Belated Strokes: Lyotard’s Writing of The Confession of Augustine

The Event of the Confession When asked to write an intellectual autobiography for the Critical Theory Institute (1) at Irvine, Lyotard confessed that he never had a theory or critical work, nor did he ever intend to place his writings under clearly defined working categories such as aesthetics, ethics and politics. He drew on the mobility and openness of the aesthetic to political, ethical or cognitive discourse, on the basis of a coming event breaking with any objectively determinable law. (2) I will argue in this article that Lyotard's reading of Augustine's Confessions, as it appears in his last book The Confession of Augustine, envisages a similar non-objective investigation of Beauty, one that consists of enacting the temporal creation from the eluding slivering of an a-temporal creative principle. This interpretation is a postmodern rejoinder to Kant's concept of "tautegory," which posits that what feels and what is felt in the aesthetic perception is the same, forming what he calls the aesthetic reflection. Lyotard's response maintains that this reflection is always imperfect, and it surprisingly takes not a spatial form (i.e. a two-way mirror), but a temporal one: it is a temporized mirroring and so it appears as always belated. To render this nuance, Lyotard plays on Augustine's distinction in his Confessions between two words that designate Beauty: a beautiful form, a delimited shape (form, species) and the process of creation itself (pulchritudo). In rewriting Augustine, Lyotard urges us to consider the act of creation (pulcritudo) in the context of the contradictory contemporary belief that everything has already been inscribed as form and may soon disappear without trace. He took from Augustine the creational meaning of Beauty and removed it from the general hermeneutical investigation and narrative detail, laying bare the "differends" encapsulated in what he (Lyotard) calls the singular witness, the poem of the Confessions. My reading of Lyotard-Augustine will try to make visible this new arrangement and the way in which it answers the twentieth century's important questions and paradoxes regarding Beauty: the difference between Beauty and the sexual, a question addressed by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents in the 1930s; the inner subject of sensation and its paradox formulated by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology in 1940s; the power a beautiful poem has to survive, to witness and to be the memory of events without trace, as described by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarte in the late 1980s, in Schibboleth pour Paul Celan, and Poetry as Experience; the relationship between writing, Beauty and time formulated by writers in the early 1930's, as in Gertrude Stein's Composition as Explanation (1926). The singularity of the encounter between Lyotard and Augustine runs along a line of thought connecting a famous fragment from Augustine's book X, 27 on memory, Sero te amavi, pulchritudo, (3) to Lyotard's obsessive concern with presentation in the age of testimony after Auschwitz. "Confiteor" is a defective verb in Latin, which is used only in the passive voice: the active meaning "I confess" can be obtained only through the form "I am confessed." This grammatical aspect of the confession in Latin matches what Lyotard, after Wittgenstein, calls the indirect and belated presentation of an event that happens (il arrive) in the form of a represented universe of a sentence (ce qui arrive). In other words, Lyotard touches upon the impossibility of presenting the occurrence as such and the irremediable deferral of its event into the universe of a future phrase. In the specific case of the confession, one can confess the event only in the aftermath, in a subsequent sentence that transforms the act into the universe of a proposition. In this way, the event can never be contemporaneous with its language and only a ruse in the discourse can make it visible. …