Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 21:13:18 +0000 From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com> Subject: confessions of augsutine What can I say about Lyotard’s “The confession of Augustine” for some reason I’ve found it the most difficult text of all to understand, to gain some clarity on, I thought originally that it was because of the fragmentary nature of the text but now after deciding to write a paragraph or two on the text I am not so sure, (in answer to Eric’s suggestion – the book had sat on the shelf of Lyotard’s texts in my office/library for a five or six weeks before I read it during the last few days…) I think it may be because of the strangely florid discursive strategy that Lyotard adopts. For instance…”open-mouthed he gapes at your beatitude, you took him as a woman, cut him through, opened him, turn him inside out…” (P3) A description of masculine rape? God taking his pleasure on Augustine? The inversion of gender, the body is reminiscent of “libidinal economy” or even perhaps the Irigary texts of the 1970s. The return to the body which I don’t remember being so strongly present in the other later works – how much of the language is related to Augustine, how much to Lyotard – (guess I’ll drive off to Hampstead and check out the Confessions of A tomorrow) - “it is the other of the there…” As if returning to a discourse addressing the other and the subject with elements of a discourse on the body… But the mixing of the discourse on the body with the subject/other discourse is a strange and difficult marriage. Anyway – I’m not clear what to make of this text – some things seem plain however Lyotard is placing Augustine and his(its) confessions as a post-modern text – certainly not in my reading a text of modernity – more related to the post-modern glories of Buffy the vampire slayer than Brecht or Beckett. The de-historicizing of the concept(s) of post-modernity is implicit in the text – but I have no idea if it is acceptable, modernity is not (in my view) separable from western-European history so why should the post-modern be? (Eric? Anyone?). “You the Other, pure verbs in act, life without remainder, you are silent…”P36 - I am reminded of Kristeva’s unpacking of these phrases – the defining of the relationship between the subject, the community and the other – is there a relationship, a similarity between these approaches here. Is this, the social change drifting over western Europe from the east in part the differend referred to here? Or is it simply the subject, the body “the mad joy, proceeds from the sexual….” On the cover it declares ‘the confessions as a major source of the Western – and decidedly modern – determination of the self and of its normativity…’ no no no – Lyotard is defining, redefining the confessions as a post-modern text. Claiming perhaps that the source of post-modernity lies in the return to the pre-modern… In one sense it reminds me of the core problem with structuralism – namely the pre-dominance of the synchronic over the diachronic. The study of the moment and its removal from its historical context. But then remember Deleuze “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous….” It seems to me that this logic, which is the kind of radical misreading which I so enjoy, both reading and doing, is precisely what Lyotard is engaged in here… check it out...more thoughts later perhaps.. best sdv
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