In the Self's Place The Approach of Saint Augustine [Hardcover]

In the Self's Placeis an original phenomenological reading of Augustine that considers his engagement with notions of identity inConfessions. Using the Augustinian experience ofconfessio, Jean-Luc Marion develops a model of selfhood that examines this experience in light of the whole of the Augustinian corpus. Towards this end, Marion engages with noteworthy modern and postmodern analyses of Augustine's most experiential work, including the critical commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marion ultimately concludes that Augustine has preceded postmodernity in exploring an excess of the self over and beyond itself, and in using this alterity of the self to itself, as a driving force for creative relations with God, the world, and others. This reading establishes striking connections between accounts of selfhood across the fields of contemporary philosophy, literary studies, and Augustine's early Christianity.

Jean-Luc Marion is Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Professor of Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne), and a member of the Acad?mie Fran?aise. Among his books to have been translated into English areBeing Given(Stanford, 2002) andThe Crossing of the Visible(Stanford, 2004).In the Self's Placeis a phenomenological reading of Augustine that engages with modern and postmodern analyses of Augustinian philosophy. Jean-Luc Marion's new book is a feast that should be savored by anyone with an interest in either the thought of Saint Augustine or in Marion's phenomenological philosophy . . . I think it would be difficult to speak too highly of Marion's achievement in this book . . .In the Self's Placeis a landmark, advancing every position which it touches. In the Self's Placeis astounding in its rigor both in terms of its uselD