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organized around the claim that for both Ricoeur and Kristeva the work of Freud constitutes a crisis for philosophy in its wounding of the ego and that the way they deal with this crisis has a great impact on their understanding of desire and the sacred. The striking homology of this trajectory among two highly influential thinkers from different generations and such different streams within recent French thought suggests, to me, that we must continue to understand our search for truth, and our understanding of the role of the sacred in philosophy in particular, as deeply rooted in the enduring challenge to the subject posed by psychoanalysis. This article also proposes that the juxtaposition of Kristeva and Ricoeur’s journey from the crisis of the self to the sacred via a philosophy of desire will bring to light strengths in each of their projects that reveal weaknesses in that of the other. Kristeva gives a compelling account of desire as an movement toward the other that opens the possibility of thinking the sacredness of nature or Being, and this reveals the insufficiency of Ricoeur’s understanding of the sacred as tied to the desire to be. Ricoeur’s return to the sacred is rooted in his great insight that our desire for the fullness of existence, the desire to be, is already a response to being before a posting of our own existence. However, this necessarily minimizes the ways in which desire is not only conatus but also eros, the ways in which desire ruptures the project of my own being in an ecstatic yearning for a Beloved that is both particular and sensuously encountered. This onesided emphasis in Ricoeur’s philosophy of desire then leads to an unbalanced understanding of the sacred that is able to think, in powerful and compelling ways, the sacredness of our striving and creativity, but unable to think very well the sacredness of being or of nature. Kristeva, on the other hand recognizes the yearning for the other that is also constitutive of desire, and by way of a different understanding of the rupture of the modern self occasioned by the philosophical encounter with psychoanalysis, one that takes Plotinus rather than Descartes as the watershed of