The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 8, 2006

Philosophy of Religion

Lyotard über die "invocatio Dei" in den Confessiones des Augustinus

In his posthumously published book The Confession of Augustine, J.F. Lyotard reconstructs St. Augustine's invocatio: his "move upward" towards the absolute. The paper deals with three segments of Lyotard's text that interpret St. Augustine's method of letting the voice of the invoked "speak within me"; his attempt to progress to the atemporal "at the umbilical" of temporal experience; and his reading of the caller and the called as (partially) identical. Two aspects of Lyotard's interpretation are pointed out as problematic: his thesis of the "silent" absolute "You"; and his assumption, that invocatio takes pleasure in a "radical heteronomous" subordination "under the law of an unknown master."