Spelling Desire with Two Ls: Levinas and Lacan

This is why I have tried to think of God in terms of desire, a desire that cannot be fulfilled or satisfied…. In this sense, our desire for God is without end or term: it is interminable and infinite because God reveals himself as absence rather than presence.

I would like to know whom or what he [Moses] faced on Sinai and on Horeb. But after all, since he couldn't bear the brilliance of the face of him who said “I am what I am,” we will simply say at this point that the burning bush was Moses's Thing [das Ding], and leave it there.

I remember a friend saying to me several years ago, “What prevents the face of the other in Levinas from being das Ding?” I didn't know quite what he meant at the time, but the question was clearly meant critically. I would like to answer the question directly now by saying that nothing prevents the face of the other being das Ding…

In a paper originally presented at the first “God and Postmodernism” Conference at Villanova University, Richard Kearney thematized the “Desire of God” in a way that paved the grounds to re-pose the same question by taking it a step further: if nothing prevents the other from turning into the monstrous site of the Thing, then what prevents God, as the absolute other, from being das Ding. How can we distinguish the Levinasian God from the Lacanian Thing? What can assure us that, within the ethical relationship with the Other, we will not find ourselves “vis-à-vis” not with a face but with the voracious emptiness of the Thing? And how can we know that our desire is a desire toward God (à Dieu) and not the metonymic desire that takes its leave (adieu) away from him?

References to Lacan in Kearney's paper were explicitly made only once (Desire of God 116). Lacan's ghost, however, haunts the text. Lacanian trademark terms such as the concept of desire as lack (112, 116), the lost obje