Thus is accomplished the movement that I make toward myself. But can it even be said that I make it toward myself? Rigorously speaking, Saint Augustine does not speak in this way and does not say as much. First, if he sometimes uses ego, he never uses it as a substantive, in the way inaugurated by Descartes: if I knew myself to be an ego and if I knew what ego meant, I would no longer be a magna quaestio for myself (Confessiones IV, 4, 9, 13, 422), and I would already have attained my essence or, at least, enough certainty to no longer worry about it. Next, is it really I myself who makes this movement, as if I had the initiative to launch it, the strength to cross it, and especially the anticipated knowledge of the itinerary? If I go through the trouble, wouldn’t this be rather because it inspires me in advance? Last of all, arriving at the finish line, isn’t it still a matter of asking and receiving—“sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur” (XIII, 38, 53, 14, 524)? Finally, and especially, is it really about myself, or is the movement not launched precisely because I know neither if I have a self nor if I am a self, nor what that means, a self? And, if the movement led me somewhere, wouldn’t this be precisely to the point of understanding this—that if I ever reach such a self, this self, which will indeed be myself, will not be for all that from me, as it will not be the one that is my own, even if it will be mine. This self, that I am, I am not it permanently, and I would not need so absolutely to move toward it if I did not find myself first of all outside it, this self, therefore outside myself, as it is without myself: “Intus enim erat, ego autem foris” (It was inside, but myself, outside) (VII, 7, 11). The movement becomes possible and unconditionally necessary in the very degree to which the more I advance upon it, the more it manifests that I am not myself my own self, more precisely that I do not of myself have access to, nor possession of, this self itself; but that it harbors and reveals more myself than I am, than I can by myself, that there is more me in me, than what I can be by myself. The self, which is myself, I, me the ego, am not it; I do not know by myself. No I is self, still less by itself, and especially not me.
I is an other, evidently. The problem consists in knowing which other. And also if it can give me access to it, who is the sole self that remains for me, the sole self that would be myself, even if it is not through me, the sole self that would be mine, even if it is not the one proper to me. It was therefore necessary to cross this originary separation of the ego from itself and, for that, first of all to enter it, therefore dive into it in all its depths. The moments of our itinerary are confined to recording the successive theses of the inclusion of the ego in the place of the self.
The first thesis (Chapter 1) holds that confessio does not constitute just one speech or language act among others but originally structures all speaking and every linguistic performance; for the principle that the call is heard only in the response implies in turn that some utterance (at least, if not all of them) already constitutes a response, which thus attests a prior word, even if it remained silent. And the confessio belongs to this type of utterance, since it carries out this reference in two ways: by the admission of faults to God and by praise toward God; indeed three times, since the two first are carried out by citing biblical words, that is to say giving in response what was received in call. Thus, confessio (and therefore the Confessiones that is entirely organized by it, as the Confessiones themselves organize the entire work) opens the space where the ego (and soon enough the alii, other believers and readers as well) find themselves before and already in the house of (apud) God. Making the ego appear by leading it back (reduction) to itself, the confessio makes it appear in and through (its) relation to God, whom it confesses as the other of reference. This is enough to define this reduction, the confessio, as an erotic reduction.
The second thesis (Chapter 2) establishes that the certainty of my existence, obtained by the performance of thought (act or primal sensing, it matters little here), far from making me accede to my essence (for example, as res cogitans, indeed transcendental I or “evaluative animal”) manifests all the more the inaccessibility of my essence: the more I exist, the more I understand that I do not know my essence, that by definition my essence escapes me. And it does so not only negatively, as in metaphysics, where the essence once defined drops to the rank of object and an empirical me, but positively, because my thought grows deeper or rather is poured forth into the chasm of memoria, which exceeds me like an unconscious and precedes me like an immemorial. Without essence and taken over by memoria, the ego (precisely because thinking) can in no way pretend to the rank of first principle. To be sure, it performs, knows, and appropriates its existence but so as to lose its self therein. This self, by contrast, it sees reappear in the desire for beatitude, that nobody can not admit, since no ego can deny being able to live only on condition of desiring to live happy. But this self of desire, the ego can aim at it only paradoxically, in the negative mode of what it cannot perform by itself, cannot know by itself, nor, of course, appropriate by itself. Nothing better signals the gap between the ego and self than the desire for beatitude, which defines the self precisely as what the ego cannot attain by itself, still less have in itself. The ego finds itself addicted to beatitude. It is given over to beatitude in that it could not receive it except by receiving itself from it as its self.
The third thesis (Chapter 3) indicates that the desire for beatitude, which now plays the role of a first principle displaced within the practical order and in this way remains valid even without one being able to complete it, know it, or appropriate it, is imposed nevertheless only because I desire it precisely, therefore because I love it. Now, in order that what I love can give me the blessed life, it is necessary that what I love without knowledge or possession remains at least true. Whence the situation of a truth to love—in other words, toward which I can no longer orient myself except through my desire and in the measure to which this desire loves it. Now, being such that I cannot not love and that, whatever happens, I love, the entire question resides in deciding what I love. Always loving, I often love another thing besides the truth—a falsehood, therefore, mine and familiar, about which I must, if I want to love it, convince myself that it does indeed hold the rank of truth, while most often I know perfectly well, or at least I suspect when alone with myself, that it is a falsehood. Henceforth, loving the truth will imply not only entering into the separation of the true and the false beloved but also deciding to pass from the latter to the former, to change loves out of love, precisely, for the true, preferred to the false. As saturated phenomenon, the truth to love therefore demands a decision, which puts to the test the ego’s resistance inasmuch as gifted.
The fourth thesis (Chapter 4) confirms the difficulty and the conditions of the decision. Decision puts the ego into operation in the figure of the will, which corresponds exactly to the displacement of the first principle from the cogitatio to desire (for beatitude). The will appears, then, as the irreducible kernel of the ego, what cannot be distinguished from it and coincides absolutely with it, always remaining at its disposition (praesto est). And yet the description should, in contrast, record that, if the will can formally decide everything about the world and its own body (without consideration, of course, for the means of materially effecting what it chooses formally), it cannot decide about itself—if it wills to will, if it wills this rather than that, if it wills unreservedly or only halfway. Nothing resists the will, except itself. Consequently, it can will itself only by willing powerfully (vehementer), which is possible only in the erotic situation of the advance—the movement of the lover who is decided about loving, without sufficient reason and without other cause besides the love itself, by advancing into the field where nobody has yet responded to his decision to love. Only the erotic advance can surpass the resistance that the saturated phenomenon arouses and the weakness of the will provokes.
The fifth thesis (Chapter 5) makes clear that the time—or, more exactly, temporality—of the ego does not refer to it alone, nor even just to finitude. It signals, as its first marker, the condition of the creature: the created is temporalized inasmuch as created, and the question of time itself begins with the advent of the created. The aporia of time in Greek philosophy (that it is divided even in the present instant but that the instant itself never remains in presence) comes from the misrepresentation of creation and from the illusion of time ascending to eternity, be it only by imitation. One must, by contrast, root temporality in the distentio animi so as to recognize there the very place of the gap between the ego and self. Thus the differance or delay of the ego to self does not consist in temporality but provokes it and stages it. The distentio animi describes, more than time, the time of sin, in which the ego is late to its self, as beforehand certain existence was to the desire for beatitude, the will to the strength of love. To the distentio animi of a time of the loss of self by self, we must oppose the crossing of the distance of the ego to self, the traversal of the regio dissimilitudinis, and the movement across differance. Ipseity in becoming. If the question is one of intention and image: “quantumcumque se extenderit in id quod aeternum est, tanto magis inde formatur ad imaginem Dei” (De Trinitate XII, 7, 10, 16, 230).
The sixth and final thesis (Chapter 6) addresses the question of place. Creation, as is already the case with temporality, its symptom, designates the gap not as differance but as distance, therefore properly place. But in contrast to the place that Greek philosophy locates in nature (more exactly, in the nature of each thing) as its natural place, Saint Augustine understands place in distance—the distance of desire to beatitude, of love to truth; in short, the differance of the ego to the self. Place is defined by the ascent of the ego toward that which it loves and which defines it more intimately than the most intimate in it. Place is defined as what the ego, instead of resting in its natural position (its natural place), attains as the veritable place of self: what it loves by itself. For I am what I love, since I put in this place all that I am, what I love offers me in return the self’s place. And if I succeed in loving nothing of myself but God, God will appear to the ego the self’s place. And consequently, as God remains by definition inaccessible, in the sense that, each time that he gives himself and in the very measure to which he gives himself, he appears as forever infinitely in advance and beyond that to which I have drawn near, the self’s place in God can become only the movement of an incessantly ongoing tension. Never will I find the self’s place as an essence, because an absolute and infinite place can only draw near to the infinite and unbounded. My place, never will I attain it as to a finite essence since it is found unto the image and in the image of the infinite. But of the infinite, I will not become in any way the image, because no image can bind in it the absolute. Therefore, my place in God that I love will be accomplished unto the image (ad imaginem) endlessly referred to the infinite, endlessly liberated from all ties so as to freely advance in the infinite that nothing binds.
The ego’s advance to the self’s place permits it finally to know itself as such—namely, as he who bears the stigmata of the place where he rediscovers himself by discovering what he loves, the incomprehensible.
An et inventus forte quaerendus est? Sic enim sunt incomprehensibilia requirenda, ne se existimet nihil invenisse, qui quam sit incomprehensibile quod quaerabat, potuerit invenire. Cur ergo sic quaerit, si incomprehensibile comprehendit esse quod quaerit, nisi quia cessandum non est, quamdiu in ipsa incomprehensibilium rerum inquisitione proficitur, et melior meliorque fit quaerens tam magnum bonum, quod et inveniendum quaeritur, et quaerendum invenitur. Nam et quaeritur ut inveniatur dulcius, et invenitur ut quaeritur avidius.
Unless, even once one has found it, it still must be sought? But this is how one must seek incomprehensible things, such that he who could find how incomprehensible is what he was seeking does not imagine himself to have found nothing. Why then seek in this way, if one understands that what one is seeking remains incomprehensible? If not because one must not stop [seeking] as long as one is advancing in the search for incomprehensible things and as long as one is becoming ever better from the fact of seeking so great a good, that one is seeking to find it, but that one finds it also in order to seek it still. That is, one seeks it so as to find it with all the more sweetness just as one finds it so as to seek it more ardently. (De Trinitate XV, 2, 2, 16, 422)
In this case the seeker comes after what he is seeking, which therefore precedes him; therefore, he can only find it. But as the sought-for infinitely precedes the seeker, the latter can only seek it forever without end, all the more so as he never ceases to find it. Between seeking and finding, the relation is reversed as a consequence of the reversal of the relation between receiving and asking. If I receive before being able to ask, then I will find before finishing the seeking. And as I am (myself, ego) that which I seek (the self’s place), since I am what I love, it follows that I will never cease coming to the self’s place, to the degree that I bury myself in the incomprehensible into whose image I understand myself. There where I find God, all the more as I continue to seek him, I find myself all the more myself as I never cease to seek that of which I bear the image. In the self’s place there is not a shape of consciousness, nor a type of subjectum, but that unto which the self is like and refers.