In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine

by Jean-Luc Marion, Jeffrey Kosky (Translator)

In the Self's Place is an original phenomenological reading of Augustine that considers his engagement with notions of identity in Confessions . Using the Augustinian experience of confessio , Jean-Luc Marion develops a model of selfhood that examines this experience in light of the whole of the Augustinian corpus. Towards this end, Marion engages with noteworthy modern and postmodern analyses of Augustine's most "experiential" work, including the critical commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marion ultimately concludes that Augustine has preceded postmodernity in exploring an excess of the self over and beyond itself, and in using this alterity of the self to itself, as a driving force for creative relations with God, the world, and others. This reading establishes striking connections between accounts of selfhood across the fields of contemporary philosophy, literary studies, and Augustine's early Christianity.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Catholic, Christianity

448 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2008

About the author

Jean-Luc Marion est un philosophe et universitaire français.

Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and academic.

Reviews

[Andy Stager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional.

Some take-aways: Marion shows that Saint Augustine's premodern Christian approach to the understanding of the self antedates preoccupations with essence and ontology. For Augustine, a discovery of the self's divided will decenters the self even more radically than postmodernity. Yet his approach does not rest content resorting to a nihilistic frivolity that ever invents new selves ex nihilo. Having descended into the darkness of himself, wherever and whoever and whenever that elusive self might be, Augustine the Christian invites us into the mode of 'confessio'--the simultaneous confession of sin and praise--which opens a space in which to desire and pursue the Other. This Other, who, in gifting us with Himself with disorienting and self-dis-esteeming Truth, has stood in our self's place before we arrived on the scene, provokes our wills to desire Him, and all the more as we find Him ever more found and yet beyond at the same time.

Of course it's much more complicated that all this, but also much better.

Some trajectories: Marion demonstrates that, to be a neo-Augustinian means to do philosophy and theology together, in the same breath, without distinction, and without subsuming the one to the other, especially under categories like metaphysics. It is unsettling to contemplate what would happen to much of our historical theology if we, Renaissance-like, went ad fontes on a quest to determine to what extent our theological formulations, and even the discipline of theology itself, is over-determined by philosophical presuppositions and the questions it presses upon Christianity. At the same time, it is exhilarating to imagine the possibilities of everything from the trajectories in the doctrine of the love of God to a fresh approach to apologetics that Marion's work opens up, here at the so-called 'death of God' and the 'end of metaphysics.'

[Cassian Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been a stimulating book, one that I will keep returning to, time and again. It has drawn me deeper into Augustine's Confessions. And it has drawn me toward a deeper understanding of internal processes. Stimulated by James and Dewey, I have a sense of the proleptic self, the self toward which I am moving. And, stimulated by Paul, I have a sense of the straining forward toward a life hidden with Christ in God. And now, stimulated my Marion's reading of Augustine, I draw that together with my Cistercian Fathers' understanding of my being made to the image and likeness of God -- and image and likeness toward which I am moving. Thanks to a passing comment in this book, I have been introduced to Michel Henry. Deeper and deeper.

[Chungsoo Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jean-Luc Marion is a masterful reader who is faithful to the texts he comments. Now, with this book, In the Self's Place (Au lieu de soi) in Jeffrey Kosky's wonderful translation, Marion has done it again with another indispensable text of the West, the text of Augustine's Confessions that arguably determined the fate of the western civilization. Marion provides his own translation of every Augustine's text he cites, making the text to come alive. The book is lengthy--a total of 302 pages excluding the endnotes--only because he cites the texts of Augustine in Latin first to be followed by his own translation in French, which is in turn translated by Kosky. Thus the most of the crucial texts of Augustine are cited in this book.

Augustine discovers the self as "an immense abyss" (Confessions, IV, 14, 22, 13), "a land of difficulty over which I toil and sweat" [in allusion to Gen. 3:17] (X, 16, 25, 14), an enigma, a mystery to itself ("I became a great question to myself" (IV, 4, 9, 13; X, 33, 50, 14)--a notion which is anachronistically postmodern 1500 years before T. S. Eliot and Nietzsche ("We are unknown to ourselves... [...] We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity..., the motto 'everyone is furthest from himself,' applies to us for ever, -- we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves..." (On the Genealogy of Morality, §1).

What is given is not always for objecthood, because "there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded--or saturated" (Givenness & Hermeneutics 5-6). For Marion the self, as understood by Augustine, is a "saturated phenomenon," just as the Truth that dwells in the mind, as we will come to find out. So too the "conversion" is an event that cannot be described or explained as a possibility within the horizon of being or consciousness: "The present [of the mind (mens)] loses its supposed (metaphysical) autarchy, since it now depends on memoria, now liberated from the ousia" (66). Thus, the self or the conversion 'experience' or, for that matter, truth cannot be explained in terms of Husserl's analysis of intentional inner consciousness nor in terms of Heidegger's dasein or disclosure of Being. These "saturated phenomena" demand to be expressed in the postmodern language Marion inherits from Derrida and Levinas, no less rigorous than the language of the modern philosophy. (The word "differance" suddenly appears, for instance, when analyzing Augustine's text on memory (65), as the entire section, § 31, is entitled by that term (186-191)). Levinas too plays a decisive role, as will be seen below, when discussing 'the third' and 'the immemorial past,' and the 'sincerity' of truth.) By use of postmodern terminology Marion succeeds in liberating Augustine from the grip of "metaphysics" (including the neo-Platonism and Thomistic ontology). Thus, Marion offers a splendid critique of Gilson's Thomistic reading of Augustine (which appears almost as an appendix at the end of the book), and thus indirectly critiques Heidegger's approached to Augustine under the all subsumming horizon of Seinsfrage. The question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that Heidegger takes to be the most fundamental, is not as fundamental as the question: "Why do I love this rather than that?" Or more precisely, "What do I love when I love You"? Or, how do I come to know and love the truth that I resist? Humans are condemned to love, not condemned to know (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.1.980a1 ("All men naturally desire to know")) or to be free (Sartre). The question is: What or which do I love? The primacy of freedom that metaphysics celebrates in both modern and postmodern era has no place in Augustine's "postmodern" conception of the self.

The title of Marion's book, "In the Self's Place" (Au lieu de soi) is derived from the title of one of the last sections in the book, § 43, where Marion inserts, as a conclusion, a summary of his main theses, which are densely articulated in the lexicon of his own. But the coinage, "in the self's place," the place of non place ("I do not have any proper place,because I no longer have place for myself nor for a self." (229-30)), is a decisive move Marion makes at the center of this book where he examines the essence of the interiority of the self in Augustine. Capitalizing Augustine's insight ("Here [in memory...] I happen upon myself, and I am recalled [to myself] (Confessions, X, 8, 14, 14)), Marion writes: "God appears as the place of self that I want and have to become" (87). This place can be reached not by knowing but by loving that exceeds the bounds of knowledge and even memory. It is the place where Augustine refers to as follows: "In all that I travel while consulting you, I find no secure place for my soul, unless in you" (X, 40, 65, 14; also I, 1). The ego must cross the distance from itself to this "place of self" in its interiority: "The distance from the ego to the self's place opens inside the self" (87). This is the place of the other where I find myself given to me as "the gifted," the given (l'adonné (88), or as the Other. I am other to myself. Marion even uses Rimbaud's expression: "I is an Other" (Je est un autre, Collected Poems 6) to designate this "self's place" (89) beyond itself, otherwise than itself, in lieu of itself, and hidden from the ego ("I would not even be if you were not in me. Or rather I would not be, if I was not in you" (I, 3, 3, 13); or, "For I would not be if you were not in me, or rather I would not be if I was not in you" (I, 2, 2, 13)(228); "Man [as imago of God] is a God only as he returns from where he comes, to his most intimate other" (246)). How is this different from Levinas who also use the same Rimbaud's expression to designate "the other in me" or "the other in the same" (OB 118, 125, 111, 114, 116, 146, 149, 150)? The "place of the self" for Marion is also the place of truth, the truth of saturated phenomenon that is given not to know but to love first. I will come back to the question of "the self's place" later toward the end.

Marion brings the rigor of phenomenology to the task, which he sets out as follows:

I will try to employ the operative concepts of the phenomenology of givenness in order to assess whether they permit a more appropriate, coherent, and correct reading of the Augustinian texts (1).

For a long time I did not understand the unity of the book, Confessions. The brilliant analysis of memory in Book 10, of time in Book 11, and the commentary on the creation account of Genesis 1 in Books 12-13 seemed to me to be unrelated and lacking coherence to the rest of the book: Books 1 through 9. However, Marion puts an end to the puzzle. The Confessions cannot end with the accounts of Augustine's own past and present life. If it were to end that way, it would merely be an autobiography. The book is not an autobiography, as Marion writes: "... it is not an auto- but a hetero-biography, my life told by me and especially to me from the point of view of an other, from close to the privileged other, God" (34). This is a bold claim. How can the Other write about me, see me better than I see myself, knows me better than myself? The structure of the Other in me will have to be delineated layer by layer. Marion does it by use of the notion, the counter intentionality or the given, which he develops from the clues that he sees sprinkled in the texts of Levinas. The Other speaking to me in the face to face is a prime example of the counter intentionality, of the given prior to my being or decision.

As Marion notes, almost every Book in Augustine's Confessions opens and ends with confessions (23, 24). The whole book Confessions is a liturgical performance of the confession of sin and of praise. The title of the book thus not only gives the confessional content of the book but also suggests to us, the readers, to participate along with the author in the confessional praise of God. Augustine makes this point quite explicit: "I want 'to do the truth' (John 3:21) in my heart and before you in confession, but also with my pen before a multiplicity of witnesses" (X, 1, 1, 14); or, "I confess before men even with these writings, who I am and not who I was" (X, 3, 4, 14). In his Retractiones, II, 6, Augustine makes it even clearer:

The thirteen books of my Confessiones praise God [as] just and good for my wicked and my good actions, and they bestir the intelligence and affect of man (humanum intellectum et affectum) to go toward him. [...] Let others see for themselves what feelings these books inspire in them; at the very least I know that they have pleased and will continue to please many brothers many times over" (as quoted by Marion, 26).

Thus, Augustine's Confessions does not claim to be an autobiography--the genre which was created only in modern time--but an liturgical act, inviting others to join him in the confessional praise. The book is a liturgical text in which the readers are invited to participate in the rite of confessional praises. Thus, Marion put it, and I quote at length:

The others, those who read, intervene neither in the role of censors nor as amateurs but as brothers in a community that crosses time and space because it is defined first of all as liturgical. Thus the literary act, too, takes on a radically liturgical standing since it aims to sustain for the readers (in the same way as for the author) the initial confessio.... Writing again amounts to confessing, this time across space and time, not oneself, but God... Starting with book X, the praise becomes definitively always plural because the confesio becomes communitarian, through the liturgy to be sure but also through the community of readers, as if the liturgy was extended to reading. Thus Saint Augustine carries out his confession for the sake of God also beneath our eyes, without any indiscrete complaisance, but so that we ourselves might end up carrying out the confession. And, as the author does not ask of his reader literary approval, but, through this, an entrance into communion with he whom the author confesses, God; the reader discovers that he does not in the final analysis play the role of ultimate interlocutor, just as the author does not hold the role of originary author. The interlocutor attests himself in he who the author and the reader confess, the invoked, God, who spoke first and to whom every word ends up returning (29-30).

The two literary implications ensue from above. (a) The author cannot be a narrator, who (as in modern novels) know everything about the character and the circumstances he is narrating. Rather, as Marion puts it, "[t]he enigma of man to himself (books I-X) would be repeated ... but positively in virtue of his likeness to nothing other than God himself, without intermediate definition, by immediate likeness to the incomprehensible itself (books XI-XIII)" (27). The author becomes a witness to the glory and mercy of His creator: "Not to explain God to man or man by God, but that man explains himself with God" (27). The point is not to know himself (as an author of autobiography) but to explain himself before God so as to confess in praise. (b) The readers, too, cannot be the critics or interlocutors who might interpret and diagnose the text. Rather, they become, along with the author, the addressees--the ones whom the ultimate Interlocutor, the Word, addresses by the words they (the author and the readers together in communion) recite in their confessions. In the liturgical and communal act of joint confessions, both the author and the readers are called and addressed by the one to whom they both confess across time and space in the 'space' of the confession and in the 'place' of liturgy: in the self's place opened up to the community. As a liturgical text, Augustine's Confessions opens a site of "the saturated phenomena."

Like Descartes' doubt, Augustine's confessions are not person but universal. For it is by and through (the act of) confessional praise one can know oneself and one's relationship to God: "the approach of God can happen only by praise" (4). The self and God are the only two things Augustine ever wanted to know "and nothing else," as he declares in one of his earliest works, Soliloquies. Indeed, as we will discuss more later, one cannot know (connaître) the self unless one knows oneself in relation to God; and one cannot know God unless one knows oneself in relation to Him. This is so not because the self somehow participates in God or God is immanent in the self (in the manner of neo-Platonism; and, as Marion shows decisively, Augustine cannot be reduced to neo-Platonims!) but because, unless one know (savoir) that he is created, he cannot know (connaître) the Creator and, conversely, unless one knows (connaître) the Creator one cannot know (connaître) oneself. Or, because unless one knows how far he is away from God, he cannot know how near He is to oneself: "God was nearer to me than I am to myself," says Augustine repeatedly. The self remains a stranger to itself because it does not know itself unless it knows itself in its relation to God, who remains unknowable, invisible, ineffable, incomprehensible, etc.



[To be continued below.]

[Nagapriya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jean-Luc Marion is the most insightful phenomenologist that I have read. His capacity to evoke the trascendent, what is revelatory, is spectacular. At times, I can grasp bits of what he says and other times it is completely beyond me, but I have sense that he his reaching towards something sacred, trying to somehow bringing into view, at least glimpses of it.

[Edel Irén · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erotic book.

“The model of the confession in fact brings about a reduction of the natural attitude which permits coming to the question of God namely love – an erotic decluction – “ JL Marion

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sheer wonder of In the Self’s Place derives, in part, from the fact that Marion’s close textual analysis of the Augustinian corpus, while self-evidently true to the texts, bears many of the hallmarks of Marion’s own philosophical and theological work. The Augustinian self is “l’adonné,” truth is a “saturated phenomenon,” philosophy is an “erotic reduction,” and Augustine, Marion insists, does not think God within the horizon of metaphysics. Yet while a lesser scholar would crudely utilize such thick, postmodern philosophical tools to understand a premodern thinker, Marion demonstrates that his particular philosophical repertoire is appropriately, even uniquely suited to interpret Augustine. That is, if one accepts Marion’s premise (and it is not uncontroversial) that Augustine steers clear of “metaphysics” as a discrete horizon of philosophical inquiry, Marion’s post-metaphysical hermeneutic renders a more faithful interpretation of Augustine than is possible when one assumes that Augustine is yet another Neoplatonic-Christian metaphysician. What is more, Marion mobilizes this hermeneutic to explore a distinctively postmodern concept of the self—a markedly Augustinian self constituted and preceded by God and desire for God. For Augustine, Marion explains, “I am not myself my own self, more precisely that I do not of myself have access to, nor possession of, this self itself; but that it harbors and reveals more myself than I am, than I can by myself, that there is more me in me, than what I can be by myself” (308). The Augustinian self, on Marion’s interpretation, is not a stable self with fixed, discernable boundaries, nor a self whom I can entirely know reflexively. “I” turns out to be an “other,” Marion concludes, such that another occupies my own place, my most intimate inwardness, and I myself must continuously and ceaselessly seek the place where my ownmost self dwells. Consequently, the approach toward my ownmost self ultimately constitutes what it means to be a self in the first place.

While In the Self’s Place is not a comprehensive study of Augustine, and while Marion primarily focuses on Confessions and, to a lesser extent, On the Trinity, he nevertheless intricately weaves most of Augustine’s most complicated and recurrent themes—confession, grace, properly-ordered love, time, creation, freedom of the will, the happy life and beatitude, and the divine names, to name just a few—into a cohesive philosophical narrative. In a certain sense, he systematizes a non-systematic thinker: the architecture and analysis of In the Self’s Place evidences the interconnected threads that unite so many of Augustine’s treatises, sermons, and commentaries. Marion’s focus on such interconnectedness in turn discloses implicit themes that materialize in Augustine’s texts—themes Augustine may not explicitly thematize—such as the immemorial, différance, the univocity of love, the inseparable link between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and the primordial dispossession at the heart of selfhood. In the Self’s Place thus showcases the fullest fruits of postmodern critical analysis of premodern thinkers; Heidegger, Levinas, Nietzsche, and Derrida each provide Marion with concepts to sharpen his interpretations of Augustine. None of this feels anachronistic in Marion’s careful treatment. To the contrary, he persuades readers just how impoverished certain modern analyses of Augustine are when divorced from heuristic concepts like the immemorial (Levinas) and différance (Derrida). Modern presuppositions about subjectivity, temporality, and creation obscure Augustine’s radical conclusions, and Marion’s task is to shake off two millennia’s worth of philosophical accretions to disclose underappreciated or unstudied themes in Augustine’s texts.

Much of what Marion seeks to dispel concerns the assumption that Augustine speaks of God rather than to God, which underwrites modern appraisals of Augustine as a metaphysical philosopher, and the related supposition that Confessions is a narrative of Augustine’s life with a treatise on time and creation tacked on at the end, rather than a cohesive prayer that seeks to praise God and understand the self as part of the same movement of confession. For example, Marion insists that Confessions is “a praise [that] become text . . . which utters an uninterrupted appeal to God. It is, par excellence, a text unto-God” (19). Praise of this sort does not talk about God in predicative terms; rather, it talks to God in full view of the fact that I, finite and mutable, am not God, and that God, infinite and immutable, is God. This encodes confession as both the admission of sin and the praise and worship of God, whose mercy alone saves the self from sin. Thus “I can praise God as God only if I name [God] as such, but I can name [God] as such only if I also denominate myself” as a finite sinner (30). In fact, Marion even claims that “I do not say my confession; I am my confession. I say it only because I am it, and I am truly only what I confess” (31).

Put differently, confession is constitutive of subjectivity: it makes us who we are. As Augustine writes, “for you, Lord, I am made known, whatever I may be. The fruit of my confession, I said it to you” (Conf. 10.2.2, my emphasis). For Marion, this means that one must understand the utterances of Confessions to be concerned with confession first and foremost, and the subject of confession, he insists, is consequently not interested in metaphysics. For Marion, whatever metaphysical themes surface in Confessions are subordinate to the existential situation of confession; in fact, upon closer scrutiny, such ostensibly metaphysical concepts ultimately testify to biblical truth that metaphysics can in no way make sense of. The subject of confession is concerned, above all, that it is created by God and thus stands in a relation of subjection to the divine. This inseparable difference between self and God impels Augustine to speculate about truth, beauty, beatitude, and time, and these become focal points for the rest of Marion’s discussion.

If there is one central theme of In the Self’s Place that Marion most often returns to, it is the phenomenological precedence of God in the constitution of selfhood. On Marion’s interpretation, desire for the happy life, the desire that constitutes the subject as subject, precedes the self insofar as it is disclosed as a “memory” of beatitude with God who, likewise, radically precedes the self as “more inward than the most intimate in me” (interior intimo meo, Conf. 3.6.11). Truth, similarly, precedes the self as a saturated phenomenon to which I must respond, rather than what I construct or produce myself, and I respond to the disclosure of truth with either love or hatred. Yet, Marion observes, the fact that I must respond to truth as either desirable or undesirable based on how I order my desires speaks to my constitution as, fundamentally, one who desires. And the further fact that who I am (i.e. one who desires) phenomenologically precedes any intentional act on my part indicates that what makes me a desirer precedes my conscious self-awareness; I do not constitute myself as a desirer by any conscious choice.

For Augustine, the self has the capacity to desire—or better, is a desirer—because God creates the self in the imago Dei, and, for Augustine, God is love. In short: if God is love, and human selves are created in the divine likeness, then we too must be lovers, albeit imperfect ones whose desires are rarely ordered properly. Marion observes that, like our desire for the happy life and the truth, the divine likeness in which we are created precedes the self in both a temporal and phenomenological sense, and so I become more like my true self to the extent that I approach the likeness of God in and by whom I am created. Put differently, the self’s constitution as imago Dei means that its subjectivity comes from God (in a relation of source or provenance) and that God calls the self to continuously constitute this subjectivity, which the self does not possess as some static essence, but for which it must strive in a relation of imitative love. In this sense, I am who I really am (toward the imago Dei) to the extent that I am aware of and adhere to my relation with God, whose perfect, triune, and constitutive love is that by which I become myself and that toward which I strive in imitation. In sum, in relation to our desire for happiness, truth, and the divine likeness, Marion calls our attention to how we arrive, belatedly, to our ownmost selves, constituted by a creator who precedes our creation in every way. For Marion, such precedence emerges as a major Augustinian theme to which he calls repeated attention, and the concepts of Derridean différance and the Levinasian immemorial thereby become useful in Marion’s exploration of the Augustinian self.

Marion is famously difficult to read, yet Jeffrey Kosky’s excellent translation of the French text renders it accessible to readers with modest familiarity with Augustine and the phenomenological tradition. If one proceeds slowly, attuned to one’s own affections and sense of what it means to have a self, Marion’s analyses are coherent and persuasive. As is always the case with phenomenology, the validity of Marion’s conclusions lies, in part, in whether he convinces the reader that “yes, it is like that.” For this reader, that sense of “yes, it is like that” was recurrent as I read In the Self’s Place.