Our objective today is to conclude this seminar on Malebranche. The question we will be concerned with is the following one: What, ultimately, is Malebranche’s doctrine of the human subject?
We have seen—and I’ll remind you of it in a few quick theses—that Malebranche undoubtedly has a theory of the divine subject. We’ve gone over the different figures of this subject. In the framework of this doctrine of the divine subject, humanity—and within humanity, each person—appears in the position of an object, an object that is ultimately the cause of God’s desire. So there can be two approaches to our interest in Malebranche. We can say: Malebranche is interesting because there is something paradigmatic about his theory of the divine subject. We can also say: Malebranche thinks a number of things about God that are useful for thinking the human subject, or consistent with what we moderns might think about the human subject.
We can therefore decipher in Malebranche what might be called a macroscopic model of the figure of the subject. This then paves the way for a translation-type exegesis; that is to say, in the final analysis, it’s a question of translating Malebranche’s theology into terms proper to the modern doctrine of the subject. This is largely what I have done and what has allowed us to see what is at once anticipatory and archaic in his thinking. He is a somewhat ambiguous figure. He is modern in terms of his configuration of categories, since he tries to think being as subject and he maintains unequivocally that the essence of the question of the subject is desire and its structure. That is his properly modern contribution. The archaic aspect is that, when all is said and done, his philosophy appears in the form of a theology. So there is a first approach, which would treat Malebranche as a paradigm or as a macroscopic model, and would assess this enterprise of thought from our modern perspective by showing that there is a sort of anticipation of categories as well as a situational conservatism in Malebranche. The metaphoric aspects remain consistently theological, and so all the enlarging, all the macroscopy, obviously depends on the fact that the subject is God, the object is the world, and the unconscious is Christ.
The other approach, whose aim is to disrupt Malebranche rather than translate him, would interrogate the repercussions of the theological or macroscopic nature of his model of the subject properly speaking, hence of the human subject. It is clear that the macroscopy does not spare Malebranche the microscopy: he still needs to talk about men and the human subject, for after all, it is the latter he is addressing. After all, God can settle his own affairs. He doesn’t need a philosopher to enlighten him. He has long enlightened himself, and he enlightened himself to the point of obscuring himself, of incarnating himself, the incarnation being his unconscious figure. Since Malebranche also has to treat the human subject, there will necessarily be symptoms arising from the fact that the matrix of his conception is macroscopic. The question is: What is man if God is a subject? Oddly enough, this is a question that Goetz, the main character of Sartre’s play, The Devil and the Good Lord, explicitly asks. And not just whether God exists, but whether he exists as a subject, as he does in a radical sense in Malebranche. Goetz’s answer is very clear: if God exists as a subject, man does not exist. And Goetz adds that, a contrario, if man exists, God does not exist as a subject. This is exactly what Malebranche’s dilemma will be.
How will Malebranche frame the question of man, the question of the human subject, since God is assumed as a subject? Let me recapitulate what I’ve already said about this. There are two legal orders: the order of nature and the order of grace. If we consider the human subject strictly in the order of nature, we can say that he is in fact a nothing, or so insignificant that he is hardly worth speaking about. It is clear that if by subject we mean the strictly natural subject, which is in reality a natural object, then it is only a null configuration of the scene of God’s desire. As pure nature, the human subject is a quasi-nothing—especially since he is not even, strictly speaking, the object of God’s desire. What interests God about man is that he should be a member of his Church. However, it is obviously not as a natural body that he can be so; it is as a spiritual being that he is a member of this spiritual body of Christ that is the Church. Consequently, as pure nature, man is not even the object of God’s desire. He is at the very most the substructure of the object of such a desire.
If we now consider the human subject in the spiritual order, which is the order of grace, the human subject is the object of God’s desire, insofar as he is a member of God’s Church and insofar as God desires him to be so. However, we have seen that the human subject could only be a member of the Church if he were touched by grace. That is not enough, though. But it is necessary. What is more, as I have repeatedly stressed, this grace does not concern the human subject as such; it is not sufficient to designate the human subject as singular. From God’s point of view, grace does not designate anyone in particular since it is dispensed according to general laws. But then—this is a crucial question—how is the human subject designated in his singularity as a subject, since he isn’t designated directly by efficacious grace? As we have seen, the grace of enlightenment, the grace dispensed by God, is dispensed according to general laws of distribution that do not designate him as such, since God, as God, has no particular reason to think of a specific person. God’s desire does not single out any person at all. The human subject is certainly the object of God’s desire, but what this desire designates is humanity as finitude, in which the infinite incarnates itself, rather than as any singular subject. What eventually singles out a particular subject can only be the occasional cause of grace and the occasional cause of grace is the thought of Christ, the finite thought of Christ. Therefore, strictly speaking, a subject is designated as such, in the spiritual order (the only one that counts), only insofar as Christ thinks of him.
But what is Christ? Christ, as I said, is the making unconscious of divine knowledge, since the conscious part, the currently conscious part, of Christ’s thought is finite. It is Christ as God incarnate who thinks of such and such a person and, in so doing, singles him out. Consequently, the infinity of divine knowledge is at all times essentially unconscious in Christ. It is therefore completely legitimate to say that Christ is the making unconscious of divine knowledge, the conscious part being only the tip—which is naturally incommensurable with the latent and inexplicit infinity—of this divine knowledge. As we can see, the singling out of a particular human subject is the way in which the massive unconscious knowledge that God has of men (and here this really means men as multiples of subjective singularities) lets through some conscious figures that have benefited from Christ’s attention—an attention that, at a particular moment, falls on such and such a person. In this doctrine, the singling out of the human subject is wholly bound up with the vicissitudes of God’s unconscious. One might say: the vicissitudes of his finite consciousness, but his finite conscious mind is only the making unconscious of his true being, of his infinite knowledge. Sticking for the time being to this strict definition of the singling out of the human subject, we can say that to be an object of God’s desire means to be subject to chance, to the contingency of God’s unconscious. Or again, once God is a subject, being the adequate object of God’s desire—the only possible identification of a human subject in this structural framework we are dealing with—ultimately depends on this unconscious of God that Christ is. It is, so to speak, a pure encounter. Christ’s thought, the figure of God’s unconscious, has encountered such and such a man and in this way he is elected, singled out for God’s desire, and therefore in the position of cause of that desire.
When all is said and done, if you ask what Malebranche’s doctrine of the unconscious is (of course, this is not his terminology, but as is always the case with him, there is a similar terminology), we could put forward the very interesting thesis that, for him, the unconscious is the infinite structured as something finite. Which allows us to say, in the singular form of the Christian metaphor, that Christ is God’s unconscious. Given that the infinite is structured like something finite—not like a language, but like something finite—there is necessarily the unconscious. Now, at this point Malebranche will attempt to turn things around so as to salvage something of the human subject, so as not to reduce it to this aleatory election as object. He will try to define our desire: not God’s desire this time, but the human subject’s desire. What I’m calling “desire” here he usually calls either “will” or “movement.” “Movement” is certainly closer to desire than “will,” but in reality, for Malebranche, “movement” and “will” are synonyms, and ultimately it is indeed a question of desire.
So what, for us earthly subjects, is our movement, our will, our desire? We should never lose sight of the general structure, which is that we are, in any event, the adequate objects of God’s desire when God’s unconscious election has fallen on us. But within this framework, Malebranche tries to elaborate a theory of our desire. The extent to which “desire” here means the same thing it does for God is the whole problem, but it is nevertheless the case that this attempt is a real one. Now, the definition of our desire, of the human subject’s desire, will be presented as the exact opposite of God’s desire. Our desire—which, as we’ll see, also has an unconscious structure—is the finite structured as an infinite. That’s the reversal. This means that our movement as human subjects, our essential desire, is precisely the desire of God. But “desire of God” can mean that our desire is the desire that God has, and therefore that our desire is identical to God’s. It can also mean that the object of our desire is God, that we desire God. So there is an ambiguity, and the whole point is that this ambiguity must be maintained as such. The human subject is the desire of God, in the double sense that it is the figure of the desire that God has for it, and/or it is a desire whose object is God.
I will now give you a series of statements by Malebranche that establish this attempted reversal. They are all taken from the Third Discourse of the Treatise on Nature and Grace, the discourse that specifically concerns the human subject.
The first statement is: “For finally, since God only makes and preserves minds for himself, he carries them towards himself as much as he conserves their being….”1
The second statement is: “It [the soul] wills only through the movement which God ceaselessly impresses upon it.”2
The third statement is: “This natural movement of the soul towards the good in general is invincible, for it does not depend on us to will to be happy.”3
And finally, the fourth statement is: “All minds love God by the necessity of their nature.”4
In these four statements, as in many others, we find the ambiguity I mentioned. The human subject’s desire is the desire of God. On the one hand, the human subject is desire to the extent that, like every movement, his movement has God as its cause. The movement of the soul is caused by God. As a living process, as a living subject, the spiritual subject is desire, movement, will, and this, in some way, is the effect of divine action. In return, this effect of divine action is a component of God’s desire. For, as the first statement says, if God constitutes the human subject at all times as movement or desire, it is ultimately because he himself desires his own glory and, therefore, fundamentally, the being of the human subject is desire, movement, will. In this respect, Malebranche is very similar to Spinoza. But these are finite figures of the desire that God has for himself.
God makes and preserves minds only for himself and therefore, insofar as he preserves their being, he preserves their desiring sense. It is indeed true that the human subject—human desire—is God’s desire in the ontological sense, that is, in the sense of an overlapping in being between human desire and the desire God has for himself. This is the first side of the issue.
The other side, which is absolutely inseparable from the first, is that, as a result, God is also the object of human desire. This is what the third and fourth statements say. Seen from without, that is, considered in the context of ontology, human desire is part of the desire that God has for his own glory, and it is from this that it derives its whole being. But seen from within, or subjectively—or again from the point of the view of the finite itself—what is given is the desire for God, this time in the sense that God is its object. This desire is invincible and indestructible. Furthermore, God carries minds toward himself as much as he preserves their being; thus, our being, our subjective being, is rigorously coextensive with the desire we have for God. This desire is just as indestructible as our being and it structures our whole life. Only death puts an end to it, by opening us up to a transfiguration of another sort. But let’s stick with earthly life. Bear in mind that this indestructibility of finite desire, which is our soul, derives from the fact that its sole cause is the infinite, i.e., God himself. That’s naturally why the movement of the soul toward the good in general is invincible. Ultimately, finite desire is structured by the infinite in the ambiguity of the maxim “human desire is the desire of God,” where God is at once in the position of being and in the position of object. We could therefore define the human subject by the fact that it is the desire of God. And since it is the anthropological figure, the subjective figure, that interests us, we will effectively take God as the object of this desire and we will say that man is the finite being who desires the infinite. Desiring should be understood in the narrowest sense of the term, namely, in the sense in which the infinite is the object, the cause, of desire.
Once we concede this point, which is consistent with the presuppositions, there are still two significant problems. The first problem: it is not at all obvious, empirically and anthropologically, that man is this being who desires God. Some people attest to that fact, others don’t. Why is it that most of the time we don’t know whether they do or not? The second problem now, which is not a new one: If it is of the essence of human desire to desire God, why are there damned people, reprobates? Some people were deprived of the Church. Now, to be a part of the Church is precisely to be in the desire of God, in the double sense of this phrase. It is important to understand that people deprived of the Church are deprived of their own desire. As is his wont, Malebranche compounds the problem here, by positing that it is of the inner and essential structure of the human subject to desire God. If there are reprobates, it’s because they have been deprived of their own desire; they are unaware of their own desire. The problem is all the greater in that Malebranche has said that this desire was invincible. The movement of the soul toward the good in general—but the good in general is God—is invincible. A reprobate is therefore an oxymoron: a defeated invincibility.
What it means to be deprived of one’s own desire is a very important problem. Psychoanalysis has recognized this indestructibility and invincibility of desire. As we know, this hardly prevents misfortune and disorientation any more than, in Malebranche, it precludes man’s fall or damnation. So it’s a crucial problem. To clarify this point, there will obviously need to be a theory of repression, a theory of object substitution. The structure of ignorance of our own desire consists in the fact that something other than God can nevertheless be regarded as the object of this desire, even though it is of the essence of this desire to have God as its object. Something can metaphorize God, that is, make him drop into the unconscious, transform him into the unconscious object of our desire, while a substitute rules over our conscious soul. This theory of object substitution is explicit in Malebranche, and he calls this singular object, which metaphorically replaces the real object of desire, which is always God, “a particular good.” A particular good can substitute for the general good, which is God. Or a finite good, a finite object, can be the metaphor of the infinite object. What happens then is actually that my desire of God is unconscious. It falls into the position of being the unconscious truth of my desire for some particular finite object. And this, says Malebranche, is what happens—he doesn’t say “unconsciously,” that’s not his word—every time a particular good is substituted for the general good. A finite object metaphorizes the infinite object, and my unconscious desire—my desire for God, which is the structure of my being—drops into the unconscious.
Let’s make sure we understand this. For Malebranche, if I desire a woman, this woman is always a metaphor for God. All concupiscence is metaphorical. It’s not the case, strictly speaking, that I’ve preferred concupiscence to the love of God. Malebranche’s vision is much too subtle for it to be reduced to assuming that there are general systems of possible desires, among which we find lofty and sublime desires, such as the desire for God, and, on the other hand, low and vulgar desires, like concupiscence. There is only one desire, which is the desire for God, and there is only one object, which can be metaphorized. Consequently, concupiscent desire is the same as the desire for God. The focus on the object can be errant or metaphorical, but not the desire itself.
So in Malebranche’s work there is this absolutely extraordinary thesis to the effect that the most abominable sins are only metaphors of the desire for God. A very convincing thesis, in my opinion, and much more insightful than the distinction between high and low parts of the subject, or than Plato’s tripartition of the soul, or than those hierarchical structures by which we supposedly control the lower concupiscent desires by higher faculties. It is at once more radical and more convincing. That said, what proves that it’s a metaphor? Because if nothing proves that it is, then any cure for it is impossible. We might even be led to think that, after all (since it is the desire for God that is expressed in this way), everything’s fine. Does it really matter whether the invincible desire for God is metaphorized as a woman, the thirst for power, or things of that sort?
In fact, there is nevertheless a symptom that indicates that it’s metaphorical. A desire is a desire for a metaphorical object when it turns out, in a field of experience to be defined—but which, for example, the confessor is able to verify by his own action—that the desire for a particular object, however strong that desire may be, is not, strictly speaking, invincible. What is especially interesting here is that what is a symptom for Malebranche’s subject is not the compulsive and automatic nature of the desire, its apparent invincibility, but the consciousness of its precariousness. This desire can be very powerful, but it’s possible to confirm that the truth of its nature, seemingly compulsive and obligatory, is that it’s actually precarious and terminable. Unconscious desire, which is in fact the correlation of the living subject with the infinite object, is invincible. The desire for the finite object is the same: there are not two different desires. The change in object is not a change in desire. Something of its essential attribute has simply remained unconscious, namely, its invincibility, which remains a predicate attached to the desire for the infinite object. What drops out is therefore not the desire itself but its invincibility. In the case of the finite object the desire is the same, but the predicate of invincibility is in some way withdrawn from it. The cure then consists in bringing both the invincibility and the infinite object back to the surface. If you manage to switch the position of the object in such a way that the infinite object returns to its place, you will have the invincibility back as well, and you will have a subject who is genuinely cured. The problem is obviously how to bring about this switching of objects.
This will produce a unique theory of what Malebranche calls “freedom.” Freedom results from the fact that the desire for the metaphorical object is not invincible and that the desire is no longer invincible once its object is a substitute object. As Malebranche puts it, in very telling fashion: “this expression, our will is free, signifies that the natural movement of the soul towards the good in general, is not invincible with respect to the good in particular.”5 Despite its apparent simplicity, this is in fact an extremely complicated formulation, because Malebranche takes special care not to split up desire. He does not say that the movement of the soul toward the good in general is invincible, whereas the movement of the soul toward the good in particular wouldn’t be. He says that the natural movement toward the good in general, which is the only movement, ceases to be invincible when its object becomes a particular good. What is in question here is therefore solely the change in object, and not the desire itself. Consequently, the human subject as desiring subject is essentially a subject whose desire—which is always desire for the infinite—is captured in a finite metaphor. Being captured in the finite metaphor defeats invincibility, or abandons it to the unconscious. As a result, invincibility becomes an attribute of the unconscious and for that very reason the conscious mind is free with regard to metaphors. As a result—and this is very important—the pull exerted by the substitute object, the force of attraction that makes us desire a particular fetish instead of desiring God, does not lie in the desire itself. For the desire in its being, in its inner essence, is the desire for God, and the object itself can add no particular force to it. In reality, it can only strip it of its invincibility.
So we are forced to ask where this pervasiveness of metaphor comes from, and why it is that, despite everything, most men revel in metaphor. Here too, we’ll encounter Malebranche’s method of compounding problems. If desire is really invincible only as the desire for God, if the desire for the substitute, finite object is not itself invincible, why is it that the human subject—men in general—are nevertheless so strongly attached to these metaphors, to such an extent that a therapeutic war, which mobilizes religious orders and countless confessionals, etc., needs to be waged in order to combat this metaphorical invasion? Malebranche has a really fascinating theory on this subject, which is that the power of the metaphor, the power of the metaphorical object, is not in desire as movement. We know that desire as movement is strongest precisely when the object is the divine, infinite object and that, insofar as we have a genuine repetition compulsion, it concerns God. The only thing that is really invincible, compulsive, endlessly repetitive, is the love of God. The rest is caught up in the vicissitudes of non-invincibility. But that’s not the source of the metaphorical object’s power. Its power comes from something completely different: pleasure, which Malebranche explicitly says is pleasure as rest, that is, as the suspension of desire. The infinite good has the disadvantage of making us desire endlessly. The finitude of the metaphorical object draws its charm not from the fact that we desire the object (though it is undeniable that we do), but from its ability to suspend desire. This is the definition of pleasure, which Malebranche expresses in this way: “the soul ordinarily rests as soon as it has found some good: it stops at it to enjoy it.”6 This means that the substitute object, the “placeholder” for God—for every object is a placeholder for God—draws its power as the cause of desire from the fact that it is the metaphorical cause of its suspension. Its superiority over God is not of the order of desire, but of the order of rest. As the cause of the suspension, it is not metaphorical, naturally. But insofar as it comes, as a metaphor, into position as the cause of desire, it has the additional virtue of suspending desire, of bestowing it as pleasure. Of course, this only lasts for a short time. We rest, and then desire starts up again. Malebranche is well aware of this. And a new object will come as a substitute, which will once again bring us rest, and then the cycle starts over again, so that man is always in the state of a wanderer, in Malebranche’s view. Man is the Don Juan not of women but of the finite metaphors of God.
Malebranche says next to nothing about women (save in always very cautious terms) with regard to the marriage of Christ and his Church, albeit always interpreting it as a metaphor, because he is much more interested in the Church as the body than as the bride of Christ. Moreover, it was not appropriate for an Oratorian priest to seem to be too knowledgeable about such things. That said, it must be acknowledged that his descriptions are strikingly reminiscent of the description of Don Juanism. In these paragraphs that Malebranche, that Baroque aesthetician, devotes to this question there is the thread of an already pre-Romantic theme: that of the endless pursuit, of forever-unsatisfied desire, of rest that is always only temporary, of the halt on the path of life, and so on. This metaphor of the state of the wanderer—this kind of figure of wandering from one substitute object to another—is quite odd. It has to do, of course, with someone whose life (as Malebranche will moreover say) is given over to concupiscence. So it’s really the libertine who is in question. But this libertine is nevertheless romanticized, because Malebranche is held back by the fact that, ultimately, it is God whom this metaphorical desiring desires. Even if the libertine—instead of having the invincibility of the desire for God—has taken up residence in the restful and constantly suspended precariousness of the desire for the object, he still has a desire for God. Malebranche must condemn him, however, and he does. But we sense that, in the conception he has of it, the state of being a wanderer is a real figure of the human subject for him, including in the structure of the desire for God.
Now that the general structure of the human subject’s desire has been reconstructed this way, the question we must still address is how grace comes into the picture. Because we’ve left grace a little aside. After all, the spiritual subject, the soul, belongs to the order of grace. How does grace act on a subject thus constituted? That’s the problem. Up to this point, when I spoke about grace, I assumed that it acted. But how will it act on the human desiring subject defined in this way? It will not do so purely and simply through the intervention of the infinite, real object. Malebranche is much too knowledgeable about the figures of the subject to think such utter nonsense. He knows full well that what might be effective on a subject fallen prey to metaphor cannot be a pure and simple reversal of the situation, which would in fact be a particular miracle. Now, if there are general laws for the distribution of grace, they should be consistent with the structure of human desire, and there is no question of shoving desire’s real object, on a case-by-case basis, in the subject’s face, as a brutal analyst might do. Malebranche is too subtle for that. But it cannot be a new metaphor either, a different, more appropriate finite object, for example. We could imagine that sublime objects might be substituted for an object of luxury, ambition, sordid greed, gold, a woman, and so on. But Malebranche is not a fan of sublimation either. So it’s neither one nor the other, and this “neither…nor” can often be found in his work, because he has a very subtle mind: it’s neither the brutality of the real object summoned back arbitrarily, nor a sublimated, or sublime, object.
The grace brought about by Christ will act by dispensing a pleasure with no representable cause, a pleasure with no object. Theology and Malebranche call this objectless pleasure a “prevenient delectation.” It is miraculous. It’s also called “the grace of feeling.” This prevenient delectation will counterbalance the force of the metaphorical cause, which, I remind you, is pleasure—that is, suspension. It will mean for us that there is a rest with no object, that is, a pleasure of desire as such, of desire with no object, with no representable object. Now, desire as such goes toward God. Not to have an object is strictly equivalent to being reduced to its being, and its being corresponds to God. Ultimately, the pleasure of desire as such is the pleasure of God. So we can say that the prevenient delectation, the grace of feeling, suspends the metaphorical suspension by using the same weapons it does, but by arousing a pleasure with no object. Malebranche touches upon a very important issue here, whose literary fate has been remarkable. We need only think of Rousseau’s Rêveries, in which Rousseau tries to define what a pleasure with no object might be, or of all the later attempts to apprehend the superiority, in terms of pleasure, of desire over pleasure. It is on this that Malebranche focuses with great skill. It is in this prevenient delectation that we find the action of Christ. At the moment when we are tempted to linger in a concupiscient rest, the prevenient delectation reminds us that desire as such is sufficient, and that the object is superfluous. We can equate prevenient delectation with a destitution of metaphors. As such, it is therefore invincible and brings back invincibility, since it suspends the metaphorical object. It is invincible with the invincibility of desire itself to the extent that, by destituting metaphor, it summons up desire as such, desire that is, as we know, invincible.
Naturally, the result is that there is no merit in renouncing concupiscence through prevenient delectation. We have simply been summoned to the invincibility of the desire for the real object through the suspension and destitution of the metaphor. This is a major problem for Malebranche, because the question of merit is a real question. We know very well that saving moral merit is required for the Church. Otherwise, one can always say: “I’m waiting for prevenient delectation—but while I’m waiting, hooray for metaphors! Let’s see what happens!” No, a doctrine of merit is absolutely necessary. And here, we naturally find ourselves at an impasse. The moral merit without which all preaching—to the extent that it purports to be militant—ultimately proves to be futile necessarily consists in desiring God, but in desiring him more than the prevenient delectation requires us to. Because you can well understand that if it’s a pleasure that is superior to all others, then there’s not much merit involved. Now, prevenient delectation, I must stress, is a pleasure. It’s a pleasure with no object, but a pleasure nonetheless. You might think that someone who gives in to prevenient delectation has merit because he or she has become better than someone else, but in fact the question of whether one is better is absolutely different from whether or not one has merit. Because as long as being better results from the invincibility of prevenient delectation, you yourself have nothing to do with it. Especially since the laws of the distribution of grace are entirely different from the internal logic of the subject as such. We must absolutely not fall back on the idea of the unconscious election by God. That would hardly sit well with someone who preaches in the hope of rallying new believers to the Church, nor with someone who wants to avoid pure and simple predestination.
So we see that this question is quite complicated. We know that the substitute metaphor, that is, the object of concupiscence, is in a position of non-invincibility vis-à-vis God. So we either abandon ourselves to this non-invincibility and it is suspended by prevenient delectation, or, using resources coming from something else—from what, though, is the whole problem—we do not abandon ourselves to it, without the prevenient delectation, which is invincible. So this means without grace, since God hasn’t willed anything with regard to a particular subject. It is therefore without grace or without sufficient grace, or with a brief and incomplete prevenient delectation, etc. We must never lose sight of the general horizon of things. In Malebranche’s theological setup grace is dispensed without regard for the particular conditions of the sinner or of the finite subject. It is dispensed according to general laws, which themselves refer to God’s general project in the creation of the world, which is focused exclusively on the establishment of his Church. Consequently, it is not logically impossible for someone to desire God for reasons that, in their own order, exceed what the grace dispensed requires.
If we tighten things up quite a bit, the fact that God might dispense insufficient grace may seem unbearable. But the fact that sufficient grace does not suffice leads, in the exploration of what that means exactly, to various dialectics that are far more interesting than maintaining that, by definition, sufficient grace suffices. Malebranche does not have a doctrine of sufficient grace; he has no trouble admitting that graces dispensed, whether they are those of enlightenment or those of feeling (since that is his distinction) can be insufficient. He never said that a grace dispensed was necessarily a sufficient grace. It is precisely in the case where grace is insufficient with regard to the difficulty of the situation—for example, with regard to the weight of the temptation concerned—that the question of the possible “extra” with regard to grace comes into the picture. It’s important to understand that we are not dealing with a logic in which salvation in its entirety depends exclusively on the sufficiency of grace. In Malebranche’s general theological corpus, he tries to claim that there is an order of grace related to the fact that, ultimately, God wants to save all men. Then, he deals with the question of sinners and reprobates, in an order that ultimately refers to what he himself has proposed as a specific doctrine on the subject: given God’s plans, grace cannot be dispensed according to particular situations. There is a general order of the dispensation of grace whereby it falls like the rain, as much on the sea or on the desert sands as on fertile land.
I am not saying that, from this point of view, Malebranche will truly get around the question of the “extra something” that the prevenient delectation represents. But it is a valid question, in its own order. He calls it the question of “merit.” The question of merit, Malebranche will say, is one of desiring God more than prevenient delectation requires us to, because prevenient delectation is in fact invincible. Merit, if it exists, is something that is in excess over the suspension of the suspension, something that is not simply caught up in the balance between metaphoric pleasure and pleasure with no object, because the action of the prevenient delectation is the counterbalancing of the pleasure with no object by the pleasure that comes from the metaphorical object. Where can this merit come from? From the idea that God is truly our good, hence the real object coming into position as the object, which Malebranche formulates in the following terms: “When the mind sees clearly by the light of reason that God is its good…”7 The difference between the prevenient delectation’s mode of effect and the mode I’m speaking of here is only that, in this case, there is a destitution of the metaphorical object by the prevenient delectation—in other words, there is a pleasure with no object, and if there is pleasure with no object, it is the pleasure of desire itself, since the very being of desire is to be the desire for God. But this doesn’t mean that with the prevenient delectation the infinite object is represented. It is very important to understand that the efficacy of the prevenient delectation is suspensive and not representative. That’s why it’s really a question of a grace “of feeling.” Malebranche will even use the term “instinct” in this connection. The sole “extra something “ possible is that the object be represented, that the infinite object actually appear, consciously, as the object of desire. In other words, that there no longer be any metaphor. Not that the object of desire be destituted, but that there no longer be any metaphor: that is, that there be, in addition to the suspension of metaphorical objects, to which the prevenient delectation gives invincible force, the advent of the good object.
That’s what merit is. Merit is defined axiomatically, like everything in Malebranche. Merit is what structures my desire as desire for God, beyond the prevenient delectation. This is what makes the real object come into representation. We have an idea of the infinite. The infinite is thinkable, representable. This has been the case since Descartes. But the problem is that Malebranche will name the representative function “reason.” So, if we strip “merit” of its intuitive connotation, we can say that every time the real object of desire is presented—and it is only presentable to thought—there is an excess over the simple suspensive efficacy of the prevenient delectation. Merit is quite simply an extra something in relation to the suspensive effect of the prevenient delectation. What is presupposed is that the infinite as thought, that is, the thought of the infinite, amounts to the same thing as the infinite as object of desire; that the thought of God, the thought of the infinite, is equivalent to the position of the infinite as object of desire, as cause of desire. This is obviously not faithful to the fact that Malebranche thinks the subject as desire, because the fact that the infinite might be thinkable, the fact that I might think (this is why he speaks of reason) that God is my good, does not place God effectively in the position of object of my desire. These two things are absolutely different. In other words, the subtle turn is that the thought of God is the thought of God as object, i.e., that it is the effective representation of the original object. Which, if you think about it, amounts to saying that the thought of God ultimately amounts to the desire for desire.
On a less speculative level, leaving aside the identification of formal contradictions (which is not our primary objective here), I think the veritable sticking point is the following: what Malebranche sidesteps, in fact, and where he is most profoundly opposed to Pascal, is that every desiring eruption of the original object is signaled not by thought but by anxiety. In certain respects, Malebranche’s philosophy, with its extreme sophistication and its constant cunning, its successive circumventions, its compounding of problems and resolutions by means of counterbalances, is largely a philosophy that wants to do without anxiety, that wants to de-existentialize the question of God, whereas for Pascal, as we know, anxiety is a central experience. In my own terms, from the point of view of the systematization of the subject, here’s what I would say: The crucial experience of the excess of the real, whatever its nature, is effectively anxiety, as Freud and Lacan have shown. What saves us, accordingly, is not reason but courage. And if we define courage—as I have always done—as the process of subjectivation that is at the very point of anxiety, that is the transmutation of anxiety, and whose object is the same, we inevitably come across the essential element of the wager precisely because the experience of the excess of real is anxiety, and anxiety can only be surmounted by a courageous wager. Pascal is also well aware that what is crucial is the undecidable couple of anxiety and courage, while Malebranche is someone who excises this dimension, this couple, and who organizes the whole of his conceptualization solely around the parameters of justice and the superego. For him, justice is the simplicity of ways, the transparency of the divine project, the balanced and ornamented Temple: what he calls divine Wisdom. As for the superego, which is the same thing but on its other face, we have no choice but to acknowledge God’s sadism in it. Whatever way you look at it, whatever way Malebranche colors its figure for us, we always encounter the terrifying nature of his God, whose plan, whatever the marginal ornamentations, appears as a completely narcissistic one, of which we are the instruments.
I would not hesitate to argue that Malebranche, in his way, proposes a remarkable theory of the subject to us, but a theory of what I would call a “half-subject,” a subject reduced to its architectonic parameters, a subject that I would call “dis-tressed,” if you accept, as I’ve proposed, that the subject is what develops in the “tress” of four concepts: anxiety, courage, justice, and superego. And deep down we understand why, with regard to these questions of the subject, grace, and Christian modernity—which amount to asking what a Christian subject is after the scientific revolution, a subject of the Galilean era, of the post-Cartesian era—the core conflict, which is not truly a conflict but rather an opposition, is the confrontation between Malebranche and Pascal. It can be said that, for Pascal, there is virtually a complete complement of subjective operators, with a dark coloration, most likely, which comes from the prevalence of the anxiety-superego couple. But there is the crucial element of completeness, the wager, which is to say the acute consciousness of the connection between subject and undecidable, the modern connection between subject and undecidable: impossible for God to be, impossible for him not to be. The wager has to be made between two real impossibilities, whereas in Malebranche we find a peerless architecture based on the architectonic parameters of justice and the superego. But we also find, through constant restorations of successive balances—up to the moment when it becomes too precarious—a sort of evasion, a way of avoiding the mirror-imaging of divine justice and its opposite, namely, the atrocity it represents, its ultimately criminal character. From this point of view, the philosophy of Malebranche appears as a long project of absolution. How can God be absolved? How can we absolve God for having created us for his glory, solely for his glory? I think that, beyond the eighteenth century and the relative withering away of these controversies, the ultimate modernity, as to the question of the Christian subject, is Pascal’s. Which allows us to explain Malebranche’s always ultimately minor status, despite the great anticipations his work contains. The clear successor to this Pascalian source would no doubt be Kierkegaard, insofar as he asks, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, what a Christian subject is after Hegel, just as the others had asked what a Christian subject was after Descartes. In so doing, Kierkegaard would come back in close contact with the Pascalian dynamic, and would write the most remarkable philosophical text on anxiety.
If we want to offer a balanced judgment of Malebranche, we can say that his great power lies in his capacity for analytical anticipation (in the purely conceptual sense of the term). His need for sophisticated counterbalancing, based on an ultimately radical hypothesis—being is subject—leads him to subtle, rich, and useful analytical connections, but somehow the meaning is missing. In this indisputable analytic virtuosity, something of the meaning is lacking. This is why we can sometimes see in Malebranche an anticipation on the question of the subject—analytical, conceptual, categorial—and at other times a desperate attempt at conservation. Whereas, finally, Pascal, as Christian as he is, is not a conservative, any more than Kierkegaard is. And so what happened to Malebranche was what his ontological aesthetic basically foreshadowed: he became a bit like a monument you visit, saying “What incredible details, how astonishing it is, what luminous stained glass windows!” But it is a monument for which there is no use other than visiting and admiring it, or attempting fragmentary uses of its ornaments. And, borrowing his metaphor of the temple and its ornaments, we might say that he succumbed to his own categories. He was not someone who saved the Church, but someone who built an intellectual monument to it. So he, too, built a Church, but a Church that probably had no services.