Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing* Jean-Luc Marion

i. what is man? In the nal analysis, why and by what right would one admit into the eld of university disciplines something like a philosophy of religion? In one view, it actually deals with religion, and not philosophy; and what is more, according to the most radical but also the most widespread hypothesis, it deals with a religion that asserts itself as revealed. But this in turn means that it will dene its object with complete autonomy, as the organized collection of articles of belief (credo, creed). In such a case, we might do best to turn to sacra doctrina, which is to say to scientia theologica, or if need be, outside of the exemplary case of Christianity, to appeal to any body of doctrine that would offer the stability and referential quality (whatever these may turn out to be) of a collection of things believed and held as true. Or, one could request for an alleged philosophy of religion a place within philosophy proper. But, in this case, could religion claim a status particular enough to become the object of a separate philosophy, one that would be reserved for it alone? In fact, does all that is summed up in this religion in question not simply reduce to one of the three objects of metaphysica specialis, without any more special particularity than its other objects (the soul and the world)? Does religion likewise not belong to the secondary philosophies, such as rational psychology, rational cosmology, physics, and so on? In this sense, every philosophy of religion would be reduced to one of the secondary philosophies, inscribed within metaphysica specialis, which is itself subjected to metaphysica generalis, that is, ontologia, and thus to the system of metaphysica as such.
* Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. This article is the text of Professor Marions inaugural lecture as the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the University of Chicago School of Divinity. 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/2005/8501-0001$10.00

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Or, nally, one could understand by philosophy of religion the science of the cultural and ritual behaviors that provoke in every human being (including those who profess atheism) the inevitable and irreducible instance that in the end must be named God. But, in this case, it is tting to renounce the a priori of metaphysica specialis in order to develop a posteriori a historical science, under the polymorphous and constantly renewed gure of a history not of religion, but of religions. And in this latter case, that of our era more than any other, the philosophy of religion to be sought should at once renounce its identity and unity as a mere remainder and index of an ethnocentrism that cannot be justied, in order to take its place more modestly, alongside other sciences, within what is more simply named anthropology. This recourse to anthropology allows, moreover, the second hypothesis nally to join up with the rst, for it is true that, according to Kant, the three questions that sum up the whole system of philosophy (meaning metaphysics)namely, What can I know? or, in other words, metaphysica generalis reduced to the science of the rst principles of human knowledge; followed by What ought I to do? which is to say, morals; and, nally, What may I hope? namely, religion itself could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the rst three questions relate to the last one. In short, the nal question, What is man? would become the rst question all over again.1 Thus the metaphysical meaning of the term philosophy of religion joins up with its empirical acceptation, that of a simple history of religions. So, in front of revealed theology, there stands opposed only the double meaning of a singular anthropology. How should we understand this anthropology? Quite clearly as the science of man; or rather, because every science reverts by denition to man (as science by and for man, as human science according to the rst historical meaning of this syntagma), anthropology will take shape as the science taught by man on man himself. Kant formulates it clearly: The most important object [Gegenstand] of culture, to whom such knowledge and skill can be applied, is Man because he is his own ultimate purpose. To recognize him, according to his species, as an earthly being endowed with reason [mit Vernunft begabtes Erdwesen] de1 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic (Ak. 9:25), trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 538. See the parallels in the Critique of Pure Reason, A 804/ B 832, and the Letter to Staudlin, May 4, 1793 (Ak. 11:429), in Correspondence, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 458. Martin Heideggers commentary reads: The Kantian laying of the foundation yields this conclusion: The establishment of metaphysics is an interrogation of man, i.e., it is anthropology. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (36, GA 3, p. 205), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 213.

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serves particularly to be named knowledge of the world, even though he is only one of all the creatures on earth. All the more at issue here is a knowledge held by man of himself in the most radical sense, which he will deploy, says Kant, from a pragmatic point of view; this is to say that, in opposition to an anthropology from the physiological point of view which aims at the investigation of what nature makes of man, this anthropology aims at what man makes, or can and should make of himself as a freely acting being [Wesen].2 This knowledge of man by himself cannot be reduced, let us note, to a simple empirical knowledge; rational psychology demands and, indeed, claims knowledge of man all the more, even if it acts freely in a different sense. The question thus becomes one of knowing if man can apply to himself his own knowledge in order to become his own object and, more generally, of knowing by what right he can make of himself something at all. For, by virtue of this rank as thing, man inscribes himself entirely among beings in the world, because his knowledge becomes (and remains) particularly that of this very world, to which he belongs without remainder. Thus are we led to substitute, for the question of a denition of philosophy of religion, another question, which supports the rst question and determines it in advance, namely, whether man can and must know himself. In this situation, the entire question (as much the question of anthropology as, through it, that of the philosophy of religion) comes down to understanding whether I know myself and, above all, by what right I know myself. Or rather, the issue is less about knowing if I know myself, as it is about understanding, in the event that I were to know myself, what status (and thus what mode of being) would be mine. Kant responds directly to these questions. I [Ich], as intelligence and thinking subject, know myself as an object that is thought [gedachtes Objekt], insofar as I am given to myself in intuition, solely and exactly, like every other phenomenon [gleich anderen Phanomen], only as I appear to myself, not as I am to the understandingthese are questions that raise no greater nor less difculty than [that of knowing] how I can be an object to myself at all [uberhaupt ein Objekt], and, more particularly, an object of intuition and of inner perceptions.3 In other terms, I do not know myself insofar as I know (following the singular privilege of being, as the sole thinker, the sole knower), but in so far precisely as I am simply
2 Kant, introduction to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Ak. 8:119), trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 3 (my emphasis; translation modied). 3 Kant, Transcendental Deduction (sec. 24, B 156), in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins, 1965), p. 167 (my emphasis; translation modied).

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known, and thus by the same right as any other known, which is to say as any other object. Strangely, I thus never know myself as I know, but always only as a me who is known, and thus as an object. I only know myself as that which I am not, as the me-object. The resulting distinctionbetween on the one hand the transcendental I, the empty form that accompanies every other knowledge but remains itself neither representable nor knowable, and on the other the empirical me that belongs to the world of phenomena, and thus of objects knownmanifests nothing of my specicity (the property of knowing) and puts into evidence precisely that which does not characterize me (the status of known). Thus am I masked and lowered to the dishonorable rank of an object. Rather than giving me access to the man that I am, this distinction between the I and the me forbids me from drawing near to the man that I am and disgures the very stake of anthropologythe self of each human being.4 Not only does man split into two irreconcilable tendencies, but the only one that is knowable, the object of the empirical me, denes him precisely by ignorance of the most extreme and inalienable property belonging to the being that I am: the property that exercises a thinking thought, as well as the inverse in a thought that is thought. Which is to say, in fact and by right the object of the empirical me substitutes for man the very denition of objecti[vi]ty. Lowered to the rank of a simple object of anthropology, man, this recent invention, as Foucault used to say, could very well have inevitably disappeared, like a fragile sandcastle, obliterated by the rising tide. And in fact, he already has disappeared. Here we should pay careful attention to Paul Tillichs strong advice: The object of the philosophy of religion is religion. But this very simple explanation already signies a problem, the fundamental problem of philosophy of religions: with religion, philosophy faces an object that refuses to become an object for philosophy.5
4 Such an application to the I of the processes of knowledge appropriate to objects alone (as empirical me) is often found elsewhere too, as far, for example, as in Husserl, where there is no longer any difculty in knowing that which thinks from any other object, precisely because this I becomes the same as an objecthere, as everywhere else, the Same signies therefore an identical intentional object of separate conscious processes, hence an object immanent in them only as something non-really inherent. Cartesianische Meditationen V (Husserliana 1:15455), trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), pp. 12627. 5 Paul Tillich, Religionsphilosophie (1925), in Fruhe Hauptwerk, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959), p. 297.

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ii. augustines quaestio The aporia marked out here nevertheless offers more than a deadendit allows a paradox to appear. If the man that I am (me) remains inaccessible, this results not because I do not know him, but on the contrary because I know him only too well as an object. Man escapes me to such a degree that the very mode of his possible knowing (which makes of him a mere thought object) contradicts and conceals his very rst feature, that of a pure thinker who thinks without becoming one who is thought. But must we then conclude that the I would not have access to itself as singular and unique, unless, on the contrary, it could never confuse itself with a thought object, in short unless it could not know itself? Put another way, would my access to this I that I alone recognize for myself require that I acknowledge that I do not appear to myself as knowledge (an object), but instead as a denitive question (without any corresponding object)? As surprising as it may seem, this hypothesis may allow us to reach the sense of a paradox rehearsed by Saint Augustine: Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio (I had become to myself a huge question).6 We are not dealing here with a mere throwaway line, for the context, on the contrary, gives it a precise meaning. Augustine states that the disappearance of a very dear friend makes him hate what he loved before (his town and paternal home) and leads him to see nothing around him but death (quidquid aspiciebam mors erat [everything on which I set my gaze was death]); this loss of another thus provokes nothing less and nothing other than the loss of self, of my knowledge of myself, which it replaces with my putting myself into question. I experience myself insofar as I discover myself to be unintelligible to myself. Another formulation conrms this occurrence: even after his conversion (in primordiis recuperatae dei meae), while listening to the chants resonating in the church (perhaps the hymns of Ambrose of Milan?), Augustine notes that he allows himself to be attracted and touched more by the singing itself than by what is being sung, the Psalms (me amplius cantus, quam res, quae canitur, moveat), thereby sinning within the very heart of prayer. Thus, he says, In your [Gods] eyes, I have become a question to myself [mihi quaestio factus
6 Augustine, Confessiones 4.4.9, ed. James J. ODonnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 1:36. English translation in Henry Chadwick, trans., Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 57 (translation modied). (Hereafter, citations of this work will list in parentheses the ODonnell page numbers rst, followed by the Chadwick page numbers.)

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sum].7 I become a question for myself, indeed an aporia for myself, because I discover that I cannot order my own prayer and thus my own perception correctly, which is to say, voluntarily; if my own prayer and perception, which dene my innermost depths, escape my control, then they make me become a question to myself. Concerning this split within myself, this quaestio, two other texts conrm just how much it renders me alien to myself. Nothing denes me more intimately than my memory (ipsum me non dicam praeter illam);8 how then can I not only forget, but (and how would I know it otherwise?) remember that I have forgotten that which I have, nonetheless, forgotten? How do I remember that I have forgotten what I no longer remember (mihi certum est meminisse me oblivionem, ipsam oblivionem meminisse me certus sum)? It would be just as absurd to reply that I have forgotten what I have forgotten in another memory than my own, and have retained memory of oblivion in my memory, as it would be to claim that oblivion remains in my memory so that I do not forget it like I have forgotten what I forgot there. There thus remains for me nothing else but to admit that I have kept in memory the image of the forgotten, but not that which I have forgotten; and I can only conclude from this that my memory, my very inner being, escapes me, and that factus sum mihi terra difcultatis (I have become for myself a soil which is a cause of difculty), so that I can only question myself, and question God: Hoc animus est, et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? Quae natura sum? (This is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature?).9 Thus if my own memory renders me a stranger to myself, how could I not also become other than myself in the experience of my will? Indeed, in my dreams at night, how can I involuntarily give in to actual pleasure, when in the waking state I am able to push aside erotic images? There is only one answer: Numquid tunc ego non sum? Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momen7 Confessiones 10.33.50 (ODonnell, p. 139; the commentary provided in vol. 3, p. 220, refers in a note back to the text of 4.4.9, cited in n. 6; Chadwick, p. 208, translation modied). This split within myself even serves as a conclusion to bk. 2 (2.10.18): et factus sum mihi regio egestatis (I became to myself a region of destitution) (ODonnell, p. 22; Chadwick, p. 34), where this region of destitution denes my alienation from myself (at the time of the rst theft) through the power of the group of wicked friends. 8 Intravi ad ipsius animi mei sedem, quae illi est in memoria mea, quoniam sui quoque meminit animus (I entered into the very seat of my mind, which is located in my memory, since the mind also remembers itself). Confessiones 10.25.36 (ODonnell, p. 133; Chadwick, p. 200). 9 Confessiones 10.16.25 and 10.17.26 (ODonnell, pp. 12829; Chadwick, pp. 19394). ODonnells commentary rightly refers this argument to the two previous passages (4.4.9 and 2.10.18; see n. 7 above).

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tum (During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my God? Yet how great a difference between myself and myself in a [single] moment).10 In a single moment I clearly discover myself to be someone other than my self, I am not what I am, I become a quaestio for myself. The experience of self ends neither in the aporia of substituting an object (the self, the me) for the I that I am, nor in the pure identity with self, but in the alienation of self from selfI am to myself an other than I. What import lies in this impossible access of the self to the self? Is the issue here a failure of knowledge, or a limitation in the consciousness of self, or, in short, an anticipation of the usual critiques of the cogito, in the style of Malebranche: Lon na point didee claire de lame, ni de ses modications (We therefore have no clear idea either of the soul or of its modications)?11 This purely negative interpretation would, however, be valuable under only one condition: that, in the case of mans I, it would be preferable that I know it by such a clear idea, or, which follows, by a concept. Now this condition raises not only the question of possibilitycan I know my I by a clear and distinct idea, or by a concept?but also and rst of all the question of legitimacy, in two senses. First, is it possible or contradictory to claim to attain the I, which alone understands (and produces) concepts, with one of these very concepts? And next: would it be licit, admissible, and desirable to know the I with a concept, if by chance it proved possible? If, on the contrary, such an attempt in the end contradicted and destroyed the very I to be attained, then the quaestio that Saint Augustine sets against it would become not an aporia but a way toward a totally different mode of conquest of that which I am as such. For what would it serve a man to know himself through the mode by which he knows the remainderthe world and its objectsif, in order to do so, he must know himself as just one more object? What would it serve a man to know himself with a concept, if in doing so he lost his humanity or, in other words, his soul? And, inversely, what would a man lose, if he only gained access to himself through the mode of incomprehensibility? Is it really self-evident that all knowledge, and even the knowledge of that which has the privilege to exercise knowledge instead of submitting to it, must be accomplished by the same and univocal concept?
Confessiones 10.30.41 (ODonnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modied). Nicolas Malebranche, Recherche de la verite: XIieme eclaircissement, in uvres com ` pletes, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: Vrin, 1964), 3:168. English translation in Thomas M. Lennon ` and Paul J. Olscamp, trans. and ed., The Search after Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 636.
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iii. everything that can be known, everything that should be known What do we really understand by the verb to know? Whether we admit it or not, we mean by to know the taking (or producing) of what Descartes called a clear and distinct idea; and we mean this not because we necessarily accept the Cartesian theory of science but because we share with it its nality: knowing seems to us to be without value if it is not, through this idea, about obtaining mentis purae et attentae tam facilem distinctumque conceptum, ut de eo, quod intelligimus, nulla prorsus dubitation relinquatur (a concept so clear and distinct, produced by a pure and attentive mind, such that no doubt remains about what we are understanding).12 What can thus be known (by virtue of idea and representation), in such a manner that no doubt about it subsists, is dened as an object; or, what amounts to the same thing, one may only admit into science that which offers an object that is certain: Circa illa tantum objecta oportet versari, ad quorum certam et indubitatam cognitionem nostra ingenia videntur sufcere (We should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition).13 From this it follows that what cannot be known as an object, and thus what cannot be according to the mode of being of objects, is worthy neither of our knowledge nor quite simply of being. Yes, this is a radical consequence, but it is a consequence drawn explicitly by Johan Clauberg, a Cartesian of strict observance, when, in order to found the then new science of ontologia, he posed as fact the strict equivalence between being and the thinkable: Ens est quicquid quovis modo est, cogitari ac dici potest (Being is all that which, in whatever manner may be, can be thought and said), to the point that being and thought are identied with one another in a single and unique ens cogitable.14 This radical thesis, which by the way exhausts the only historically documented meaning of ontologia, does not oppose what is to what is thought (as the real to the ideal) but, on the contrary, poses their strict equivalence. Accordingly, the condition of a beings Being understood as an object is no longer
12 Regulae ad directionem ingenii, III, AT X:368, lines 1517. English translation in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Douglas Murdoch, trans., Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2:3 (translation modied). Citations of this work will be listed hereafter with page numbers from the English translation in parentheses. 13 Regulae ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X:362, lines 24 (Cottingham et al., p. 1). The title of this Regula can be compared with that of Regula III, AT X:366, lines 1114. 14 Johan Clauberg, Metaphysica de Ente, quae rectius ontosophia [dicitur] . . . , secs. 6 and 4, respectively, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1691), 1:283. Berkeley will simply radicalize this decision (if it can be radicalized any further).

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decided in or by this being itself, but in and by the mind that knows it, because the knowing mind constructs this beings concept. In Cartesian terms, one could say that there is only that which can satisfy the conditions of possibility xed by the Mathesis Universalisnamely, order (whatever it may be) and measure. Anything else is unintelligible and thus does not come under knowing.15 It follows that the object is never dened in itself, nor by itself, but always by the thought that knows it in constructing it. More essential to the being as object than the being is to itself is the ego, which xes the beings conditions of objectication and makes of it an alienated beingalienated from itself by the knowledge of another. It falls to the intuitus to accomplish concretely this alienation of the object: in-tuitus rather than intuition, a gaze that is active and on the lookout, not a neutral vision, because it only exercises its view according to the mode of a guard (-tueri), the guard who makes sure and places under security, who keeps an eye on and watches over that which henceforth remains under his dominion: the object. No one exposed this alienation of the thing by the concept that precedes and reconstitutes it into an object better than Hegel. In naming a thing, man substitutes for its immediate being and its qualities of sensible representation a name, a sound made by [his] voice, something entirely different from what [the thing] is in intuition; but this name that is not the immediacy of the thing, this name into which the thing withdraws, becomes something spiritual, something altogether different. Thus nature transforms itself into a realm of names, because the external object itself was negated in that very synthesis.16 The object appears henceforth as suchas alienated being, which has lost its being in order to receive it from the I: the object is not what it is . . . the thing is not what it is.17 Thus, man speaks to the thing as his. And this is the being of the object.18 The being of the object only consists in receiving its being from man, who alienates it in so
15 See the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, IV, AT X:377, lines 23378: illa omnia tantum, in quibus aliquis ordo vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim [sc. Universalem] referri, nec interesse utrum in numeris, vel guris, vel astris, vel sonis, aliove quovis objecto, talis mensura quaerenda sit (I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of order or measure and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever) (my emphasis; following the correction of G. Crapulli according to text H [critical edition, The Hague: 1966]; Cottingham et al., p. 5). 16 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (18056), with Commentary, trans. and ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), pp. 8990 (translation modied). 17 Ibid., p. 88. 18 Ibid., p. 90.

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very far as he names it. Put another way, by means of the name . . . the object has been born out of the I [and has emerged] as being. This is the primal creativity exercised by Spirit. Adam gave a name to all things.19 Hegel obviously alludes to the Biblical episode in which God gives to man power over the animals by giving him the right to name them: [He] brought them to the man to see what he would call them (Gen. 2:19). Adam gives a name, and thus a denition to the animals, which thus become subject to him, because in general all knowledge by concept reduces what is known to the rank of object. Adam thus names in the manner by which the I knowsby concepts of objects. However, Adam has the power thus to name only that which can legitimately become for him an object: the animals (and the rest of the world), and perhaps the angels, but not God, and not himself. If, moreover, he claimed to name them, either this name would have no validity, or, if it had validity, what he named would not be man as such (as the unrivaled thinker) but merely a thought-object like all the others. Thus it follows from the characteristics of knowledge by concepts that man cannot name man, which is to say dene man, except by reducing him to the rank of a simple concept, thereby knowing not a man but an object, possibly animated, but always alienated. Therefore there is no contradiction between, on the one hand, knowledge of man as the object of anthropology and, on the other, the impossibility of this knowledge within the reexive self-consciousness. For knowing the me as an object, constituted by alienation like all objects, in no way opens access to the I, which alone knows objects and thus opposes itself to them. This distinction shows itself simply in the case where I, a human being, am the insurmountable difference between the two sides of the cogitatio, the ego and the object. From this there immediately and necessarily follows another conclusion: if one is unaware of or neglects this distinctionthat is to say if one persists in claiming that man can (and therefore must) become an object for man (homo homini objectum)one only displaces this very distinction: for that which will be known as object, even when dressed up with the title of man, will in fact not be one and will not be able to make himself be recognized as
19 Ibid., p. 89. The rst act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullied them as beings on their own account, and made them into ideal [entities]. . . . In the name the self-subsisting reality of the sign is nullied. Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. Kimmerle and K. Du ssing (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1975), 6: 288. See also System of the Ethical Life (18023) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy, 18034), trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York, 1979), pp. 22122. I follow here the classic interpretation of Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 326 ff. (and also Alexandre ` ` Koyre, Hegel a Iena, Etudes dhistoire de la pensee philosophique [Paris: 1961], pp. 135 ff.). `

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one. Indeed, each of us can, in various ways, have this experientia crucis: dening a man is equivalent to having done with him. Not because he would no longer be thought, but precisely because one thinks him by not thinking of him, because one thinks him without beginning the thinking from him himself but, instead, beginning from one other than him, namely, from the mind that denes him by alienating him, which is to say the mind that thinks him according to the mode of comprehension. Or, to classify a man is to downsize him as a human being, because he could not be classied any other way than according to an order and a measure (models and parameters) that come to him from elsewhere, which is to say from the workings of my rationality. We take notice of this alienation, which makes the dened, classied, and comprehended human being fall to the rank of a simple object, every time we end up admitting that, in order to put forward a denition by concept of man it is rst necessary to dare to ask the question, What is man? This simple question, even and above all if we do not give it an answer, already includes within it another, much more threatening question, because it asks, What is a man? More threatening indeed, because even and above all if we cannot give an answer, we nevertheless easily authorize ourselves to use the question negatively, transforming it into a nal question, Is this [still, truly] a man? To claim to know and to dene man with a concept leads inevitably to a decision about his objectication, or rather to a decision about his humanity according to the objectication that we will have produced. Dening man with a concept does not always or immediately lead to killing him, but it does ll the rst condition required to eliminate all that does not t this denition. The dangerhaving done with some among men because we can dene manis not exaggerated or nonsensical. We experience it directly, as a clear possibility, in all the applications of its objectication. For instance, when I nd myself in a medicalized situation (e.g., admittance to the hospital, removal of clothing, transfer to surgery, the reading of test results, submission to treatment), I become a medical object. Or more precisely, the hospital technologys inevitable hold of power over me eliminates in me anything that will not reduce to a medical object. Under the gaze of medical personnel, and very soon under my own gaze, the treatment of my sick body will lead to its interpretation according to the parameters of physical bodies (size, quantication, measurements, etc.), with the result that my living esh will disappear. Soon I will no longer feel the fact that I feel myself: anesthesia will not only deliver me from my pain, but also from my suffering self, and thus from my selfs self-suffering. Next, every non-

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objective function will disappear from this self (me), and my esh, or that which is animated within me, will become an animal-machine. This medical denition of my body as an object will also allow for the distinction of health from sickness in terms of norms. Thus is opened the fearful region in which man can make decisions about the normality, and thus the life and death, of other human beingsbecause these human beings have become simple human objects. Another example of objectication occurs when I am dened as an object reduced to the parameters seen by economic theorywhen I become the famous economic agent, supposedly summed up by the calculation of my needs, by the evaluation of these needs in numbered costs and the balancing of these costs against purchasing power, and nally by the purported rational calculation of a correspondence between the costs of the objects of the needs and this purchasing power. In order to attain even an approximation of rigor, this stage-by-stage reduction assumes that choices are made according to the laws of exchange and thus that the economic agent proceeds strictly according to self-interest, in short, that I only know and practice business, which is to say strict exchange according to the iron law of a selshness that is no longer moral, but epistemological. Thus there disappears from economic analysis everything that escapes exchange and commerce, but which doubtless makes them possible and ows over them in every direction: the gift and all the forms of social gratuity that have not yet been rendered economic. For if economy economizes on the gift, then more fundamentally, gratuity economizes on economy itself.20 Without lingering over other processes of objectication (psychiatry, biology, etc.), let us consider directly the denition of the human being not only as social animal (social living being), but as political object, such as it raties and perfects the mobilization without remainder of the humanity of man.21 The political determination of man is not summed up by his sociability, but, at the very least, politics imposes upon that sociability a technological treatment. In particular, through the determination of ones identity (of his name, I.D., passport) according to number: dates (from birth to death), places (residence, work, trips, etc.), health, commercial operations (bank account numbers, credit cards, etc.), local as well as long-distance communications (sound and visual recordings, electronic addresses, cell phones, etc.), all become numbers, such that the identity thus digitized according to limitless parameters erects a comprehensive denition of the citizen.
See my analysis in La raison du don, Philosophie 78 ( June 2003): 332. Mobilization is understood here in the sense used by Ernst Ju nger in Der Arbeiter (Hamburg, 1932) and in Die totale Mobilmachung, in Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930).
21 20

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And inevitably this comprehensive denition ends up by authorizing, indeed demanding, the separation of men according to those who satisfy the political conditions of this citizenship and those who are excluded or ought to be (exclusion, beginning with the jobless, the homeless, the maladjusted, delinquents, and illegal immigrants, and ending with the mentally ill, or embryos reputedly not yet humanized, or supernumerary, etc.). From the identity card to the list of interdiction, the outcome, while not good, is nonetheless possible, easy, and rapid. Political wisdom consists rst in resisting such an outcome. Failing such resistance, there will be no end of ideologies or racisms that produce denitions of man and, through an inverted outcome, proscribe those who do not t in, before moving on to the arrest, or indeed to the extermination of the submen or nonmen thus identied.22 A frightening consequence thus imposes itself: to claim to dene what a man is leads to or at least opens the possibility of leading to the elimination of that which does not correspond to this denition. Every political proscription, every racial extermination, every ethnic cleansing, every determination of that which does not merit lifeall of these rest upon a claim to dene (scientically or ideologically) the humanity of man; without this claimed guarantee, no one could put such political programs into motion. Even the worst of modern tyrants needs reasons and concepts. Here we nd a new experientia crucis: in order to kill a human being, it is necessary to have the permission to kill. But in order to have that, it is rst necessary to be able to deny to such and such a human being (the well-named So and So) his or her face and thus his or her humanity; and one gets there by dening and comprehending humanity through concepts, by xing its limits and, in this way, discovering the one who cannot claim humanity, and thus can or ought to die. Here a metaphysical proposition in appearance perfectly neutral takes on the aspect of a silent threat: every determination is a negation, or more exactly (because in the event the issue is extension alone), gura non aliud quam determinatio, et determinatio negatio est (gure is nothing but limitation, and limita22 Primo Levi lived and described perfectly the moment when the number, having become the most efcacious tool for the denition (in this case ideological and racist) of man, and thus for the stigmatization of the nonman (the Jew), silences the name of a man by substituting itself for that name: He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three gures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man (If This Is a Man; The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf [London: Abacus, 1987], p. 48). And once the name of a man is abolished, and his humanity thus denied, it becomes possible and even quite easy to put an end to him physically, as a dog or a pigin other words, as an animal.

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tion is negation).23 Determining amounts to denying (and not the inverse, for if determination is sufcient for denial, a negation does not always sufce to determine). Determining the humanity of man thus amounts to making an end of him. Moreover, this experientia crucis can be conrmed by inverting it: I can only love (the contrary of killing) another that, precisely, I do not know, at least in the sense of being able to comprehend him or her as an object and dene him or her by a concept. I can only love him who remains for me without denition, and only for as long as he thus remains, which is to say as long as I will not have nished with him. iv. the depths of incomprehensibility Thus nothing of what I understand tells me of the humanity of the Other or gives me access to it. If then I want to maintain that, being a human being, nothing human is or ought to be foreign to me (Terence), it would be necessary to add a derivative consequence: nothing that I know, beginning from a comprehensive denition of humanity, can reveal the dignity of the human being, much less defend it. And consequently, I cannot know myself as such, by turning on myself any such denition of humanity; for, in this case too, I would substitute for the man in me something other than me, that is, precisely, an alienated thing, an object comprehended by a concept. Thus there appears the denitive weakness of every humanism: not only does it claim to comprehend as a matter of fact what man can and ought to be; but above all it assumes that such a knowledge reinforces the humanity in man, when such knowledge instead destroys it or, in any case, threatens it. The weakness of humanisms claim consists in dogmatically imagining not only that man can hold himself up as his own measure and end (so that man is enough for man), but above all that he can do this because he comprehends what man is, when on the contrary nothing threatens man more than any such alleged comprehension of his humanity. For every de-nition imposes on the human being a nite essence, following from which it always becomes possible to delimit what deserves to remain human from what no longer does. It follows, then, that in the particular case of man, philosophy would have for its task not to correct mans incomprehensibility, as if it were a defect to overcome, but to preserve it as a privilege to reinforce. But for all of that, can we indeed preserve the incomprehensibility of man
23 Baruch Spinoza, Epistula 50, a J. Jalles, 3d ed., ed. J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land (The ` Hague, n.d.), 3:172. English translation in Abraham Wolf, trans. and ed., The Correspondence of Spinoza (London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 270.

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as the sign, the proof, and the guarantee of his humanity? How do we avoid the confusions and contradictions implied by this demand? And rst and foremost, does a de jure incomprehensibility not lead nally to a simple de facto unknowing? And, since such an unknowing either disappears into a denitive ignorance or disqualies itself as a poorly formulated question, does it not always just vanish? In short, can one maintain for very long the comprehension of such a fragile incomprehensibility? In order to surmount these difculties, it would be necessary to found and legitimize the impossibility of dening and comprehending manand thus to envisage such an impossibility within a new positivity and no longer as a pure and simple defect. How do we do this? Let us return to Hegels interpretation of Adams privilege in the book of Genesis. There, man has the power to name, to understand, and thus to dominate; but Adam exercises this privilege only upon the animals, never upon God or upon himself. Why do these two escape naming and thus escape the comprehension and, nally, the domination of man? That God would escape is conceived without any difculty: the Creator is not easily understood, and thus named, by his creature. But why is it that man does not name himself? No interdict is brought to bear here. Nothing more than the second commandment is necessary, which forbids making for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above (Exod. 20:4)anything, therefore, that would claim to represent God through comprehension. But is man, too, in heaven above? Most certainlyfor this is the decisive paradoxbecause that which is tting for God (of whom no name, no image, and no concept can claim comprehension) is also tting for man: man, and he alone among all the living, was created not according to [his] kind but in [the] image . . . [and] likeness of God (Gen. 1:24, 26). This paradox receives a precise commentary from Saint Augustine: be renewed in the newness of your mind. That is not a making according to kind [secundum genus], as if renewal were achieved by imitating a neighbours example or by living under the authority of a human superior. For you did not say Let man be made according to his kind [secundum genus], but Let us make man according to our image and likeness, so we may prove what your will is.24 Man remains unimaginable, because he is formed in the image of the One who admits no image whatsoever. By right, man resembles nothing, because he resembles nothing other than the One who is properly characterized
24 Augustine, Confessiones 13.22.32 (ODonnell, p. 196; Chadwick p. 292, emphasis added; translation slightly modied). Augustine quotes, successively, Rom. 12:2 and Gen. 1:24 and 26.

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by incomprehensibility, the One who David Tracy has named the Incomprehensible-Comprehensible God.25 Or again, if God remains incomprehensible, man, who resembles nothing other than Him, will also bear the mark and the privilege of His incomprehensibility. Put another way: the human being belongs to no kind whatsoever, refers to no genus, is not comprehended by any denition of (in)humanity. Delivered from every paradigm, he appears immediately within the light of the One who surpasses all light. Mans face bears the mark of this borrowed incomprehensibility in so far, precisely, as he too reveals himself as invisible, like God.26 Man is thus radically separated from every other being in the world by an insurmountable and denitive difference that is no longer ontological, but holy. No longer does the human being distinguish him- or herself from the rest of the world as the Platzhalter des Nichts (lieutenant of the nothing)27 or the Hirt des Seins (shepherd of Being),28 but as the icon of the incomprehensible. Mans invisibility separates him from the world and consecrates him as holy for the Holy. This argument is found explicitly formalized in this manner by Gregory of Nyssa, among other authors:
The icon is properly an icon so long as it fails in none of those attributes which we perceive in the archetype . . . therefore, since one of the attributes we contemplate in the Divine nature is incomprehensibility of essence (t` o akata lhpton th ou j a ), it is clearly necessary that in this point the icon i should be able to show its imitation of the archetype. For if, while the archetype transcends comprehension, the nature of the icon were comprehended, the contrary character of the attributes we behold in them would prove the defect of the icon; but since the nature of our mind, which is according to the icon of the Creator (tq kat i ko na tou kt janto ), evades our knowledge, i it keeps an accurate resemblance to the superior nature, retaining the imprint
25 David Tracy, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 54. 26 According to Emmanuel Levinas, le visage est signication et signication sans contexte. . . . En ce sens, on peut dire que le visage nest pas vu. Il est ce qui ne peut devenir un contenu, que notre pensee embrasserait; il est lincontenable, il vous mene au-dela (the ` ` face is signication, and signication without context. . . . In this sense one can say that the face is not seen. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond). See Ethique et inni: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1982), pp. 8081. English translation in Richard A. Cohen, trans., Ethics and Innity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 8586. 27 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 118. English translation in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 106. 28 Martin Heidegger, Brief uber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 342. English translation in Krell, pp. 234, 245.

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of the incomprehensible [xed] by the unknown within it (tq kav agnqjtq).29 auto n

Knowing man thus requires referring him to God the incomprehensible and thus by derivation to grounding incomprehensibility in the incomprehensible, by virtue of mans being its image and likeness. Augustine, too, comes to this conclusion: whereas Saint Paul, for his part, writes that no one among men knows the secrets of man except the spirit of man which is in him (1 Cor. 2:11) and thus assumed that man comprehends the secrets of man, Augustine does not hesitate to write on the contrary that tamen est aliquid hominis, quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis, qui in ipso est, tu autem. Domine, scis ejus omnia, quia eum fecisti (yet there is something of the human person which is unknown even to the spirit of man which is in him. But you, Lord, know everything about the human person; for you made humanity). Beginning from this unknowing of myself, who is nevertheless known by anotherGod aloneit is necessary to make use of the process of confessio, or rather the constitutive duality of a doubly oriented confessio, oriented toward my ignorance of self and toward anothers knowledge of me. Contear ergo quid de me sciam, contear et quid de me nesciam . . . (Accordingly, let me confess what I know of myself. Let me confess too what I do not know of myself. For what I know of myself I know because you grant me light, and what I do not know of myself, I do not know until such time as my darkness becomes like noonday before your face).30 Man differs innitely from man but with a difference that he cannot comprehend, and which, in order properly to respect it, he should not comprehend. Not only does man know that he does not know himself, even if this were only because within his most intimate depths he discovers an unfathomable memory: Magna vis est memoriae, nescio quid horrendum, Deus meus, profunda et innita multiplicitas. Et hoc animus est et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ego sum Deus? Quae natura sum? (Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery, my God, a power of profound and innite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature?).31 But above all, man
29 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, etc., trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series II, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 39697 (translation modied). 30 Confessiones 10.5.7, citing at the end Psalm 89:8 (ODonnell, p. 121; Chadwick, pp. 18283). 31 Confessiones 10.17.26 (ODonnell, p. 129; Chadwick, p. 194). A strong and frightening echo of such a horror is found in both Luther and Calvin, as B. A. Gerrish has superbly demonstrated; see his To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of

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understands, within this impasse, that the one who is alone in knowing him remains for him another, namely, God: Utrum ita sim, nescio. Minus mihi in hac re notus sum ipse quam tu. Obsecro te, Deus meus, et me ipsum mihi indica (Whether I am one or the other I do not know. In this matter I know myself less well than I know you. I beseech you, my God, show me myself).32 Under Augustines analysis, mans incomprehensibility to himself thus takes on yet wider and vaster dimensions. To begin with, as in the Greek fathers, the analysis points out not only the image and likeness of God within mans incomprehensibility but also a unique privilege held by the human being with regard to all other creatures (which only resemble their genus, which is to say, themselves). Next, this incomprehensibility tells man that he goes beyond and exceeds himself, in short that lhomme passe inniment lhomme (man transcends man), following the formulation of an exemplary Augustinian: in a word, man passes beyond his own means, man lives above his means.33 Finally and above all, according to a strict consequence, only the innite and incomprehensible can comprehend man, and thus tell him of and show him to himself; only God can reveal man to man, because man only reveals himself by revealing, without knowing it, the one whose image he bears. Not only is it true that Je est un autre (I is another), but this other calls himself God within man, the speculative Emmanuel. Henceforth, absent God, man can no longer appear as such, but disgures himself by taking on the gure of something other than himself, which is to say by allowing himself to resemble something other than God. This is the denition of sin: man thinks he attains unto himself by choosing to resemble less than God. The dissimilarity in the image devalues him short of God, and, barring God, man loses the human face. Thus the soul, cum stare debeat ut eis fruatur, volens ea sibi tribuere et non ex illo similis illius, sed ex ipsa esse quod ille est, avertitur ab eo, movetur et labitur in minus et minus, quod putat amplius et amplius. Quia nec ipsa sibi, nec ei quicquam sufcit recedenti ab illo qui solus sufcit (instead of staying still and enjoying them [the good things of God] as it ought to, . . . wants to claim them for itself, and rather than be like him by his gift it wants to be what he is by its own right. So it turns away from him and slithers and slides down into less and less which is imagined to be more and more; it can nd satisfaction neither in itself nor in anything else as it gets further away from him who alone can
God, in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 13149. 32 Confessiones 10.37.62 (ODonnell, p. 144; Chadwick, p. 216, translation modied). 33 Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Lafuma sec. 131). English translation in A. J. Krailsheimer, trans., Pensees (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 34.

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satisfy it).34 I shall make only two remarks as commentary on this powerful phenomenology of sin. First, sin does not consist in wanting to enjoy the supreme good things, those of God, for they are given by God without jealousy; rather, sin lies in wanting to enjoy them by oneself and not through God, in wanting to appropriate them for oneself in the rst person (as in Phil. 2:6: arpagmo n), in short in denying the ` character of the giftscorning the given as gift. Second, this entire movement unfolds within the similitudonon ex illo similis ejus which is to say, within the image and likeness, within mans incomprehensibility to himself. v. the privilege of positive self-unknowing Mans incomprehensibility to himself thus designates a privilege, one by which man, or rather the one who alone (taking up Leibnizs formulation) is able to say ego, arrives at recognizing, precisely by never himself knowing what, or rather whom, it is that he resembles, who it is who preserves his identity and can name himnone other than the One who created him. I cannot dene myself, but, like every human being (and it is precisely in this that we recognize a human being), no one can know me and tell of me except, eventually, the one who creates me. God alone knows and preserves within his own secret the secret of man. Thus my unknowing of myselfotherwise called the impossibility of my gaining access to myself through any idea, concept, or image whatsoever that I may produce, except through the image that another gives to mein no way signies a aw or defect in my knowledge, as metaphysics has so often claimed. Take, for example, after Malebranche,35 Baruch Spinozas belief that he can hold that mens se ipsam non cognoscit, nisi quatenus corporis affectionum ideas percipit (the mind does not know itself except insofar as it perceives ideas of affections of the body).36 This is a problematic thesis in every respect, if only because it implies that by knowing the ideas of what affects its body, the mind would thus know itself as this very body and, because this body is affected by every other body, the idea
34 Augustine, De Trinitate, 10.5.7. English translation in Edmund Hill, O.P., trans., On the Trinity (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 1992), p. 292. The same argument, exposed in a more systematic way and at length, may be found in John Scot Eriugena, De Divisione Naturae, IV, 7, PL 122, col. 771 ff. See the standard-setting paper by Bernard McGinn, The Negative Element in the Anthropology of John the Scot, in Jean Scot Erigene et lhistoire de la philosophie, ` ed. Rene Roques (Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S., 1975), pp. 31525. 35 Confessiones 10.30.41 (ODonnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modied). 36 Baruch Spinoza, Ethica II, sec. 23. English translation in Samuel Shirley, trans., and Seymour Feldman, ed., The Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 81.

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that the mens would have of itself would thus coincide with that of the complete extended world. In this way we would instead have to conrm that what man would know of himself would precisely not be himself, but anything other than himself. Similarly, when Kant underscores that the transcendental I has of itself only a ganzlich leere Vorstellung (completely empty representation) and thus that it has no experience of itself and that the transcendental object is equally unknown [gleich unbekannt] in respect to inner and to outer intuition, what does he deny to man?37 Quite clearly, man is denied the status of object, subjected to an intuition and inscribed within the common experience of the world, which is to say, Kant denies man what the I can become only by its disappearing as such, by its ceasing to be that through which the objects of experience, insofar as they conform to the conditions of intuition, become possible. Far from this absence of knowledge doing harm to mans dignity, it appears as the rst bulwark, for, beyond the question concerning the knowledge of man, the question of what such knowledge would make of man imposes itself. Indeed, the impossibility of assigning him any denition at all xes the only correct denition of man, because it attests to him precisely as das noch nicht festgestellte Thier (the animal that is not yet stabilized). Nietzsche here inherits directly from a tradition that goes back at least to Pico della Mirandola: homo variae ac multiformis et desultoriae naturae animae (man [is an] animal of diverse, multiform, variable, and destructible nature).38 The nature (and denition) of man is characterized by instabilityman as the being who remains, for himself, to be decided and about whom one never ceases to be astonished. Man, undecidable to man, thus loses himself if he claims to decide about himself. He remains himself only as long as he remains without qualities, other than those of monstre incomprehensible (a monster that passes all 39 understanding). Let us not be mistaken: Pascal here designates a privilege, that of showing forth (monstrare) in oneself the incomprehensible. But are there not objections to be made? For example, following Heidegger, one could assimilate the biblical denition according to image and likeness to the Greek denition according to the possession
37 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 346/B 404, A 354, and A 372, respectively (Smith, pp. 331, 336, and 348). 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884), 25 (428), Werke VII/2, ed. ColliMontinari (Berlin and New York, 1974), p. 121. See also Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate hominis, ed. G. Tonion and O. Boulnois (Paris, 2004), p. 12, and also pp. 4, 6. English translation in Charles Glenn Wallace, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael, trans., On the Dignity of Man, and On Being and the One, and Heptaplus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 6. 39 Pascal, Lafuma sec. 130 (Krailsheimer, p. 32).

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of logo in order to understand both as imposing upon man the mode of Being im Sinne des Vorhandensein (in the sense of subsistence [occurring and Being-present-at-hand]).40 But what proof does Heidegger give of the equivalence between these two denitions? If necessary, the denition by lo go could fall under reproach; but does the denition according to the image of God not exclude, precisely, anything having to do, in God and thus in man, with Being as subsistence (vorhanden)? Unless, that is, Heidegger includes neither denition in the division of nite being from innite being.41 But there too, does he not take up, as if it goes without saying, the metaphysical distinction par excellence of the ens into nitum and innitum, introduced by Duns Scotus through to Suarez, without seeing that this distinction doubtless contradicts the incomprehensibility of the image and likeness? Does he simply want, in the end, to deny theology the right to tackle the question of mans status, just as he denies it that of responding to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? by holding that anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth already has the answer to the question . . . before it is asked: beings, with the exception of God Himself, are created by Him. God Himself is as the uncreated Creator. This remains, Heidegger believes, unacceptable, because one who holds on to such faith as a basis can, perhaps, emulate and participate in the asking of our question in a certain way, but he cannot authentically question. . . . He can act only as if [nun so tun as ob] . . . in the beginning God created heaven and earth, etc.42 This argument presupposes in its turn that, by invoking creation, the believer condently knows and thus comprehends what man is, because faith certainly tells him. It is precisely the case, however, that what the Scripture says here establishes nothing certain and procures no clear and distinct knowledge whatsoever; on the contrary, its revelation of man as created in the image and likeness of God institutes an unknowing that is all the more radical in that it is founded in the incomprehensibility of God himself. From a reverse perspective, would it not be he who assumes from the outset that the question of man is inscribed in advance within the horizon of Being and determines man as the being in whom what is at stake is Being? Would it not be someone like this who would here be seeming to think the incomprehen40 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1963), sec. 10, p. 48, line 32. English translation in John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., Being and Time (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 74. 41 Heidegger, Brief uber den Humanismus, GA 9, p. 319. 42 Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, p. 5. English translation in Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, trans., Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 78.

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sibility of man? For it could be that Scripture fails to pose the question Why something rather than nothing? not out of ignorance, but rather in order not to presume a horizon, even that of Being, for the question of man and because it questions the world and man in a way that is yet more radical than would ever be allowed by the thinking of Being. And above all, what the Scripture gives as answer to the question it poses remains by denition a bottomless question, because it perpetuates nothing less than the incomprehensibility of God. If questioning denes the piety of thinking, then Scripture, too, unfolds this piety, because it alone leaves forever free and intact the questioning of its question. Despite this, metaphysics has indeed replied (whether it should be allowed to or not) to the question concerning mans denition of himself. And we know well that the Cartesian cogito has no other importance than to assure the ego its comprehension of itself and thus to impose itself as the rst principle of every other science. Nevertheless, it would be more tting to doubt this vulgate of Cartesianism, because the texts of Descartes so often contradict it. Contradiction occurs rst of all because the egos very performance of its existence unfolds within a space that is, from the outset, dialogical (with the Deus qui potest omnia, with the genius aliquis malignius).43 Next, contradiction occurs because the ego of the cogito recognizes that its nite thought culminates in a faculty of will that is paradoxically innite, ratione cujus imaginem quandam et similitudinem Dei me refere intelligo (in virtue of [which] . . . I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God); and above all the common understanding of the comprehensibility of the ego is contradicted because the ego identies its faculty of thinking of itself with the image and likeness of God within it, to the point that the faculty of self-knowing is simply one with the faculty of knowing God: ex hoc uno quod Deus me creavit, valde credibile est me quodammodo ad imaginem et similitudinem ejus factum esse, illamque similitudinem, in qua Dei idea continetur, a me precipi per eandem facultatem, per quam ego ipse a me percipior (but the mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness and that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty which enables me to perceive myself).44 Let us consider
43 See Meditationes, AT 8:21, line 2 and 8:22, line 24, respectively. See my study Lalterite originaire de lego, in Questions cartesiennes II: Sur lego et sur Dieu (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), chap. 1. 44 Mediationes, AT 4:57, lines 1415 and 2:51, lines 1823, respectively (Cottingham et al., pp. 101 and 98, respectively).

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this extraordinary text: founding the thinking of self upon my thinking of God, to the point of merging them within the space opened by the image of and likeness to God. Even more: because Descartes at the same time does not cease to underscore the fact that remaining incomprehensible belongs to the very denition of God (idea enim inniti, ut sit vera, nullo modo debet comprehendi, quonima ipsa incomprehensibilitas in ratione formali inniti continetur [the idea of the innite, in order to be true, cannot by any means be comprehended, since this very incomprehensibility is comprised within the formal concept of the innite]), we must conclude that, strictly speaking, the ego, image of the incomprehensible, remains incomprehensible also to itself.45 The power and profundity of mans incomprehensibility is such that even the ego cogito is inscribed therein and conrms it. vi. the question without a response According to Aristotle, only the divine can reach the point of thinking its own thinking and knowing itself absolutely. And man has neither a denition of nor access to this knowledge. The theology of revelation, through other paths, conrms this impossibility. And yet, it no longer understands this impossibility as something forbidden, but rather as a grace and a privilege: man remains incomprehensible, but in the image and likeness of the incomprehensible par excellence; he thus holds a derived and gracious excellence: that of knowing himself as incomprehensible. Put another way, man appears to himself as a phenomenon that he cannot constitute, because he exceeds the eld of every horizon and of every system of categories. Which can be formulated as: man appears to himself as a saturated phenomenon. Philosophy must know, and thus also not cease to will to know, the one who knows, at the risk of degrading the one who knows (himself) to the status of what he knows. Theology in the strict sense recognizes its objectin fact, a formal nonobjectas revelation. It thus accepts, or rather claims as its highest epistemological necessity, to treat of the incomprehensibility of God, such as it results directly from his innity and, above all, from his holiness. The incomprehensibility of the human being remains. Founded and required by the incomprehensibility of the One whose image and likeness man bears, it is bound up with theology. Nevertheless it does not
45 Meditationes, Ve Responsiones, AT 6:368, lines 24. English translation in Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 2:218.

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belong entirely, or even foremost, to theology, because man must comprehend this very incomprehensibility, by opposing it to, and preserving it in front of, every other comprehension that he gains over every other thingthings that can become objects. Let us recall here Paul Ricurs brilliant statement: the claim by knowledge to constitute itself raises the most formidable obstacle to the idea of revelation. In this regard, Husserls transcendental idealism potentially contains the very same atheistic outcome as Feuerbachs idealism of self-consciousness.46 In this sense, which is rst of all negative, or rather denegatory, mans incomprehensibility comes under the domain of philosophy. Thus, in its relation to both philosophy and (revealed) theology, which it skirts by opposition, the incomprehensibility of the human being can be seen to dene the proper domain of what I willingly call the philosophy of religion.

46 Paul Ricur, Hermeneutique de lidee de Revelation, in La Revelation, ed. Daniel Cop pieters de Gibson (Bruxelles: Facultes universitaires Saint-Louis, 1977), p. 46.

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