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59 David J. Depew lyotArd’s Augustine 4 Jean-François Lyotard’s The Confession of Augustine derives from lectures given at philosophy conferences in 1997. When he died in April 1998, the text remained unrevised and incomplete. nonetheless it was almost immediately published and translated.1 in spite of these complications, the main points of Lyotard’s essay can be summarized fairly economically. once i have done so, i will turn to what is novel about his interpretation of Confessions and how, in its novelty, Lyotard was intervening in ongoing philosophical discussions about the constitution of our consciousness of time, a key issue in twentieth-century european philosophy. i then consider how this late text relates to the main themes of Lyotard’s philosophizing. i end by suggesting why it was not odd for a secular intellectual of the radical left to think well of europe’s most seminal conservative theologian, and what the significance of their encounter might be for students of communication processes. whAt lyotArd sAys ABout Augustine’s Confessions inspection of our experience, Lyotard reports Augustine saying, shows that there is for us no presentation of the present, no now. We are strung out (distentio animi) between past and future.2 This is in fact a defining character of our life. “Distentio est vita mea,” says Augustine.3 The reason lies in the overwhelming power of desire (concupiscentia). Driven as we are since infancy by the urge for domination (libido dominationis), desire is constitutive of our experience itself: sexually cathected, endlessly bent toward pleasurable satisfaction (delectatio), and no less endlessly frustrated. By the time you realize 60 f Augustine for the PhilosoPhers you are under the control of a concupiscent desire, it is already too late. The deed is done, providing fuel for remorse. Just as often it is undone, fanning the flames of regret. As to improving ourselves, we are all masters of delay. We fantasize, as already accomplished, decisions that remain undecided and deeds that remain undone. We constantly temporize. our consciousness is written in the future anterior tense.4 it follows, Lyotard argues, that we cannot predictively say of a temptation , “i will be able to ward this off.” neither are we in a position to predict, “i will not be able to ward off this” or even in retrospect to say “i was unable to ward it off,” both of which presume that it might have been otherwise. We can only say, “i will have been able to do nothing to ward off the rout.”5 “This future anterior,” Lyotard writes, “sets the future upon a powerlessness that is already accomplished.”6 We are always already taken unaware, whether by lust, ambition, or even, as we clamber up Augustine’s ladder of loves, attachment to God.7 “The clear phenomenology of internal temporality ,” Lyotard summarizes, “covers over a strange mechanism, a grammar of the ways in which concupiscence conjugates essential frustration.”8 To see what Lyotard philosophically makes of these recognitions, we might begin by recalling what Augustine himself, or at least Augustine as speaker of his Confessions, makes of them. Augustine’s conversio, his turning of his soul from the things that are outside to the spacious fields of “memoria” within—which in the last books of Confessions yields the first phenomenological description of mental acts in the history of philosophy and in doing so grasps their temporal character—changes the affective situation for the better. There are, Augustine reports, “three activities in the mind, anticipating, observing, and remembering.”9 Scrutinizing how these are interrelated, we see that “a long future time is not really in the future but is a present anticipation in the mind of a long time and that a long past time is not really in the past, which is no more, but is a present memory of a long time in the mind.”10 yet we are too “disarticulated [dissilui] into time” to actually experience this rich present as it whizzes by.11 We can experience ourselves as missing the presence of the present, and desiring it, but not much more. Augustine remarks that this limitation makes questions about what God was thinking or doing before he created the universe as ill formed as they are inevitable for people who are distracted by and dispersed among external things.12 For God, everything is eternally copresent in all its fullness and dimensionality.13 Still, reflective disengagement from outer things [13.58.121.131] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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