years later. The Metaphysics of Morals is not itself identified as “metaphysical foundations,” though its two parts are: the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right and the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Virtue.

The 210 pages of draft material for the Metaphysics of Morals in Volume 23 are third in quantity among drafts, exceeded only by the material for the Critique of Pure Reason and the incomplete and inchoate Opus Postumum. Three-quarters of this material is devoted to the Doctrine of Right, and about half of the remaining is aimed at the Introduction and Preface of the Doctrine of Virtue, prominently concerning the distinction between right and virtue. Generous selections from these drafts are included here.

Some other drafts were apparently inadvertently included in the published version of the Doctrine of Right.

Loses Blatt F1 (fall 1795–fall 1797)

Why has there never been a monarch who has risked declaring openly that he thinks nothing of the concept of right and takes it to be mere pedantry and that the people must be satisfied with that and will be if they only conduct themselves passively under his governance and simply let him lead them and care for them as a shepherd does a herd of sheep, and thereby really feel themselves comfortable and well-off and that his people are also completely satisfied under his governance, which is often the case: why does he consider himself required in each of his decrees to feign respect for the right of the people (although he has none) and why does he fear, not without reason, that such a naive declaration should completely alienate the people from him. – The reason is not to be sought in a claim that the concept of right and its principle would be a concept that unites all natural aims of the people and its whole interest, so that the well-being of the people is made into a motivating ground of obedience for the people; instead in the eyes of the people right has for itself its unconditioned highest worth to which they pay homage, and the politician considers himself, against his will, constrained by the concept of right as to a point lying outside the sensible world but connected to it, like Archimedes placing his lever in order to move the world when he wants, because of the expected benefits and happiness; a state that is absolutely monarchical and wisely administered governed but merely passive also really inclines to these benefits and happiness; more than a state in which is found the turbulence resulting from having been led around by the voices of the majority, which is a state that achieves nothing.

Loses Blatt E 77, four pages (dated after September 29, 1797, St.Michael's 23:461 Day)

Kant thought of improvements to his approach to ideal political relations soon after his essay “Theory and Practice” appeared before the reading public in the famous Berlinische Monatsschrift in September 1793. Likely within a month he penned a fragment he titled “Something on the relation of theory to practice” (F 23 below) that discusses theory and practice (treated in the newly published essay) as well as the republican type of government (treated only later in Towards Perpetual Peace). Between that time and August 13, 1795, when Kant wrote to the printer Friedrich Nicolovius that he would send a manuscript for a new book before the end of the week that Nicolovius could publish for the next book fair (12:35), Kant formulated what would become his most sustained look at international relations and the possibility of peace based on republicanism, a federalism among states, and cosmopolitanism. During that time he gave no indication in any surviving letters or other sources that he was working on a book on the topic, so it is unclear precisely when he decided to transform his afterthoughts into preparatory drafts. Scholars have long suggested that the Peace of Basel between France and Prussia, signed April 5, 1795, was the immediate trigger for Kant's decision to create the new publication. While it could be that Kant took the opportunity provided by that decidedly non-perpetual peace to complete his work for publication, he may have had the short book in mind long beforehand. The topic concerning international structures to ensure peace had been brought to prominence in 1713 by the Abbé St. Pierre, who inspired many others over the following decades and whose proposals Kant knew of for most of his career.

The drafts translated here range from the early one discussing theory and practice to parts of the Reinschrift that did not make it into the final published version. Dating of these drafts is not included in the Academy edition but is taken from Werner Stark's study of this material, mentioned in the general introduction.

Kant wrote to his friend Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk on Friday, October 13, 1797, with morbidity on his mind. After discussing Tieftrunk's proposal to publish a collection of Kant's minor writings, he writes,

Kant scholars have generally identified these two essays as the first and second parts of what later became the Conflict of the Faculties. Prior to 1798, Kant had not yet conceived of the published work that united three essays on the relation between the philosophy faculty on the one hand and the theology, law, and medical faculties on the other, so he would have treated the first two parts as distinct essays.Other indications, however, suggest that Kant did not leave the essay, titled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?,” in his cabinet drawer but had submitted the essay for publication earlier in the month. In a draft of this same letter Kant notes that “a treatise of mine for the Berliner Blätter has been sent off” (13:464), and the “old question” essay is clearly identified by that precise title as that treatise in another letter to Tieftrunk of April 5, 1798, when Kant complains that the censors had quickly and quietly rejected it for publication in the Berliner Blätter on October 23, 1797 (12:240).Whether Kant had a copy of this essay in his drawer or not, from these sources it is clear that any drafts of this essay would date prior to October 1797, possibly coinciding with work on the Doctrine of Right and probably not afterward.

A beginning date for work on this essay is more difficult to pinpoint. Since the essay prominently features the French Revolution as an anchor for the claim that humanity is progressing, it cannot be earlier than 1789.

Loses Blatt F 13. This loose sheet also contains R8100 (19:642–43) on determinism and religion and R159 (15:57) on anthropology, both dated 1794–95. This passage appears after R8100 and before R159.

[first page]

Of Perpetual Peace.Means for it. 1) Do not retain old claims. 2) Do not conquer any independent countries. 3) Do not maintain standing armies (perpetuus miles). 4) Do not accumulate a treasury. 5)Do not create any national debt. – These are negative means. Positive 5 every state reforms itself.

Here the practical ones [say] that one can become prudent through experience alone and consider the way things are always done as real and expedient; for those who thinkmetaphysics is vain theory and empty dreaming are in possession of the principles means that the world can use for perpetual peace; still they must consider this dreaming with peaceful hearts, and as something which has absolutely no influence on business people, and they draw attention to the schools. – Play with ideas.

The metaphysician, who in his sanguine hopes to improve the world will always be juggling ten balls (i.e. doing the impossible),will be viewed with a shrug of the shoulders. Harrington's Oceana.

Loses Blatt F 20. This appears to be a draft of the footnote on 8:347–48.

Objective practical necessity to act in a certain way (to do or to refrain from doing) as long as it does not contradict the laws, that is, can be thought merely as possible not as necessary; consequently a permissive law, a necessity of the contingent in accordance with laws, that, if they are laws of reason and the permitted action. But if it is considered merely as not forbidden (as permitted) consequently also not as necessitated, then the action conceived this way is not thought as standing under that practical necessity and the concept of a permissive law of pure reason contains a contradiction if freedom, which in this case is not restricted by any law, is yet at the same time represented as something that needed to be restricted through a law.

The first page of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid features famous frontier photographer L. A. Huffman's caption to a picture of Billy he allegedly took. Where the picture should be, however, there is nothing but an empty frame. The text thus starts with a forceful problematisation of representation as, contrary to Huffman's statement, Billy is not depicted. In addition, the Huffman caption is fictional. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid thus immediately signals that the status of the image, that representation will be an issue both formally and in terms of content. This problematic status of representation is in fact already emphasised in the preceding paratext, as the copyright page mentions diverse ‘original’ sources, the accuracy of which is more than contested (such as Walter Noble Burns's The Saga of Billy the Kid), or which simply do not exist (such as Huffman's book Huffman: Frontier Photographer, which is purportedly the source of the caption). In addition, the copyright page, referencing the text's intertextual and transmedial nature, also states that the ‘comic book legend is real’ – a playful comment on the relation between fact and fiction in the vein of the famous quip from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ as it applies to the figure of Billy, and as it is taken up on the narrative's first page with the fictional caption to an allegedly factual but non-depicted image of Billy. These observations are reinforced by the fact that the cover (of my Vintage International edition – the original Anansi publication features an Eadweard Muybridge picture of a man on horseback) does actually depict Billy by means of a reprint of the so-called Upham tintype – the only authentic image of Billy we have. As a result, Huffman's caption can only accompany an empty frame since the image it purportedly comments on does not exist. As readers, we thus witness a great spectacle: an existing but fictional text accompanies a non-existing but allegedly factual image that is represented as such – an empty frame.

Right from the start, beginning with the paratextual elements, Ondaatje's narrative thus complicates the relation between fact and fiction. This is, of course, more than fitting in face of the text's protagonist: the legendary Billy the Kid.

Difference and Hybridity

Ana Castillo's oeuvre is generally taken to be descriptive of Chicana culture and thus predominantly received in terms of ethnicity, feminism, and politics. As a result and as befits Chicana literary studies’ received tradition, Castillo scholarship is strongly thematic, with the themes of ethnic, sexual, and cultural identity taking centre-stage. Accordingly, the conceptual tools used for these thematic explorations are predominantly derived from postcolonial, feminist, and cultural studies with those of hybridity – or mestizaje as its specific Chicano/a variant – and difference ranging foremost among them. In this vein, and in accordance with the general bent of Chicana literary criticism, Castillo's work is read as representing the particular cultural, political, and economic situation of Chicanas and as articulating and affirming a resistant politics of hybridity and difference. The often unusual formal aspects of her work, if considered at all, are subsumed within this framework and relegated to the role of servant to these presumably primary political concerns. In short, in both Chicana literary scholarship in general and Castillo scholarship in particular, politics rules over poetics. This relationship needs to be reversed, however, as otherwise the critic runs the risk of effacing the poetic work's being qua literary art; no matter how explicitly political Chicana literature may be, it is always political as literature and warrants being treated as such. First and foremost, these works are works of literature and their respective politics is always channelled by means of literature. Scrutinising these means is the primary task of literary criticism. Thus, with respect to literature, rather than poetics (and, more broadly, aesthetics) being a question of politics, politics in fact is a question of poetics (or aesthetics). This is the case precisely because poetics itself is in turn a question of ontology: it is the poetics of a given literary work, which tells us what it is. In other words, literary artefacts are poetic objects. This is hardly a revolutionary diagnosis; nor should it generate much antagonism. In fact, this observation borders on the trivial.

This book proposes a differential theory of narrative. In doing so, it goes against the most basic fundamentals of narratology. These fundamentals seem so self-evident that they are generally assumed as granted and only rarely voiced explicitly. They are exemplarily set out in this covert manner in the following programmatic statement from Roland Barthes's ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’:

While the statement's thrust seems to go against a mimetic and thus traditional understanding of narrative, it in fact leaves intact the most basic parameters that all theories of narrative have endorsed in one way or another before and ever since Barthes. These parameters are: (1) narrative is a specifically human business (both in the sense that all humans tell stories – storytelling as a pan-cultural phenomenon; and in the sense that humans tell stories whereas apes, trees, stars, and stones do not); (2) narrative is limited to the field of knowledge (as either its acquisition, storage, or expression, or any combination of these); and (3) narrative is based in experientiality (either as a means of communication or as a way of making experience intelligible in the first place, or both). In short, narrative is taken to be anthropocentric, epistemological, and experiential.

I cannot possibly go through the entire history of narratology here to substantiate this point: namely, that the richness and diversity of narratology rest on these three more or less tacit assumptions. Instead, I will have recourse to exemplary discussions of pertinent conceptualisations and theorisations throughout the book. But let me briefly point to three recent essays on the history of narratology that corroborate my claims. Jan Christoph Meister's entry on ‘Narratology’ in The Living Handbook of Narratology sketches the history of both the discipline and the term.

To date, House of Leaves has overwhelmingly been read in light of its mediality, the question of technology, and digital culture at large. Apart from the oft-quoted pioneering articles by Brian W. Chanen, Mark B. N. Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Jessica Pressman (Chanen 2007; Hansen 2004; Hayles 2002a; Pressman 2006), three out of five essays dealing with House of Leaves in the first book project exclusively devoted to the works of Danielewski read the novel through this lens (McCormick 2011; Evans 2011; Thomas 2011). Add to that another two essays from Revolutionary Leaves (Aghoro 2012; Bilsky 2012), the second such project, and the excellent chapter from Alexander Starre's Metamedia (Starre 2015) and it becomes clear that mediality and the digital make up the predominant paradigm in Danielewski scholarship. Another recent foray into this very territory comes from Mark C. Taylor, who gives the topic a theological bent, going so far as to conclude that House of Leaves is the manifestation of ‘the Web’ as ‘the “embodiment” of God today’ (Taylor 2013: 155). While these critics are right in emphasising the novel's engagement with mediality, technology, and digitality, this engagement makes up just one aspect of a much larger metaphysical concern – a concern that registers in Taylor's onto-theological reading – weaving together issues ranging from narrativity to the act of reading, from discussions of representation to more general questions of matter and spirit. In doing so, House of Leaves explicitly and directly – arguably more so than any of the other narratives considered in this book – explores the workings of difference, culminating in nothing less than the projection of a veritable differential cosmology. This cosmology is as much a matter of what is presented as it is one of presentation itself. Both the narrated and the narration suggest an inherently fractured, fractalised, differential world. In other words, difference becomes the guiding principle of both the created world and its creation. Since the means of creation are those of narrative, House of Leaves comes to embody the correlation between a differential cosmology and a differential narratology. The sufficient reason of what could be called House of Leave's narratocosmogony is precisely the abyss of difference, becoming's ‘universal ungrounding’ (DR: 114).

In its emphasis on verisimilitude and its depiction of social relations, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is a realist novel and thus deviates substantially from the more experimental set-ups of Castillo's and Ondaatje's narratives discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. While The Mixquiahuala Letters’ and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid's respective forms emphasise and enact incompleteness, processuality, and divergence (a series of disconnected narrative and poetic vignettes in Ondaatje's case; a set of letters that present the reader with three divergent story variants in Castillo's), nothing like that holds for Whitehead's novel. The Intuitionist can be described as a realist African American alternate history detective novel, clearly structured into two parts, which are subdivided into another two parts respectively. Several commentators have labelled it a postmodern novel (Bérubé 2004: 163; Liggins 2006: 365; Russell 2007: 46), but this characterisation at best holds in terms of literary history, not form. While it might thus be a postmodern novel, it is certainly not a postmodernist novel. Michele Elam even describes it as employing a ‘naturalistic’ tone (Elam 2011: 120). Ramón Saldívar proposes his own term, speculative realism, to account for the ‘revisions of realism and fantasy into speculative forms’ he sees at play in novels such as Whitehead's (Saldívar 2013: 3). I suggest that the term altermodern, as theorised by Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, who provide a literary historical contextualisation and a formal qualification, best captures the novel's form. Thus, while it may be too early to herald it as a (literary) historical term, the altermodern comes to designate a specific poetics. Following Nicolas Bourriaud's original emphasis on time and temporality, Avanessian and Hennig meticulously tease out the time-related ramifications of altermodernist narrative fiction. In doing so, they stress the importance of grammatical tense. In their account, a specific use of the present tense becomes the most significant marker of the altermodern and its negotiation of temporality, narrativity, fictionality, and reality – all issues that are at the heart of The Intuitionist, which indeed is a present-tense novel. Since this altermodernist poetics is perfectly compatible with a realist style, The Intuitionist's realism can be further qualified as altermodern realism.

The novel tells the story of Lila Mae Watson, the first female African American elevator inspector and an Intuitionist.