The Confession of Augustine

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by Jean-Francois Lyotard,

Translated by Richard Beardsworth

Stanford University Press

Due/Published August 2000, 136 pages, paper

ISBN 0804737932

In this posthumous work Lyotard approaches Augustine's Confessions by returning to his earliest phenomenological training, rearticulating Augustine's sensory universe from a vantage point imaginarily inside the confessant's world, a vantage point that reveals the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic world and the mystical, being and appearance, sin and salvation. Lyotard reveals the origins of phenomenology in Augustine's narrative, and in so doing also shows the origins of semiotics to lie there (in the explication of the Augustinian heavens as skin, as veil, as vellum).

Lyotard's explication of Augustine is also a final survey of the entirety of the philosophical enterprise, a philosopher's reflections on the very basis of philosophy. He sees the Confessions as a major source of the Western--and decidedly modern--determination of the self and of its normativity, the point of departure for all reflection and the condition of possibility of all experience. Lyotard suggests that Augustine's "I," Descartes's "cogito," and Husserl's "transcendental ego" in essence or structurally say the same thing.

Lyotard aims at no simple ascription of Augustine's position. Instead, his text centers on what he takes to be Augustine's central confession: the repeated avowal of an essential uncertainty concerning the status of the faith confessed, of being in a sense already too late, of a difficulty in being no longer of this world while being in it all the same. Far from offering the foundation of all subsequent journeys to selfhood, Lyotard sees the Confessions as many evocations of a certain loss of self, of a temporality that is not given or recuperated all at once--or once and for all--but that time and again is lost or forgotten.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

Review

This half-finished text, cut short by Lyotard’s death, is a stirring and compelling meeting of contemporary philosophy and the philosophical/theological canon. What distinguishes Lyotard’s writing is not only his incisive look into the meaning of Augustine’s Confessions, but an uncanny and at times, unsettling ability to capture its tone and intensity. Lyotard gets inside the confessant’s world, revealing the meetings of the sensual and spiritual, the erotic world and the mystcial, being and appearance, sin and salvation. What we also have here is Lyotard’s understanding of Augustine as a thinker who laid the foundation for much of what was to follow in Western thought. It is from Augustine’s “I,” Lyotard suggests, that modern notions of the self and the uncertainty of faith and selfhood can be found. Imperfect and incomplete as this work might be, it offers important insights into both Augustine’s work and Lyotard’s understanding of phenomenology and the philosophical project. Also included are sections from Lyotard’s notebooks.

Other recently published titles from Lyotard:
Postmodern Fables
Lyotard's excellent biography of André Malraux, Signed, Malraux