Confessio does not consist only or first in an act (even of language or even a performative) but in a disposition (indeed, being put at the disposition) on the part of the one confessing to the confessed. In confessio the ego finds its condition and therefore also its place: it becomes itself precisely in the measure to which it responds to a call always already issued, but never entirely received, with praise (of the holiness of God) and, inseparable from it, an admission (of faults which conspire against the holiness of God). Must we conclude from this or expect that I myself, now in the situation of double confessio, can succeed in taking possession of my own place and accede to myself? The question cannot be avoided, ever since the Soliloquia placed the ego with regard to God, as all that wisdom desires to know: “Deum et animam scire cupio / Nihil ne plus? / Nihil omnino” (I desire to know [what are] the soul and God. / Nothing else? / Absolutely nothing else). The difficulty consists less in the knowledge of the two terms of desire (“nunc autem nihil aliud amo quam Deum et animam quorum neutrum scio” (but in fact I love only God and the soul, about both of which I know nothing))1 than in the comprehension of their relation. Here access to God is but one with the soul’s access to itself because, more radically, my access to myself passes, in the disposition of confessio, through the access to God, who precedes me. So how could I know myself if that implies first knowing God? Saint Augustine offers no assurance that I can but, in fact, doubts it very much. He does not ask of God the knowledge that he has of myself (that remains incommunicable to me on principle) but precisely my knowledge by myself (however still impracticable by my own means). And he asks it in a prayer, from which will arise all the conceptual research to come: “Potestas nostra, ipse est. / Itaque ora brevissime ac perfectissime, quantum potes. / Deus semper idem, noverim me, noverim te. Oratum est” (Our power, it is [God] himself. / Pray then as briefly and perfectly as you can: / God, who always remains identical, make it such that I know myself, make it such that I know you. Hark, my prayer is offered).2 But a wish and a prayer are not enough, or not yet, to assure a knowledge of self by self, still less a knowledge that would be certain. To reach that, a strict conceptual argument is needed, one that would permit reaching the self itself on the basis of the self. That is to say, an argument comparable to that which, since Descartes, is understood by the name of the cogito: “I am thinking, therefore I am.” Namely, a “truth, so solid and secure,”3 in that it would open an access of the self to itself in and through thought. The exercise of thought would suffice for me to enter into the place where my self is found.
This doctrinal comparison with Saint Augustine seems all the more inevitable since, in Descartes’s lifetime, it already seemed obvious to many. As early as 1637, according to Descartes’s own testimony, his friend and correspondent Mersenne had on his own compared the thesis of the Discourse on the Method with a text from Saint Augustine’s The City of God: “Nulla . . . Academicorum argumenta formido dicentium: ‘Quid si falleris?’ Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest; ac per hoc sum, si fallor” (There is nothing to fear from the arguments of the Academicians who ask: “And if you are deceived?” For if I am deceived, I am. That is, he who is not cannot in any way be deceived; and, in that way, I am if I am deceived).4 Above all, in 1641, at the time of the publication of the Meditationes, Arnauld, whose Augustinian erudition can hardly be contested, immediately confirmed the parallel, basing it, this time, on a passage in De libero arbitrio: “Quare prius abs te quaero, ut de manifestissimis capiamus exordium: utrum tu ipse sis. An fortasse metuis, ne in hac interrogatione fallaris, cum utique si non esses, falli omnino non posses?” (Also I would ask you first to begin with the most manifest things: yourself, are you? Lest you perhaps fear to be deceived on this question, whereas, if you were not, you absolutely could not be deceived?)5 The authority for such a comparison seems so strong to Arnauld that, having become in the meantime a convinced Cartesian, he does not miss the occasion to confirm it in 1648, during his second correspondence with Descartes, this time by citing De Trinitate:
Mentem nosse se etiam cum quaerit se, sicut jam ostendimus. . . . Cum se mens se novit, substantiam suam novit; et cum de se certa est, de substantia sua certa est. . . . Nec omnino certa est, utrum aer, an ignis sit, an aliquod corpus, vel aliquid coporis. Non est igitur aliquid eorum: totumque illud quod se jubetur ut noverit, ad hoc pertinet ut certa sit non se esse aliquid eorum de quibus incerta est, idque solum esse se certa sit, quod solum esse se certa est.
The mind knows itself even when it seeks itself, as we have shown. . . . When the mind knows itself, it knows its substance; and when it is certain of itself, it is certain of its substance. . . . It is not absolutely certain if it is made of air, of fire, some body, or something of the corporeal. It is therefore nothing of all that, and all that it is necessary for it to know can be summed up in this: that it be certain of not being any of the things about which it is not certain, and that it be certain of being only that which it is certain to be.6
To these parallels others could be added. In particular, the short version of the argument that Descartes draws directly from doubt, without passing through the cogitatio (in the formulation “dubito ergo sum, vel quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum”),7 offers a nearly exact echo of the certainty of doubt itself such as it is formulated by other Augustinian texts: “Quandoquidem etiam si dubiat, vivit; si dubitat unde dubitet, meminit; si dubitat, dubitare se intelligit; si dubitat, certus esse vult; si dubitat, cogitat; si dubitat, scit se nescire; si dubitat, judicat non se temere consentire oportere” (Even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts the origin of his doubt, he remembers; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wants to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he need not consent imprudently).8 Before so many parallels, shouldn’t we consider the case closed and admit, with the majority of interpreters, that Saint Augustine already produced, at least in a still hazy outline, the Cartesian argument for the cogito? Doesn’t Descartes himself seem, for that matter, to validate with “great satisfaction” this lofty ancestry?9
Yet it behooves us to doubt that Saint Augustine anticipated the Cartesian cogito—for at least two reasons, with the expectation that in the end a third will be discovered, which is by right first.
From the outset we will observe that Saint Augustine does not reach the ego by certifying its being through the exercise of its cogitatio but by certifying its life by the exercise of doubt even about this life: “Potesne, inquam, nobis dicere aliquid eorum quae nosti? Possum, inquit. / Nisi molestum est, inquam, profer aliquid. Et cum dubitaret: Scisne, inquam, saltem te vivere? / Scio, inquit. / Scis ergo habere te vitam, siquidem vivere nemo nisi vita potest. / Et hoc, inquit, scio” (Can you, I asked, say to us one of the things that you know? / I can, he says. / If it is not too much trouble, I say, tell us something. And as he was in doubt, I asked him: do you not know at least that you live? / I know it, he says. / You know therefore that you have life, since nobody can live except by life. / That I know, he says).10 As for Descartes, doubt here yields before the evidence that it denies and assures with the same move and at the same time. But, here, the issue is, in contrast to Descartes, the evidence of life or, more exactly, of the life in me, different from me, but without which I would not be, nor be myself. This radical divide is developed quite clearly by a text from his mature writings:
Quantum rerum remanet quod ita sciamus, sicut nos vivere scimus? . . . Quoniam certum est etiam eum qui fallitur vivere. . . . Sed qui certus est de vitae suae scientia, non ea dicit “Scio me vigilare,” sed “Scio me vivere”: sive ergo dormiat, sive vigilet, vivit. Nec in ea scientia per somnia falli potest. . . . Mille itaque fallacium visorum genera objiciantur ei qui dicit “Scio me vivere”: nihil eorum timebit, quando et qui fallitur vivit.
How many things are left that we know as we know that we live? . . . For it is certain that even he who is deceived lives. . . . But he who knows with certain science that he lives does not say: “I know that I am awake,” but “I know that I live”: therefore whether he sleeps or wakes, he lives. And dreams cannot deceive him in this knowledge. . . . One can therefore pose all sorts of fallacious visions as objections to the one who says “I know that I live”: but he will never fear any of them, since even he who is deceived lives.11
Thus appear several differences between Saint Augustine and Descartes: first, certainty does not bear so much on being as on life; next, it is not based so much on the institution of the cogitatio as essence of the res cogitans as it is on the performative contradiction of a living doubt. What do these differences have in common? The second indicates that whereas, for Descartes, the experience of self-contradicting doubt attests to the certainty of the act of thinking in such a way that the ego finds in it its essence as res cogitans, in contrast, for Saint Augustine, doubt does not assure the mind of any essence, which it could perform at will, but assigns it to life, unshakable and inevitable but uncontrollable. Now, it falls to life to determine also the first difference: for Descartes, certainty ends up at esse, more exactly at esse as first of all mine, in first person, sum; there is an indisputable being, unshakable, and this is precisely me, ego. In contrast, for Saint Augustine, certainty ends up at life, from which I certainly do draw my being but which I am not myself primarily, even though I only am through it. For—and here is the chief point—no living thing is its own life; every living thing lives through the life that it is not and does not possess, not through itself. Nobody lives by himself. Saint Augustine says it literally: “vivere nemo nisi vita potest” (nobody can live except by life).12 What is proper to the living consists in that it does not possess its own life but remains a tenant of it. “To live” means “to live for the time being” because, more essentially, by a proxy—by virtue of the proxy that life accords the living. In this sense, if it turns out certain that I live, I possess the certainty of living only in the precise instant of my present life, without any guarantee of still living in the following instant, precisely because the instant literally is not. Therefore, I am certain that I live, without ever being certain that I am inasmuch as living. If life certainly constitutes my essence, then it becomes certain that my existence is not a certainty for me, except in the instant. And the fact that this instant is prolonged changes nothing about the basic observation: I am not my life, but I live by proxy from life. “To live” means the certainty of not having the certainty of living again, or rather of having the certainty of not living by oneself—living gives only the certainty of dying. Only the Living par excellence lives from itself.13 We see now that these two differences, in fact, make just one: there where Descartes accomplishes the ego’s appropriation to itself (its thought assuring it of itself in its being as res cogitans), Saint Augustine assigns the mens to its life (by the contradiction of doubt) only to expose it to this very life; now, this life, by definition not belonging to me as mine, I can only expose myself to it as that to which I belong, more myself than me and for the sake of which, from this moment, I disappropriate myself of myself. The same act of cogitatio thus provokes two opposite results: in one case the appropriation of the ego to itself, in the other case the disappropriation of the mens to itself.
A second reason to doubt that Saint Augustine anticipates the Cartesian cogito confirms this first one: Descartes himself recognized his distance from Saint Augustine. Against the purported evidence for the comparison and against the prestige of such an authority, he himself sometimes claimed unambiguously,
I am obliged to you for drawing my attention to the passage of St. Augustine relevant to my I am thinking, therefore I exist. I went today to the library of this town [Leiden] to read it [De civitate Dei XI, 26], and I do indeed find that he does use it to prove the certainty of our existence. He goes on to show that there is a certain likeness of the Trinity in us, in that we exist, we know that we exist, and we love the existence and the knowledge we have. I, on the other hand, use the argument to show that this I which is thinking is an immaterial substance with no bodily element. These are two very different things.14
Of course, one could hold that Descartes himself also ends up recognizing in the res cogitans “a certain likeness of the Trinity.”15 Yet it remains indisputable that he means first to establish it as a res intellectualis and intelligens,16 so as to find in it a first principle so very first that it even precedes the knowledge of God: “I took the being or existence of this thought as my first principle, and from it I deduced very clearly the following principles. There is a God.”17 To be sure, both arguments are about connecting thought and being, no longer with regard to God (as in the tradition issued from Aristotle), but now also with regard to the finite mind, soon to be named the subject. Yet one begins with the ego so as to deduce from it existence, even that of God, as if on the basis of a first principle different from this very God, while the other is about an assurance, by doubt and its contradiction, of the mens, for the sake of seeking outside it its condition of possibility, life. This opposition cannot be hidden: it is played out between self-appropriation by the equivalence of thought with being (essence inasmuch as existence) and self-disappropriation of a living of a life other than itself. Two philosophers, at least, saw this perfectly. Blondel first: “Is there a more serious misreading than that which discovers his [Saint Augustine’s] influence in the Cartesian cogito? . . . Augustine never would have dreamed of setting up its thinking as a ‘cornerstone,’ of positing it as absolute and in the absolute, of making the mind such as we know it a sufficient and separable substance.”18 And, of course, Heidegger: “Descartes blurred Augustine’s thoughts. Self-certainty and the self-possession in the sense of Augustine are entirely different from the Cartesian evidence of the ‘cogito.’”19
Having established this fundamental opposition beneath the appearance of one and the same argument, what remains is to measure its import and understand what is at stake in it.
One point thus seems established: at no time does Saint Augustine succeed (nor even attempt, as Descartes will) in assuring the ego of its existence or assigning it cogitatio as essence (res cogitans). Why this recoil before what appears to us today as undeniable evidence? Or else was Saint Augustine missing certain elements needed to validate the argument?
The cogitatio was evidently not missing, since it falls to him to have, first of all, definitively established its conceptual usage, on the basis of a somewhat hazy etymology for that matter: “Quia tria cum in unum coguntur, ab ipso coactu cogitatio dicitur” (For when these three terms [memory, vision, and will] are collected into just one, this collection is called cogitatio).20 Nor was esse missing, seeing as he clearly indicated that the mind is certain only of that alone that it is certain to be—”certa sit, quod solum esse se certa est.”21 What then is or would be missing in Saint Augustine such that he could not write ego cogito, ergo sum like Descartes?22 If he was not missing the cogitatio nor esse, he could only have been missing the ego itself—this ego that, for Descartes, sustains the two other terms that manifest it only because, more essentially, they presuppose it straightaway, as early as the doubt; to the point that the cogitatio is so identified with the ego as its very act that it ends up disappearing in it, finally emerging alone, but imperial, in its being without any more mention of it: Ego sum, ego existo.23 The ego is missing from Saint Augustine, at least in the Cartesian sense of “ego ille, quem novi” (this ego here that I have come to know),24 seeing as he knows it only as a question, and a question concerning an unknown essence: “Quis ego et qualis ego?” (Confessiones IX, 1, 1, 14, 70). And the reason for this questioning goes without saying: for him, access through the cogitatio to being (or rather to life) does not permit acceding to myself and especially not to identifying myself by an essence. In other words the fact that my access to my being through my thought is imposed indisputably does not imply that I have, in this being through thought, the least access to myself in the figure of an ego known by itself. Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself. Not that he anticipates the objection to come in metaphysics, an objection that is vulgar by dint of repeating that what exists is not myself because “it thinks in me,” without myself being at issue; he does not contest that, myself, I think and that through this I am certainly. But he contests or, rather, observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself25 or that would say itself an I myself—and thus would know its essence.
But then what am I taught by the certainty (still uncontested) that I am inasmuch as I think? It teaches me that in thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself in saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside of myself. I have no other ego besides my division itself with my self. In entering the terrain into which the alliance of thought and Being introduces me, I do not discover myself nor discover myself as a myself assured of self, but I see that I escape myself because I myself exceed myself—that I am this very excess of myself over myself. The cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself.
Saint Augustine describes this exile often and clearly, showing there-by that the supposed cogito reveals that I am a quaestio mihi, a question to myself—that I am myself as this question. Once, he feels himself having become to himself a great question—”factus eram mihi magna quaestio” (Confessiones IV, 4, 9, 13, 422)—at the death of a friend. This childhood friend had shared a life and its joys with him—up until the moment of his falling into a great agony. During this agony, moribund and unconscious, he receives baptism; but surviving by a remission, far from denying this so to speak involuntary baptism, as Augustine hoped, he lays strong claim to it and in the end dies baptized. Why does this mourning provoke, more than just sorrow on account of the other, an unintelligibility to himself? No doubt because the friend, “dimidium animae meae” (part of my own soul), keeps a part of myself, which his death amputates, such that I take on with horror a life that I do not want to live partially “nolebam dimidius vivere” (IV, 6, 11, 13, 426). But no doubt there is more: the half-a-life that the death of my friend leaves to me had in fact already escaped me from before his decease, since, in his agony, he had, through baptism, changed his life by receiving it this time from the Immortal himself; consequently, this life already escaped me by dint of a life that remained absolutely foreign to me. The death of the friend deprives me of my own life, but his new life still more. Such an escape of myself out of me (for it is precisely the self that lets life escape) leaves me without myself, as one remains without voice. And this is not just a provisional state, one that would result from a passing event, like a simple crisis. It concerns an ordeal as repeated as is temptation, or rather as the five modes of temptation that, in adding themselves up in each other and constantly intervening on me, define the permanent status of my condition. If “oneri mihi sum” (I am a burden for myself), this results from the fact that “‘temptatio est vita humana super terram’ sine interstitio” (“the life of man on this earth is an ordeal” [Psalm 30:10], without the least respite) (Confessiones X, 28, 39, 14, 210).26 Saint Augustine analyzes in detail at least two cases of the exile that they suggest and of the quaestio mihi, the question to myself, that they repeat.
First the case of one of the concupiscences of the flesh, sexual desire. I can from now on (now that I am converted and a bishop, editing the Confessiones), he argues, resist it without trouble, so lacking in strength is it as long as I remain vigilant (“mihi vigilanti carentes viribus”). In other words, as long as I remain myself, being and thinking (being
because thinking), true child of the cogito, sexual temptations will remain without effect, even though the images that would incite them still remain alive “adhuc vivunt in memoria mea” (Confessiones X, 30, 41, 14, 212). Yet it happens that as soon as I fall asleep, not only do I greet them without showing any resistance, but sometimes I even let myself go so far as to actually take pleasure in them (“non solum usque ad delectationem, sed etiam usque ad consensionem”). Therefore, at the very moment when these images become weaker because they offer nothing real (“dormienti falsa . . . vigilanti vera”),27 the erotic dreams, though involuntary, do not allow for me to take the step to action, such that I am not he who I am precisely because I am certain in thought that I am (in dreaming because I think). The supposed cogito, by admitting me into my existence without fixing for me an essence, therefore, alienates me from myself: “Numquid tunc ego non sum, Domine, Deus meus? Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum, quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo!” (At this moment am I not myself, O Lord, my God? And yet a gulf intervenes, separating me from myself, between the moment when I pass into the torpor of sleep and that when I come back!) (X, 30, 41, 14, 214).28 This difference, if it manifests itself in time, is not itself defined temporally, or else it refers to a scission of the ego temporalized, so to speak, after the fact. For the scission arises in general as soon as the ego, in this case the mind (animus), attempts to determine itself by itself: “Imperat animus corpori et paretur statim: imperat animus sibi, et resistitur. . . . Imperat animus, ut velit animus, nec alter est nec facit tamen. Unde hoc monstrum?” (The mind gives a command to the body and the body obeys it immediately. The mind commands itself, and there is resistance. . . . The mind commands the mind to will and there is no other but it itself, and yet it resists. Whence this monster?)29 The monster (monstrum—put otherwise, the phenomenon beyond the norm that is to be shown, demonstrare) consists in that the mind refractory to the mind that gives it a command is not an other, different, but remains one and the same mind, the sole mind—namely, a mind that it itself cannot even command itself. What is the meaning of this failure of command, except that this mind has not mastered itself and is not such that could take itself into hand—in other words, comprehend itself? The supposed ego manifests itself by demonstrating the contradiction in it of its equality to itself. From the beginning A is not A; I am not myself.
We should not restrict, crudely, the demonstration of the supposed cogito as a monstrum solely to erotic dreams (in fact, mere examples of the temptations linked to the sense of touch). It is repeated almost in the very same terms in the case of one of the temptations linked to the sense of hearing. As is well known, Saint Augustine had discovered the greatness of the Christian faith, in fact for the first time, in Milan, while listening, on one hand, to one of the sermons of Saint Ambrose disclosing to him the spiritual sense of scripture and, on the other hand, to the liturgical songs penetrating him deeply, in particular in the prayer of the Psalms. This experience, musical to be sure (and therefore of importance for the author of a De musica), had an especially powerful spiritual effect: entering into the prayer of the community of believers and becoming an agent of the liturgical mysteries.30 An ambiguity, however, quickly insinuates itself: does the emotion born from singing these hymns come from what these songs say to God as praises (“moveor non cantu, sed rebus quae cantantur”) or only from the songs themselves in their strictly musical beauty? Augustine came to suspect that to the contrary “me amplius canus, quam res quae canitur, moveat” (what gave me my emotion was more the song than the things sung).31 This is not just a case of a beautiful soul’s exaggerated scruples but of a very real and very disturbing suspicion. I do indeed differ from myself, to the point of losing all knowledge of myself, not only in the experience of my failings (erotic desire, weakness of will) but even in the experience of my highest exaltations (in this case my communion in liturgical prayer). Even in this apparently pure joy, I am deceiving myself; I do not know what I am really doing; I do not comprehend myself, in any case no more than in my erotic dreams. The pretended heights of “religious experience” change nothing: “mihi quaestio factus sum” (I have become, in fact, for myself a question) (X, 33, 50, 14, 232).32 Even when it prays, the ego differs from its myself, or rather self-differs and is therefore not appropriated to any myself.
What is unadvisedly named the “Augustinian cogito,”33 therefore, leaves the ego in exile between its existence (certain) and its essence (unknown). Man’s ignorance of himself cannot be overcome by a more exact investigation or by a more profound interiority. The contrary is true: the more the certainty of existence permits the mind to enter into its being, the more the endless traversing of this field leaves it inaccessible to itself, unknown, impenetrable, like an abyss: “Grande profundum est ipse homo” (Man himself, what an immense abyss) (IV, 14, 22, 13, 446). Saint Augustine can say without any incoherence, on one hand, that “homo sibi ipse est incognitus” (man is [to] himself unknown) and, on the other hand, that “[mens] se ipsa nihil sibi possit esse praesentius” (nothing can be more present to the mind than itself),34 for the certainty of existence does not imply knowledge of the essence any more than knowing that I am tells me who I am—and even if my ego consists in Being. The supposed cogito does, indeed, introduce me into Being, but it leaves me there with unknown essence, in-between, knowing myself without self-knowledge: “Quid ergo dicemus? An quod ex parte [mens] se novit, ex parte non novit? . . . Non dico totum scit, sed quod scit tota scit” (What shall we say? That the mind knows itself in part, and does not know itself in part? . . . I do not say that it knows all of itself [entirely], but that what it knows it knows in its entirety) (De Trinitate X, 4, 6, 16, 130). What the certainty of my existence offers to me is summed up in the consciousness of my anonymity. I am, therefore I remain, what I am but without essence, without identity, without name even. I am, but just enough to sense that I am not myself, or rather that this existence that I am is not myself; or that this existence, which leaves me without essence, opens for me no access to myself, entangles me in it and holds me to the separation of myself. Being holds me but so as to hold me back from acceding to this self that is not said or given in being.35
This anonymity weighs so heavily on the analysis of the ego that it even sometimes leads to a forced reading of a passage from Saint Paul: “Tu enim, Domine, dijudicas me, quia et si ‘nemo scit hominum, quae sunt hominis, nisi spiritus hominis, qui in ipso est,’ tamen est aliquid hominis, quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis, qui in ipso est, tu autem, Domine, scis ejus omnia, qui fecisti eum” (You, O Lord, you judge me because if “nobody among men knows the things of man except the spirit of man which is in him” [1 Corinthians 2:11], nevertheless there is something of man that even the spirit of man, which is in him, does not know, but you, Lord, you know all the things that you have done) (X, 5, 7, 14, 150). Saint Augustine’s thesis consists in citing Saint Paul saying that only the mind of man knows man so as to correct him by adding that, in one case, that of the essence of man, the mind of man himself does not and that therefore God alone knows it, in his role of creator of all things, therefore also of man. In other words the essence of man, which remains inaccessible to man, resides in the secret of God. Now the text of 1 Corinthians 2:11 does not lead to this conclusion (an unknowable essence of man, except for God alone). Provided one does not truncate it too quickly (as Saint Augustine does), it has an entirely different intention: just as only the spirit of man knows what is in man, so, too, only the Spirit of God knows what is in God. Therefore, since we have received this spirit, we can know God (1 Corinthians 2:11–12). Augustine’s interpretation clearly, intentionally then, betrays the Pauline text: while Paul wants to establish, by an analogy between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God, that man can know the gifts of God, the commentator, Augustine, would like to establish, to the contrary, that far from us having knowledge of the gifts of God through the Spirit of God poured out into us, not only do we know nothing of these gifts, but inversely God alone knows man, which his own spirit cannot. How to justify this divergence, however provisional?36 Evidently, by the necessity of defending and illustrating in Pauline terms, even deformed, the radical and decisive paradox of man’s anonymity to himself, despite the pretended cogito or rather by virtue of its limits.
The ego, therefore, does not know itself, but in this unknowing, it can dwell—because it is and exists in it with an anonymous certainty. It knows itself certainly to be and to exist but so as to sense all the more evidently that this Being and this existence, no more than the thought that assures it of them, do not give it to itself or give a self to it. Its certain existence does not qualify it in its own regard but immobilizes it and fixes it by forbidding it all access to a self—to its self, now without essence, without definition, therefore without the ipseity of a self. The Augustinian ego finds itself imprisoned outside itself, being just enough to conceive that its self will remain inaccessible to it and that anyway it is not it, for the anonymous being of the hypostasis cannot by definition reach, still less name, the slightest ego. In this sense we must give up speaking of an Augustinian ego since never will I see myself as ego ille.
This imprisonment of myself outside itself appears so paradoxical that one might want to seek a supplemental argument that confirms it. This argument is presented in the case of memoria—on condition that we do not fall back too quickly onto what metaphysics commonly means by this term. That is, from the beginning, Saint Augustine radicalizes its signification: memoria does not so much designate one faculty of the mind among others as it constitutes this mind itself and, so to speak, absorbs it: “animus est ipsa memoria” (the mind is this very memory); “ego sum qui memini, ego animus” (It is I who am [the one] that remembers, myself, the mind).37 And, in effect, I do not simply have memory, but (in contrast with other faculties) I am identically my memory, since “ibi reconditum est quiquid etiam cogitamus” (here is where all we think is gathered and kept).38 To the point that consciousness or at least self-thinking thought is said and carried out in memory of self: “tamen [mens] noverit se tanquam ipsa sit sibi memoria sui” ([the mind] knows itself inasmuch as it itself is for it(self) memory of itself); in other words: “mentem semper sui meminisse” (the mind always had the memory of itself).39 Shouldn’t we conclude from this that the permanent possibility of a memoria sui compensates, so to speak, for the impossibility of the cognitio sui (cogitatio sui) by restoring the ego’s access to itself, to the self? But this is only an appearance. In fact, memory, understood precisely as memoria sui, not only gives the ego no access to itself but renders unquestionably manifest the impossibility, on principle, of such access. “Magna vis est memoriae, nescio quid horrendum, Deus meus, profunda et infinita multiplicitas; et hoc animus est, et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? Quae natura sum?” (Great is the power of memory, my God, its depth and infinite multiplicity possess I know not what fearful things. And this is the mind, and this is what I am, myself. What then am I, my God, of what nature am I?) (Confessiones X, 17, 26, 14, 186). The aporia of my ego stems (here quite precisely) from the fact that my own nature (my quid, my quiddity—in other words, my essence) remains radically inaccessible to me, and all the more so as the fact (my existence) of my mind is imposed incontestably. Memoria affords me, in so many ways, the ordeal of self only so as to convince me of my inadequacy to my self: “Magna ista vis est memoriae, magna nimis, Deus meus, penetrale amplum et infinitum. . . . Nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum. Ergo animus ad habendum se ipsum angustus est, ut ubi sit quod sui non capit? Numquid extra ipsum et non in ipso?” (Great is this power of memory, my God, a vast and infinite secret chamber. . . . And myself I do not grasp all that I am. My mind is not of sufficient scope to possess itself, and so where is that which it does not grasp of [its] self? Or else [is this place found] outside itself and not in it?) (X, 8, 15, 14, 166). Memoria accomplishes and consummates definitively in it the inaccessibility of the ego ille that I am. Remembering, even myself, means that there is no transition possible between the fact of myself and my nature, my essence, my ipseity. This should not be so surprising, for despite what one could expect, memoria is characterized by two paradoxical properties: on the one hand, it encompasses infinitely more than what my cogitatio can conceive; on the other, it ends up finally by not remembering itself.
Detailed review of its prerogatives confirms this. With memoria it is, of course, and first of all an issue of the faculty of bringing back to mind what, among all that I have thought, I wish to think again: “Ibi reconditum est, quidquid etiam cogitamus. . . . Ibi quando sum, posco, ut proferatur quidquid volo, et quaedam statim prodeunt, quaedam requiruntur diutius” (Here, when I am in it, I demand that what I want should be brought forward, whatever it might be, and some things come immediately; others take a longer time) (X, 8, 12, 14, 162). Memories are at issue, therefore, images of objects absent, but always already perceived and therefore always available to return over a more or less long term: “rerum sensarum imagines illic praesto sunt cogitationi reminiscenti eas” (images of things sensed that are there available to the thought that recalls them) (X, 8, 13, 14, 164). And moreover “cum dico, praesto sunt imagines omnium quae dico ex eodem thesauro memoriae” (when I say [them], the images of the things that I say are available to me, taken from the same treasure house of my memory) (X, 8, 14, 14, 166), “in memoriae sane mea praesto sunt imagines [rerum]” (images of things are available to me in my memory) (X, 15, 23, 14, 180). In this sense memoria functions as a living memory, which treats only what has not been forgotten because it has not gone far off: “haec omnia rursus quasi praesentia meditor” (I meditate on all these things again almost as if they were present things) (X, 8, 14, 14, 166). Memory, in fact, remains a memory of the still present, so much so that it remembers especially what is most present to it, namely itself first of all: “Cum memoriam memini, per se ipsam sibi praesto est ipsa memoria” (When I remember memory, the memory itself is through itself available to itself) (X, 16, 24, 14, 182) since in effect “sui quoque meminit animus” (the mind also remembers itself) (X, 25, 36, 14, 206). But if the memory, like the mind, also remembers itself, precisely because it makes but one with it and assures its self-consciousness, it therefore does not yet pass beyond the field of the conscious, of what remains present to it, therefore of the present itself. Memory thus has the strange condition of not functioning except in regard to what I have not forgotten: “Ibi reconditum est, quidquid etiam cogitamus . . . et si quid aliud commendatum et repositum est, quod nondum absorbuit et sepelivit oblivio” (Here all that we think is stored . . . and all that is commended to it and deposited there, provided that forgetfulness has not yet absorbed and buried it) (X, 8, 12, 14, 162). Memory therefore remembers all that I have not forgotten, in a word, all except what I forgot, “praeter illa, quae oblitus sum” (X, 8, 14, 141–64). In short, this first memory serves only if one does not need it.
This interpretation of memory as, so to speak, a tautological faculty should not be surprising: it is a consequence authorized by Aristotle, among others. If one sticks to the division of roles in the three moments of the vulgar conception of time—in which the present stems from the field of sensation, the future that of hope, leaving to memory the past40—then either memory treats the past as sensation treats the present, that is to say as an available being and one that remains, or it treats it as hope treats the future, as a being not (yet) available but a mere possible. But both processes turn out to be absurd in the case of the past: if it is no longer available and remaining, it is no longer anymore a possible. Memory is in charge of an unavailable, but more than a possible, since it was already available. Thus the metaphysical interpretation of memory as simply rememorizing and reproductive misses the essence of memoria.
A more radical conception of memoria such as it was practiced by Saint Augustine must therefore be ventured, one that discloses other functions and other recesses. For if it contains previous sensations and perceptions in the form of images (X, 8, 13), it very quickly shows itself to accomplish other functions. First, it composes and reorganizes the images of the past out of the resources of the mens itself (X, 8, 14). Next, in the case of theoretical knowledge (the “liberal arts” rather than the modern “sciences”), it goes even farther in welcoming not only images of things but the things themselves (“nec eorum imagines, sed res ipsas gero” [X, 8, 15, 14, 168]; “in memoria recondidi non tantum imagines [rerum], sed ipsas [res]” [X, 10, 17, 14, 170]). That is, the “things themselves” of theory cannot be known as images of things of the world since they are not found there. If, therefore, these things appear without duplicating anything whatsoever in the world, it must be that they reside elsewhere, in the mind, of course, in memoria. Hence, it also falls to memoria to encompass the act of the cogitatio, inseparable from the mind. This is so of course first because remembering supposes thinking,41 but especially also because cogitare supposes a repetition of comparisons and collections (cogere, colligere) of terms to synthesize, therefore a temporality contained, maintained, and thoroughly covered in both senses “ut denuo nova excogitanda sint indidem iterum (neque enim est alia regio eorum) et cogenda rursus, ut sciri possint” (they must again be extracted by thought as if new [so as to lead them back] once again toward the same [place] (for they do not have another) and they must be collected again so as to be able to know them) (X, 11, 18, 14, 172ff.). For Saint Augustine the cogito, therefore, does not encompass memoria as one of its many modes (imagination, sensation, will, understanding, etc.); rather memoria encompasses all the cogitatio because it alone assures to it the unity of its flux by temporalizing it. With a radicality seen neither by Aristotle nor by Descartes, Saint Augustine here anticipates Kant.
This is eminently the case for the memoria of numbers (X, 12, 19) and that of the affections of the mind (X, 14, 21). Though at first glance it appears to concern two extremes, on one side the most abstract of objects, on the other the most passive flux of thought, they have it in common to be kept only “quasi remota inerior loco, non loco” (as if removed to a more interior place, which is [however] not a place) (X, 9, 16, 14, 168). Here memoria does not retain past thoughts so much as it contains, without temporal difference, all the utopic knowledges of the world: numbers, abstract idealities, lived experiences of consciousness, their flux, the changes of this flux, the combinations of imaginary objects, and finally, and above all, the cogitatio itself.42 Memory keeps safe all knowings, or rather all knowings remain even if we do not think them, and this remaining without place is named precisely memoria: “memoria tribuens omne quod scimus, etiamsi non inde cogitemus” (attributing to memory all that we know, even if we do not think on its basis) (De Trinitate XV, 21, 40, 16, 530). Memoria thus appears as the place of what does not have place, the place of all the thoughts that are not of the world.
Sometimes it even seems to offer a place to the truth that is least accessible to my thought: myself. That is, Saint Augustine sometimes introduces a highly paradoxical concept of self-memory. In particular, when he must confront the formidable contradiction of two equally rational demands: on one hand one can only love what one knows; on the other each of us loves (and desires) the beatitude that we have never experienced and therefore do not know (see below, Chapter 3, §16). How to explain the fact that we can in the case of our beatitude love with desire what we do not know with even the slightest clear idea? How to name an unconscious knowledge of what it knows—in other words, without knowledge of what it knows? One final hypothesis can be imagined, even though it seems like an oxymoron: “An aliquem finem optimum, id est securitatem et beatitudinem suam videt, per quamdam occultam memoriam, quae in longuiqua eam progressam non deseruit” (Unless it [sc. the mind] sees an excellent end, that is to say its security and its beatitude, by some hidden memory, which did not abandon it when it strayed so far) (De Trinitate X, 3, 5, 16, 128). But this hypothesis makes the difficulty all the greater, more than it resolves it. For how to explain the memory in me of what I never had or knew? How to explain that I keep in my memory my beatitude, without properly having a complete and exhaustive memory of myself? In short, how could the memory of my beatitude perdure without a comparable self-memory, a memory of the self? (“Sed cur memoria beatitudinis suae potuit, et memoria sui cum ea perdurare non potuit?” [ibid.]). Now then, it might behoove us to admit that memoria is deployed with total security beyond the limits of the self. In this way the anonymity of the ego would assume a new figure: I am of an in fact certain existence, without however the slightest access to my essence nor to my ipseity, and this crisis can last my whole lifetime, for it finds its place (and its nonplace) in my memoria. I can still love what I know nothing about and therefore endure my existence without essence because what I know nothing about, my quaedam memoria occulta at once preserves for me and hides from me. And since I am my memoria, I therefore become hidden from myself.
The question of memoria only now begins to be posed as such, now that it appears as what hides me from myself or, more exactly, as what takes charge in me of the essence that escapes me—my own, an interior hiddenness, a hiddenness to myself, a placeholder in me of interiority, an interiority of hiddenness. Contrary to the ordinary doctrine of the philosophers (Greeks, but also Descartes) who would like to have it that the wise man owes nothing to memory because he would be liberated from his body, Saint Augustine insists not only that “res aliquas sapientis memoriae custodiri” (the wise man should keep things with his memory) but that often this memory is nothing like a slave obeying the mind (“obtemperat mihi”) since it often rises up and tramples it (“in aliis rebus ita sese erigit, ut ejus sub pedibus miser jaceam” [in other matters, it arises in such a way as to cast me, miserably, beneath its feet]).43 Like the body (in fact here the flesh), memoria subverts the ego and strips it of access to itself (and to the self), alienates it essentially from its essence. Memoria, therefore, displays an essential ambivalence: it renders absence present but also keeps absence absent. It implies, as such and by definition, not only sometimes obeying (obtempere) the mind by putting at its disposition what it had lost, but also resisting it (sese erigere) by hiding from it what it lost (indeed, we will see, by hiding from it the very fact of having lost it). The radicality of this Augustinian break from the common metaphysical determination of memory cannot be underestimated. For, if memoria passes beyond the limits of what in the cogitatio remains accessible to the mind—in short, if it crosses the frontier of consciousness—just where does it convey me outside myself? This raises the question of knowing “quanta et quam multa memoria nostra contineat, quae utique anima continentur. Qui ergo fundus est, qui sinus, quae immensitas quae possit haec capere [ . . .]?” (how many things our memory contains and what size they are, all things that are not less completely contained in the soul. What fund, what breast, and what immensity can contain that?) (De quantitate animi V, 9, BA 5, 244). To where does memoria extend itself so exceedingly far, or, rather, to where does it extend me myself beyond what I can think, that is to say outside of myself?
Saint Augustine proves this unthinkable expansion of the domain of memoria by emphasizing that memoria is not limited to conserving past things, an obvious point that metaphysics established with ease, but also bears on thought’s presence to itself. “Quapropter, sicut in rebus praeteritis ea memoria dicitur, qua fit ut valeant recoli et recordari; sic in re praesenti, quod est sibi mens, memoria sine absurditate dicenda est, qua sibi praesto est ut sua cogitatione possit intelligi” (This is why, just as we call memory in things past that by which we can recall them and remember them, so too can we say without absurdity that there is a memory in the present thing that the mind is to itself, by which it can at its own disposition comprehend itself by its own thought).44 The present itself, even and especially the present understood in the radicality of the self-presence of res praesens, quae est mens, governs memoria because it, too, must recall itself. Differance, which shifts thought from its presence and therefore from its self, is stigmatized perfectly here and confronted as such, but it is not frozen in the mere report of an intuitive deficiency or the empty denunciation of the illusions of immediacy. It opens onto the paradox of memoria, which keeps secret the self. But, in keeping it secret (in withdrawing it from the grasp of the ego), it could also be that it secretes it still more powerfully.
Before arriving at this point, let us confirm that the present itself depends on memoria by considering the privileged example of reading, that is to say of the text, therefore of writing really put to work. To listen or read, it is not enough to listen or to read; one must also remember the sounds or letters. Failing that, the past present to hear and read can only pass immediately, therefore pass away and become a past, without our having (had the time to have) heard or read anything at all—more exactly, without our having retained anything, without having kept the memory of anything. We can maintain our present only if we retain it through memoria; we maintain it (so that it does not become a past) only by retaining it through memoria (so as to stay not passed away). What makes us lose our present (time) does not stem from a shortage of present perception but from the deficiency in the present of memoria. “Verius itaque dixerimus, cum tale accidit, ‘non meminimus’ quam ‘non audivimus’” (We should therefore say when such a thing arrives: “We no longer remember,” rather than “we did not hear”). Only the application of memory makes sensation into a perception, therefore renders the present to its presence (“adhibita memoria sensui corpori” [De Trinitate XI, 8, 15, 16, 202]). The present loses its supposed (metaphysical) autarchy, since it now depends on memoria, now liberated from the οησία.45
But the scope and primacy of memoria goes to the point of paradox, when it comes to reign over the future itself. The example comes from the recitation of a text and, here again, from the choral chant (no doubt the ecclesial chant heard in the church of Milan), dictis et canticis, which speaks about memory, memoriter. But why not rather say that we speak and sing by seeing in advance, by foreseeing in each moment what it will be necessary to say in the following moment? “Et tamen ut praevideamus, non providentia nos instruit, sed memoria. Nam donec finiatur omne quod dicimus sive canimus, nihil est quod non provisum prespectumque proferatur. Et tamen cum id agimus, non dicimur providenter, sed memoriter canere vel dicere; et qui hoc in multis ita proferendis valent plurimum, non solet eorum providentia, sed memoria praedicari” (And yet, to foresee, it is not foresight that guides us, but memory. For until we have finished saying or singing, nothing has been uttered that was not foreseen and anticipated. And yet when we do so, we do not say that we sing or speak from foresight but from memory; and those who are especially good at saying many things are not normally praised for their foresight, but their memory) (De Trinitate XV, 7, 13, 16, 454). In fact, this is not about just the memory that makes me retain (return to the present) what I will have to say or sing in the following instant. It is also about the passage of this moment itself, so that it stays united between its beginning (which stays retained instead of flying away at once) and its end (which imposes itself in advance and attracts without yet being acquired). Take this example: “Dicturus sum canticum, quod novi; antequam incipiam in totum expectatio mea tenditur, cum autem coepero, quantum ex illa in praeteritum decerpsero, tenditur et memoria mea, atque distenditur vita hujus actionis meae in memoriam propter quod dixi et in expectationem propter quod dicturus sum” (I am going to sing a psalm that I know. Even before beginning, my expectation tends toward the totality [of the psalm], but after I have begun, as what I remove from it passes into the past, my memory will in turn tend and my active life be distended into memory of what I said and expectation of what I am going to say) (Confessiones XI, 28, 38, 14, 336). The anticipatory expectation not only must pass within and be transformed into memoria, but with it alone my sounds are dispersed into meaningless atoms, if memoria does not retain and contain them in one story or one song. Here memoria functions as a retention, which assures the present moment its duration in its entirety by retaining its three ecstases, so that they can each play with or against one another. It alone assures a time to the moments because it illuminates time by giving to it what it does not have, a space: “memoria, quod quasi lumen est temporalium spatium” (memory, which is like the light of the space of the times).46 Memoria passes beyond the reach of the cogitatio because, like the originary impression of time, it precedes it and makes it possible—not just like the originary impression since it operates precisely in the role of originary impression: that from which come the ego and its cogitatio, in an originary and radical passivity.
But the retreat of the mind and its secret, the abditum mentis (De Trinitate XIV, 7, 9, 16, 368), sinks still farther. For memoria does not recall only what I could have forgotten; it sometimes also recalls the fact of forgetting itself. Reminding me of a lost thing does indeed make me retrieve it, but, above all, it tears it from oblivion. Memory retrieves for me the forgotten thing by making me also forget my own forgetting. Memory and forgetting surely do move in inverse proportion, the one growing as the other diminishes. Yet there is also another situation, that in which I remember having forgotten, without for all that remembering what I forgot. Forgetting could not become an ordeal for the mind if it did not remain still present to it, if it itself disappeared into forgetting. For, if forgetting let itself be forgotten, it would no longer concern the mind in any way, which would have forgotten it. To experience forgetting, one must not have forgotten it, as one can forget a thing. Oblivion is therefore not some thing, but a possible modality of each thing. And to not forget forgetting, it must be retained by the memory itself, “memoria retinetur oblivio.” In other words, “cum vero memini oblivionem, et memoria praesto est et oblivio” (when I have a memory of forgetting, memory is available to me, but so too is forgetting).47 The choice of memory is no longer limited to the alternative of either recovering the forgotten by annulling forgetting or losing its trace to the point of forgetting about forgetting. A third possibility arises: keep the memory of oblivion as such. But that is a contradiction, a double one at that. Not only must memoria take into its charge its contrary, but above all it must also renounce reducing anything and everything whatsoever to consciousness. In effect, in the case of forgetting as forgotten, it manages the forgotting without anything forgotten and this forgetting (forgotten) no longer offers anything that could become a memory. Memoria no longer remembers anything because it no longer works on a forgotten being but on forgetting without being, oblivion, a something neither passed nor absent nor present.
But if memoria does not remember, properly speaking, anything whatsoever, why still name it a memory, still make it into memory and not forget it? Or, would we have to go so far as to say that memory bears on that of which I can no longer have any consciousness, therefore on the unconscious?48 The answer is undoubtedly no, be it only because the concept “unconscious” presupposes that of “consciousness,” which can itself appear only on the basis of Descartes’s ego ille,49 therefore in strict contradiction with what Saint Augustine thinks with the term ego (or mens). It seems more appropriate to stick with the ultimate paradox of memoria: it keeps the memory of that which it cannot by definition remember, oblivion, the immemorable par excellence.50 Memoria therefore bears on the immemorable or, with more sobriety, on what Levinas thematized with the name the immemorial. It is not a matter of “a weakness of memory” but of what “reminiscence could not recuperate,” definitively “irrecuperable,” because “it was never present” and will remain forever “a past that passes on the present,” which will never become present again because it never was, according to an “antecedence prior to all representable antecedence.”51 Memoria, such as Saint Augustine develops it to its extreme, no longer concerns what was present to my mind in the past and could become so again in the future—in the literal sense, the re-presentable as re-presentable—but what in me remains inaccessible to me and uncontrollable by me (what I forgot, my forgetting of what I forgot, and even my forgetting of this forgetting itself), and which, despite or because of this, governs me through and through. It is indeed a matter of this: without memoria I am not, but with it, which by definition I do not comprehend, I do not comprehend myself—I have no presence to myself, and I forget myself. The aporia of the ego itself, taken in the anonymity without ipseity of its existence, now finds its title and its place: memoria precisely of the immemorial.
The aporia of the ego to itself (the quaestio magna mihi) is therefore repeated and culminates in the aporia of memoria, understood not as the faculty for the restoration of suspended representations but as the experience of the immemorial. Whence the observation that “factus sum mihi ‘terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii’” (I have become to myself “a land of difficulty over which I toil and sweat” [Genesis 3:17]) (Confessiones X, 16, 25, 14, 184). The citation refers to the earth where Adam and Eve will be exiled once they are chased from the original paradise; but in this context the exile becomes an interior exile. I become for myself the very place of my exile outside myself, since the most intimate in me, memoria, not only can just as easily not remember me as remember me (memory manages forgetting, which implies forgetting of forgetting itself), but in the final analysis it bears on the memory of what was never present nor represented to me—the immemorial. I inhabit a place, myself, where I do not rediscover myself, where I am not at home, where I am not myself. Exiled from the inside, I am not there where I am. I am without myself, late and lagging behind myself. Memoria thus leads to forgetting, and this radical forgetting manifests the facticity of the ego: “We do not repeat the being we have been; we do not take ourselves over [assume ourselves] in our facticity. What we are—and what we have been is always contained in this—lies in some way behind us, forgotten. Expecting our own can-be to come from things, we have forgotten the factical Dasein in its having-been.”52 Heidegger’s suggestion here lets us read the rest of Augustine’s analysis with all its force: “Ego sum qui memini, ego animus. Non ita mirum, si a me longe est quid quid ego non sum. Quid propinquius me ipso mihi? Et ecce memoriae meae vis non comprehenditur a me, cum ipsum me non dicam praeter illam” (It is I who remember, I the mind. There is nothing surprising in the fact that what is not me should remain strange to myself. But what is closer to me than myself? And yet, the power of my own memory escapes my comprehension even though without it I could not call myself myself” (ibid.). The contradiction of the noncomprehension of what comprehends me most intimately and without which I could not conceive myself, memoria, is exposed in the contradiction of its unthinkable (void) object: the memory of forgetting. Forgetting, I cannot remind myself of it, properly speaking, since it effaces that which it lays hold of (the forgotten), but neither can I say that I forgot it since I know perfectly well that I forgot, even if I forgot what I forgot. “Et tamen quocumque modo, licet sit modus iste incomprehensibilis et inexplicabilis, etiam ipsam oblivionem meminisse me certus sum, qua id quod meminerimus obruitur” (And yet, in whatever way it might be, however incomprehensible and inexplicable, I am certain of remembering forgetting itself, this forgetting that ruins what we remember) (ibid., 14, 186). The interpretation of memory no longer as the faculty that restores the past in a re-presentation but as memoria of forgetting, of the forgetting of forgetting, and finally of the immemorial ends by admitting that in fact if this memoria defines me to such a point that my mind (animus, mens, cogitatio) cannot be conceived or experienced without it, and if this memoria turns out “profunda et infinita multiplicitas . . . varia, multimoda vita et immensa” (a profound and infinite multiplicity . . . a life changing and manifold without measure) (X, 17, 26, 14, 186), then not only must we face up to the stupor (“Multa mihi super hoc oboritur admiration, stupor apprehendit me” [Great astonishment came over me; a stupor seized me] [X, 8, 15, 14, 166]) and the fright (“nescio quid horrendum . . . profunda et infinita multiplicitas” [its profound and endless multiplicity, what a fright!] [X, 17, 26, 14, 186]), but we must also, and above all, draw the following conclusion, strange but unavoidable: if memoria, which contains the secret of my mind (abditum mentis), goes beyond what my cogitatio and my mens comprehend, then I will have to think beyond my own thought if I ever want to think myself. If “nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum. Ego animus ad habendum se ipsum angustus est” (Myself, I do not grasp myself entirely. For my mind is too narrow to contain itself) (X, 8, 15, 14, 166), then I must think myself by thinking beyond myself.
Memoria thus renders aporetic, on principle, all self-knowledge since it demonstrates that the mens’ path to itself is lost in the immemorial. The mens knows now that it extends beyond what it will ever know of itself. But the aporia contains more than an interdiction and already offers a way out. For if memoria imposes on the mens that it endlessly outrun itself in pursuit of its own withdrawal, it would have to be admitted that the mens can outrun itself. At issue would be the ego transgressing its being or rather its life: “Quis est ille super caput animae meae? Per ipsam animam meam ascendam ad illum. Transibo vim meam” (Who then is it who is found above the summit of my soul? I will ascend unto him through my very soul. I will go across my own vitality) (X, 7, 11, 14, 160). Or: “Transibo et hanc vim meam, quae memoria vocatur” (I will go across even this vitality which is mine and is called memory) (X, 17, 26, 14, 188). But how to transcend one’s own vitality? If this is not just an absurdity, isn’t self-transcendence reducible to a rhetorical hyperbole, one without conceptual import, not to mention a “mystical” extravagance? Let us look at it a bit more closely. We saw that the mens knows itself certainly to be (in fact, to live) because it cannot doubt that it is thinking; it therefore is as, and as long as, it is thinking itself. But what would it be if it were thinking without thinking itself? For Saint Augustine this is not just a matter of a mere hypothesis but of a disposition of the mens that he already practiced during his last and highest prayer, the one with Monica at Ostia. At a certain moment, but still not the last, it could happen that “et ipsa anima sileat et transeat se non se cogitando” (the soul itself falls silent and surmounts itself not thinking itself) (IX, 10, 25, 14, 118). Let us note three points here. First, even if the mens does not think itself, it still thinks—which is what enables it to certify its existence; the argument of the cogito absolutely does not demand that I think myself but that I think something in general, indeed anything, no matter what. Next, in not thinking itself, the mens no longer inquires into its essence, does not fall back on the existential privilege of the cogitatio in favor of the search for the essence of the cogitant—in short, is free of self. Finally, the mens becomes what it knows because it loves it and therefore wants to identify with it, the result being that if it thinks an other besides itself, possibly supra caput ejus, it will become it, since it loves it. In short, as soon as the mens frees itself enough to think by thinking another besides itself, it can pass beyond its own (non)essence and become, by thinking another, other than itself. Let me insist once again that for Saint Augustine it is about a practice, an act, and a deed, as is witnessed by the story of Ostia: “erigentes nos ardiore affectu in id ipsum praeambulavimus gradatim cuncta corporalia et ipsum coelum, unde sol et luna et stellae lucent super terram, et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo et mirando opera tua, et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis” (lifting us up with a more ardent affection toward “it itself” [Psalm 121:3], we went by degrees through all corporeal things and even the heavens out of which the sun, the moon, and the stars shine down on the earth; we rose by thinking and speaking more intimately, and admiring your works, we came to our own souls and we transcended them, to reach the region of endless abundance) (IX, 10, 24, 14, 116).53 I am because I think, but not because I think myself. And, as memoria forbids me from thinking myself and refers me to the immemorial, what is left to me is only thinking in the mode of this reference beyond myself.
The question now takes the form of a clear paradox: if the mens, which exists certainly inasmuch as it is thinking, cannot however think itself in its essence because it exceeds itself in its role as memoria, how will it be able to reach its ipseity? In other words, how could the ego enter into itself, into its self, when it neither can nor should pretend to enter into possession of its essence since it itself passes beyond its own measure? Memoria opens me onto an immemorial that I cannot, by definition, rejoin but one without which I will never be myself. The sole path from self (existence) to self (essence) would consist, for the mens, in rejoining the immemorial by a thought that itself transcends itself. The contradiction seems obvious: the intrinsic finitude of thought cannot self-transcend without deluding itself or dissolving itself. The finitude of thought in me cannot think the immemorial; it forbids me from hitting upon myself.
No doubt this is so—at least if the immemorial has to be reached only by thought, and by thought exercising an intentionality that I will set forth on the basis of myself heading in the direction of this immemorial, as if it were a matter of aiming at an objective, an object, or a worldly being. But the immemorial is nothing like an objective, an object, or a being and belongs no more to the world than to space. Without object, unworldly and utopic, the immemorial does not escape just our finite thought but in fact all thought inasmuch as thought is intentional. Does it remain, for all that, definitively unthinkable? Again the answer is without a doubt “yes”—at least if thought must always be exercised intentionally on the basis of an ego heading toward its objective: object or being. But it nevertheless remains that thought, when it does not comprehend what it would like to aim at, can at least still think itself on the basis of what it cannot comprehend, but which comprehends it. For this, it would be necessary to substitute for strictly intentional thought a “great thought,” which would admit no longer aiming intentionally at anything whatsoever, but which would know how to let what it thinks come to it, weigh on it, and be exercised over it.
Such a thought is enacted and becomes weighty as a desire. Desire in effect enjoys a privilege that intentionality by definition ignores: desire is something I can neither aim at nor attain by deciding on my own; I can at best and sometimes await it, desire it, or rather let it become desirable. For, contrary to appearances, desire does not arise first from me so as to aim at its object but is enacted in or rather over me, weighs on me, and invades me, even if I neither comprehend nor possess its supposed object, or rather precisely because I do not possess it, attain it, or even comprehend it. Desire is imposed on me of itself, at its initiative, and never at mine. I cannot decide to desire even if desire can make me decide to do my all to fulfill it. And desire does not impose on me because I comprehend it and have authority over it but, to the contrary, because it imposes itself on me from above with all its authority, which, most of the time, I do not truly know. Moreover, my desire is born and lived very often from my impossibility of knowing and comprehending the nonobject, which imposes itself all the more on me, in that it imposes always thinking of it, even when I do not comprehend it. Let me be more specific: Of course, it is not enough that I do not comprehend (a nonobject) for me to desire; for what I do not comprehend, I can desire only sometimes—when, precisely, it makes itself desirable, therefore on condition that it knows how to incite my desire and that it merits it. Or rather, as it never falls to the desirer to decide to desire and as desire alone decides its birth (and its death), I desire only what has the power, the prestige, and the dignity to inspire this desire in me. Obviously, then, desire comes to me as from elsewhere, therefore from beyond myself.
Thus specified, the privilege of desire grows even stronger: desire, in imposing itself on me, individualizes me. Objective intentional thought of objects does not succeed in identifying me since, by rule, anyone other than me should be able to think the object that I thought, for my epistemological primacy over the object is endorsed only so long as I constitute it according to the rules of objectification, to which I must submit like any other subject enacting universal rationality. The rationality of the object should universalize me so as to validate me, and therefore it leaves me anonymous. By contrast, desire identifies me: it and I appear face-to-face, without any object or universal rationality serving as a screen standing between us. Desire is enacted over me so immediately that it mirrors for me the first image that I will ever have of myself. More than mirror, it serves for me as idol. For the desire to which precisely I respond, no other besides me answers to. If another seems able to answer it in the same way as I do, either he would not in fact respond to it exactly as I, and we would have to admit two desires in reality quite different, or else he would become effectively an other myself, be it only in a collective identity provoked by one and the same collective desire. In the final analysis, what exercises a desire over me is something I receive and respond to in person, as such. My desire—or more exactly, that to which I respond and commit myself—knows better who I am than my (intentional) thought ever will. My desire prepares for me the ipseity that I will never comprehend but that, in advance, comprehends me. The assurance of my essence, which does not follow from certain knowledge of my existence, does indeed befall me but from elsewhere than my own intentional thought, starting from an unshakable alterity, that of my own desire. For it does not come from me but imposes itself on me.
With great brilliance Saint Augustine put this arrangement to work, for he was able to see and to mark a desire so unconditional that every interlocutor without exception should recognize it as his. He borrowed its formulation from Cicero: “cum vellet in Hortensio dialogo ab aliqua re certa, de qua nullus ambigueret, sumere suae disputationis exordium ‘Beati certe,’ inquit, ‘omnes esse volumus’?” (as he would like to take as the point of departure for his argument in his dialogue Hortensius, a certainty beyond all discussion, he says: “To be happy, this is certainly what we all want”).54 As the reading of this text played, according to Saint Augustine’s own repeated and insistent declarations, a decisive role in his discovery of God, it can be inferred that this discovery, for him first of all, consisted in becoming conscious of the unconditioned desire in him for beatitude, as seems to be witnessed by the Confessiones: “Nonne ipsa est vita beata, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit nemo est? . . . Nota est igitur omnibus, qui uns voce si interrogari possent, utrum beati esse vellent, sine ulla dubitatione velle responderent. Quod non fieret, nisi res ipsa, cujus nomen est, eorum memoria teneretur” (Is it not the happy life itself that everyone wants? And is it not impossible to find anybody who does not want it? . . . It is therefore known to all, those who, supposing that one were to ask them if they want to be happy, would no doubt respond in one voice that they do. This would not happen if their memory did not retain for them [for their mind] the thing itself, from which the name comes) (Confessiones X, 20, 29, 16, 194, 196). In fact, the earliest texts, which follow the conversion, identify its moments, and prepare its recapitulation by the Confessiones, make a massive appeal to this radical argument. These begin with an entire treatise dedicated to the blessed life written as an echo, no doubt quite consciously, to that of Seneca. “Beatos esse nos volumus, inquam. Vix hoc effunderam, occurrerunt una voce consientes” (To be happy, this is what we want, I say. Barely have I said it than they all with one voice admit it) (De vita beata II, 10, 4, 238). There is a consensus: it is not possible to doubt the will every man has to live happy. One should even doubt that it is possible to find a single man who wants to live without the least hope for the slightest possibility of finally experiencing something like the blessed life. The desire for beatitude is not added on, as an option, possibly taken or not, to the desire to live; the connection between wanting-to-live and the desire for beatitude turns out to be analytic a priori.
We understand better now why Saint Augustine had substituted life for being. Being cannot go beyond itself and precisely for that reason lets the mens stray between the existence that it certifies for it and the essence that it steals from it, to the point that in this very in-between beatitude appears not only unattainable but even out of the question. It is not self-evident to Being—and therefore to beings—that it should also be good, because good does not in and of itself belong, any more than goodness, to what Being permits saying of beings. Accordingly, to evoke an τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ίδέα, Plato must suppose it beyond essence, ἐπέϰεινα τῆς οὐσίας.55 In contrast, since life does imply in and of itself that the living receive it from elsewhere and can lose it, therefore that it live in the intrinsic incompleteness of an opening, it is set forth in the horizon of a desire. Life, inasmuch as opening come from elsewhere, does not possess itself any more than it defines itself; it is received and lost, therefore desired, desirable, and offered as desirable in the form of the happy life. Being does not permit or forbid beings anything but to be, without promising or assuring them anything more than the presence of a permanent time (thus I can imagine myself possessing it and effectuating it as long as and as often as I want it). Life (precisely because I do not possess it but receive it from elsewhere) gives itself only on condition that I receive it in each instant, therefore without stop or limit, in the situation in which I desire it also and necessarily as happy. Being gives only Being (because it, in fact, does not give it), while life gives life, therefore gives it happy (because it can only give itself). When life is substituted for Being, it is already a matter of beatitude, intrinsic to desire and therefore unknown by Being that neither desires nor could desire.
There is more. The strength of the argument for such a desire for beata vita in all men stems no doubt from the fact that not one among them would ever deny it—but especially so from the fact that this universal acquiescence happens without any theoretical knowledge, by concept or representation on the part of the mens, of what the vita beata implies or of what it consists. To the contrary, the desire for beatitude appears all the more certain as it is not preceded or sustained by any certain theory of what it desires. This contradiction between desire (certain) and its object (uncertain) constitutes the very heart of the argument.
Quid igitur? An dicendum est etiamsi nihil sit aliud beate vivere quam secundum virtutem vivere, tamen et qui hoc non vult, beate vult vivere? Nimis quidem hoc videtur absurdum. Tale est enim ac si dicamus: et qui non vult beate vivere, beate vult vivere. Istam repugnantiam quis audiat, quis ferat? Et tamen ad hanc contrudit necessitas, si et omnes beate velle vivere verum est, et non omnes sic volunt vivere, quomodo solum beate vivitur.
What now? Am I to say that though living happy is nothing other than living virtuously, nevertheless even he who does not want it [to live virtuously] wants to live happy? This would be as if we were saying that even he who does not want to live happy wants to live happy. That truly appears too absurd. Who would ever want to listen and bear this (theoretical) contradiction? And yet, necessity constrains us to do so, since it is true that, on one hand, everybody wants to live happy and, on the other, everyone does not want to live in the sole way in which one can live happy. (De Trinitate XIII, 2, 7, 16, 284)
The argument drawn from the universality of the desire for beatitude seems contradicted by the fact that the means of attaining the virtuous life are rejected by the majority of those who claim loudly and clearly that they want happiness. Yet the truth of the two terms of this contradiction must be maintained: the end remains true, even though the refusal of the good is incontestably called for. But the contradiction is not one, for it results from a conflict in which at least one of the two terms has no theoretical status: the universal desire for beatitude does not rest on any theoretical knowledge, of whatever sort, of the nature of beatitude, of which nobody has any experience. Rigorously considered, only the refusal to live according to virtue would rest on arguments (utilitarianism, cynicism, egoism, skepticism, etc.). As for desire, it adapts well to its theoretical nullity since it is set forth as desire. The theoretical contradiction does not affect it since it is exercised according to a strictly erotic certainty, which needs only to desire but not to theorize the object of desire or know it. The principle of desire therefore contradicts the theoretical contradiction because it passes beyond, in the name of paradox—and of paradox in the erotic reduction—every theoretical presupposition. Desire knows and thinks the vita beata (in fact, it alone can reach it) but without having any theoretical representation of it and, above all, without having the slightest need for one. And in fact, beatitude does not appear to he who desires it in the field of the cogitatio, of the mens and therefore of comprehension, but in that of memoria. To the question “utrum in memoria sit beata vita” (whether the blessed life is found in memory) comes the response, “Quod non fieret, nisi res ipsa, cujus hoc nomen est, eorum memoria teneretur” (That would not happen if the thing itself, for which it is the name [beatitude], was not something men held in memory) (Confessiones X, 20, 29, 14, 194, 196). The desire for the happy life is something with which we are familiar without knowing or comprehending, for it inhabits us like the immemorial, the closest and farthest away, inasmuch as it happens in and through our desiring.
The vita beata or rather the unconditioned universality of its desire now assumes the rank of principle, therefore of first principle (for, strictly speaking, only the first deserves the title). The texts that establish this are too numerous to list, but they converge on the same principle:
Beatos esse se velle, omnium hominum est. . . . Beatos esse se velle, omnes in corde suo vident, tantaque est in hac re naturae humanae conspiratio, ut non fallatur homo qui hoc ex animo suo de animo conjicit alieno; denique omnes id velle nos novimus. Multi vero immortales se esse posse desperant, cum id quod omnes volunt, id est beatus, nullus esse aliter possit: volunt tamen etiam immortales esse, si possunt.
To want to be happy, this is a fact for all men. . . . That they want to be happy, they all see it in their heart, and so common is the aspiration of human nature on this point that a man who supposes it of another on the basis of his own soul takes no risk of being wrong. Finally, we know that we all want it. To be sure many despair of being able to be immortal, but all want to be immortal, if possible.56
The desire for beatitude is so deserving of the dignity of principle that it must be admitted unconditionally and unreservedly, even if the result of this is the desperate frustration of not being able to reach it, since immortality escapes us. We prefer (or rather we should, for there is no other choice) the sadness of not being able to reach beatitude (by immortality) over renouncing the desire for it. This implicitly rejects and disqualifies the pretention of the pagan sage to (being able to) renounce his desires, or at the very least his desire for eternity. Nobody can remove himself from the desire for beatitude that nobody can satisfy. There is as much illusion and lying in claiming to fulfill this desire as in pretending to extinguish it. This in-between defines the sole honest condition of man, whose instability now becomes the sole constant. The desire for beatitude is indisputable: “Omnis autem homo, qualiscumque sit, beatus vult esse. Hoc nemo est qui non velit, atque ita velit, ut prae caeteris velit; imo quicumque vult caetera, pro hoc unum vult” (Every man, whoever he might be, wants to be happy. There is nobody who does not want this and who does not want this above all else. Moreover, whoever wants other things wants them only for the sake of happiness). What can be disputed, however, is the means toward this sole end, means all the more varied as they intend by any means this sole necessity:
Diversis cupiditatibus homines rapiuntur, et alius cupit hoc, alius illud: diversa genera sunt vivendi in genere humano; et in multitudine generum vivendi alius aliud eligit et capessit; nemo est tamen quocumque genere vitae electo, qui non beatam vitam cupiat. Beata ergo vita, omnium est communis possessio; sed qua veniatur ad eam, qua tendatur, quo itinere perveniatur, inde controversia est. Quid est hoc, ut, cum omnibus non placeat quaecumque via, omnibus placeat beata vita?
Men are seized by very different desires: one desires this, the other that. Very different are the ways of living among the human species, and from among the multitude of these ways of living, each chooses something other and embraces it. There is, however, nobody, whatever way of life he chose, who does not desire a happy life. The happy life, this is their common good; but which way to go to get there, which way leads there, here is where the dispute arises. But then, how does it happen that while they do not agree about the way, they all do agree about the happy life?57
Here again the contradictions remain obvious and insurmountable so long as one persists in considering the desire for beatitude as a theoretical first principle—for one cannot assume a desire without the means of its accomplishment as a principle of knowledge, still less as a ground of action. But this very objection dissolves as soon as one takes seriously that what this principle is about is the desire for beatitude, not knowledge or possession of it. The vita beata assumes and deserves the status of principle insofar as it is desire, not knowing or comportment. It is not inscribed within the cogitatio nor even in the mens; it exceeds them both to the point that it is the mens and the cogitatio that are inscribed within the vita beata. Beatitude governs the ego and, in a sense, grounds it because it precedes it as the objective of its desire. The mens remains ignorant of the vita beata inasmuch as it thinks it, but it knows it insofar as it desires it. And, as this very desire does not belong to it, but comes to it from the vita beata of which it is ignorant, the mens comes from what it does not know and precedes it. We therefore should not speak here of a desire (or of a love) for the principle but of a principle of desire—or, better, desire as principle.
That is, with the principle, desire for the beata vita shares the privilege: doubt, come before it, stops and instantaneously collapses. It stops and collapses no longer before the act of a particular thought, which implies an existence, but before the universal impossibility for any man of wanting to live without desiring his happy life. More clearly, nobody can live without wanting to live, and nobody can want to live an unhappy life; even if we confront a life deprived of the characteristics commonly connected to happiness (ascesis, sacrifice, intentional dispossession, indeed perversion), this condition always becomes from a certain point of view desirable to it inasmuch as a paradoxical, but resolute, access to the happy life. The performative contradiction privileged by the argument from the Cartesian cogito (I cannot think anything at all, even think that I am not, without necessarily already being, therefore I am) recedes behind another contradiction, one more radical because it does not suppose any performance of thought, but the pure facticity of desire: nobody can accept living a life without beatitude, or at least without the possibility of beatitude: “censesne quemquam hominum non omnibus modis velle atque optare vitam beatam? / Quis dubitat omnem hominem velle?” (Do you think that even just one man can be found who does not want or desire with all means available the happy life? / Who would doubt that every man wants to be happy?) (De libero arbitrio I, 14, 30, 6, 194). From the impossibility of doubting it, follows the possibility of being certain about it: “Beate certe omnes vivere volumus; neque quisquam est in hominum genere, qui huic sententiae, antequam plene sit emissa, consentiat” (It is certain that we all want to live happy; and in the entire human species there is nobody who does not agree with this proposition, even before we have finished saying it) (De moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum I, 3, 4, BA 1, 140). The principle is therefore formulated positively in a certain proposition: “Omnium certa sententia est, qui ratione quoquo modo uti possunt, beatos esse omnes homines velle” (It is a certain proposition for all those who can use their reason in the slightest little bit that all men want to be happy) (De civitate Dei X, 1, 34, 422). It is therefore a certainty, leading to a certissimum58 knowledge that takes the place of the Cartesian inconcussum.59 For the cogitatio that knows is substituted the desire that wants; for the being that I could provoke is substituted the life that I can only receive; for the impossibility of thinking (oneself) without being is substituted the impossibility of wanting to live a nonhappy life. The same reason becomes, from theoretical, practical, and the same thought finds its principle only at the price of desiring. For the inconcussum is desire, therefore a lack, not self-possessed knowledge. And therefore an inconcussum thinking itself only while not knowing itself, which does not know itself in producing itself on the basis of itself, but in receiving itself from the one who excited it as desire. For the vita beata does not mark an exception to the reception of life but consecrates it.
We must now confront the paradox of such a principle, first and unshakable, which can be thought only by the name of unconditional desire for a beatitude that we do not, by experience and perhaps by definition, have—in other words, an absolutely certain principle but one that we can never confirm. “Mirum est autem cum capessendae atque retienendae beatitudinis voluntas una sit omnium, unde tanta existat de ipsa beatitudinie rursus varietas atque diversitatis voluntatum, non quod aliquis eam nolit, sed quod non omnes eam norint. . . . Quomodo igitur ferventissime amant omnes, quod non omnes sciunt? Quis potest amare quod nescit? . . . Cur ergo beatitudo amatur ab omnibus, nec tamen scitur ab omnibus?” (It is a wonder that while one finds among all men one and the same will to lay hold of and to keep beatitude, there exists a variety and diversity of wills aiming at it—not that somebody does not want it, but all do not know it. . . . How then do all love so passionately what all do not know? Who can love what he does not know? . . . Why do all love beatitude when all do not know it?) (De Trinitate XIII, 4, 7, 16, 280ff.). Here we spot the paradox (mirum) of a knowledge by desire that does not know, neither intentionally nor representationally, the thing that it desires, be this only because this desire does not concern a thing in the world. Now, how are we to explain that what we do not know we still desire, think, and in this sense might even know? In fact, “nonne ipsa est beata vita, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit nemo est? Ubi noverunt eam, quod sic volunt eam? Nimirum habemus eam nescio quomodo” (Isn’t it the happy life that everybody wants and that absolutely nobody does not want? Where did they learn about it so as to want it? For we do indeed have it, but I do not know how) (Confessiones X, 20, 29, 14, 194). There is a quasi knowledge, proper to beatitude—or, more exactly, to the desire for beatitude—which is knowing without comprehending or representing, literally just enough for desiring it. This knowledge, not theoretical but practical, erotic even, which does not know how it knows what it knows—Saint Augustine attributes it precisely and once again to memoria. “Quaero utrum in memoria sit beata vita. Neque enim amaremus eam, nisi nossemus” (I am asking if the happy life might not be found in memory. For we would not love it, if we did not know it) (ibid.) This implies that when we know in the mode that permits loving what cannot be represented, we remember, in the sense of a memory of what was never present, in the sense of the immemorial.
Of course, this must be made more specific: we do not remember the happy life as we remember our father (whom we have seen, but cannot see again, in this life at least), or as we remember Carthage (which we could have seen and could see again, barring a geological catastrophe). The vita beata is not something we have ever seen, and there is nothing that assures us that we will ever experience it. We have no memory of it, not even like the idealities (mathematical, logical, etc.) that subsist only in our mind but remain always accessible there, because the vita beata subsists nowhere, not even in our mind, and is not any more accessible there than anywhere else. “Non sane reminiscetur beatitudinis suae [homo]: fuit quippe illa et non est, ejusque ista penitus oblita est; ideoque nec commemorari potest” (Man [in a state of sin] no longer remembers his beatitude; it was and is no more; it has fallen into deep oblivion for him; he can no longer remember it) (De Trinitate XIV, 15, 21, 16, 400). I do not have memoria of the happy life as if I had forgotten it after having known it, as if it were still memorable, a memorial, a memory that it depends upon me to have and recollect. To the contrary, I appeal to memoria in order to accomplish a mode of thought that knows indubitably what it can neither represent nor aim at intentionally. That is, memoria, already identified as the thought that knows what theoretical consciousness can neither see nor say, coincides with the universal and unconditioned desire for the beata vita, which forces itself upon the thought of all men without, at least for the great majority of them, their having the slightest conception of it. If memoria bears on the immemorial, and if the vita beata forces itself upon us without our knowing where this principle comes from, then memoria appears as the place of the vita beata and the path of desire.
Memoria as instance of the immemorial thereby establishes itself as the sole proper place of the vita beata, desired without our knowing it, thought without our thinking it. “Nescio quomodo noverunt eam, ideoque habent eam in nescio qua notitia, de qua satago, utrum in memoria sit, quia, si ibi est, jam beati fuimus aliquando” (I do not know how they knew it, their having I know not what notion of it, and I ask whether it is not in the memory that it would be found because if it was found, then we would already have had happy days). Beatitude inhabits us unconsciously, and its desire governs us like an immemorial. For this reason I seek to know if the happy life is not found in memory: “quaero, utrum in memoria sit beata vita. Neque enim amaremus eam, nisi nossemus” (I seek to know if the happy life is found in memory. For we would not love it if we did not know it) (Confessiones X, 20, 29, 14, 194). The common rule that connects knowledge to love remains valid, but in the case of the desire for the happy life, it functions in an inverse sense: I do not desire beatitude because I would first know it (for, at least in the mode of representation, I do not know it), but from the incontestable fact that I desire it unconditionally, it is necessary to infer that I know it, though in an exceptional way—in a knowledge without concept or representation, but desiring. Since nobody can deny that he feels (to the point of suffering from it) this desire for the happy life, it is necessary to admit that he knows it in some way or another, even though we do not know how we know it. This is called knowing in memory: “quam se expertus non esse nemo potest dicere, propterea reperta in memoria recognoscatur” (this thing that nobody can deny having experienced is therefore acknowledged to be found in memory) (X, 21, 31, 198ff.). In other words the vita beata precedes us as an immemorial.
In the place where Descartes claimed to have reached, with the performance of the cogitatio, the existence of the ego, but also knowledge of its essence, Saint Augustine experiences that the performance of the cogitatio reaches only certainty of existence and attests the inaccessibility of its essence. He therefore substitutes for it the indisputable fact of the unconditioned and universal desire for the vita beata, perfectly known (like an essence) but whose actual possession (existence) remains perfectly problematic. We must now weigh the consequences of this inverted arrangement.
The two opposed characteristics that define the absolutely certain desire for an absolutely unknown vita beata, as contradictory as they seem, nevertheless permit us to determine the new inconcussum more precisely.
First, the vita beata, although or rather because it remains unknown as such, supposes an anchor in the truth: “Quisquis igitur ad summum modum per veritatem venerit, beatus est” (Whoever reaches the supreme measure through truth is happy) (De vita beata IV, 34, BA 4, 382). Or else: “Aeterna igitur vita est ipsa cognitio veritatis” (Eternal life consists therefore in the very knowledge of the truth) (De moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum I, 25, 47, BA 1, 206). Obviously this cannot be a mere reprise of the theme “the beatitude of the sage,” happy because he contemplates noetically the true, since here, paradoxically, the vita beata remains unknown to the desire that nevertheless postulates it. It concerns therefore, at the very least and to put it somewhat provisionally, a truth accessible in another mode than the noetic: “Haec est vera dilectio, ut inhaerentes veritati juste vivamus” (This is true dilection, to live justly while standing in the truth) (De Trinitate VIII, 7, 10, 16, 58). The truth at issue here gives itself to know, but above all to inhabit, as a place where we can stand and steadfastly so, in such a way that dwelling there is in the end equivalent to loving, indeed to loving it. One sees at once that in order to situate the vita beata (still unknown) in the truth, much more is needed than to know it through contemplation in the noetic face-to-face. It is necessary to love it and identify with it, that is to say live from it. That the truth becomes life even implies that the one is not possessed (nor produced) any more than the other. I am therefore obliged to describe more carefully the here implicitly accomplished transformation of the essence of truth when it becomes the place for the vita beata and because it first becomes the soil where life is planted (see Chapter 3, §§20–21).
A second determination confirms the now not exclusively noetic character of truth, at least when it gives its place to the vita beata—joy, or rather the joy of enjoyment: “Illa est igitur plena satietas animorum, haec est beata vita, pie et perfecte cognoscere a quo inducaris in veritatem, qua veritate perfruaris, per quid connectaris summo modo” (This consequently is the fullest satisfaction of souls; this is the happy life, to know piously and perfectly he who leads you to truth, of which truth you rejoice, through which you are connected in the highest mode) (De vita beata IV, 35, 4, 284). Joy and enjoyment become the sensible index of truth because here truth no longer offers only information to know but opens as a territory to enter, a state of life to enjoy. Truth, it need not so much be contemplated as enjoyed: “Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate” (The happy life consists in rejoicing to enjoy truth) (X, 23, 34, 14, 202). Or else: “beata vita, quae non est nisi gaudium de veritate” (the happy life which can be reduced to the joy of enjoying truth) (Confessiones X, 23, 34, 14, 202). Here again, the understanding of truth, not only as the place of beatitude but as an enjoyment and a joy, supposes a still more radical swerve in its essence.
Hence a third consequence: since God is but one with truth, but a truth that is convertible with charity (and eternity)—“o aeterna veritas et vera caritas et cara aeternitas!” (oh eternal truth, true charity and charitable eternity!) (VII, 10, 16, 13, 616)—it must be concluded that the joy enjoying the happy life resides only in divine truth, in true God. “Quomodo ergo te quaero, Domine? Cum enim te, Deum meum, quaero, vitam beatam quaero. Quaeram te, et vivit anima mea. Vivit enim corpus meum de anima mea et vivit anima mea de te” (How will I seek you, Lord? For when I seek you, my God, I seek the happy life. I seek you and my soul lives. For my body lives of my soul and my soul lives of you) (X, 20, 29, 14, 192). This does not dogmatically close the search, by collapsing the transcendental orientation of the ego, for example, into the supreme being, substituting God for the vita beata. It concerns, rather, taking seriously the consideration that since I am not by definition my life, still less my happy life, I can only receive it without producing it, nor even conceiving it: “Quomodo ergo quaero vitam beatam? Quia non est mihi” (How then can I seek the happy life? Because it is not mine) (X, 20, 29, 14, 194). Life, a fortiori the happy life, is not possessed; therefore it is received. From whom and from what, if not God? “Haec est religio christiana, ut colatur unus Deus, non multi dii; quia non facit animam beatam nisi unus Deus. Participatione Dei fit beata.”60 For as with the vita beata vita, so with God nobody has seen him, nobody knows him, but nobody can remove himself from him, be it only as a question or a desire.
This chain of determinations imposes a radical reversal on the figure of the ego. For, if my happy life, for which desire constitutes me as myself without possible compromise, can be reached only in a truth that I neither know nor am, since it belongs in the end to God, then I am powerless before what I want most essentially. We even have to go so far as to say that I am not what I am if I limit myself to being only what I know and what I have power over, the cogito, sum. Not only does the gap between what I desire (the beata vita) and what I am able to will as measured by what I know (“What can I hope for?”) become a yawning chasm, uncrossable, but it also becomes my most evident and definitive characteristic. Not only does the (certain) desire for the (unknown) happy life condemn the fantasized attempt at self-equality (the principle of identity A = A being accomplished in the self-identity of the self to itself), but it also disqualifies the horizon within which such an equality even became thinkable—the horizon of the thinkable, the representable, the comprehensible in the sense of the noetic deploying the face-to-face of the ego subject before its object double. In establishing that desire wants and intends beatitude (and redefines truth in terms of its enjoyment), Saint Augustine opposes head-on Aristotle’s thesis—that desire intends and wants first only to know (Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εὶδέναι ὀρέγονται ϕύσει—”All men by nature desire to know”)61—and anticipates the thesis that he will inspire literally in Pascal: “All men seek happiness. This is so without exception.”62 But if the ego must now be recognized as he who originally desires, then it must take the measure of this originary desire and admit that, more originally than as cogitans, it is put in play as amans, lover. And, for the lover, the question never consists in deciding to love or not but always and only in orienting oneself in terms of desire, in determining what he loves: “Nemo est qui non amet: sed quaeritur quid amet. Non ergo admonenur ut non amemus, sed ut eligamus quid amemus” (There is nobody who does not love. The only question is what does he love. We are not summoned to not love, but to decide what we love).63 I am, certainly, but inasmuch as I love (and desire the vita beata). The lover loves so radically that loving decides everything about him and first of all his being. Accordingly, to reach himself, he does not have to master an οὐσία (supposedly his own, though he perhaps does not have one), but reach what he loves; and to know himself, he does not have to be preoccupied with knowing himself but with knowing (or at least identifying) what truly is decisive for him—namely, what he loves in truth. More intimate to me than any equality of the self to itself thus turns out to be the distance of the lover to what he loves. Whoever travels this distance knows himself because he knows the other self who resembles him more than himself—a self more him than he himself.
To travel this distance of the self in the self’s place, it is first necessary that it open. Now it opens according to a simple rule: “melius quod interius” (the better is the more interior) (Confessiones X, 6, 9, 14, 156). And more precisely, “interior est caritas” (the more interior is charity) (Tractatus in epistolam Ioannis VIII, 9, PL 35, 2041), which means that distance opens according to the viewpoint of charity, perfectly coherent with the reference of the mens to what it loves. Such a rule is obviously marked first by the negative effects provoked by its ignorance and contempt: “Exterius enim conantur ire, et interiora sua deserunt, quibus interior est Deus” (Men strive to go to the more exterior and abandon the more interior within them, to which God is even still more interior) (De Trinitate VIII, 7, 11, 16, 60). The distance from the ego to the self’s place opens inside the self, not toward the exterior, for this interior alone opens onto what the lover loves. But the interiority in me of what I love does not, for all that, belong to me, as if I kept myself behind closed doors, since the vita beata remains immemorial to me, unknown like all that I love wholeheartedly. The interior is constituted by charity, quite possibly the charity in me; therefore it is not imprisoned in my immanence: the interior remains no more in me than what I love remains my own. Almost immediately there follows a positive sense of my distance in the self’s place. If God occupies, as most interior axis and highest of causes (“intimo ac summo causarum cardo” [De Trinitate III, 9, 16, 15, 304]), the place of the vita beata, therefore the place of my desire, then he (and he alone) reveals my final and originary place: “Neque in his omnibus, quae percurro consulens te, invenio tutum locum animae meae nisi in te” (In all that I travel while consulting you, I find no secure place for my soul, unless in you) (Confessiones X, 40, 65, 14, 258). Thus is accomplished the change of place: if I am (what, therefore) there where I love, then that becomes my self more interior to me than my private ego. Now what I love is named God; therefore, I find myself there. Put otherwise: God appears as the place of self that I want and have to become. To the initial question: “Et quis est locus in me, quo veniat in me Deus meus?” (And what is the place in me where my God can come into me?) (Confessiones I, 2, 2, 13, 274), finally comes the response: “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summ meo” (But you were more interior [to me] than what is most inward in me and higher than the most high in me) (III, 6, 11, 13, 382). The paradox, which is marked first by comparatives that surpass the superlatives, indicates a place that I discover neither outside me nor in me, because it finds me in a self not belonging to me but to which I belong and in which I must finally arrive. God surpasses me with his absolute alterity only inasmuch as, by the very distance that it opens, he defines what I love, therefore what identifies me in my self: “tu enim altissime et proxime, secretissime et praesentissime” (you, [who are] highest and nearest, most secret and most present) (VII, 2, 2, 13, 524), “omni secreto interior, omni honore sublimior” (more interior than any secret, more sublime than any honor rendered) (IX, 1, 1, 14, 73), “et interior omni re, quia in ipso sunt omnia, et exterior omni re, quia ipse est super omnia” (both more interior to each thing [than itself], because everything is in it, and more exterior to each thing, because it is above all).64 And thus I am not from myself nor in myself because I am no longer essentially who I am but what I love—my distance to the place of [my] self is defined by my distance to what I love. The cogito, sum is carried away toward the interior intimo meo.
This does not mean only or first that I am not an ens per se, or that I am an ens creatum, for it is not a question of making an ontico-ontological determination, not even an inverted or contradicted one. The issue is my mode of manifestation to myself. In fact, crossing the distance from myself to the self’s place, I happen upon and to myself: “Ibi mihi et ipse occurro meque recolo” (Here [in memory, in the immemorial] I happen upon myself, and I am recalled [to myself]) (Confessiones X, 8, 14, 14, 166). In other words I myself happen to the degree that I advance into the distance where I see my self so to speak come upon me. I happen as he who receives himself at the same time as what he receives and precisely so as to be able to receive it—the gifted [l’adonné]. The Augustinian texts recognize it and describe it without the slightest ambiguity. A commentary, for example, on the basic argument of 1 Corinthians 4:7 (“What have you that you have not received?”) insists that “qui videt non sic glorietur, quasi non acceperit non solum quod videt, sed etiam ut videat” (he who sees is not glorified as if he had not received not only what he sees, but also the very fact of seeing) (VII, 21, 27, 13, 638). For it is a matter of receiving not only the gift received but at the same time, and from the same donation, the self that receives it: “priusquam essem, tu eras, nec eram cui praestares ut essem et tamen ecce praeveniente totum hoc quod me fecisti et unde me fecisti” (before I ever was, you were, and I was not yet anything whatsoever to which you could give it to be and yet, see! I am on account of your goodness which occurs in advance, before all that you did for me and from which you made me) (XIII, 1, 1, 14, 424). From the outset the creation of the ego is thought in the figure of the gifted: “Deus autem nulli debet aliquid, quia omni gratuito praestat. Et si quisquam dicet ab illo aliquid deberi meritis suis, certe ut esset, non ei debeatur. Non enim erat cui deberetur. . . . Omnia ergo illi debent, primo quidquid sunt, in quantum naturae sunt” (Now God owes nothing to anybody, because he gives all gratuitously. And if someone says that God owes him anything whatsoever for his own merits, it is at least certain that he does not owe it to him for his being there [to merit it by his own merits]) (De libero arbitrio III, 16, 45, 6, 410). I have nothing—better, I am nothing—that I did not first receive, beginning with the very self who receives. The ego comes from the given self, and not the self from the ego’s self-consciousness. From this distance of the given to self from the self there obviously follows a still more radical separation of the ego from what gives it to itself and gives the self to it. Distance that can be understood, to put it in terms of space, as a gap in which I remain on the outside of my own center, cut off by God: “intus enim erat, ego autem foris” (for the light was inside, but me, I was outside) (VII, 7, 11, 13, 604). Distance that can also be understood in terms of time, as a gap in which I would always already be late for what gives me to self: “Sero te amavi pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris et ibi te quaerebam et in ista formosa quae fecisti, difformis inruebam. Mecum eras et tecum non eram” (Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! Look, you were inside and I was outside, and I sought you there and, rushing headlong into the beautiful things that you made, I became deformed. You were with me, and I, I was not with you) (X, 27, 38, 14, 208).65 Come up against the nearest (propinquor),66 I can enter into the distance that opens me in the self’s place.
It goes without saying that one can, that one even should, here think other determinations of the ego by its distance in the self’s place: “I is an Other,” of course, and “the being which in every case we ourselves are is ontologically that which is farthest—das Fernste.”67 But this should happen only on condition of not collapsing the distance opened by Saint Augustine into mere figures of alienation, even and especially not by declining it according to the Seinsfrage. For here the other not only is named God, but this God also names me myself for the first time, inasmuch as he knows and dispenses my self more than I ever could. In all cases we must be cautious about the homage Husserl rendered, by a misreading, to Saint Augustine. In citing, as the final words of his Cartesian Meditations, “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interior homine habitat veritas” (Do not go out; turn into yourself; the truth resides in the interior of man),68 he wanted to endorse the claim that man finds truth in his interiority and therefore should not seek it outside, in the world. But Saint Augustine, in this text, does not ask merely that we quit the exterior (the world) for the interior (subjectivity, transcendental or not) but that we transcend the interior itself for the superior (and the more interior than my most inward). He goes on, without leaving the slightest ambiguity: “et si tuam naturam mutabilem inveneris, transcende et teipsum. Sed memento cum te transcendis, ratiocinantem animam te transcendere. Illuc ergo tende, unde ipsum lumen rationis accenditur” (and if you found your mutable nature, transcend also yourself. But remember that when you transcend yourself, you transcend your rational soul. Direct yourself therefore toward the point from which the rational light shines). For the inner man does not constitute the dwelling place of truth, since, in contrast, he inhabits himself in He who opens truth to him: “ipse interior homo cum suo inhabitatore . . . conveniat” (the inner man himself is found with he who inhabits him).69 Truth dwells in the inner man but not in the sense that the inner man would have truth in him, since in fact it dwells rather in he who is invited and invited the truth into him: “Non omnino essem, nisi esses in me. An potius non essem, nisi essem in te” (I would not even be if you were not in me. Or rather I would not be, if I was not in you) (Confessiones I, 3, 3, 13, 276).
I am not when and each time that I decide to be by deciding to think. I am each time that, as lover and as gifted, I let the immemorial come over me, as a life that does not belong to me and that, for that very reason, inhabits me more intimately than myself.