Abraham meets wayfarers, whose faces are the traces of the Infinite, along the road to the Promised Land. The wanderers meet him “from the horizon of Infinity.” They could only be encountered by someone who himself is open towards Infinity. An important lesson comes from this: only the one who himself is open onto Infinity can stand before the epiphany of the face. What does it mean to be opened onto Infinity? What words will render this opening? Lévinas uses the word désir—desire. What is desire? By posing this question we stand upon the third path of understanding the face—a path that leads us towards explaining the subjective condition for the possibility of experiencing the face. The second and third paths run parallel to each other. We will proceed in such a way that we will not lose any of them from sight. Lévinas writes: “On the other hand, the idea of the Infinite implies a thought of the Unequal. I start from the Cartesian idea of the Infinite, where the ideatum of this idea, that is, what this idea aims at, is infinitely greater than the very act through which one thinks it. There is a disproportion between the act and that to which the act gives access. For Descartes, this is one of the proofs of God’s existence: thought cannot produce something which exceeds thought; this something had to be put into us. One must thus admit to an infinite God who has put the idea of the Infinite into us. But it is not the proof Descartes sought that interests me here . . . In Descartes the idea of the Infinite remains a theoretical idea, a contemplation, a knowledge. For my part, I think that the relation to the Infinite is not a knowledge, but a Desire. I have tried to describe the difference between Desire and need by the fact that Desire cannot be satisfied: that Desire in some way nourishes itself on its own hungers and is augmented by its satisfaction: that Desire is like a thought which thinks more than it thinks, or more than what it thinks. It is a paradoxical structure, without a doubt, but one which is no more so than this presence of the Infinite in the finite act.”
Desire is something like the reversal of longing. Longing is directed at the past while desire goes towards the future, perhaps even further—towards eternity itself. Desire and longing identically grow out of the present and are identically a protest against it. They are connected by the conviction that what is real is not present. However, longing knows well the countries it longs for, because of this it calls man to a return. Longing directed the steps of Odysseus when he was returning to Ithaca. Desire does not know its home, it never returns, it is condemned to abandon all pasts and all presents.
Nevertheless, one should not accept that desire is consciousness of some lack—the lack of something or someone—a nothingness understood as a hole in being. Ontological attempts to represent desires are meaningless. Only an ontological lack, but not a metaphysical lack, can be grasped through its surrounding context. In his imagination man compares what he does not have to what he could be when thinking ontologically—whence the striving to supplement lack might flow. But we are not concerned with supplementing a lack. Desire is not the desire for fullness, if we understand by fullness the full development of all man’s capabilities and the possibilities they contain. Whoever strives toward fullness has not cured themselves of egoism—he remains within himself and encloses himself within his own confines. Fullness is in the realm of need, but is not desire’s goal. Desire comes to those who manage to satisfy all their needs. It is a “happy unhappiness,” because it is known, above all, by those who have fully tasted happiness fully through satisfying their needs. Its principle is not egoism. It only knows egoism as the pain of an incompletely overcome egoism.
Desire is an opening. However, it is not an opening onto everything without distinction. If this opening did not introduce distinctions through itself, then man would not be able to encounter the other and the epiphany of the face would not have any more meaning than the rising of the sun. In desire, as an opening, there must be some sensitive point thanks to which it is possible to read the utterance proper to the face. Desire knows what it wants, even when it refuses it and does not want it.
We do not diverge from Lévinas’ views when we say that desire is goodness. He writes: “The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other. The customary analysis of desire can not explain away its singular pretension . . . The metaphysical desire does not long to return, for it is desire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland and to which we shall never betake ourselves. The metaphysical desire does not rest upon any prior kinship. It is a desire that cannot be satisfied . . . The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.”
(excerpted from chapter 1)
