The Joker’s motiveless action inverts Kantian ethics into a death-drive freedom.

Evidence

While Batman is drawn into utilitarian calculations, The Joker is free in the same way that the death drive is free: he acts with indifference to consequences, glorying instead in a kind of ungrounded unbinding of orderly causal sequences. The reference to “fairness” above is not idle. As an imp of the perverse, The Joker stands for an inverted (or freaked) Kantian justice. In many ways, we are looking at the reversal of Kantianism into Don Giovanni Žižek has described many times (Don Giovanni’s decision not to save himself, to maintain his commitment to his libertinism even when doing so will result in his execution, becomes an ethical gesture). The Joker acts without any pathological interests, grandly symbolising his lack of instrumentality with the burning of the pyramid of money. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 575

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch8’s claims about fixation, death drive, and non-instrumental action; recalls Don Giovanni material raised across chapters.
• DEEPTHINKING: The Don Giovanni reversal — committing to one’s project even unto execution as an ethical gesture — folds aesthetic commitment into moral theory.