Kenotic God

The "Kenotic God" is a concept introduced at the intersection of Lacanian sexuation theory and theology, designating a figure of divinity whose essence consists not in omnipotent mastery but in self-emptying (Greek: kenōsis — "emptying out"), unknowing, and a sublime form of weakness. As the theoretical move in Boothby's text makes explicit, this figuration of God is mapped onto the feminine side of Lacan's formulas of sexuation: where the masculine logic of exception produces a phallic, hierarchical, doctrinal religion organized around a sovereign master-figure (a God as supreme Master Signifier, a totalized exception that grounds the phallic function), the feminine logic of the "not-all" underwrites a radically different religious experience — one that remains open onto das Ding without foreclosing it through symptomatic defense, and that is aligned with Other jouissance rather than phallic jouissance. The Kenotic God is thus not an exception that grounds a totality but a being that is itself traversed by lack, non-knowledge, and love.

In this sense, the Kenotic God performs, at the level of divinity, what Lacan's formulas of sexuation perform at the level of the subject: it refuses the logic of the One (the all-founding exception) and instead inhabits the non-all, the incomplete, the open. Its "majesty" is paradoxically a function of its weakness — a structural alignment with the void at the heart of das Ding rather than a sovereign filling-in of that void. This makes it a theological correlate of the analytic traversal of fantasy: rather than offering a fantasmatic completeness or a Master Signifier that quilts the field of meaning, the Kenotic God remains exposed to the gap, modeling a divinity that does not cover over but endures the constitutive incompleteness of the real.

The concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 207) and operates at the outer edge of Boothby's argument, where he turns Lacan's formulas of sexuation into a hermeneutic grid for re-reading religious experience. The concept is most directly anchored in the cross-referenced notions of the Not-all and Other Jouissance (the feminine side of sexuation), Das Ding (the impossible void around which desire and the sacred orbit), and the Gap (the structural incompleteness that no Master Signifier can fully close). It stands in critical relation to the Master Signifier: conventional, hierarchical, doctrinal religion operates precisely by installing God as a supreme S1 — the self-grounding exception that organizes all meaning — whereas the Kenotic God radically refuses this function, enacting instead the structural position of the not-all. In this sense, the concept is an extension of the Lacanian critique of the paternal exception into the domain of theology.

The concept also implicitly invokes Castration and Fantasy. A God aligned with the masculine logic of exception would be a fantasmatic figure of non-castrated wholeness — the One who lacks nothing — while the Kenotic God is, structurally, a castrated divinity: one who has given up jouissance, who does not occupy the place of the un-barred Other. This aligns with Lacan's own gestures in Seminar XX toward an "unknowing God," which Boothby takes as license for a gendered re-reading of das Ding: rather than the void of das Ding being covered by a phallic, doctrinal superstructure, it is embraced in kenotic, feminine-structured religion. The Kenotic God thus functions as an extension and theological application of the logic of the non-all and Other jouissance, a specification of what divinity looks like when read through the feminine formulas of sexuation rather than the masculine ones.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.207)

Lacan's twentieth seminar continually flirts with the notion of an unknowing God, a suffering and kenotic being whose majesty consists precisely in a sublime form of weakness.

The phrase "majesty consists precisely in a sublime form of weakness" is theoretically loaded because it inverts the classical theological and Lacanian logic of the Master Signifier — where authority derives from exception and totalization — and instead locates divine sovereignty in the structural position of the not-all and the gap; the word "sublime" further signals a Lacanian register in which an encounter with das Ding (the void, the unbearable) is not avoided but inhabited, making weakness the mode of access to the Real rather than its failure.