God

Who Can I Fuck?

Simon Critchley
In Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine describes himself as ‘still tightly bound by the love of women’, which he describes as his ‘old will’, his carnal desire. This will conflicts with his ‘new will’, namely his spiritual desire to turn to God. Alluding to and extending St Paul’s line of thought in Romans, Augustine describes himself as having ‘two wills’, the law of sin in the flesh and the law of spirit turned towards God. Paralyzed by this conflict and unable to commit himself completely to God, these two wills lay waste Augustine’s soul. He waits, hesitates, and hates himself. Seeing himself from outside himself, from the standpoint of God, Augustine is brought face-to-face with his self and sees how foul he is, ‘how covered with stains and sores’. He continues, ‘I looked, and I was filled with horror, but there was no place for me to flee away from myself’.

Such is the fatal circuit of what Michel Foucault calls the Christian hermeneutics of desire opposed to the pagan aesthetics of existence. In a seminar at New York University in 1980, Foucault is reported to have said that the difference between late antiquity and early Christianity might be reduced to the following questions: the patrician pagan asks, “Given that I am who I am, who can I fuck?” The Christian asks, “Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?” Foucault’s insight is profound, but let me state categorically and without a trace of irony that, as a committed atheist, I side with the deep hermeneutics of Christian subjectivity against the superficial pagan aesthetics of existence. The question of the being of being human - who am I? - that begins with Paul and is profoundly deepened by Augustine arises in the sight of God. The problem is how that question survives God’s death. This is Rousseau’s question in his Confessions, it is Nietzsche’s question in Ecce Homo, and it is Heidegger’s question in Being and Time. In my less humble moments, I think of it as my question as well. Whether or not he exists, we are slaves to God.

Copyright © 2009 Simon Critchley

In September 2008, Simon Critchley inaugurated the How to Live project with a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. The above is an exclusive extract from a new project. In 2010 Simon will be touring the UK (with Shahidha and Nemonie) in the new How to Live Ambulance. An appointment register for the Open Heart Surgery will be available soon.

Simon Critchley is chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently at work on two new projects: one on the faith of the faithless, and one on being inauthentic.

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