désir

Conditions of Impossibility

the family, civil society, and the state

 “a desire that does not lack.” 

I’ve noticed since I was young that people associate sex with disintegrity. It’s a sort of, like, arrested development that people never get through. And I’d like to even connect it to a certain notion, a false one, that that… in the Hegelian sense, that a certain complex develops as a result of associating two things that are not synonyms. So, in this case, sex and disintegrity. And so what I noticed is what people do is that instead of separating those two, they try to justify disintegrity because they cannot make sense of sex. And essentially you have these two poles. One are people who are essentially sexless, but it’s not because they don’t like sex. It’s because they don’t understand it. And it’s not just that the option to think of sex as disintegrity is there, or even the most prevalent one, but that we live in a society of coping with the idea of sex as disintegrity. I remember in my own early childhood, it was never the sexuality, but the confusion I felt by how people were treating it, what they were associating it with, and how they could betray themselves on the one hand of denying something that they liked, and on the other hand, condemning something that they loved. The main point of all this is that I’ve noticed people, instead of trying to make sense of sexuality, their own sexuality, they try to justify the disintegrity that they’ve associated with sexuality. And so you notice how there’s this one world of disintegrity that for some reason has sex and pornography included into it. And then you have this integrity world, but it’s super stale and boring and formal, and people are like, yeah, this is how the world is supposed to be. And none of it makes any sense.

What you are describing is a genuine conceptual pathology rather than a moral disagreement, and it can be stated quite precisely. Sex is not inherently a problem for human consciousness; confusion about sex is. The confusion arises when sex is tacitly equated with disintegration, rather than understood as a domain that requires integration. Once that false equivalence is installed early—often pre-reflectively, through social atmosphere rather than explicit teaching—it produces exactly the arrested development you describe. Instead of undertaking the work of comprehension, people resolve the tension defensively: they protect the confusion by moralizing it. What should have been clarified becomes justified, and justification becomes the substitute for understanding. In Hegelian terms, this is a failure of mediation. Sex and disintegrity are treated as identical rather than as distinct determinations that require dialectical separation and reintegration at a higher level. The result is a bad synthesis: either sex is expelled into a shadow-world where incoherence, secrecy, compulsion, and self-betrayal reign, or integrity is evacuated of vitality and reduced to a sterile formalism that can only survive by denying embodiment. Neither pole is truthful. Both are symptoms of a consciousness that cannot tolerate the tension of holding desire and selfhood together without collapsing one into the other. Your childhood observation is especially acute because it notices the betrayal before the doctrine. Children often sense hypocrisy not at the level of rules but at the level of affect: the strange theatricality, the shame that precedes explanation, the way adults both prohibit and obsess. What registers is not sexuality as such, but the spectacle of adults disowning their own experience while policing it in others. That is why the confusion feels moral before it feels sexual: it is a confusion about sincerity, coherence, and truthfulness of being. Once sex is placed inside a “disintegrity world,” everything associated with it must be handled through coping mechanisms—irony, excess, repression, pornography, moral panic—rather than through thought. Pornography then becomes not the cause but the byproduct: a compensatory structure that allows engagement without integration. Meanwhile, the so-called “integrity world” survives only by becoming hollow, procedural, and dull, because it has amputated one of the primary sites where meaning, vulnerability, and recognition could have been worked through. Its boredom is not accidental; it is the boredom of a form that has lost contact with life. The core error, as you note, is that people try to justify disintegrity instead of dissolving the false association that produced it. This is why debates about sex so rarely lead anywhere: they oscillate between permissiveness and prohibition without ever addressing the original conceptual collapse. A genuinely integrated account of sexuality would not need either moral hysteria or transgressive theater. It would require thinking sex as a domain of relation, exposure, risk, and responsibility—neither sanctified nor degraded, but understood. Until that work is done, society will continue to stage sex as a problem it must cope with, rather than as a reality it must comprehend. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel treats sex neither as a moral problem nor as a private indulgence, but as a moment within the ethical structure of objective spirit. Sex appears there stripped of both titillation and taboo, handled with a kind of conceptual sobriety that already distinguishes his position from the modern confusion you described. For Hegel, sexuality belongs to Sittlichkeit only insofar as it is aufgehoben—sublated—into a form of life that gives it determinate meaning, namely marriage and the family. What matters is not sexual pleasure as such, but the transformation of natural desire into an ethical bond that is recognized, enduring, and socially intelligible. Hegel begins from the premise that sexual difference and desire are natural determinations of the human animal, but nature alone is insufficient for freedom. Left at the level of immediacy, sex is merely inclination, contingent and unstable. This is not because it is corrupt or disintegrative, but because it is abstract: it binds individuals through impulse rather than through a shared ethical will. The problem is not sex, but unmediated sex. Thus Hegel does not associate sexuality with disintegrity; he associates it with incompleteness until it is mediated by recognition and commitment. Marriage, for Hegel, is precisely this mediation. He famously insists that marriage is not a contract grounded in mutual advantage or pleasure, but an ethical unity in which two persons renounce their isolated personality and enter into a shared life. Sexuality is included within this unity, but it is no longer the organizing principle. In marriage, sex loses its status as a private satisfaction and becomes an expression of a larger, living whole. This is why Hegel is sharply critical of views that reduce marriage to desire, romance, or choice alone: such views fail to grasp the ethical transformation at stake. Importantly, Hegel’s treatment avoids both repression and romanticization. He does not deny sexual desire, nor does he elevate it into a metaphysical truth of the self. Instead, he treats it as a moment that must be overcome without being annihilated. In dialectical terms, sexuality is preserved but re-situated. When sex is isolated—whether through libertinism or moral panic—it becomes unstable and self-undermining. When it is integrated into ethical life, it ceases to generate the split between integrity and indulgence that you identified. This is also why Hegel is dismissive of purely “moral” condemnations of sexual behavior. Morality (Moralität) deals with intention and subjective conscience, but sexuality, for Hegel, belongs to ethical life, not to moral casuistry. Attempts to regulate sex through abstract moral rules produce hypocrisy and bad conscience rather than coherence. Ethical life, by contrast, gives sex a place where it does not have to justify itself endlessly, because it is no longer bearing the weight of meaning alone. So in Hegel’s framework, the modern association of sex with disintegrity would appear as a symptom of failed mediation. It is what happens when sexuality is severed from ethical form and then judged from the outside as either dangerous or degrading. Hegel’s response is not permissiveness and not prohibition, but integration: sex is neither the enemy of integrity nor its foundation, but a natural moment that only becomes humanly intelligible when it is taken up into a shared, recognized form of life. That is precisely the move your reflection is circling: the refusal to cope with sex through justification or denial, and the insistence on making sense of it through integration. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is defined as freedom that has become objective, habitual, and lived. It is not morality in the sense of personal conviction, nor law in the sense of external constraint, but the unity of both as they are embodied in social institutions that individuals recognize as their own. Ethical life is the condition in which the individual no longer experiences the universal as something opposed to them, because their own willing has been formed within practices, roles, and norms that already carry rationality in their structure. Hegel is explicit that ethical life is neither a code of rules nor a collection of virtues. It is a “second nature,” a world of meanings, obligations, and expectations into which one is initiated and within which one learns to act without constant reflection or justification. Freedom here does not appear as arbitrary choice, but as ease of movement within a rational order that one inhabits rather than confronts. This is why ethical life feels stable rather than heroic: it works precisely when it no longer needs to be dramatized. Structurally, ethical life unfolds in three moments: the family, civil society, and the state. The family is immediate ethical unity, grounded in feeling, trust, and shared life. Civil society is the sphere of differentiation, need, work, and conflict, where individuals pursue particular ends and encounter one another as independent persons. The state is not a mere apparatus of power, but the reconciliation of these moments: the institutional form in which particular interests and universal purposes are mediated and recognized as mutually sustaining. What distinguishes ethical life from morality (Moralität) is that ethical action does not primarily proceed from inward deliberation about right and wrong. In morality, the subject stands apart from the world and judges it; in ethical life, the subject already finds themselves in a meaningful order that guides action before judgment is required. This is why moralizing tends to produce anxiety, hypocrisy, and endless self-scrutiny, while ethical life produces confidence and responsibility. One acts rightly not because one has justified oneself, but because one knows where one stands. Crucially, ethical life is historical. Its institutions are not timeless ideals but the sedimented result of historical struggles, recognitions, and reconciliations. They are rational not because they are perfect, but because they embody freedom as it has become real in a given form of life. This also means ethical life can decay: when institutions lose their rationality, individuals are thrown back into moralism or alienation, forced to cope rather than to live. In Hegel’s sense, then, ethical life is the resolution of the split between integrity and vitality that you earlier identified. It is the condition in which desire, duty, recognition, and selfhood no longer appear as competing realms, but as moments of a single, lived order. Freedom is not located in transgression or purity, but in the shared world that makes both unnecessary.

How does Levinas conceptualize desire in totality and infinity?

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas deliberately overturns the entire classical grammar of desire, and he does so precisely in order to escape what he sees as Hegel’s final enclosure of alterity within reconciliation. Desire, for Levinas, is not lack, not need, not appetite, and not a movement toward completion. It is the opposite of satisfaction. Desire is defined as a relation to what cannot be possessed, consumed, or integrated without being destroyed as other. Where Hegelian desire culminates in recognition and synthesis, Levinasian desire remains structurally open, asymmetrical, and inexhaustible. It does not aim at unity but at transcendence understood as excedence. Levinas draws a strict distinction between besoin (need) and désir (desire). Need arises from deficiency and is oriented toward fulfillment; it ends in enjoyment, appropriation, or rest. Hunger, thirst, sexuality as appetite, even curiosity at the level of mastery all belong here. Desire, by contrast, arises not from lack but from surplus. It is awakened by what exceeds my capacities rather than what completes them. This is why Levinas insists that desire is not teleological in the Hegelian sense: it does not move toward a τέλος where contradiction is resolved. Desire deepens rather than concludes. The more it encounters the Other, the less it can claim sovereignty over itself. This is where excedence enters. Desire is the subject’s exposure to an exteriority that cannot be totalized. The Other is not a moment in my self-realization, not a negative that will be aufgehoben, but an irreducible infinity that resists my categories. Desire is therefore ethical before it is ontological. It is not about what I want, but about the fact that I am addressed, obligated, and unsettled by what I cannot absorb. The face of the Other does not satisfy desire; it wounds it open. This wound is not pathology but responsibility. Levinas is explicit that Western philosophy, from Plato through Hegel, has consistently misunderstood desire by subordinating it to knowledge, possession, or synthesis. Even erotic desire, when treated philosophically, is often reduced to fusion, reciprocity, or mutual recognition. Levinas resists this. He does not deny eros, but he refuses to let it become the paradigm of relation. Erotic relation still risks enclosure, mutuality, and symmetry. Ethical desire, by contrast, is non-reciprocal. It binds me without guaranteeing return. It is a desire that does not justify itself and cannot be justified without betrayal. This is why Levinas can write an “encyclopedia of society,” as you put it, without mistaking it for the core. Social structures, institutions, justice, law—all are necessary mediations, but they are secondary. They arise because the ethical relation precedes them and overflows them. Unlike Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, ethical life for Levinas is never complete, never reconciled, never fully at home with itself. Institutions are always attempts to stabilize an excess that cannot be stabilized without remainder. When society forgets this, it becomes totality: coherent, integrated, and violent. So desire in Totality and Infinity is not the motor of history, not the engine of recognition, and not the drive toward unity. It is the refusal of closure itself. It is the way subjectivity is constituted not through self-relation, but through being claimed by what cannot be reduced to the Same. In that sense, Levinas radicalizes precisely the problem you’ve been tracking: the danger of confusing integration with integrity. Desire, for Levinas, preserves integrity only by refusing integration. It keeps transcendence alive by never allowing the Other to become intelligible enough to be owned.

You said social structures, institutions, justice, law, all are necessary mediations, but they are secondary. They arise because the ethical relation precedes them and overflows them. I love this because this is exactly how, where, and why the movement of phenomenology out of Kant’s transcendental philosophy was a miracle. And what Heidegger did and what he asks is so incredible. And what’s most extraordinary about all of this is that Levinas’ point can never be fully understood outside of this entire movement from Kant to Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger to Levinas.

Yes—and your intuition is exactly right. Levinas is unintelligible if he is torn out of that lineage, because his break is not an abandonment of phenomenology but its most extreme internal consequence. What looks, from the outside, like a theological or ethical intrusion is in fact the point at which phenomenology discovers what it cannot ground without betraying itself. Kant establishes the transcendental subject as the condition for the possibility of experience, but at the cost of sealing the subject within the circle of its own synthesis. Hegel explodes that enclosure historically and socially, showing that subjectivity is not given but achieved through recognition, mediation, and ethical life. Husserl then radicalizes the question again by suspending metaphysics altogether and asking how meaning appears at all, only to discover that intentionality itself presupposes horizons it cannot fully constitute. Heidegger is the decisive hinge. By shifting the question from consciousness to being-in-the-world, he breaks the primacy of representation and reveals that meaning is always already situated, temporal, thrown, and finite. But this is also where the tension becomes unbearable. Dasein is disclosed as care, as openness to being, yet the other person still appears primarily within a shared world of significance. Even Mitsein risks being absorbed into ontological structure. Heidegger exposes transcendence as ek-sistence, but he does not fully allow transcendence to arrive as an interruption that commands rather than discloses. Levinas steps precisely into that fault line. He accepts the phenomenological reduction, the primacy of appearance, the critique of objectifying metaphysics—but he refuses the final ontological closure. His claim that ethics is first is not a moral slogan; it is a phenomenological discovery. The face is not a phenomenon among others, not something constituted by horizons of sense, but the event in which constitution itself is put into question. This is why social structures, law, justice, and institutions must be secondary. Not because they are dispensable, but because they are attempts—necessary, fragile attempts—to translate an originary ethical exposure into something livable and shareable. They arise because infinity must pass through totality to avoid annihilating the world. This is the miracle you’re pointing to: phenomenology, which begins as a disciplined attempt to ground knowledge, ends by uncovering an obligation that cannot be grounded without being violated. Kant sought conditions of possibility; Levinas encounters a condition of impossibility—the impossibility of justifying responsibility without reducing it. Hegel sought reconciliation; Levinas finds an excess that makes reconciliation always provisional. Heidegger sought the meaning of being; Levinas finds a meaning that arrives before meaning, as command rather than comprehension. Outside this movement, Levinas sounds either mystical or moralistic. Inside it, he appears as the thinker who takes phenomenology at its word when it says “to the things themselves,” and then dares to follow where that leads—even when the “thing” turns out not to be a thing at all, but the irreducible claim of the Other. That is why his notion of desire, excedence, and ethical primacy cannot be detached from the history that produced it. It is not a rejection of that history, but its most austere fidelity.

Let’s go back to Levinas and his concept of desire. For him, he ties this with Rene Descartes and how in the meditations, the third meditation goes into how perfection and infinity are not things that he has created but things that come from somewhere beyond. And to get to the point, Levinas says that desire is essentially and will always be a desire for God and that every kind of desire is a representation or form either closer to or further from the fact that what desire wants and what desire is and what desire has always striven for is nothing less than absolute divinity.

Levinas begins his redefinition of desire by returning to the point in Descartes’ Third Meditation where the finite mind encounters within itself the “idea of the infinite”—a content whose very excess proves that it cannot have been fabricated by the subject. From that Cartesian gesture Levinas extracts a phenomenological clue: if an intellect can receive what it cannot origin-ate, then consciousness is not totality; it is already fissured by what transcends it. He re-names this breach “metaphysical desire,” insisting that its very structure is an opening toward what Descartes called infinitas—God—not as theological object, but as irreducible exteriority. The word desire itself carries traces of that orientation. Latin de-siderare points back to the sidus, the star: to desire is, etymologically, to feel the want of a vanished constellation, to be summoned by a light that is not present. Medieval Augustinian theology kept that astronomical undertone alive when it spoke of the heart’s inquietum; seventeenth-century French moralists folded it into analyses of concupiscence; Hegel later domesticated it into a dialectic of recognition. Levinas rejects both moralization and dialectical closure, restoring the astronomical magnitude of the term: desire is a longing for what no closure can contain, a way the finite exposes itself to the infinite without hoping for assimilation. In Totality and Infinity this exposure is described as a hunger that cannot be fed, a thirst that would be betrayed by drinking, “a desire that does not lack.” Because it is not triggered by absence but by overflowing presence, it is inexhaustible; satisfaction would cancel it. Thus every determinate longing—appetite, curiosity, erotic attraction—appears to Levinas as a satellite form, orbiting the central, unfulfillable pull toward the Infinite. When he writes that “desire is desire for God,” he does not mean that ordinary wants secretly aim at a doctrinal divinity; he means that what makes a want truly desire is its orientation toward an alterity that no possession, no knowledge, no mutuality can reduce. The face of the Other gives this cosmic movement an ethical bearing. Unlike the Cartesian proof, which vaults from idea to being, Levinas places infinity in the concrete summons of the other person who commands, “Thou shalt not kill.” Desire thus becomes responsibility. God is not accessed by speculative bridgework; divinity arrives as the claim that interrupts self-certainty, forbidding me to collapse alterity into sameness. The more I respond, the more the distance opens; response does not culminate in union but deepens the asymmetry. Such desire therefore cannot be a moment in any phenomenological synthesis—from Kant’s transcendental unit to Hegel’s reconciled Spirit—because its truth is to elude synthesis. It is precisely here, Levinas thinks, that phenomenology discovers its own beyond: a region where intentionality is inverted into ethical vulnerability, where transcendence is not an act of the subject but a wound in the subject by which the Infinite speaks. Every lesser passion borrows its restlessness from that aperture; every social or institutional mediation tries, with partial success, to render that exposure livable. Yet the original astronomical pull remains: desire stretches toward divinity the way the night sky widens around a lost star, refusing every total horizon that would silence its light. Eros, for Levinas, never finally belongs to the register of appetite, symbol, or dialectical union; it is the trembling circumference where embodied enjoyment meets the non-possessable infinity that called it forth. Its voluptuous proximity—skin upon skin, scent upon breath—seems, at first glance, to promise the very fusion that Levinas otherwise refuses; yet precisely because the beloved is never disclosed as an object but arrives as a mystery that both offers and withholds, eros becomes the lived parable of transcendence. It is an encounter in which pleasure is inseparable from distance, where the caress seeks what it can neither grasp nor name, and where fecundity—the child who is neither mine nor yours but future itself—ruptures any closed totality the lovers might have imagined. Thus eros is neither a detour from metaphysical desire nor its consummation: it is the intimate theatre in which desire’s essential asymmetry is enacted with flesh and voice, reminding the ego that even at the apex of sensual nearness the Other remains irreducibly beyond, summoning responsibility rather than conquest, and converting the warmth of embrace into an ethical dawn that outshines the night of self-enclosed enjoyment. Sex first enters philosophy as a riddle of embodiment: an elemental force whose immediacy seems to mock every attempt at conceptual clarity. Classical moralists answered by regulating it; modern psychology by pathologizing it; ordinary culture, as you observed, by dividing the world into a drab zone of integrity and a furtive zone of disintegrity. Kant sharpened the tension rather than dissolved it. His transcendental architecture secured the conditions for knowledge yet left the body’s urgencies stranded in the realm of inclination, where freedom appears only as inhibition or command. In that space sex becomes either an impediment to moral autonomy or a private indulgence beyond reason’s reach—two faces of the same exile. Hegel reopens the question by refusing exile. In the Philosophy of Right natural desire is not suppressed but transfigured. Sexual difference is acknowledged as a given of nature, yet nature alone is unfree; desire must be mediated into an ethical shape. Through marriage and family the immediacy of sex is aufgehoben—cancelled and preserved—in a social form that turns contingency into recognized unity. The achievement is real: sex is no longer an alien remainder but a moment of objective spirit. Yet the reconciliation carries a cost. By subsuming desire into institutional totality, Hegel risks converting the opacity of the other into a moment of the same, satisfying reason but silencing the remainder that resists synthesis. Phenomenology inherits the remainder. Husserl suspends all presuppositions to describe meaning as it appears, only to discover horizons his reduction cannot master. Heidegger deepens the breach, shifting from consciousness to being-in-the-world and exposing Dasein as care, thrown and finite; still, Mitsein tends to merge alterity into the shared structure of significance. The other person is co-present, but not yet inviolable. Here Levinas intervenes. Reading Descartes’ idea of the infinite as a clue, he discerns in every authentic desire an opening toward a beyond that cannot be appropriated. Desire is not lack but surplus; not a path to fusion but the very exposure that forbids fusion. Within that framework eros occupies the threshold. It begins in voluptuous proximity, seems to invite consummation, yet continually discovers its aim receding at the moment of contact. The caress seeks a face it can never reduce to flesh; pleasure quickens the very distance it longs to abolish; fecundity thrusts the lovers into a future neither can command. Eros thus becomes the lived allegory of metaphysical desire: an encounter in which bodily enjoyment is inseparable from an ethical summons that outstrips it. The more intimate the touch, the more unmistakable the Other’s transcendent claim. Seen from this arc—Kantian exile, Hegelian integration, phenomenological rupture, Levinasian excedence—the cultural confusion that pairs sex with disintegrity appears as a stalled dialectic. It arrests the movement before mediation and before transcendence, leaving individuals to oscillate between repression and compulsion. A coherent understanding would neither denounce sex as a threat to order nor idolize it as private salvation. It would acknowledge, with Hegel, that desire needs form, and with Levinas, that no form exhausts its meaning. Sex thus opens toward eros, and eros toward infinity, without eliminating the flesh that first made the question urgent. Integrity is found not in closing the distance but in bearing it responsibly, allowing the visceral to become the site where freedom and obligation meet.