Kenotic Self-Emptying

Kenotic Self-Emptying, as it appears in Rollins's theological argument (peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006), names the mystical-ethical operation by which the subject renounces its ego — its imaginary self-coherence, its narcissistic investment in its own image — so as to become a transparent conduit for divine love. Drawing on Meister Eckhart's kenotic tradition (kenosis: Greek for "emptying," referencing Philippians 2:7, Christ's self-emptying), the move is not one of moral self-improvement or doctrinal correct belief, but of a more radical structural shift: the subject must surrender the very apparatus through which it ordinarily organises its relation to the world. The ego, in this frame, is not merely a limitation to be worked around but the active obstacle to ethical transformation — it must be vacated. Self-surrender is therefore cast not as a loss but as the condition of possibility for something to flow through the subject that the subject could not generate by its own will or effort.

The argument is theological in idiom but structurally consonant with Lacanian categories: the ego that must be dissolved is precisely the imaginary formation that Lacan identifies as the locus of méconnaissance, the defensive wall that interrupts genuine encounter with the Other. The "dwelling place" the subject is to become is, in this theological register, a figure for the kind of decentred subjectivity that Lacanian ethics also demands — a subject no longer organised around ego-mastery but around a constitutive opening toward alterity. Where Lacan speaks of the subject's relation to lack and to das Ding, Rollins's kenotic subject empties itself of the self-sufficiency that forecloses that relation. In both cases, the dissolution of ego-sovereignty is the prerequisite for any genuine ethical or transformative act.

Within the source (peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006), Kenotic Self-Emptying functions as a theological hinge: it is Rollins's primary mechanism for arguing that authentic Christian practice is not about holding the right beliefs or following the right rules, but about a structural transformation of the subject. The concept cross-references six canonical Lacanian nodes, and its theoretical weight becomes clearest when placed against them. Most directly, it is an extension and theological re-specification of the Lacanian account of the Ego: just as Lacan argues that the ego is an imaginary, alienating construction whose dissolution is the condition of genuine analytic subjectivation, Rollins argues that this same ego-structure must be emptied for ethical-spiritual transformation to occur. Kenotic Self-Emptying is thus the theological analogue of the Lacanian demand that the analysand relinquish ego-mastery.

In relation to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the concept can be read as a parallel — and partial critique — of the Lacanian formulation: where Lacanian ethics demands fidelity to one's desire against the "service of goods," kenotic ethics demands fidelity to an alterity (divine love) that traverses the subject only once the subject has vacated its self-serving position. Both resist a morality of comfort and adaptation; both require the subject to undergo something rather than to perform something. The concept also resonates with Sublimation — in both, an ordinary subject-position is raised or opened toward something beyond the imaginary register, with the ego's deflation as the enabling condition — and with Lack, insofar as the "emptied" self is structurally a subject defined by constitutive absence rather than self-presence. The Neighbour, too, is implicated: it is precisely the ego's resistance to the Neighbour's opaque jouissance that kenosis claims to dissolve, making love of the neighbour-as-Thing imaginable only after self-emptying. Together, these cross-references position Kenotic Self-Emptying as a theological specification of the broader Lacanian problematic of ego-dissolution and ethical openness to the Real of the Other.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

we must let go of ourselves in such a manner that we can become a dwelling place in which God can reside and from which God can flow

The phrase "let go of ourselves" names ego-dissolution as the prerequisite, while "dwelling place" reframes the subject not as an agent but as a receptive, decentred structure — a void that enables passage rather than a presence that acts. The paired movement ("reside ... flow") captures the double logic of kenosis: first an inward emptying that makes room (the subject as lack), then an outward ethical transmission — structurally mirroring the Lacanian idea that it is precisely the subject's constitutive lack that opens it to the circulation of desire and love beyond the ego's imaginary closure.