Abstract

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine narrates the intense struggle of a self divided and dissociated from itself in the throes of becoming other than what it is. His attempts at conversion and self-transformation involve a struggle with his habituated self; his habits, ever resistant to change, impede his becoming. Insofar as Augustine disavows the significance of his self ’s multiplicity to enabling his capacity to convert, he comes short of providing us with an account of the self ’s capacity for change. It is on this point that reading Confessions with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the body without organs” (a term that describes creative experimentation with forms of life and subjectivity) helps deepen our insights into the self ’s becoming. Such a minor reading of Confessions can be achieved by extracting the concept of “formless matter” (a term Augustine uses to designate the primacy of the capacity for mutability in creation) from his reading of Genesis in order to bring it to bear on thinking through the work of the self that enables his capacity for conversion. Beneath the theological account that privileges heaven, because of its changeless “cleaving to God,” over the ever-transient creatures of the earth, there lies an ontological account wherein formless matter, the capacity to change, plays a pivotal role in ethical becoming and capacitation. In his process of conversion, Augustine breaks his habituated patterns of sensing and makes himself into a “body without organs” in order to be capacitated by alterity, and in so doing enables a becoming different that takes place with and through difference.