Breached Horizons: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion 1786605341, 9781786605344

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Breached Horizons

Breached Horizons The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion

Edited by Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, and Steve G. Lofts

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson and Steve G. Lofts All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:

HB 978-1-7866-0534-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 978-1-78660-534-4 (cloth) 978-1-78660-535-1 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Abbreviations of Primary Works by Jean-Luc Marion Editor’s Introduction: Traversing the Beyond with Jean-Luc Marion Rachel Bath and Kathryn Lawson

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 1 How Marion Gives Himself Kevin Hart

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 2 The Question of the Reduction Jean-Luc Marion

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PART I:  REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST

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 3 Amor et Memoria51 Ugo Perone  4 Givenness, Grace, and Marion’s Augustinianism Felix Ó Murchadha

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 5 Ways of Being Given: Investigating the Bounds of Givenness through Marion and Husserl Pierre-Jean Renaudie

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 6 On the Threshold of Distance: The Origins of the Gift-Question in Marion Ryan Coyne

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Contents

PART II:  PRESENT OPENINGS

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 7 Reading Textual Dramatics: Marion, Levinas, and the Interplay of Affection and Reason Stephen E. Lewis

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 8 The Moving Icon: Critically Seeking the Aesthetic in Marion and Finding a Phenomenological Alternative with Husserl Jodie McNeilly

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 9 Love without Bodies Cassandra Falke

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10 “As an Orpheus of Phenomenality . . .” Kevin Hart

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PART III: BREACHING FUTURE HORIZONS

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11 Discovering Human Insufficiency with Marion: From Vanity to Weakness of Will Jennifer Rosato

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12 Marion’s Spirituality of Adoration and Its Implications for a Phenomenology of Religion Christina M. Gschwandtner

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13 From Negative Theology to Hermeneutics: Marion as Interpreter of Saint Paul Claudio Tarditi

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14 An Excess of Happiness: The Approach of Marion Jeffrey L. Kosky

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15 Flight from the Flesh: Freud’s Id and Ego as Saturated Phenomena252 Brian Becker Index269 About the Contributors

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Abbreviations of Primary Works by Jean-Luc Marion

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Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. BS Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. CN Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset, 2010. CNV Ce que nous voyons et ce qui apparaît, overture de François Soulages. Brysur-Marne: INA Éditions, 2015. COV The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. CQ Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky, John Cottingham, and Stephen Voss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. CV Le croire pour le voir. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2010. DI “D’autrui à l’individu.” In Emmanuel Levinas, Positivité et transcendance, suivi d’Études sur Levinas et la phénoménologie. Edited by Jean-Luc Marion. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000. DMP On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. DS De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001. DSE Dieu sans l’être: Hors-texte. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1982. ED Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.

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EG

Abbreviations of Primary Works by Jean-Luc Marion

On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. EP The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. FP Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida. Paris: J. Vrin, 2012. GH Givenness and Hermeneutics. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lafouge. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2012. GP “The Gift of a Presence.” In Prolegomena to Charity, 124–152. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. GWB God without Being: Hors-texte. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. IA “L’intentionalité de l’amour.” In Prolégomènes à la charité. Paris: La Différence, 1986. IAD The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. ID L’idole et la distance. Paris: Grasset, 1977. IE In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Vincent Berraud and Robyn Horner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. IM “The Impossible for Man—God.” In Transcendence and Beyond. Edited by John Caputo and Michael Scanlon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. ITN “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology.’ ” In God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, 20–41. Edited by John D. Caputo and M.J. Scanlon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. LS Au lieu de soi: l’approche de Saint Augustine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008. MM “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing,” in The Journal of Religion (2005): 1–24. MP “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology.” Translated by Thomas A. Carlson, in Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4 (1994): 572–591. NC Negative Certainties. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. NIO “Note sur l’indifférence ontologique.” In Emmanuel Levinas. L’éthique comme philosophie première. Edited by J. Greisch and J. Rolland. Paris: Le Cerf, 1993. PC Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.



PE PG

Abbreviations of Primary Works by Jean-Luc Marion ix

Le phénomène érotique: six méditations. Paris: Grasset, 2003. “The Phenomenology of Givenness.” In Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology, 40–65. Edited by Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. PP Sur la pensée passive de Descartes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013. RAG Reduction and Givenness. Translated by Thomas Carlson. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998. RC La rigueur des choses: entretiens avec Dan Arbib. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. RD Réduction et Donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989. RG The Reason of the Gift. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. RML “Resting, Moving, Loving: The Access to the Self according to Saint Augustine,” in The Journal of Religion 91 (2011): 24–42. RT The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. SD Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981. SP In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. UR “Understanding Revelation: A Phenomenological Re-Appropriation,” Second of the Gifford Lectures: Unpublished, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZdIP0GOxs. VR The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. WS “What We See and What Appears.” Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. In Idol Anxiety. Edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, 152–168. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Editor’s Introduction: Traversing the Beyond with Jean-Luc Marion Rachel Bath and Kathryn Lawson

Hard and blue hangs the horizon In its perfect circle curled, While we teeter, swing and stagger, Shifting in a shifting world. One would think it had existence, This horizon form and stable, Lying like the sharp-cut edges Of a blue and cosmic table. Knowledge sometimes is a burden. I could wish I did not know What a sharp illusive circle We fling round us as we go.

—Eunice Tietjens, “Horizon at Sea,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse LV, VI (1940): 318.

The horizons that enfold us appear fixed, but this sense is ultimately illusory. If we take Eunice Tietjens’ poem as an example, when we gaze upon the ocean on a clear afternoon, we witness the horizonal line that acts as the boundary of our visual experience. There is a distinct edge where the sky touches the water. Despite its clarity, this contour can never be reached: if we sail out toward the horizon, it moves ever farther away. In all forms of horizons, there is always an excess beyond the reach of our perceptual capacities, our understanding, and our experience. In this light, the horizon is an illusion that is forever beyond our grasp. It marks the edge of one of many circles. Despite our practical knowledge of this 1

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illusion, there is an ever-so human appetite to somehow breach the horizons that bind us. To provide another literary example, in the opening of Moby-Dick, Melville claims that the sea is the cure for a drizzly November in the soul. We wonder, however, whether it is perhaps not the water that draws us, but the horizon that the sea occasions. The horizon is a source that calls, dares, beckons, soothes, taunts, and entices. It is the human condition to be enfolded within a horizon, but so too is it human desire to reach beyond, to breach the horizons that hold us. In this volume, we take up this notion of the “horizon” as our framework for examining Jean-Luc Marion’s thought. The concept of the horizon in its philosophical sense is one of the most central ideas of the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology uncovers the world as a horizon of experience that is fashioned by our social norms, expectations, and human psychology. In turn, phenomenology forms its own horizon within which all further phenomenological thought must unfold. We begin with the notion of a horizon—a breached horizon—because it opens our discussion onto the ways that Marion’s work moves between worlds and creates spaces where the horizons that constitute those worlds can be transcended. This volume situates Marion’s thought in some of its nearest horizons, including those of phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and theology, and it highlights the ways Marion’s work already transcends those horizons, as well as how novel applications of his thought can overcome disciplinary and thematic boundaries. Some of the contributions to this volume mine Marion’s ideas in order to present original and important applications of his thought to the study of art, literature, theology, philosophy, and psychology. Some cover Marion’s wider corpus, including later works such as The Erotic Phenomenon, Revelation and Givenness, and In the Self’s Place, all of which have been previously unaddressed in the Anglophone literature on Marion. Others consider the historical context of Marion’s thought, including the figures he converses with in his work, his place in and between various traditions of thought, and the way he has renewed the traditions he inherited. A careful reader of both Husserl and Heidegger, Marion’s thought has, over time, moved beyond the grounds cleared by his predecessors. For Marion, the horizon is a boundary, a limitation upon phenomena that excludes radically different or unforeseeable possibilities. Thus, Marion’s interest in the horizon exceeds the horizon as such and moves outward to that which defies, transcends, and breaches the horizon. While Marion and his readers note the perspective of one horizon and suggest other possible horizons, it is the liminal leap, the airborne moment between two worlds, in which Marion’s thought truly takes flight. It is here that we understand Marion to be bringing together the phenomenological tradition and the theological tradition. In



Editor’s Introduction 3

this regard, thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo are as present in Marion’s thought as are the phenomenologists. Adapting the notion of horizon to a givenness that is breached by an experience of excess known as God, Marion challenges the Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of horizon, ultimately breaching the horizon of phenomenological thought as it had been circumscribed. More forcefully, Marion returns to the phenomenological reduction an essentiality that Heidegger had challenged, but with the addition of an erotic reduction, Marion moves beyond Husserl. In the erotic reduction, we stand upon the shore asking, “Does anyone out there love me?” We make the leap as we bravely suspend ourselves over the abyss of loving another first, breaching the horizon of our own being by daringly asking ourselves, “Can I love first?” And, finally, we land upon the shore of a new horizon when we realize that another, namely, God, has always loved us first. For a successful erotic reduction, we must breach horizons of self, other, and world. The volume works on the premise that the richness, diversity, and farreaching extent of Marion’s thought must not only be seen from traditional disciplinary standpoints. Rather, Marion’s thought flourishes in liminal spaces between disciplines. Hence, to fully recognize the value of Marion’s work, we contend that it must also be viewed from the intersections of a variety of disciplines. In this way, the chapters of this volume maintain an acceptance of the significance and efficacy of Marion’s work while presenting unique analyses of Marion’s thought and its relevance to aspects of other fields of inquiry. Some of the chapters return to the past with an examination of the different trajectories of thought that have motivated Marion’s work, the relationship of Marion’s work to the history of Western thought, and Marion’s own intellectual history. Other chapters enter into the present instances in which his work already breaches the horizons established by his predecessors and the textual ways in which his thoughts can jump off the pages and into our lives. Finally, some chapters leap toward possible futures and the novel directions opened by the excess of his thought. This collection begins with Kevin Hart’s introduction to Marion’s phenomenological thought. Hart explains Marion’s thinking alongside a general discussion of the foundational question of phenomenology itself: “How? How do things give themselves to us, and how do we receive them?” He elaborates Husserl and Heidegger’s place in the phenomenological tradition in terms of the way they relate to this foundational question, and then introduces Marion as a thinker who has learned from both philosophers and who has in turn opened phenomenology toward a new direction. In this way, Hart suggests that Marion’s work on the “saturated phenomena” is what radically opened phenomenology toward this novel direction. Asking “How?” of Marion in relation to the heritage of phenomenology, Hart illustrates three

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key features of Marion’s thought. First, Marion refuses to allow being to be the endpoint of reduction. Second, Marion reorients phenomenology toward absolute givenness, enabling it to be a study of that which is prior to both being and beings. And, third, Marion underscores the importance of the reduction while also modifying it. This historical contextualization of Marion’s intellectual background situates the work that is to come in later chapters by way of shoring up Marion’s renewal of the tradition he has inherited. Following Kevin Hart’s introduction to Marion’s thought is a chapter by Jean-Luc Marion himself. His chapter addresses the question of the reduction in the phenomenological method, specifically Michel Henry’s formulation of the fourth principle of phenomenology. Henry discards the principle “as much reduction, as much givenness” based upon its implication of the structure of call and response. This is because the formal structure of call and response repeats the gap of the intentional ecstasy. In contradistinction, Marion shows that call and response liberate the gap of intentional ecstasy because the call is paradoxically always already given but not yet rendered into a phenomenon, and the response constitutes the phenomenon of the call after the fact. Marion’s contribution here demonstrates the way he is already overcoming the classical horizons of phenomenology. In doing so, he is opening phenomenology toward fields of possibilities that were previously withheld. After these introductory chapters, the subsequent works are divided into three sections. In the first section, “Reflections on the Past,” we look at Marion’s place in the history of philosophy and his intellectual history. In the second section, “Present Openings,” we consider how Marion’s work can move from a textual exercise to a way of informing lived experience through reflection upon the boundaries constituted by our horizon. In the third section, “Breaching Future Horizons,” we turn to new directions in which Marion’s thoughts can be guided and to novel applications of his ideas. Situating Marion in the history of philosophy presents us with the opportunity to better understand where he can take us in the future and how he can affect us in the present. The same is true of the chapters that push us to reexamine and reorient our own lived experience by means of going beyond present boundaries, for they also help us see links to other experiences of philosophy in the past and give us the courage to leap into his future thought. REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST This first series of chapters situate Marion in the history of philosophy and offer a grounding in the philosophical and theological past that has created the foundation of Marion’s work. We must not be deceived by the historical



Editor’s Introduction 5

nature of these thinkers: each chapter offers a new interpretation of how Marion is situated in Western thought and inevitably offers the reader genuine moments of openness and natality in the return to the past. From Plato to Descartes, and from Augustine to Husserl and Levinas, these chapters seek the convergence of philosophy and theology as they situate Marion’s work in the canon by utilizing new interpretations to hold open the past. We begin this section with a sweeping overview of the philosophical tradition in Ugo Perone’s chapter Amor et Memoria. Perone traces the relationship between love and memory as it has developed over the course of the history of Western philosophy in order to reveal how modern secularization has altered the meaning of both. In the history of philosophy, love and memory are viewed as intertwined: we see this in Plato as well as in Plotinus and Augustine. Modernity, from Descartes onward, challenges this intimate connection. The interruption of continuity caused by secularization has resulted in the need for religion to rethink the unity of love and memory, for the classical model is no longer tenable. In response to this problem, Perone argues that Marion has reconceived love from a phenomenological viewpoint. This chapter, which takes a hermeneutic approach to the question of love and memory in modernity, attempts to sketch an account that focuses on memory. With hermeneutics, we mend the torn fabric of time by way of expressing risky interpretations which are open to being tested as successes or failures in our lived experience. For Perone, then, it is memory as interpretation that can encounter the love that transcendentally supports knowing. For Felix Ó Murchadha, the movement beyond metaphysics happens with the merger of philosophy and theology through Marion and Augustine. In “Givenness, Grace, and Marion’s Augustinianism,” Ó Murchadha posits Augustinian grace as the central point of exploration in Marion, even though he admits that it is not always acknowledged as such. Ó Murchadha suggests that Marion engages in an Augustinian critique of the “capable ego” from Descartes to Kant. In order to support this claim, Ó Murchadha calls upon the second epigraph in the English edition of The Erotic Phenomenon, which is the Augustinian quote: nemo est qui non amet (“there is no one who does not love”). As the recipient of potential grace, Marion’s gifted ego displaces the capable ego. The freedom of the gifted is a leap of faith which loves but which also requires the grace of a divine command in order to rationally do so. From this perspective, the phenomenology of givenness, as Marion accounts for it, ultimately depends on the Augustinian logic of grace. Through an openness toward the rationality of the Augustinian God’s grace and not through one’s own assertion of rationality upon God’s grace, philosophy reaches its theological fulfilment and the difference of philosophy and theology dissolves. Ó Murchadha hence shows us Marion’s deep connection with and radical rethinking of his predecessor, Augustine.

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In “Ways of Being Given,” Pierre-Jean Renaudie looks at Marion’s philosophical engagement with Husserl and argues that Marion must rethink this “conversation.” Marion claims that Husserl’s categorial intuition achieves an expansion of the intuition as well as a broadening of givenness as such, which brings legitimacy to the third reduction, therein providing the foundation for Marion’s phenomenology. However, Renaudie’s chapter critically argues that Marion misses an important aspect of Husserl’s phenomenological breakthrough and that there is a more interesting concept of the given within Husserlian thought. Renaudie argues that Husserl offers an original intuitive fulfilment wherein the given extends beyond givenness, but he simultaneously maintains a classic notion of the given, which is grounded in sensibility. Hence, it is the given, and not givenness, which makes up the horizon of phenomenality. Interested in the conceptual origins of the gift-question, Ryan Coyne maintains that Marion relates this question to the absolute distance between the “I” and the source of its vitality. In his chapter “On the Threshold of Distance,” however, Coyne notes the absence of a specific term to link the gift-question and distance. Coyne suggests that a displaced notion of “Levinasian paternity” can fill this absence. Through the Levinasian notion of paternity, Coyne suggests that we can acknowledge the crucifixion of Christ as the hidden ground for the Nietzschean death of God, and the end of metaphysics. In questioning the gift, then, Marion takes on a Levinasian vision of philosophy that takes questions of religion to be an important part of philosophy itself, and not belonging to the separate field of theology. Similar to Ó Murchadha, that which is beyond metaphysics, for Coyne, is reached by blurring the lines of the lines between theology and philosophy, and it is Marion’s rethinking of his intellectual predecessors that brings this intimate connection to light. PRESENT OPENINGS In this second section, we turn to chapters that show how Marion already breaches classical horizons, allowing us to move from the text of Marion’s philosophy to a reexamination of our lived experience. After all, the epoché is essentially a method for moving beyond our intellectual theories to an actual experience of the phenomena. We must not forget that this is the goal of phenomenology and Marion is no exception. These chapters challenge us to go with Marion beyond ourselves and beyond our boundaries. We have the opportunity through these chapters to examine our own lived experience in light of Marion’s work as it is showcased in discussions of art, literature,



Editor’s Introduction 7

and religion. In this section, the reader is asked to reflect upon the boundaries constituted by their present horizon. Stephen E. Lewis examines the philosophical engagement of Marion with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in “Reading Textual Dramatics.” Lewis goes a step beyond the “conversation” between Marion and Levinas by considering the comparative dramatics that both thinkers have with their readers. In other words, Lewis reads Marion and Levinas in a way that takes the affective impact of their texts seriously. He focuses on how each thinker wrests an emotional reaction from the reader and, through that reaction, stages a philosophical drama. The reader is not an audience member objectively observing the production but an actor in the production who contributes both affection and reason. Each in their own way, the philosophies of Levinas and Marion engage the reader in a dramatic movement from being to that which is beyond being. Lewis argues that the inclusion of the reader in the conversation yields insights that bring clarity to the assumptions and aims operating in each thinker’s work. Thus, while Lewis offers us insight into the conversation between Levinas and Marion, it is ultimately the conversation with the reader that Lewis brings to the fore in his chapter. In this way, we are challenged to consider actively our engagements in the philosophy we read and to reflect upon what those engagements evoke. In “The Moving Icon,” Jodie McNeilly explores the place of God in art through an investigation of the icon in the work of Marion. Calling upon Marion’s treatment of the visual arts, McNeilly argues that the icon is ultimately grounded, not in Marion’s phenomenological work, but in his theological authority of scripture. McNeilly notes that Marion participates in an aesthetic argument to account for the icon and that this mode of neutralized belief provides a phenomenological discussion of the idol within the philosophy of religion. However, it is only via a return to the experiences of the faithful, as set out in scriptural authority, that the experience of veneration can be described and the icon wholly accounted for in Marion’s work. Here, McNeilly reminds us that experience of the scriptures in the present moment is a condition for the possibility of grasping Marion’s phenomenology of the icon. Following Marion’s distinction between the flesh as the house of lived experience and the body as the mere existence of the physical form, in “Love without Bodies” Cassandra Falke aims to show how our love of works of art relates to our love of people. Of course, works of art are not persons; they cannot be killed, and they cannot invoke ethical responsibility because they do not have flesh. And yet, we can make love to both books and people. In terms of the erotic reduction, because books cannot abandon themselves to love as can people, and their body is separated from flesh as can never be the

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case with a person, this means that reading literature can move us to the first stage; we have made the lover’s advance, and we have committed ourselves to loving first and to being open to the unpredictability of our beloved. With a book, we can begin the erotic reduction; the erotic reduction cannot, however, be fulfilled because a book lacks flesh and cannot give itself. Yet, by entering us into the erotic reduction, a book gestures beyond itself toward the embodied beloveds through whom we discover ourselves in-the-flesh. As the reader engages in Falke’s argument for the power of the text to act as a catalyst toward love, we are called to experience this very process through Falke’s own text. In an Orphic incantation all his own, Kevin Hart explores a myriad of literature in his chapter “As an Orpheus of Phenomenality . . . .” Calling upon a variety of texts, he places Marion’s philosophy within this literature in order to explain and apply Marion’s thought. With a specific emphasis on poetry, Hart explores how Marion’s phenomenality is related to love. It is through careful attention to the saturated phenomenon that Marion allows the lover and the artist to be overcome with excess. Through lyric poetry, Hart notes that commonplace phenomena either break down or they appear as saturated phenomena. Similarly, the beloved appears as saturated phenomenon and is not merely seen in a commonplace manner. Thus, in the reading of poetry, one experiences the beloved as phenomenalized in love. Hart’s invocation of Marion’s concepts breaks down the boundaries between the phenomenality respectively embodied by philosophy and poetry. BREACHING FUTURE HORIZONS In this final section, Marion’s thought is projected along new and different paths. Some chapters reveal openings for Marion’s work that had not yet been discovered. Others present applications of his ideas to different fields of study, primarily psychology, in order to show how Marion’s work can overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries and offer novel perspectives on these different disciplines. In short, the authors in this section show us future directions for and novel applications of Marion’s work, orienting us toward a new way of doing philosophy with Marion. Jennifer Rosato places Marion into conversation with Augustine of Hippo in her chapter “Discovering Human Insufficiency with Marion.” For Marion, the discovery that the entirety of the world is mere vanity arises from boredom and leads to melancholy, but Rosato notes that Marion also calls upon a positive outcome from this experience. By revealing the insufficiency of our lives, vanity asks us to see that which truly matters: love. And it is love that gives our activity in the world meaning. Rosato argues that Marion’s



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description of Augustinian weakness of will in In Place of the Self is comparable to Marion’s own account of vanity, insofar as both are experiences of the human insufficiency that provokes us to recognize meaning as bestowed only via a gift of love. Vanity discovers that the horizon of being is insufficient and thus recognizes the need for a gift, if existence is to be bestowed with meaning. Rosato proposes that this parallel between Augustine and Marion not only helps us to appreciate the rich coherence of Marion’s thought but also suggests that there is more than just the negative path to the gift. Opening with examples of how boredom affects us in our day-to-day lives and textual evidence in both Augustine and Marion as to how we can find new methods of undergoing the erotic reduction, Rosato implores her reader to push open the possibilities of the reduction and allow new phenomenological methods of reduction to be born from this process of uncovering the gift. Christina M. Gschwandtner argues Marion’s oeuvre must be read under the new horizon of the spirituality of adoration. In “Marion’s Spirituality of Adoration and Its Implications for a Phenomenology of Religion,” Gschwandtner shows that Marion’s work has both “negative” and “positive” tenors. Negatively, Marion strives to protect the divine from an idolatrous naming that would subject the divine to human reason or that attributes the same kind of being to God as to other beings. Positively, Marion outlines a position of adoration that enables a different way of approaching the divine. The homo adorans’ reverential approach to the divine divests the self of its self and graces it with the capacity to respond to the gift of the divine other. This is the only proper response to Christ’s self-given sacrifice of self, when, willing to endure the cross, he emptied himself in order to take on our sin. Reading a spirituality of adoration across Marion’s oeuvre unifies otherwise disparate themes; it also connects Marion’s “theology of kenosis” with his phenomenology of givenness. The devotee’s active adoration of the divine is the emptying of the self, and this kenosis is the paradigm of the human being. The negative and positive tenors are thus complementary aspects of the devoted love that most essentially defines the homo adorans. In this way, Gschwandtner posits Marion’s work as a description of and invitation to a spirituality of adoration, or a new way of relating to and approaching the divine today and in the future. In the chapter “From Negative Theology to Hermeneutics,” Claudio Tarditi carefully reveals how Marion’s thought moves beyond the crisis of metaphysics by way of overcoming the ontotheological concept of God. Tarditi argues that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness operates toward this end, and is deeply influenced by Saint Paul’s letters. Pauline thought primarily informs Marion’s project of overcoming metaphysics and transcendental phenomenology in two ways: first, through the relation between human logos and the logos of god; and second, by way of the notion of invisibility. Indeed, it

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is through the letters of Paul that Tarditi gives us a new horizon for Marion’s thought. As a theoretical framework, the relation between human logos and the logos of God contributes a logic of givenness, which is unlike the rationality of metaphysics insofar as it is indifferent to ontological difference and crosses the difference between being and beings. This framework, in effect, opens ontological difference and provides the possibility of receiving the gift that delivers being. Pauline thought also contributes a notion of invisibility that enables the overcoming of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology by way of demonstrating a radically different way of gazing upon objects, one that allows the gifted to receive the image as the highly saturated icon. Removed from its theological context, this framework suggests that the experience of otherness is conceived most radically as infinite invisibility, and that preserving the radical alterity of the other by not constituting them in full visibility overcomes transcendental phenomenology. In “An Excess of Happiness,” Jeffrey L. Kosky elucidates a possible role and place for happiness in Marion’s philosophy. Kosky argues that the instances of happiness in The Erotic Phenomenon include the phenomenon of the happy idiot, which is the happiness of the other, and the phenomenon of happy love, which is the happiness of the egoic “I” that gets back from love what the “I” has put into it. These forms of happiness have no place in erotic truth. Happy love is a “calculated business affair” that is not true love, and the happiness of the happy idiot is revealed as an illusion. Nonetheless, Kosky proposes that the erotic reduction provides an excess of happiness. In Being Given, excessive happiness is described as a saturated phenomenon that is shown in the receiver’s response, a response that phenomenalizes what is given. In other words, in the erotic truth, “I” appears along with what is given. Drawing upon the example of Rimbaud’s joyful swoon at the dawn of summer, Kosky demonstrates how happiness is unbearably excessive, and that this unbearability is expressed as a swoon that delimits the self as insufficient in the face of excessive joy. In contrast, Augustine’s confession describes the movement toward beatitude, a form of excessive happiness, by way of confessing his insufficiency at responding adequately to what is given. In this way, Augustine maintains himself as his own insufficiency in the erotic truth. Moving beyond the egoic reduction to the erotic reduction thus shows how happiness is a saturated phenomenon that gives way to a lover who desires and who is given to herself in the excess of happiness. By revealing the place of and for happiness in Marion’s work, Kosky provides openings for future elaborations of happiness by Marion or those who draw on his ideas. Finally, this section concludes with a chapter that breaches the horizon between phenomenology and psychology. In his chapter “Flight from the Flesh,” Brian Becker argues for rethinking the Freudian psyche in terms of an interplay of saturated phenomena in order to free the psyche from its



Editor’s Introduction 11

imprisonment within a Kantian metaphysics. Becker argues that Freud’s most provocative insight was that the unrepresentable unconscious is the unthinkable par excellence. He further alleges that by positing the dual-instinct theory of the life and death drives, Freud backed away from this insight, for the a priori drives render intelligible the “unthinkable” content of the unconscious. From this philosophical contradiction emerges a psyche that is firmly trapped within metaphysics. This psyche is an example of a poor or common phenomenon, which reinforces the classical metaphysical subject. In order to regain the unknowability of the psyche that gives itself as excess, Becker rethinks the fundamental Freudian categories of the id, the life and death drives, and the ego in terms of Marion’s paradigms of saturated phenomena, the flesh, the event, and the idol. First, the invisible unconscious id, figured in terms of overwhelming excess, is rethought as flesh. Next, Becker supplants the causality of the dual-drive theory with their phenomenality by way of figuring the life drive as birth event, and the death drive as death event. Birth and death are saturated events that define the unfolding of the flesh which houses them. Flesh transitions to body through the resistant encounter with the other, just as the Freudian ego is born from the pain of the parent’s first resistance to the child, the first “No.” This original ego is bodily and excessively visible, unlike the excessive invisibility of the flesh. Thinking this transition by way of the paradigm of the idol, the ego is seen to relate to the invisible flesh by way of its being framed as a body, to the extent that what is encountered is not flesh but the body. We flee from our flesh, from its vulnerability to suffering, and idolize the body-ego in order to protect the psyche, to the extent that the id as invisible flesh makes us unknowable to ourselves and the ego as idol bedazzles us and leaves us unaware of our unknowability. Rethinking the psyche in this way shows that it is a saturated phenomenon, one which constitutes a subject unlike the classical metaphysical subject. CONCLUSION We return to the opening lines of our introduction in which we invited you to consider the image of the visible horizon. While all thought develops within a horizon, it will become clear through the explorations undertaken in these chapters that no horizon is so absolutely fixed that it is unbreachable. The human urge to grasp after the unknown, to chase after the horizon always beyond our reach, is transformed into the overcoming of a traditional paradigm of thought through an understanding of the past, an opening in the present, and a leap into the future. The chapters of this collection were initially presented at the 2015 conference Breached Horizons: The Work of Jean-Luc Marion. This conference

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was hosted by the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy and the Centre for Advanced Research in Catholic Thought, both housed at King’s University College at Western University. We would like to extend our warmest gratitude to King’s University College and St. Peter’s Seminary for the hospitality and support. We also thank Oxford University Press for their generous permission to use the poetry of Geoffrey Hill in this collection. The spirit of this volume has taken seriously the aim of the 2015 conference, which was to enable cross-cultural and interdisciplinary discussions about the work of Marion insofar as it has transformed various disciplines and breached traditional horizons. We are grateful to the authors who participated in this conference and who have contributed their work to this volume. We would like to extend our thanks to these contributors, for they have shown us how thinking alongside the radical thought of Marion can reveal how the horizons that constitute our worlds may be overcome. It is in the spirit of these thinkers that we encourage the reader to use this collection not only to gain increased scholarly insight into Marion’s work but to also breach their own horizons.

Chapter 1

How Marion Gives Himself Kevin Hart

It is a pleasure and an honor to introduce Jean-Luc Marion: an honor because he is one of the most eminent living philosophers, and a pleasure because he and I have been friends for a good number of years. Yet the task of introducing him, to say a little about his life and works, is not an easy one. In modern philosophy, especially in phenomenology, we often hew to a genre that gives a negative slant to the sort of thing I have been asked to do. We all remember the story of Martin Heidegger beginning a series of lectures on Aristotle in 1924 by telling his students, “Aristotle was born, worked, and died,” and perhaps we also recall Maurice Blanchot in L’Écriture du désastre (1980), doubtless reflecting on Heidegger’s line and taking it further, noting, “The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.”1 If this erasure of life were not enough to depress us all, there is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who finds himself truly able to speak of Husserl only when he has become “transcendental” and when he is “disencumbered of his life.”2 And there is also Jacques Derrida, whose entire work might be understood as saying, again and again, that even in the midst of life we are always and already mourning the Other and indeed ourselves: the proper name and the signature do nothing but bear witness to a death that is to come. The structure of life is survival in the sense that only a trace remains.3 If one does not follow this rather dismal pattern of speaking of a philosopher’s “life and works” by annulling the life and even granting priority to death, there is always another genre that waits just behind it, offering considerable reassurance to the one who must speak: the venerable academic form of laudate, which invariably and rightly comes only after eminence has been achieved and which, even when delivered with the very best of intentions, details the writings of the person to be honored as essentially complete, as 13

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if the scholar being praised might say, as Paul once did to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”4 The person assigned the task of introducing the renowned scholar thereby does not do what is strictly asked of him or her, namely, lead the scholar in so that his or her work may be discussed but rather, with an expansive smile, leads him very clearly out. In effect a laudate says that the scholar’s books have become a nest from which he or she is soon to take flight, and that before long his readers and admirers will be free to settle themselves in that same nest as comfortably as they can. There is always a recess deep in a scholar’s mind where we agree, secretly or not, with Schleiermacher’s view that our task is to understand an author’s texts even better than he or she has done.5 And some people can be so eager to begin the job of improving on the eminent scholar’s self-understanding that his or her empirical presence is no more than an annoying impediment to their work. I wish to resist the usual genres that suggest themselves, and take my cue from something else that Heidegger said when lecturing on Aristotle: “Life is a how.”6 This unassuming remark abides at the foundation of all phenomenology, no matter to which school or faction of it one belongs. The great irruption in thought that is phenomenology is at heart a very simple one. It consists of acknowledging the authority of the two great questions that have dominated Western thought—“What?” and “Why?”—and then shifting to a third question that has been sidelined, “How?” In the morning of our philosophical lives, when we first read Plato or Aristotle, we are often blinded by the sheer force and power of those first two questions. We relish how Plato’s Socrates discomposes his interlocutors in Athens by persistently asking, “What is . . .?,” and we see just how far he can get in sticking to that question. And we also follow, with admiration, Aristotle when, in considering logic or being or the generation of animals, he asks the question “Why?” and in doing so initiates so much of the spirit of science that shapes our world today. Yet Husserl taught us to attend to a third question, one that does not deny the necessity of the first two but that opens up an infinite, new realm of investigation: how things give themselves to us and how we receive them. (Gegenstände im Wie is Husserl’s memorable expression, penned sometime over the period 1905–1910.7) It is Husserl who draws our attention to the transcendental aspect of consciousness, to how we constitute phenomena—make them present to ourselves—in particular ways; and it is Husserl, we also need to recall, who stresses that this consciousness is embodied. Phenomena not only have a genitive aspect, a manifestation of, but also a dative aspect, a manifestation to.8 With great patience, Husserl draws our attention to the many ways in which phenomena give themselves to us: in perception, to be sure, yet also in thought, anticipation, memory, phantasy, schematization, and so on.



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So when the young Heidegger begins teaching and writing he too is guided by the question “How?” He follows Husserl, in the sixth of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), in seeing how being is given, namely, in categorial intuition, and he develops the idea when Husserl loses faith in it. Indeed, Heidegger proposes a stripped-down phenomenology, one without eidetic vision and ever more finely distinguished reductions. Husserl had already shown that there is no firm line between subject and object, since the intentional structure of consciousness crosses that line perpetually. It is one of Heidegger’s achievements that he deformalizes this insight, demotes the theoretical role of the gaze, and speaks instead of coping in the world. He insists that there is no division between psychic and bodily acts. As he says, “The primary being-there-function of bodiliness secures the ground for the full being of human beings.”9 With the rethinking of the subject by way of Dasein, that structure of doors and windows (as Jean-Yves Lacoste observes so well), Heidegger also rethinks the very nature of phenomenality.10 It is a pity that “phenomenality” is such an ugly word, since it names something very beautiful: the movement of self-manifestation, which is never without a “how.” With Heidegger, no longer is phenomenality a matter of something shared between the transcendent and the immanent, as it is for Husserl, but it is entirely coordinate with the phenomenon itself. For as we are told in Sein und Zeit (1927) the word “phenomenology” means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”11 It follows from Heidegger’s revision of phenomenology that reduction can be no more than a movement from beings to being; and accordingly τὰ ϕαινóμενα are τὰ ὄντα when the latter answer to the question “How?” instead of to the questions “What?” and “Why?”12 Now Marion has learned a great deal from both Husserl and Heidegger, including how to disagree with each of them in such a way as to open phenomenology in fresh directions. He learned, for one thing, to prize Heidegger’s rethinking of phenomenality; and he learned, for another thing, not to allow being to be the inevitable endpoint of the reduction. If he appears, in his first writings, as a thoroughgoing Heideggerian, setting the thinker’s insights against his conclusions, so that God is not viewed through the lens of “being,” no matter how it is conceived, he comes, by the time of Reduction and Givenness (1989), to learn true radicalism from Husserl, especially from the author of The Idea of Phenomenology (1907). He learns to recognize the authentic heritage of phenomenology as the study of absolute givenness, which is prior to both beings and being. This brief reflection gives us a preliminary sense of how to ask the question “How?” of Marion: How does he negotiate the heritage of phenomenology and, in particular, how does he read, balance, and offset its greatest two practitioners, Husserl and Heidegger?

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I shall come back to these questions in a moment, but before I turn to them I want to point out something else about the outbreak of phenomenology at the start of the past century. We think, correctly, that phenomenology opened up new paths for thought in the twentieth century and continues to do the same in our own day. Perhaps we also think—correctly again, I would say—that phenomenology is remarkable for its flexibility, almost its elasticity. It has an impressive ability to remake and relaunch itself from unsuspected positions; and it is noteworthy that it is so flexible that later practitioners can jettison concepts and protocols that were central to its founder. Heidegger reformulates reduction, and perhaps was never a true believer in it in any case; Merleau-Ponty thinks that reduction must be partial; Henry rethinks phenomenology so thoroughly that the essence of manifestation is to be found in non-intentional ὕλη, thereby rendering transcendental reduction no more than eidetic reduction; and Levinas regards reduction as antiphenomenological, a matter of theory rather than attention to the concrete phenomenon.13 Yet at the same time that phenomenology opened new paths into the future it also, as it were, set ripples going in the past. Heidegger begins to read Aristotle in the 1920s, and when he does so, he finds that the Stagirite is talking of phenomena; he looks into medieval mysticism and elucidates it by way of phenomenology; and he begins to read the letters of Paul and uses the new philosophy to do so. Phenomenology did not at first call for a hermeneutics; it already was one. Of course, the ripples that Heidegger started to detect in ancient Greece could be found outside philosophy itself. Soon it became possible to recognize that painters and poets were also doing phenomenology, and perhaps doing it better than the philosophers. If you really want to see in what ways life is a how, read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or look at canvases by Bruegel the Elder, Poussin, Cézanne, or listen for a while to Bach, Hayden, or Son House. Philosophers are drawn to the theory of phenomenology, while poets and painters and singers are attracted to doing it, at least in part, usually without having had the slightest tuition on how to do so. Or, if you prefer, philosophers seek to fill the logical space of reasons while poets and painters populate the formal space of experience. Assuredly, in order to discern that orientation one has to approach the painters and poets and musicians in a phenomenological manner. Phenomenology is not done just the once, and it is not only ever done on that which has never before been subject to the gaze. It is a great merit of Marion that not only has he engaged with the theory of phenomenology but he also has paid close attention to the visual arts as sites where phenomenality is most intense as well as to one of the most piercing narratives that the West has produced, Augustine’s Confessions.



How Marion Gives Himself 17

I promised to return to the questions of how Marion negotiates the heritage of phenomenology and, in particular, the diverse patrimonies of Husserl and Heidegger. The first thing that needs to be said is that Marion took many years of preparation before asking the question “How?” He started out as a historian of philosophy, specializing in seventeenth-century French philosophy, primarily Descartes and Pascal, and he has never let that thread fall from his hands. One of his most recent works is Sur la pensée passive de Descartes (2013), and it is testimony that he remains one of the most exacting and vibrant scholars of Descartes alive today. Even in his early scholarly work, however, he was already informed by Heidegger’s account of metaphysics as having an ontotheological constitution; and so we find Descartes read through a Heideggerian lens so as to expose a theology that was never actually written by the French philosopher and to see how metaphysics, as diagnosed by Heidegger, structured Descartes’ notions of God and the soul, and how Pascal gives us a clue how to escape from those notions. We also find, over the same early period, Marion engaging in Christian theology from a phenomenological perspective. Unlike many young French philosophers, including Catholic philosophers, Marion gave himself a rigorous schooling in the Fathers, both Eastern and Western, and their writings— spiritual as well as dogmatic—informed his early essays in theology. Much of what goes on in his early writing is nicely condensed in the very title of one of his books: Dieu sans l’être (1982). It is translated as God without Being, which is inevitable in English; but it also means “God without having to be God”: God is free to determine himself how he wishes, as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite indicates at the very end of the Mystical Theology. God is free to give himself to us as love, and is not obliged to come into focus through the lens of being, whether it be the “being of beings” or even what Heidegger came to call Seyn, a non-metaphysical understanding of being. At the same time, if one listens closely, Dieu sans l’être means “God without letters,” in other words “God outside the text.” The homophone was to provoke a sharp reaction from Derrida in his account of apophatic theology, “Comment ne pas parler,” which Marion was to rejoin in later work, “Au nom ou comment le taire.”14 The reception of Marion in the English-speaking world started, for the most part, as a reception of Derrida and Marion in dialogue with one another. “Life is a how,” says Heidegger; but we know that Heidegger always seeks to determine life as being; and Marion’s work comes into focus when we see him resisting this very move. For him, it is the divine life without reference to being that is primary; and in a later work, Le phénomène érotique (2003), it is love without being that draws his attention. Now Marion is certainly not saying that God does not exist or that there is no such thing as love. On the

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contrary, he affirms that God is and that there is love. His point is that we begin to understand God and love, along with other things, only when we attend to the primacy of their self-givenness. Phenomenology has always been a philosophy that is committed to the “things themselves,” and in a very particular manner, by way of concretion.15 Something becomes concrete in phenomenology not when we can find a particular example of it but, rather, when we can describe a definite situation in which an abstraction has meaning. “God” is the most abstract of all abstractions—He is “distant, difficult,” as Geoffrey Hill has Ovid say in a poem—but when Jesus taught the parables God became concrete for his listeners.16 When Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” that lofty abstraction, divine sovereignty, becomes urgent in its meaning by force of the verb.17 Examples can be multiplied without end, in literature, the visual arts, everywhere. For phenomenology has no limit. There is a moment in the life of any phenomenologist when one suddenly begins to do it and not merely talk about it. How one begins to do phenomenology is always singular. For Marion, there was a partial engagement in his earlier theological writings, yet this was still a matter of applying insights developed by others and raising the stakes somewhat. In truth, Marion became a phenomenologist only after turning to document its history. This is in Reduction and Givenness, and what Marion found in writing that book is that Husserl had retreated from his own best insights. Reduction became limited, especially in Ideas I (1913), to a passage in which objects are brought from transcendence to immanence, and, as we have already noticed, although Heidegger extended reduction, so that it was from beings to being, the movement was not fully answerable to the insight that Husserl had presented in his lectures of 1907 in a course devoted to the theme of “Thing and Space.”18 The opening five lectures of that course are now published independently of what followed them as The Idea of Phenomenology, and it is there that Husserl figures the task of phenomenology as grasping “the meaning of the absolutely given, the absolute clarity of the given.”19 No student of Descartes could fail to be excited by this project. Yet it is not as a student of Descartes that Marion responded to Husserl’s first elaboration of the science of seeing. I like to think that Marion lingered over the fourth lecture of that series, especially over lines such as “Absolute givenness is an ultimate” and “to deny self-givenness in general is to deny every ultimate norm, every basic criterion which gives significance to cognition.”20 I suspect that, when reflecting on these lines, Marion started to think that the history of phenomenology had been a series of subtle, complex evasions of these bold statements. How did Marion enter phenomenology? By going back to Husserl’s grounding insights and by developing them in a fresh manner. Originality is not a matter of invention; it is a question of returning to origins in the right manner.



How Marion Gives Himself 19

In order for absolute givenness to be registered one must perform reduction to the very limit. Some phenomena give themselves absolutely without too much trouble: natural numbers, for example, exhaust their phenomenality in cognition. Yet most other phenomena call for more from us, their givenness is immense, and is kept within bounds, even by phenomenologists, by appeals to the governing role played by intentionality. If offered an opportunity, however, these phenomena do more than supply adequate fulfillment; they are more than adequate to an intentional rapport. Marion calls them “saturated phenomena,” and in Étant donné (1998) and beyond he has patiently elaborated his theory of them, of the four modes of saturation, and saturation to the second degree. Just recently, in his 2014 Gifford lectures, he devoted himself to a close analysis of saturation to the second degree in considering the theme of divine revelation. More generally, Marion has spoken in the register of phenomenological theory about the modes of saturation, and he has engaged them concretely. He has spoken of those moments of overwhelming fulfillment and other times of distressing disappointment; he has pointed us to how certain extreme events are saturated with intuition (e.g., the Transfiguration of Christ), and indicated how saturation is often banal: we can find it anywhere. Absolute givenness gives itself, more often than we had perhaps imagined, by way of saturation. Such is how Marion actually started to do phenomenology rather than to talk about it. The history of philosophy nourishes philosophy. Doubtless there is still a great deal to be done in amplifying this theory of saturation, and perhaps one day we shall look back and see that Marion’s work was far from being essentially complete in 2015, that there were original and important moves still to be made. To be sure, the idea of saturation calls for minute examination with regard to diverse phenomena; we need to study partial saturation, and saturation that occurs outside the realm of perception—in acts of the imagination, memory, and anticipation, for instance—and we need to explore the ways in which the theory of saturated phenomena can help not only theologians and biblical scholars but also literary critics and art critics in their labors. Some of these concerns have been voiced, and Marion has engaged his critics in debate. One long-standing discussion has been over the role of hermeneutics in a philosophy of absolute givenness. Those of us who grew up, partially at least, within analytical philosophy think of Wilfred Sellars’ criticisms of “the myth of the given” as one of the cornerstones of analytical philosophy, while those of us who grew up, again at least in part, within continental philosophy tend to think, with Heidegger, that interpretation has always already commenced.21 Marion has explained his thoughts on this set of issues, at least in a preliminary way. What shows itself first gives itself; but in order to show itself a phenomenon requires the attention of l’adonné, and that attention is hermeneutical all

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the way down.22 Not that it need be a hermeneutics of suspicion; it can be a hermeneutics of contemplation. Unquestionably, the attention in question here is not simply natural attention; it bespeaks reduction of one sort or another, whether that reduction is partial or complete. One’s gaze can be arrested by something that appears, but for something to appear there must be a degree of attention or openness. Reduction is always a duet. Marion has thought long and hard about reduction, and has given us a narrative in which it plays a central role: Husserl’s reduction of things to phenomena in experience, Heidegger’s reduction from beings to being, and his own reduction in counter-experience of everything to givenness. Yet it seems to me that we are barely at the start of thinking about reduction, of understanding what Eugen Fink had in mind when he spoke of the “awful tremor everyone experiences who actually passes through the phenomenological reduction.”23 That tremor is brought about by the realization that the world is being “de-absolutized” in the very act of reduction, that phenomena are being constituted, made present, in and through the conversion of the gaze. Doubtless there is a tremor also for those who practice reduction as formulated by Heidegger: fundamental attunements, such as the dread of death and deep boredom, strip away the patina of the world and leave us to reflect on being. To perform the third reduction, the one that brings us to givenness, cannot yield a tremor of the sort that Fink evokes, for l’adonné merely receives and does not constitute. If there is a tremor at all it is one that comes from being overwhelmed. It is every phenomenologist’s right to develop the reduction, and Marion has been more searching in this area than almost anyone else. The “third reduction” is certainly intriguing in its challenge to Heidegger’s reduction. Marion prizes deep boredom as the way to the third reduction, and this concerns me, since, with the exception of primary school, I have never been deeply bored and I wonder if therefore I am to be forever cut off from givenness. Surely there are other moods that quicken reduction: the tranquility that comes with contemplative prayer, for instance, can also dissolve one’s enthrallment with the world and open one to receive phenomena more fully than is usually the case. So I wonder whether the path to givenness must go only through the narrow gate of deep boredom. Yet Marion has also proposed what he calls “the erotic reduction,” which is triggered by asking the question “Does anyone out there love me?,” is radicalized by asking “Can I love first?,” and is completed with the realization “You have loved me first.” Exactly what relation there is, if any, between the third reduction and the erotic reduction is not entirely clear to me. Perhaps the feeling of not being loved generates boredom, but I would have thought that the more pervasive sense would be that of a deep-seated sadness. The originality of the erotic reduction abides



How Marion Gives Himself 21

in the claim that it comes from outside the self. Heidegger departed from the mental ἄσκησις that Husserl commended—a mood is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective, it “comes over you,” as we say—and Marion goes a step further: the erotic reduction leads one outside the self. Not wholly, though: to be sure, the erotic reduction calls into question the primacy of the Cartesian quest for epistemic certainty in the ego cogito, ego sum, but it does not challenge the fundamental orientation of reduction, from the outside to the inside, although that distinction is rendered more problematic. One task that Marion bequeaths to us to consider is the importance of reduction. Unlike Henry, Levinas, and Romano he does not jettison it but rather underlines its importance more firmly and more persistently, than one finds in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Derrida. We need to think about the reduction in fundamental ways: its strength, its origins, and its directions. One might wonder if all reductions are strong enough to lead one back to an appropriate state where one can respond to being or receive givenness. One might ask what constitutes the strength of a reduction. With regard to the origin of reduction, it makes sense to see reduction motivated in meditative and contemplative prayer. If so, does this make phenomenology into a “spiritual exercise,” however oblique or however attenuated? Again, one might well say, with reason, that every time a writer begins a poem or a story he or she performs reduction of some sort. As soon as Kafka wrote, “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K,” he had passed from the natural attitude, though maybe not to the phenomenological attitude.24 Perhaps, if Blanchot is correct, he had slid by way of an “infinite reduction” to a non-world in which image and being pass ceaselessly into each other.25 One might ponder whether reduction occurs in such a way that it leads not into consciousness or existential structures or the hermeneutical choices of l’adonné but rather back to a prior claim that is made on one, as I think happens when we pass from “world” to “Kingdom” when hearing the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth. For myself, I am less concerned to minimize the subject than to maximize the power of reduction. But I shall not expatiate on this theme. I have come to praise Marion, and in philosophy all deeply considered disagreement is indirect praise. It seems to me, as I reflect on Marion’s writings, that his work is greater than his books, which already give so much to us. His work expands far beyond the printed pages that he offers to us, and it opens up for us diverse futures, in which we repeatedly encounter the ways in which he deals with phenomena. I wonder about some things that he has not yet developed: not that all philosophers need to cover all of philosophy and produce a “system.” (We should be pleased that some philosophers never elaborated a system; we should be thankful, for instance, that Frege never gave us an ethics.) “Life is

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a how,” Heidegger said, if I may return to the burden of my theme; and it is worthwhile to reflect on what a phenomenological ethics, chez Marion, might look like: a discourse on values, on how we should live. Already we have some idea of what this might be with his work on “negative certainties,” his powerful insistence that “human beings” cannot be defined. To translate his rich book rather brutally into a sentence, one slanted to my own concerns: we are marked ineluctably by the imago dei. I shall offer no clues about a Marionite ethics here, let alone how he might develop a phenomenology of intersubjectivity on the basis of l’adonné, but simply say that there is an opportunity to engage in a debate over “intuitionist ethics” with, let’s say, Robert Audi in the United States (representing analytical philosophy) and Marion in France (representing phenomenology). Needless to say, perhaps, Marion jumps to love as a grand answer to moral problems; yet we might wonder if love, even ἀγάπη, tells the whole story of ethics; it may be “first ethics” (in the sense of “first philosophy”) but it may not be a decent guide to how to live concretely with other people. L’adonné is certainly not passive, but it would be a good thing to know in more detail how it can act in the world. Perhaps one day we shall have a fuller and better idea because we hope that Marion will tell us more, much more, about his ideas and pursue them for many years to come. You might say that I have said much more, indeed far more, about Marion’s works than his life, and that I have been bowing to Heidegger’s dictum on Aristotle with which I began even while saying that I do not wish to adhere to it. In defense of my orientation toward Marion’s works, I would like to say that the “how” that is Marion is given in a very particular way. For Marion is nothing if not an extremist. This means that he adheres very closely to a particular point of view, seldom accommodating other views, and in so doing is very different from Ricœur, on the one hand, who, if anything, sought to overcome disputes and find a reasonable via media, and who said, in essence “both-and,” and, on the other hand, from Derrida, who insisted on saying “neither-nor,” neither structuralism nor phenomenology, while, all the time, taking endless account of both positions and others that might impinge on the questions he poses. Ricœur and Derrida are reasonable men, each in his own way; and, in his own way, Marion seeks to be unreasonable, to affirm a principle of “insufficient reason,” and, more generally, to pursue a philosophical program in a single-minded manner.26 In his philosophical stance, he is close to Levinas and Henry, each of whom was nothing if not single-minded. I should perhaps say something about a third aspect of Marion’s extremism. It is this. His thought is marked in various ways by generosity: something ample, to be sure, something prolific, no doubt, and something liberal



How Marion Gives Himself 23

in its attention to such a wide range of topics. It is also, I would say, generous in the sense that it is strong in flavor. We speak of a “generous wine” and Marion might well be regarded as a “generous philosopher” in exactly that sense. If he gives us, finally, an understanding of “life without being,” it is not an evacuation of life but an affirmation of it: life given as fully as possible. NOTES 1 Hannah Arendt testifies to the anecdote. See Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004), 154. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 36. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. and intro. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160. 3 See Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” trans. James Hulbert, in Parages, ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 4 2 Timothy 4: 7 (Revised Standard Version). 5 See Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” New Literary History, 10, no. 1 (1978), 9. 6 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 16. 7 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 121. Henry cites this short sentence on several occasions. He would, of course, demur over the expression “purified experience,” since for him any reduction interrupts the flow of transcendental life. 8 Heidegger insists that manifestation for the Greeks was quite different. See: Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 36. 9 Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 134. 10 See Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skeban (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 11. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 58. 12 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, ed. and trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 21; Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 10. 13 See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 15–18; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

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Routledge, 1962), xiv; Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 53; Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Andre Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 142–51. 14 See IE, 128–62. 15 See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), I: 252. 16 See Geoffrey Hill, “Ovid in the Third Reich,” in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39. I allude to my account of the “basilaic reduction” as elaborated in Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 17 See Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 27. 18 See Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. and ed. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). 19 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 7. 20 Ibid., 49. 21 See Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Robert Brandom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 22 See GH, 53–63. Marion seeks to distinguish his position from Sellars’ in this chapter. 23 Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method with Textual Notations by Edmund Husserl, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 144. 24 See Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, rev. E. M. Butler (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 1. 25 See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 303–4. Also see Kevin Hart, “Une réduction infinie,” in Cahiers de l’Herne: Blanchot (2014), ed. Éric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté (Paris: L’Herne, 2014), 323–8. 26 See EP, 76–82.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Letters: 1925–1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Edited by Ursula Ludz. Translated by Andrew Shields. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “Living On.” In Parages, edited by John P. Leavy. Translated by Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavy, and Avital Ronell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.



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Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hart, Kevin. Kingdoms of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Hart, Kevin. “Une réduction infinie.” In Cahiers de l’Herne: Blanchot, edited by Éric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté. Paris: L’Herne, 2014. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Edited and translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation. Translated by Girard Etzkorn. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Hill, Geoffrey. “Ovid in the Third Reich.” In Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.” In Poems and Prose, edited by W. H. Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Husserl, Edmund. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Edited and translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1987. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skeban. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Levinas, Emmanuel. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Andre Orianne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. Givenness and Hermeneutics. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lafouge. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” In Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures.” New Literary History 10, no.1 (1978): 1–16. Sellars, Wilfred. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Edited by Robert Brandom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Chapter 2

The Question of the Reduction Jean-Luc Marion

Among the many difficulties or, rather, the many paradoxes, that phenomenology has confronted us with, insofar as it is more an anti-method than a method of a radically new initiative in philosophy, we certainly find the operation we customarily call the reduction. There is no shortage of reasons for seeing difficulties with the reduction, especially given that Husserl erected it and saw it as foundational for any philosophy that wished to establish itself as a phenomenology. We can say that the history of difficulties surrounding the reduction appears not only as the history of phenomenology, but also already as the history of Husserl’s own explanation of his entire project. We must reformulate here Ricoeur’s statement that phenomenology is defined as a collection of contradictory interpretations of Husserl’s theory by noting that phenomenology consists in the collection of discussions and disagreements about his theory and the practice of the reduction. There was a time when no one claimed the title of phenomenologist without first being a craftsman of the reduction. Yet a contrario the first and exemplary debate in Göttingen between Husserl and his Munich students was initially a debate about the nature of the reduction, namely, a debate about whether or not the eidetic reduction (part epoché, part eidetic) of the Logical Investigations should fall under the control of the explicit transcendental reduction found in Ideas I. Today, however, there is a strong tendency among those who call themselves phenomenologists to reject the reduction outright or, at the very least, diminish its use to such a degree that it no longer has any force, and this has been done by some of the leading practitioners of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty,1 Gadamer,2 and Ricoeur,3 to Romano,4 Pradelle,5 and Benoist6). In response to the aforementioned views of the reduction, one sometimes finds the counterthesis that phenomenology can 27

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only be understood as a form of idealism, and that the reduction must be conceived as a transcendental reduction exerted by a radically transcendental I.7 Michel Henry has made an important, original, and very enlightening contribution to this complex and often-confusing debate with his 1991 article, “The Four Principles of Phenomenology.”8 We will begin by focusing on his analysis and, in particular, its pointed and pertinent focus on the relevance of the fourth principle, which I discussed a few years ago: “As much reduction, as much givenness” [Autant de réduction, autant de donation].9 In this formulation, along with the other principles, Henry claimed to be radical and to overcome: (1) the Kantian principle “There is as much appearing as there is being”; (2) the “principle of all principles,” as defined in §24 of Ideas I; and (3) the rallying cry “To the things themselves!”10 Certainly, let us immediately note that none of these four principles receives the approval of Henry for one basic reason: because they are “purely formal concepts,” they lack any “purely phenomenological matter,” which is not limited to the world, but which ultimately refers back to the phenomenality of life: these concepts cannot define appearing, the most basic mode of the appearing of phenomena, because they only deal with the appearing that is derived from the things of the world, thereby completely omitting a phenomenality of an entirely different order, namely, the auto-affection of life that does not admit the ecstatic gap. This “catastrophic confusion of the appearance of the world with the universal essence of appearing” conceals the fact that “the Archi-revelation of Life never gives itself as evidence [Evidenz].”11 Having Henry’s challenge before us, let us now review the respective shortcomings of each of the four formulations. THREE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE PRINCIPLES In the first formulation, “as much appearing as being,” the appearing becomes the necessary and sufficient figure of being; to put it more banally: here everything that appears is insofar as it appears, even if it is not always in the same way and to the same extent, be it true or false, proven or imagined, existing or only possible, and so on. This formulation, however, fails on two counts. First, it leaves the appearance itself indeterminate, because it assembles under the same term various modes of phenomena that are diverse, divergent, even incompatible; rather than collect them under the undifferentiated category of the percepta of an unspecified percipi that refers back in all cases to the percepta’s only real correlate, we find a percipere that each time posits percepta by means of a universal and univocal cogitatio. This is what Descartes saw and did. But this reversal led him precisely to establish the percipere and its cogitatio as a first being [étant] (ego sum, ego existo), hence



The Question of the Reduction 29

founding the appearing on the being of a privileged being that is irreducible to these appearances. This is what the first principle neither says nor thinks, and it is at this point that the second failure shows itself: the being of the phenomenal percepta, which are already indeterminate, depend on a being that is different but also indeterminate (as Heidegger marked it). To Henry’s correct diagnosis, a remark must be added: here the role and perhaps the need of the reduction is already sketched out. For what is lacking in appearing as such in order for it to be already taken as being is the unequal multiplicity of the modes of phenomenality, which do not all appear in the same way and which are not yet qualified in their being. This qualification can occur only in another instance that is thinking and not just thought and that decides the dignity of these modes of appearing and subsequently their respective ontic dignity. It is precisely for this reason that appearing, in seeking to make itself equal to being, requires itself to submit to the test of a reduction. The fact that the reduction operates along the lines of this “Cartesian path,” only to distinguish degrees of being by distinguishing degrees of certainty, and the fact that it therefore only considers phenomenality in terms of certainty, this does not limit it to just sketching out a phenomenological reduction. That we are unable to determine whether this “Cartesian path” operates as a reduction of essences or as a transcendental reduction (i.e., following Malebranche and Leibniz or according to Kant), this suggests less an inadequacy of Descartes’ view than the radical nature of the beginning of this path, which is still fraught with several competing, if not contradictory, directions. In any case, the first formulation is obviously not sufficient to establish the principle of phenomenality, but it does disqualify the indeterminate appearance. We must follow Henry closely here. The third principle, “Back to the things themselves [Sache],” operates as the “reversal”12 of the first: it is a question of renouncing what the second principle called “theories produced by the power of thought, erdenkliche [conceivable]” in order to arrive at (in both senses) what it is about. The distinction that translators highlight here between Sache and Dinge should, however, not mislead us. Certainly, it has less to do with things (Dinge) in their already defined materiality and constituted objectivity (for then there would be no need to “go back,” as they would already be accessible without the need of “theories”) than with what is at stake (Sache), what is still under discussion and thus what precisely remains to be informed, clarified, and ultimately to be achieved. In both cases, however, we assume the same premise, namely, that beyond or below what manifests itself (or does not manifest itself), there already exists that which has not yet manifested itself, which awaits to meet our gaze; thus, we observe the assumption that being precedes phenomenality and is not defined by phenomenality and its machinations. In other words, “the radical reduction of being to appearing [the first principle] comes to

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substitute itself for their inevitable dissociation.”13 We confront, here, not only the danger of a realism tout court, but also the danger of a theory of the thing-in-itself, though, certainly an inverted thing-in-itself, as here it would be accessible, in fact, it would be necessarily accessible—phenomenality would have no role to play, not even that of a point of access. You can see here the beginnings of today’s so-called new realism, which claims to be a radical innovation, while it is probably a regression or, at very least, an illusion. For no thing, no situation [affaire] can ever concern us (or assure us) if it does not first reach us, if it does not affect us, that is, if it does not appear to us. The mode of appearing appears at once and does so definitively with that which appears. Despite Descartes, Henry has rightly challenged the claim that light, the lumen presupposed by the light of the mind, remains indifferent to what it illuminates,14 unless, and this would only aggravate the situation, the things themselves were to undo their own phenomenality and were limited to a transparency without the appearance of worldly objects [objets]. For what can we still expect of objects, these pure objectives that have just conformed to the intent [visée] that consumes them as soon as they are established? These objects are defined in effect without any in-der-Welt-sein, they are barely worldly as they lack the very experience of being in a world, they are barely phenomena, as their appearing disappears no sooner than it is posited in the evidence of our coming to know them. The third principle tends to obliterate not only the ontic consistency but also the phenomenal consistency it governs. Must we expect, then, from the second principle, the “principle of principles,” an approach that is ultimately phenomenologically appropriate to appearing? The principle reads: “every originally given intuition is a source of lawfulness [droit] for cognition, . . . everything that is originally offered to us in intuition (in its carnal effectivity, so to speak) must simply be received for what it gives itself to be, but also without exceeding the limits in which it gives itself.”15 However, according to the reading of Henry, this is a “murder.”16 But a murder of what? It is a murder of everything that is excluded from the definition of the phenomenon of intuition. For intuition only has meaning to the degree that it fulfills its function within intentionality, because since Kant, intuition has had the privilege of giving that without which the concept would remain empty, and thus intuition is only in its relationship with the concept. The giving intuition only has a role in and for the concept, which implies, in Husserl’s language, that its fulfillment aims [vise] only for intentionality. In other words, the privilege of intuition is limited uniquely to the phenomenality of the intentional object. “This is the transcendence of this object, its distancing constitutes phenomenality as such.”17 It is thus only an ecstatic phenomenality because the “principle of principles” makes a claim to universality and allows for no exceptions. One must conclude that if “intuition is only a name for this transcendence, it therefore implies in itself this



The Question of the Reduction 31

unconscious but radical elimination of life.”18 The second principle, which “in truth, is the first,” thus carries out the “murder”—the murder of that other phenomenal area that is radically different from the region and from the phenomenal regime of transcendental (and ecstatic) objects aimed at by the distance from intentionality, the murder of “the infinite Life that continues to give us to ourselves and generates us as it generates itself in its eternal selfaffection.”19 And indeed Husserl always remained, sometimes to the detriment of his most courageous analyses, if not a prisoner, then a hostage, to this concentration of phenomenality on the modes of the appearing of the objects that follow the unique phenomenality of the intentional gap.20 Thus, each of the three formulations of the principles of phenomenology leads us respectively to a missed phenomenality in an appearance, an object or an intentional gap, all indeterminate and never questioned. THE FOURTH PRINCIPLE We need, therefore, to move on and examine the fourth and final principle we introduced under the formula “so much reduction, so much givenness.” In a precise and generous reading, Henry recognizes that he has committed a breakthrough, namely, a “returning to the reduction of a positive significance” rather than an understanding of it “in a purely negative sense.”21 The reduction does not reduce, it leads us back again [reconduit]. It returns [reconduit] the appearance to what is at stake in it [son enjeu] and to its visible core, namely, to that which appears insofar as it appears and this in accord with its mode of appearing. “Far from limiting, restricting or omitting or ‘reducing,’ the reduction thus opens and gives. And what does it give? Givenness.”22 Certainly, in order to give, it restricts the appearing to itself, it limits it by excluding the appearance and theories that normally envelop and obscure it, it destroys the familiar prestige of the natural attitude. In Cartesian terms, we say that it suspends the dubious (the appearance) in order to highlight the certain; that is to say, in Husserlian terms, it returns [reconduit] the appearing to what really appears in it and in person; in short, it distills the appearing from its empiricity [empiricité], still indistinct and pure in the “manifold of intuition,” in order to give to it its spirit and its taste, in order to expose it as it gives itself. The reduction gives to appearance its self-giving as phenomenon: Selbstgegebenheit [self-givenness]. In doing so, it does not aim at [vise] an ontic residue, but at that which remains of the ontic only as a symptom or secondary result, the given as appearing [apparaîssant]. “The radical reduction reduces appearing to itself.”23 For our part, we formulate this today as follows: the reduction gives to the phenomenon the appearing in itself rather than the unreduced appearing that excludes the phenomenon from

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the definition of the thing-in-itself. The reduction gives to the phenomenon self-manifesting, understood as a thing manifesting itself in itself. Our redefinition of the reduction as the work of the gift follows, according to Henry, several radical modifications of phenomenality: (1) The given that gives the reduction to the phenomenon can no longer be characterized, as does Husserl, by the deep lack of a ground of intuition, which, before ecstatically awaiting the intended referent [visées], initially (if not always) remains “punctual, temporary, surrounded by unfilled horizons.”24 On the contrary, the appearance continues to happen according to what Henry calls “the ‘more’ that characterizes the original gift” and “is nowhere lacking.”25 This is what we call saturation, the excess and surplus that animates the appearance beyond the phenomena of the type of object in the direction of what Henry not only identifies as “the invisible essence of life,”26 but also in the direction of what we describe as the saturated phenomena. (2) The result is that phenomenality is not limited to the finite objects of the world, no more than givenness is limited to “the finitude of some ecstatic horizon,”27 including that of being, in the sense of Heidegger, or that of being a subject assumed to be constituted by its intentionality, understood in the Husserlian sense. The appearance is measured neither by being [l’être] nor by focusing on a being [l’étant]. “The subordination of ontology to phenomenology”28 thus established challenges Heidegger’s establishment of phenomenology as the method of ontology by taking up certain insights made by Husserl,29 which we have radicalized just to the point of speaking about a status of going “beyond the being” of the Ego.30 Indeed, one could certainly argue that Husserl’s 1907 discovery of Gegebenheit as the ultimate nature of phenomenality can be identified directly with being, and that it falls back into an ontic determination by the very negligence of its “ontological indifference,” to take up the very accurate analysis of Jean-François Lavigne.31 Nothing requires reduced phenomenality, that of givenness, to be reabsorbed into the ontological interpretation of beings, especially if these beings are primarily defined by their belonging to the world and their dependence on intentional sight (i.e., on ecstatic sight). On the contrary, the phenomenon is reached and clarified without exception more originally by the gift in it than by beingness. The reduction returns the phenomenon to the gift by reabsorbing what is not given in the appearance, without needing to always concretize it along the way under the appearance of a being, or even of an object. From the perspective of Henry, this means that the phenomenon par excellence, Life, no longer inscribes itself in being (nor as a being), but nevertheless it does manifest itself in every intentional ecstasy however small.



The Question of the Reduction 33

And yet, although Henry recognizes the “extreme merit” of the fourth principle,32 ultimately he does not admit it as the principle of phenomenology; and this for the fundamental reason that he gives by way of a clear argument: in principle, we would be able to establish that “as much reduction, as much givenness” exceeds the limitation (according to Husserl) of the reduction to the phenomenal horizon of the object, as reworked by the critics of Heidegger. However, in order to exceed the limitation (according to Heidegger) of the reduction to the phenomenal horizon of being, it is necessary to plunge to the depths of boredom, which displaces even anxiety as the fundamental attunement of Dasein in suspending the call of [the finite] being and, ultimately, the call of being of [the finite] being.33 Now, if Henry was able to accept the suspension of the horizon of being, he was not able to accept the means by which we suspended it, nor the fact that the call (Anspruch) constitutes, in its structural relationship to the response, a phenomenologically justified alternative. Indeed, Henry writes: “the binary pair call/response, which replaces the classic dichotomy of subject/object . . . only reverses the relation of thought in both cases as a creation of personality, that is to say as a keeping safe. Far from escaping the Call of Being and its implicit phenomenology, the structure of the call returns to itself and receives precisely the ‘structure’ that is its own, namely, the opposition to ‘Ek-stasis.’ ”34 It is of no importance, here, that the “structure of the call” does not “create,” for us, not even the hint of “personality,” for this is not the heart of the objection. The argument consists, in essence, in raising that which for the phenomena of life held no appeal, because there is, in its case, no place to respond: “what characterizes the achievement of life [l’atteinte de la vie] is that it anticipates [devance] every response and does not await [attend] any of them. . . . And if there is no place for a response that would give us time to assume or reject the destiny of being, this is because there is, strictly speaking, no longer a call.”35 Life neither calls nor requires an answer, because “we are already thrown into life, crushed against it and against ourselves, in the suffering and enjoyment of an invincible pathos.”36 The play [jeu] of the call and the response not only does not apply equally to all phenomenality, and thus has no relevance for the originary phenomenon of life (the Arche-phenomenon), but it is precisely this play that prohibits access—a dual structure, a distance, and thus an ecstasy, the most constant and radical phenomenological obstacle to a phenomenology of life. In its claim to maintain a single definition of phenomenality in ecstasy, “this pure form of the call . . . resembles the unelaborated and univocal concept of early phenomenology.”37 In order to absolutely surpass such a final “empty formalism”38 it is thus necessary to suppose another “pure phenomenological materiality [matière-content],”39 namely, life. Hence, here we encounter the demand for a material phenomenology in the strictest sense.40 The material of the appearing and, primarily, of life, determines only

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the “how” of the phenomenon, in this case a phenomenality without ecstasy. Hence, we have here the deduction of a specific reduction to life, a reduction without intentionality, without the structure of the call, without an ecstatic object. ECSTASY AND THE “STRUCTURE OF THE CALL AND THE RESPONSE” In the final analysis, Henry’s argument for discarding the principle “as much reduction, as much givenness” has less to do with the formulation itself than with what it ultimately implies, namely, the formal structure of the call and response. We must now examine this implication and whether or not the “structure of the Call” really refers back to the ecstasy of intentionality, whether it would be valid, in the best-case scenario, for the phenomenality of the world, and not for life. This interpretation is based on a clear and unambiguous assumption, namely, that an ecstasy, that is to say, a distance and a gap, essentially separates the call from the response: one is logically opposed to the other, for the call must remain unanswered, as the response must reject the call. This opposition, that is always possible, that is in fact always ecstatic, must therefore hold out the possibility of being chronologically marked by a temporal gap: once the call has been initiated, after a lag time, instantaneously or delayed, the response surges forth. The two terms, which are of course reciprocal, would therefore remain in a relationship that both distinguishes and maintains them. Henry does not describe this situation because he takes it for granted; it is, in effect, only because he takes for granted that the structure of the call and response is equivalent to the intentional structure of the subject to the object. However, there arises here the central point: the whole issue revolves around verifying the equivalence between the structure of the call and the response, and that of intentional ecstasy. Now, as I established some time ago:41 the response comes from the call because, phenomenally speaking, it precedes it. This paradox indicates that the relationship between the call and the response cannot be conceived as a simple chronological succession (physical, worldly), because their relationship is not within the ecstatic gap of intentionality. Let us illustrate this through an analysis. (1) The call is not heard [entendre-understood] by someone who listens, who, already awake, awaited it. The town crier [le veilleur] who awaits the dawn can serve us as a paradigm here. For if he awaits the dawn, he is already awake [veille]; he owes this having already been awoken to



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another call, to which he has already responded: he has already accepted that the sun must return at the end of every night, or that God always saves and will always save his people. Only the first call, which allows him to awaken steadfast and confident, allows him to watch over the rising dawn. It is, however, this first call (his faith in God and his conviction in the laws of astronomy) that alone previously woke him. Empirically speaking, at the moment of being awoken [éveil] in the morning by the ring of an alarm clock [réveil-matin], there was not, before the wake-up call, an already awoken consciousness that was simply awaiting or a consciousness asleep that was not yet awaiting simply because there was no consciousness; rather, there was a non-consciousness that slept like a log. Likewise, phenomenologically speaking, there was no Ego (especially a transcendental Ego) that preceded the call or anticipated it the way a conscious intentionality anticipates its object. The recipient of the call is born at the same time as the call, he awakens at once with the call from his own absence. Whoever awakens hears [entend], so to speak, the call at the precise moment they respond to it (by awakening), reconstituting the call by their response, even after the fact. It must be concluded that the awoken, the called, does not situate himself at an ecstatic distance from the call (or whatever term we prefer), because, in fact, he was not before it—quite simply: not there in order to Dasein. (2) Do we, however, respond as soon as we have been awoken by the call? Having received the call, do we address it as such, do we respond to the responsibility of the response, which depends on and stems from it, much like another term the call has placed before and in front of us [de soi] and the received call? Shown is the ecstatic structure (subject/object, intentional ecstasy), which absolutely does not correspond here to the real phenomenological situation of the response. For it belongs to the call that what fundamentally occurs does so, initially and for the most part, in an indeterminate, anonymous and silent form. (a) The call is indeterminate because I do not immediately know if there has indeed been a call: it might have only been the illusion of a noise, an insignificant disturbance, a confusion that I mistakenly took for a call; I have to decide in fact that it is a call and that its possible qualification as a real call constitutes my first response. (b) The call is anonymous then, for I must still decide that it was truly addressed to me and for me, without my knowing immediately where it came from or what it holds in store for me: for, without contradiction, it is entirely possible for me to identify the fact of a call without knowing its origin nor its meaning nor what it holds out for me [what it could mean for me] [portée]. The search for

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identity (for my own identity as the one called through the call) is an integral part of the event and of the experience of a call. To come to terms with this anonymity requires a response from me that can be developed only by enduring this call. (c) Finally, the call is silent, because as long as I do not set the meaning, the call remains empty and says nothing. Assuming that I know where it comes from, and that it concerns me personally, it nevertheless remains empty as long as I have not established whether it is a simple morsel of information that should be recorded in some neutral data records or whether it is a call asking me, in return, for a reaction, an action, a decision, a conversion or, as it is justly put, a vocation. Again, I have to decide and do so by stating the response that alone will make the call into a fuller phenomenon and into appearing as such. It follows that the call never appears by itself or immediately, but is only there where the response ends by constituting it as an audible or visible phenomenon. The call is accomplished only in the response, and with the response, remains inaccessible. Thus, between the call and the response, there occurs no temporal or logical gap: the call, always already there, only appears after its arrival in the response it generates, and it remains invisible and inaudible when no response showcases it [le met en scène]. The paradox of the call (always already given, but not yet rendered into a phenomenon) and the response (that first constitutes the phenomenon, but always after the fact) results in prolepsis: the call is found immediately in the response. This prolepsis inextricably links them together, abolishing the delay of intentional distance while negating the constant gap in ecstasy. The objection of Henry falls away: the call and the response, understood as both “formal” and “structure,” supposedly do not repeat the gap of the intentional ecstasy; rather, to the contrary, they contradict it, abolishing and liberating it. THE UNIVOCITY OF “LIFE” WITH CALL AND RESPONSE There is more. Not only does the fourth principle (with its corollary call and response structure) not fall under the critique of Henry because it does not assume ecstatic phenomenality, but it also, and it alone, is able to conceive the non-ecstatic phenomenality of “life.” Indeed, as we know, the objection has been made against Henry that the phenomenality, which, for him, is most fundamental and, in fact, most essential, leads to a splitting, without any hope of transition or compatibility, of phenomenality into two incompatible



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options. In fact, he goes so far as to establish “two phenomenologies,” according to a true “duplicity/doubleness of appearing” that occurs between “ecstatic truth” and “non-ecstatic self-appearing in the essential pathos of life.”42 Should we not detect in such heterogeneity the symptom of the insufficient determination of phenomenality, that is to say, turning against Henry’s argument, should we not continue to brand his view as a formal and abstract determination of phenomenality and the principle of phenomenology? It should also be noted that, in his review of the four formulations of the principle of phenomenology, Henry challenges them all, but he does not succeed (in fact, he does not really try) in producing a new formulation, almost as if he renounced the task itself, perhaps as much out of weakness as by design. Henry’s discovery of the auto-affection (of life) as a crucial phenomenon that escapes the intentional gap and its aporias—though in itself difficult to contest—suffers from an obvious weakness, namely, its inability to trace the (ecstatic) intentional appearance of the objects in the world (which we could not otherwise do without) back to the non-ecstatic auto-affection that should ground them and, in order to do this, must remain connected to them. This leading back [reconduction] (we prefer more this modest term than, for example, the Kantian term deduction) would allow us to pass from an ecstatic phenomenality to a non-ecstatic phenomenality through the variation of the gaze that brought about a variation in the phenomena, especially in relation to their respective “hows” [as we mentioned at the beginning]. It reduces all its grounding power to the phenomenality of life, which would then, and only then, become the model from which the intentional ecstasy was derived, though this reduction would clearly be achieved by means of an impoverishment, but it would still cohere as belonging to one and the same unique phenomenology. Perhaps, in this way, we can move beyond the gaping dichotomies left by Husserl (between the life world and the world of scientific objectivity) and by Heidegger (between Ereignis and the metaphysical essence of art), or even by Levinas (between infinity and totality, the ethical and justice, the other [autrui] and the third). What would it be, then, according to Henry, to conceive of the achievement of the specificity of the auto-affection and, thus, the non-ecstatic phenomenality of life? The precise answer: In the ordeal/trial [l’épreuve] that each living being makes of his/her life and, through this life, makes themselves, s/he cannot evade the “embrace with the self,”43 which this life embraces. This embrace leaves no choice for the living, because the living already immediately live it, whether the living want to or not, and thus this phenomenon is prior to all subjectivity that could await it and intentionally aim at it, and that in awaiting a fulfillment that here takes place immediately, even precedes it without the least bit of intentionality. However,

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do we not encounter here a number of elements of the call and response structure? Does Henry himself not state this while emphasizing that “the call . . . is the embrace that gives itself to us at the same time it gives us to be?”44 The facticity without delay of a life always already there and always more intimate to me than myself indeed bears the character of the call. The instance of fulfillment, which occurs without deviation, tardiness, or delay, thus, which I cannot escape (since to ignore it is not enough to abolish it) and I can only bear either as an enjoyment or a suffering, either one or the other, without ever constituting it as an object, this too bears the character of the response. As for the non-ecstatic embrace of life with itself, which is accomplished in the auto-affection of the living, it bears the character of the identity of the call and response, in which only the call gives itself as a phenomenon. So that the living, given to itself in the gift that life offers of itself to the living, possesses precisely the character of the gifted [l’adonné], [the being] who receives itself at the same time that it receives the gift. To summarize with Henry: “The receiver, nevertheless, does not precede that which it forms as a prism—it results from it. The filter deploys itself first as a screen. Before it gives itself the gift that has not yet been rendered into a phenomenon, no filter awaits it. Only the impact of what actually gives brings about, through one and the same single shock, the flash that explodes the first visibility and even the screen upon which it is crushed or flattened. Thought arises from pre-phenomenal undifferentiatedness, like a transparent screen takes on color immediately upon the impact of a beam of light that had hitherto remained colorless in its translucency and which suddenly explodes.”45 For this “crushing” [écrasement] and that unique “shock,” the structure of the call and the response renders possible the illuminating [permet ainsi d’éclairer] of the obscure “embrace” of the auto-affection of life; the converse, however, is not true. Better, it allows, or at least it does not prohibit, the illumination of the auto-affection of life as an extreme case, though consistent with others, of phenomenality in general, without dividing phenomenality into two regions and two incompatible phenomenologies: understood [entendue] from the perspective of the call (the response and the gifted [l’adonné]), the “embrace” of life could also be extended to worldly figures of phenomenality and like many variations, which become more and more distant and ecstatically certain; it can be made aware of what initially establishes them, but not exclusively, as the immanent deployments of the original giving. There is no doubt that this deployment, which remains prohibited, if one holds onto the unique auto-affection in order to fulfill the call and the response in “life,” is legitimate, given that it authorizes the power of the fourth principle: “as much reduction, as much givenness.”



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THE REDUCTION IS UNAMBIGUOUS BECAUSE IT IS RECIPROCAL We need now to turn away from the critique of Henry and his refutation of the call and response “structure” to focus on the question that guided us from the beginning and that elicited my comments, namely, the question of the reduction. The strongest and most common objections against the phenomenological authenticity of the reduction are focused on one principle: the claim that the phenomenological reduction leads, after the idealistic turn of 1913, to a transcendental reduction that entails and is, in fact, the result of an Ego that is itself transcendental. Present-day post-Husserlian developments in phenomenology (and some of them are indisputably successful) agree with other philosophical developments (and more often their aporias) in radically challenging that no Ego (or subject, etc.) can today still claim a transcendental posture and transcendental dignity. Thus, in absence of a transcendental Ego, it is necessary to renounce the reduction, which is itself and has always been assumed to be essentially transcendental. This critical orientation is in agreement with the conclusion of Henry concerning the principles of phenomenology: all of them presuppose in different ways the intentional ecstasy, the gap between the (transcendental) subject that is intentionally directed toward [visée] its object (objective) and thus the opening of the world that follows a phenomenality of exteriority. Thus understood, the objection focuses on the who of the reduction and the what of the reduction—the question becomes, who reduces what to what? Or still more precisely, it focuses on the relation of exteriority (and of unilateral domination) of the who to the what. Thus, insofar as we challenge the transcendentality of the Ego in general, or, more specifically, we oppose to it “life” via Henry, we also reject the reduction by presupposing a relation to it and, in fact, an unequal relation between two heterogeneous terms, a reducing agent, the other that is reduced. But this presupposition is not selfevident. It is necessary to challenge this by recognizing that the reduction is not accomplished in a one-sided and unequal relation, but always in a reciprocal and mutual relationship of its terms, that is, a relationship between its who and its what. A Number of Examples Will Support and Perhaps Even Establish This View (1) It is remarkable that in the case of a paradigmatic transcendental reduction, such as the one Husserl established between consciousness and reality (or nature, the world, etc.), that the “principled distinction between the modes of being, the most fundamental there could be in general,” nevertheless continues to be a “principle of difference in the modes of givenness”; indeed,

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it always concerns the Gegebenheit, the datum or “givenness.” “We firmly maintain: that while it belongs to the essence of the givenness through appearances (Erscheinungen) that give nothing as ‘absolute’, except in a unilateral presentation, there, in fact, appears [instead], in the essence of the immanent givenness of the given, an absolute.”46 Thus, notwithstanding all the differences, the actor of the reduction maintains the character of the reduced—here, the Gegebenheit, the givenness. He keeps it, or more exactly, he takes it up precisely in order to carry out the reduction: the who modifies itself in absolute givenness in order to be able to modify the what in relative givenness. The transcendentality remains, but it characterizes the Ego because, in reciprocal determination of the two terms as given, one is still given as an object, which, as object does not subsist only as known and, therefore, requires an essentially cognizing actor, and nothing more than this. This inequality or dissymmetry, however, does not impede the who from reducing the what by means of becoming itself (i.e., the who) determined by the reduction, which, in this case, is givenness. (2) We find meaningful confirmation of this reciprocal determination in the second principal figure that Husserl introduces in his phenomenology, namely, the reduction of transcendental experience to the sphere of ownness. We see this in his treatment of the question of how we can access the other Ego or what we call the other [autrui] such that the autrui no longer appears only as an object in the world (thus as a physical body, Körper), but as an alter ego, as “a reflection of myself, and not merely a reflection; as analogous to myself, however, not as simply analogous in the usual sense of the term.” This would require, through aspects of its appearance, like any other object in the world, that it also penetrate the status of the subject as much and as me, in a phenomenality that cannot however, in principle, appear directly among the objects in the world. How to understand this paradox? I propose in two stages. First, through a further reduction, which, oddly, focuses neither on the world nor the other I sought, but on the transcendental Ego that I am, on me and only me. Indeed, I myself can reduce my-self by bracketing everything in me that pertains to immanent transcendence, that is to say, the meanings (obtained through other modes of the reduction of essences), that allow me to hold onto real immanences. In this case, I notice that, “when I actually (eigentlich) reduce other people I actually obtain bodies (the physical body, the Körper), when I myself reduce my-self as a human being, I obtain my flesh (Leib) and my soul (Seele), or simply, me/I, grasped as a psychophysical unity in my personal I, which operates (wirkt) in this flesh and through its mediation in the exterior world, and which also suffers it.” In other words, “Among the bodies (the physical body, the Körper), actually seized in a unique feature of my flesh



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(my lived body, my Leib), namely, as the only one who is not simply a body (a physical body, a Körper), the only object inside my abstract worldly layer, to which I experimentally assign a field of sensation (Empfindungsfelder).” Reduced to one’s own actual flesh, that is to say, to one’s own flesh as what is proper to oneself, the transcendental Ego itself reduces “I/me, the I-human being reduced (the psychophysical I), I am also constituted as an articulated element of the world.”47 Hence a new possibility: Reduced as feeling my flesh and feeling the world as I feel my flesh, I can, through analogy, undertake empathic acts through which I can see the other as my double, one who resembles me. However, this assumption proceeds in the reverse direction of my own reduction to my flesh: the autrui appears as a concealing Körper and as appresenting a Leib, while I myself experience my-self [je m’éprouve moi], once my own Körper has been reduced to ownness, as Leib. We do not wish to take away from the details of this famous demonstration,48 but we will retain only what is important for us here: in order to reduce the other, the autrui, to his own proper phenomenality, namely, in order that he is not limited to his appearance as a physical body in nature, but in order that he is able to establish himself as another flesh, it is necessary that I myself, first and as much, reduce to my flesh as to my ultimate ownness. The reduction explicitly becomes here a reciprocal relationship between the who [of the reduction] and the what [of the reduction]. And when the what shows itself to be an other, an autrui, it is necessary that the who, the Ego, reduce itself to its flesh. The reciprocal nature of the relationship of the reduction even imposes a proportional univocity, therefore increasing the modes of phenomenalization (in fact, of givenness) of the two terms. The phenomenalization progresses in proportion to the reciprocity between the univocity of the two terms. We can, no doubt, elaborate this rule in any number of examples. Let us outline just two possible ones. (3) First, when Heidegger undertakes to let the phenomena appear from their self [soi], he no longer continues to see them in the horizon of objectivity (in which Husserl always insisted on constituting them), but in the horizon of being, as the beings in their being. He therefore varies their phenomenality from one horizon to the other, first through the distinction of those same phenomena as subsistent objects (vorhanden) and then as useful things (zuhanden). However, this onticontological reduction (and it is still a reduction) is only able to provide the what with a mode of being, that is to say, with a mode of phenomenality, to another as long as the who that operates it no longer understands [entende] himself only as a knowing and perceiving Ego (reproducing the minimum being of esse est percipere aut percipi, presupposed by the position of Descartes); the who [of the reduction] becomes the transcendental Ego of Kant and Husserl,

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but it is also the who that apprehends itself as that being who finds itself in charge of the being of other beings. It is therefore necessary to reduce the I of Dasein. The problem of the appropriation of the self (Eigentlichkeit) aims to reduce the common figure of the transcendental Ego, that is to say, in the existential analytic, the They (das Man)—that anyone and everyone can, if they are before the phenomena, know them, that is to say, recognize them as always already known in order to use them without seeing them, in short to be able to produce and consume them. To reduce the They signifies disclosing Dasein in its authenticity (eigentlich) through the anticipatory resoluteness by which Dasein discovers that it is in its being a being toward end (toward its own death) because it orientates itself temporally toward the future instead of encysting in the present, as do the objectively present [vorhanden] objects. The enduring [l’épreuve] of this resolution takes place in the fundamental attunement of angst in which Dasein sees the appearance of the nothingness of all objects, of the region of the world as such, in fact it almost sees the ontological difference. Thus, Dasein must reduce itself to its own authentic ontological status in order to be able to reduce objects to their ontological status. The reduction, therefore, shows itself here also to be reciprocal; and this explains the constant back and forth of the existential analytic, which continues to undertake at once both the reduction of things to their beingness and the reduction of I to Dasein, understood as the ontological being. And this reciprocity of the reduction implies a univocity (though not without difference, as we almost have in this case the ontological difference).49 Let us consider a second example. (4) Once we admit, as it would seem reasonable to do, that Levinas opposes to the transcendental reduction of Husserl and to the ontic-ontological reduction of Heidegger the reduction that is called ethics, which gives the phenomenality of totality over to infinity, we discover the two characters that we are trying to discern in any phenomenological reduction, namely, the reciprocity and univocity of each one of its two terms. The ethical reduction leads us back from the general outline of the natural attitude in which the other human being appears first as an animated figure, visible in the common space, endowed with characteristics consistent with those of any object (quantity, spatiality, dimensions, administrative data, dates of production, validity, physiological performance, various returns, etc.), to a radically other appearing. This mode of appearance whereby the other [autrui] appears ethically as an other, as an autrui, manifested in the face, remains, if we want to see it as a façade and in terms of objectivity, literally invisible: for the face [face] and the face [visage] do not render the autrui as objects seen in the world, precisely because its alterity does not show itself here, neither through symptoms nor expressions nor statements; strictly speaking, the façade of the other human being manifests nothing of his alterity, but rather and most



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often it conceals it behind the mask or a lie. The autrui, as such, is never manifested as a phenomenon according to the same how [of the reduction] as belongs to the phenomena of the world. And yet, the invisible face phenomenalizes the autrui in its pure alterity; it is thus followed by a further how of the appearance, in speaking, in saying (even without its pronouncement, in fact, most often in silence) “Do not kill me.” It concerns the autrui, because one encounters here the question of a command that sets before me an ethical constraint and obliges me vis-á-vis this other: the other is understood as primordial and as possessing a right over me. Evidently, I can transgress this injunction, but it signifies that, because I can invalidate it and negate it only at the cost of his murder, this is definitely an autrui. The autrui, therefore, no longer appears as an object of my intentional aim, as my objective, at the level of other objects in the world; it exerts on me a counter-intentionality (a prohibition, a command) that constrains me and overthrows me [me renverse]. It overturns [renverse] my status as a transcendental Ego into the status of the one responsible for the autrui—the one who has to respond, and respond unconditionally (responsible not only for my transgressions against him, but also for the evil he has done, for the harm that could have been done to me). Once the ethical reduction has unveiled the what to be an autrui, the reduction rightly establishes the true who, while as for me, I become not a what (as in Hegelian recognition or in Sartrean consciousness) but a who, insofar as I now understand myself as ethically obligated to the autrui. The reduction transforms me, through the election of the command, in being a hostage to the same gesture that makes it appear as infinitely other [autrui]. Consequently, we see how we are to radically understand what Husserl calls the “inversion of values, Umwertung”:50 what is reversed is not only the mode of the appearing of the what of the reduction but also the mode of the appearing of the who [of the reduction]. The reversal concerns the one and the other—it concerns the natural attitude toward the field of idealities, toward the inter-objective objects of science, but also toward that of the being of beings or even toward the imposition of an ethics. The reduction always reciprocally accomplishes itself. If it were not the case that the who never comes to another how of its phenomenality, how could the who trigger or tackle the corresponding modification of the how of its what? From this reciprocity there immediately derives the univocity that, at least, minimally touches on the how common to the two terms of the reduction, in the same understanding, in understanding of the same phenomenal theatre. The reduction can take many forms, of which transcendental ecstasy and self-love constitute without doubt the two extremes; but all observe the collusion between the given and the gifted devotee. Even the subjective naturality of the epoché, when it responds to the event of the world, registers this complicity. For in the reduction, it is never a question of the

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unfolding of givenness; rather, as we have said, it is about “as much reduction, as much givenness.” Translated from French by Steve G. Lofts. NOTES 1 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s hesitation in a note from February 1969, in Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 225. 2 Hans Georg Gadamer, Vérité et Méthode, II, 1, 3 (Seuil: Paris, 1996), 266. 3 See the excellent presentation of the development of Ricoeur’s thought by Françoise Dastur in “De la phénoménologie transcendantale à la phénoménologie herméneutique,” in Paul Ricoeur: Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique, ed. Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 37–51. 4 For example, Claude Romano, “La phénoménologie peut-elle être transcendantale?” in Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). More precisely, contesting the notion of the erotic reduction: Claude Romano, “Love in Its Concept: Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon,” trans. Stephen E. Lewis in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 319–39. 5 For example, Dominique Pradelle, Généalogie de la raison: Essai sur l’historicité du sujet transcendantal de Kant à Heidegger (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013). 6 Indirectly but succinctly referred to (although no longer in connection to the reduction): Jocelyn Benoist “Le sujet, ou plutôt la subjectivité,” in L’idée de phénoménologie (Paris: Beauchesne, 2001), 105–22. See also chapters 1–4 of Benoist, Autour de Husserl. L’ego et la raison (Paris: Vrin, 1994). 7 Jacques English, “Pourquoi la phénoménologie est et ne peut qu’être une philosophie transcendantale,” in Sur l’intentionnalité et ses modes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 285–339. 8 First published: Michel Henry, “Les quatre principes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (1991): 3–26; republished: Michel Henry, “Les quatre principes de la phénoménologie,” in Phénoménologie de la vie: De la phénoménologie, Vol. 1 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 76–104. 9 See my work, RD. I already accounted for this analysis in ED, “Quadrige” §1. I undertook such a discussion only within the framework of my own phenomenology. Here, now, we have to reexamine the issue of the reduction itself from the viewpoint of Michel Henry. 10 On the historical origin and their uses, see ED, 19. 11 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 84, 85, and 80. 12 Ibid., 81. 13 Ibid., 83: “que devient, dans la rupture dévastatrice qu’il [in particular, ce dédoublement du concept de phénomène], l’unité primitive de l’apparaître et de l’être?”



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14 Ibid., citing René Descartes, Œuvres De Descartes, Vol. X, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), 360: “humana sapientia, quae semper una et eadem manet, quantumvis differentibus subjectis applicata, nec majorem ab illis distinctionem mutuatur, quam Solis lumen a rerum, quas illustrat, varietate,” which must be corrected to read “l’indifférence de la lumière à tout ce qu’elle éclaire.” 15 Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie et une philosophie phénoménologique pures, I, §24, Hua.III, trans. Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 78. (translation modified). 16 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 87. 17 Ibid., 86. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 87. 20 Lavigne makes a historical observation about Henry: “Tel quel, le principe laisse entièrement dans l’indétermination et l’indistinction aussi bien le type d’intuition considéré que les variétés de ‘ce qui apparaît à nous.’” See: Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1903–1913) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 28. 21 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 88. One can reject this reproach by citing Husserl’s repeated statements in which he says that bracketing is not “naturellement pas à comprendre comme une privation” in Husserl, Idées, 65. Also see: Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, in Hua I, ed. Stephen Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 60. Yet, it is true, that what is bracketed includes the world (of the natural attitude), which, according to Henry, is “ectstatic space,” understood in his own sense, and not in the sense of “life.” 22 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 88. 23 Ibid., 90. 24 Ibid., 91. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 100. 28 Ibid., 94 and 95. 29 Martin Heidegger: “Der Ausdruck ‘Phänomenologie’ bedeutet primär einen Methodenbegriff”; “Phänomenologie ist Zugangsart zu dem und die ausweisende Bestimmungsart dessen, was Thema der Ontologie werden soll. Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich”; “Sachlich genommen ist die Phänomenologie die Wissenschaft vom Sein des Seinden,” in Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), 27, 35, and 37. 30 See RD, 240 (as cited by Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 95). Michel Henry makes reference to my analysis of boredom, as opposed to the anxiety discussed in Being and Time (Heidegger, 97). See RD, 280. 31 Lavigne, 28. See all of §3, which deals with the interpretation of the “three principles,” 2. One sees here a “totale indétermination ontologique” (Lavigne, 32, also 372 and 527) but this total indetermination is not only negative, for it is also beautifully positive. 32 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 97.

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33 See RD, §§ 4–7, 272. 34 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 101. Emphasis mine. 35 Surprisingly, here we can cite, Henry, 102. 36 Ibid. See: “le caractère purement formel des énoncés” (78), “les concepts purement formels” (84), “l’appel comme tel apparai[t] quelque peu formel” (99). We also see this reproach made by Janicaud: “pur, absolu, inconditionné, tel est cet appel. Il s’adresse, il est vrai, à un lecteur, un interlocuteur, fût-il idéal. Mais voici l’interlocuteur à son tour réduit à sa forme pure, à l’interloqué ‘comme tel’. Une expérience à ce point amaigrie jusqu’à son apriori diaphane n’est-elle pas trop pure pour oser encore prétendre se donner comme phénoménologique?” Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991), 49. 37 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 104. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 87. 40 See Michel Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990), in particular, chapter 1, “Phénoménologie hylétique et phénoménologie matérielle.” 41 Already in ED, 390. 42 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 100. We also find an earlier formulation: “Parce que leurs essences n’ont entre elles rien de semblable, parce qu’elles diffèrent au contraire dans l’hétérogénéité irréductible de leurs structures, l’invisible et le visible ne sauraient se transformer l’un dans l’autre, aucun passage, aucun temps ne les relient, mais ils subsistent à l’écart l’un de l’autre, chacun dans la positivité de son effectivité propre. Ainsi doit s’entendre, à la lumière de cette hétérogénéité structurelle essentielle, leur opposition, non comme une opposition entre deux opposés, telle qu’elle s’institue dans un lien, mais comme une opposition dans la différence absolue. Une telle opposition dans la différence absolue est celle de l’indifférence.” Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 561. Haar pursues this objection, albeit in a more polemical manner: “De quel droit cette seconde phénoménalité, seconde dans la présentation, mais en réalité la seule vraie et originelle—la première étant un détournement aberrant et catastrophique de la seconde—, s’appelle-t-elle phénoménale, puisqu’elle n’a pas de dehors, pas de phaïnesthai, pas de luisance, pas d’éclat, pas de visage, ni d’apparence, qu’elle n’est ni Schein, ni Erscheinung?” Michel Haar, “Michel Henry: entre phénoménologie et métaphysique,” Philosophie 15 (1987): 21–29, reprinted in Lectures de Michel Henry. Enjeux et perspectives, ed. Grégori Jean and Jean Leclercq (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2014), in particular, 49. See also the critique of Janicaud, 57–71. For a more precise and documented account of the opposition to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl, see Jean-Luc Marion, “Michel Henry et l’invisibilité du phénomène,” in Figures de la phénoménologie, Husserl. Heidegger. Levinas, Henry, Derrida (Paris: J. Vrin, 2012), in particular 107, reprinted in Lectures de Michel Henry. Enjeux et perspectives, 81. 43 Henry, “Les quatre principes,” 72. 44 Ibid. 96. We have omitted (a) the qualification “L’appel de l’être,” which wrongly restricts the call to one of its particular cases; and (b) the description of the



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call as “c’est tout simplement son surgissement en nous,” which wrongly supposes an anterior we to the call itself insofar as it wakes a supposed we as well. 45 ED, 365. We find here a precise description of the surprise as a specific kind of phenomenality, which fits well in this context. 46 Husserl, Idées, §42, 96; and Ibid., §44, 102. See Ibid., “Toute choséité donnée en personne (leibhaft gegebene) peut aussi, malgré cette donation en personne, n’être pas, tandis que nul vécu donné en personne (leibhaft gegebenes Erlebnis) ne peut aussi n’être pas.” Also see the commentary by Didier Franck, Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981), 24; and RD, 85. 47 Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes, §44, 125, 128, and 129. 48 See, Ibid., §50–55, and Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie II (1923–24): Husserliana 8 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959), §53. 49 See RD, c. II–IV, 65–210. 50 Husserl, Idées, §31 and §76, 65 and 174. More often, one finds universaler Umsturz in Husserl, Erste Philosophie II, for example, 23, 37,40, 68, 73, 75, 165, and 169.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benoist, Jocelyn. Husserl: L’ego et la raison. Paris: J. Vrin, 1994. Benoist, Jocelyn. “Le sujet, ou plutôt la subjectivité.” In L’idée de phénoménologie. Paris: Beauchesne, 2001. Dastur, Françoise. “De la phénoménologie transcendantale à la phénoménologie herméneutique.” In Paul Ricoeur: Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique, edited by Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney, 37–51. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991. Descartes, René. Œuvres De Descartes, vol. X. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: J. Vrin, 1983. English, Jacques. Sur l’intentionnalité et ses modes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003. Franck, Didier. Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Vérité et Méthode. Seuil: Paris, 1996. Haar, Michel. “Michel Henry: entre phénoménologie et métaphysique,” Philosophie 15 (1987): 21–29. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953. Henry, Michel. Phénoménologie matérielle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990. Henry, Michel. “Les quatre principes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (1991): 3–26. Henry, Michel. L’essence de la manifestation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003. Henry, Michel. “Les quatre principes de la phénoménologie.” In Phénoménologie de la vie: De la phénoménologie, vol. 1, 76–104. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003.

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Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge: Husserliana 1. Edited by Stephen Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. Husserl, Edmund. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie et une philosophie phénoménologique pures. Translated by Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1950 Husserl, Edmund. Erste Philosophie II (1923–24): Husserliana 8. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959. Janicaud, Dominique. Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991. Jean, Grégori and Jean Leclercq, Editors. Lectures de Michel Henry: Enjeux et perspectives. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2014. Lavigne, Jean-François. Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1903–1913). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. Réduction et donation. Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989. Marion, Jean-Luc. Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Michel Henry et l’invisibilité du phénomène.” In Figures de la phénoménologie, Husserl. Heidegger. Levinas, Henry, Derrida. Paris: J. Vrin, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Pradelle, Dominique. Généalogie de la raison: Essai sur l’historicité du sujet transcendantal de Kant à Heidegger. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013. Romano, Claude. “Love in its Concept: Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon.” Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. In Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, edited by Kevin Hart, 319–339. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Romano, Claude. “La phénoménologie peut-elle être transcendantale?.” In Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Stephen Strasser. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie et une philosophie phénoménologique pures. Translated by Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Stephen Strasser. Erste Philosophie II (1923–24): Husserliana 8. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959.

Part I

REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST

Chapter 3

Amor et Memoria1 Ugo Perone

THE GREEKS: PLATO AND PLOTINUS One could perhaps claim that Plato was the first philosopher to fully develop an explanation for how the concepts of memory and love work together. Articulating the role of memory as a way to knowledge in the Meno, he opened a pathway that proved to be an important milestone in the history of Western philosophy. Knowledge, Plato tells us, belongs to our origin, an origin from which we have become distanced. This distance is like a wound or an injury. Knowing which we can achieve does not remain untouched by pain and suffering. An old adage tells us: qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem, he or she who increases knowledge also simultaneously increases suffering or pain. Correspondingly, the ontological horizon of being to which we come no longer possesses the rounded-off smoothness or polish of Parmenidean being; rather, the horizon of being assumes the form of a rough, uneven abasement, which comes about through the non-immediate path of anamnesis. Memory does not come without pain, for it cuts through all the domains of forgetfulness. Everything in Plato’s life could be understood as falling under the auspices of remembering: the master is dead and the only form of presence he maintains is achieved by recalling his words. The master, the only just teacher, was sentenced to death by the polis, in the only unique place where it was truly possible to be just. Not even writing down the master’s words helps us, as each time we speak of him, he disappears; each time we speak of him, we either run the risk of diminishing his spirit or we inevitably find ourselves relying too heavily on the partiality of the written word. The mistrust of writing stems from the awareness of its purely instrumental use. No instrument exists that can successfully restore an absence. 51

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Memory is a rigorous discipline that seeks to not let disappear that which has happened. But how can it push us forward? It can do so if it is, as it is for philosophy, love. The child of poverty and wealth, neither properly a god nor a human being, the divine child love takes the opposite path of memory. The latter reassures us as we face the unknown, as it draws on that which is already known, whereas restless love, because it is animated by a desire that yearns to free itself from need, is led into making more demands. Love bears the traces of a division. Perfectly separated bodies, which are like sorb-apples halved for pickling, as Plato writes in the Symposium, seek in the other that satisfaction that the originary body could find in itself, and hence they project themselves toward another body. Once satisfied by the body of the other, they seek a more universal desire. Beauty reflected in the particular magnifies itself into the beauty of all bodies to the extent that it vertiginously seeks beauty in itself, the pure idea of beauty. Only philosophy can help in this situation, because, as Plato’s Symposium makes clear, the simple dialectic of need and desire deprived of the care for thought attains nothing: it spirals and traps itself in its very own development. None of the guests, in fact, ever succeed in telling us what love truly is. The final words go to Alcibiades—and not even to Socrates. We end not with a discourse on love, but with a discourse on Socrates and his power of seduction. It is as if the dialogue tells us that love, which places into a dialectical relation both need and desire, does not allow itself to be pronounced except perhaps in an inadequate manner, because love pushes forward toward an unknown land, toward a terra incognita. Moreover, Socrates places the great and final discourse on love in the mouth of the stranger from Mantinea in order to tell us that one does not properly know what love is. All we know is that someone or something elicits it in us. It happens, however, in the case discussed previously, that love reconnects with memory. Need elicits desire and experience ignites the process of anamnesis, which ultimately reassures us that we live in the idea. Plato remarks in the Phaedrus that there exists a desire to fly that is elicited by the lack of divine powers that were once witnessed and never forgotten: “When one sees beauty from here below, while remembering true Beauty, one puts on wings and desires to fly, but one remains incapable [the dialectic of desire and necessity], and looking up to the heavens . . . participates . . . in the mania that is called love.”2 There is no reason, then, why philosophy is charged, as its name suggests, with the task of linking love with knowing, or, as was said, love with memory, which is precisely a gateway to knowing. Memory configures itself as a knowing that possesses the form of love because memory does not cease to arduously burn; memory does not become quiet when faced with its consequent effect. Memory is like the love that is nourished not only from the search but also from the fullness of knowing. And so, neither inclination



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toward inexhaustible and inconclusive research (i.e., the unfulfilling modern idea of research for the sake of research) nor a sick inclination toward love that is thought from the beginning to stem from its own proper end can be found in the form of memory (as is the case for the figure of love celebrated by Kierkegaard). But after Plato comes Plotinus. Memory disappears, for the One falls into the abyss of the immemorial. To occupy oneself with how one comes to knowledge appears banal; the discussion is now framed in an ontological manner. And we find ourselves walking on the path toward a place that exceeds not only the body but also reason, a place that transcends not only the self but also the other. We are moving toward a unity that is present without being representable, which animates or mediates without an idea. The life that precedes a life cannot be remembered except perhaps as that which is, but which never takes on an objectifiable form. What memory is made of is nothing other than the forgotten. Plotinus writes, “Memory, even the memory of higher things, is not the highest value.”3 But in this view of memory, memory is not a having, but only an imagining or a protrusion of the self; memory is a desire for something that is other, be it intelligible or sensible.4 Thus, there is no remembering as such, except as love. The only gateway, therefore, is eros, and this is why the Platonic description of eros is taken up with great acuity by Plotinus, albeit with minor variations. Like in Plato’s account, eros for Plotinus is elicited by Beauty. Eros is “a vision that has in itself its very own image”; it is an intermediary between the “desiring and the desired” that enjoys “the beautiful while brushing up against it.”5 Eros is even described as an act of contemplation, but an act that is already marked by time, for it descends from Kronos. “Hence, Eros is similar to a material being, a demon born of the soul insofar as it lacks the good and desires it”;6 eros is a desiring machine, a perennial aspiration, but without the assistance of Platonic memory, understood as anamnesis or recollection. Eros is a blind love, because it can neither see nor will it to ever be able to see what it aspires to. In order to see eros, we have to exit ourselves through a destabilizing ecstasy—a love that certainly generates, but generates without ever having possessed. Plotinian love, therefore, does not have an object upon which it can apply itself. It is, in a certain sense, a love of nothing. Not a nothing that would continue to be or be once again something, but a love that is the unfathomable remains left over from the separation of the One and the Good from being. A love that, with respect to being, exceeds being. In this exceeding, there is superabundance, a nothingness of being that Plotinus calls charis: a love of nothing, given freely only as freedom can truly be given, a love of nothing, understood as a love not subjected to being. With Plotinus, we face the establishment of an ontology that does not have being as its protagonist. The chanciest praise of love is not anchored in memory.

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AUGUSTINE: ANOTHER LOVE Jean-Luc Marion has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the bases and foundation of language.7 For example, in au lieu de soi we can detect a play on the expression au lieu de: at the place of, in place of, and so on. Au lieu de soi, instead of being a biography of the self, is a “biography” of God. Instead of autobiography, we find hetero-biography. With Augustine, one finds an incredible play of and with language, a play that is no longer possible in the writing of Montaigne and Rousseau. Even in the expression au lieu de soi, understood as the “place of the self, the place of interiority,” plumbed to its depths by Marion in his reading of Augustine, the alterity of God becomes closer to us than any other self. Hence, we can say, that in Augustine, we do not only find the turn to interiority, as Husserl suggests at the end of the Cartesian Meditations when he cites Augustine, but we also find the very individuation of interiority as the locus or place constituted by our relation with God.8 Bringing forward the discussion of memory, albeit always in the form of the immemorial, Marion writes: “Au lieu de soi, je reçois de me recevoir d’allieurs que de moi. L’aporie du soi ne disparaît donc jamais—elle se reçoit comme l’horizon de mon avancée vers l’immemorial.”9 (At the locus of the self/Instead of the self, I accept to receive myself otherwise than I am. The aporia of the self, therefore, never disappears: the aporia is received as the horizon of my moving toward the immemorial.) Love and memory, as we shall see, are reconnected in the thought of Augustine. But memory does not have the form of possessing or ecstasy. Memory is an immense power that holds onto what is forgotten, because, as in the case of the woman who seeks the lost coin, it has preserved traces of that which has been lost. Memory is no longer a knowing, and that which memory holds back does not belong to me, as if it was being. Memory becomes, drawing from hermeneutics, the locus or place of a diffraction, a straightening, which is constitutive of who I am. Memory is neither remembering nor forgetting; rather, it is a process of remembrance. In a typically Augustinian paradoxical fashion, it holds back in some way the I that is inaccessible to myself. Memory does not hold back the past. Rather, it leads to the presence of thought to itself. Memory remembers forgetting as a possibility that is possible for everything, it works on an immemorial that will never become present. Memory contains, therefore, more than my mind (mens) or my cogitations (cogitatio). This is why I have to go beyond a cogitare in order for me to be able to think myself. Memory renders aporetic all knowledge of oneself. I dwell in a place in which I do not find myself. This is why I am, because I think, but not because I think myself. There is in memory a structural reference back to the immemorial, and it is this attitude that I need



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in order to think myself. Also, I cannot say here that with this notion of memory, I am able to reach myself. Memory is crossed through by time, it holds back that which disperses it without permanently hardening it. This is why we can understand Augustine’s view of memory that oscillates from eternity to instantaneity, which both appear to be the most consistent loci of time. Whereas the past is no longer and the future is yet to be, it is only in the instant, however fleeting, that we recognize that the structure of the instant is no different from that of eternity. Time flows from this very time frame, which is the time of creation. The memory of the created human being retains the creating act of God. Traveling through memory constitutes, for time, the I with its own identity, while destabilizing it from the very moment in which the I’s identity can be grasped solely in relation to God. The reception of the I, its power to measure time is, in fact, destined to disperse unless God, with His love, collects and preserves being. The world is in the hands of human beings and human beings are in the hands of God. There is a persistent ambiguity in time because it cannot remember the essential ambiguity of eros. Memory, that palace with a thousand rooms, holds back that which it does not possess. But it does so always too late, and so it is never able to possess, it only momentarily arrests. Memory detains love, not the love for myself who loves—again, always too late—but the love for myself insofar as I have been loved, even before I knew it. Three terms are found together in Augustine’s writings: memory, time, and love. It is only with this triad that we can proceed in a non-dialectical fashion, by means of successive returns: the terms coil upon one another. Each time they are deployed by Augustine they are introduced by an et tamen, an “and nevertheless . . .” supported by a prayer. Despite their respective differences, I think it is worthwhile here to read in an Augustinian fashion Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. Benjamin learned much from Augustine, perhaps in an oblique way thanks to Hannah Arendt. Above all, he learned that time constitutes itself through a stopping, an arresting—the einstehen of the two sides of a balance scale that, once both sides are of equal weight, comes to a perfect balance in order to determine the exact weight of an object. In this einstehen or arresting, one finds salvation, much like the emergency break that stops the launching of time called “revolution.” Let us return once again to a seductive passage of Augustine’s: Late have I loved you, oh Beauty ever ancient and ever new. You were in me and I was outside. I sought you there. In my deformity, I threw myself upon the beautiful forms of your creatures. You were with me, but I was not with you. Your creatures held me back from you, they are inexistent, if it were not for

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their existing in you. You called me, and your cry broke through my deafness; you came to me in a flash, and your splendor dissipated my blindness, you diffused your fragrance and I breathed it in, gasping for you. I tasted and now I am hungry and thirsty. You touched me and I burned with desire for your peace.10

This text is remarkable for numerous reasons, but, above all, because it takes up the Platonic connection between love and beauty. Augustine remains firmly rooted within the logic of his ancient teacher, who, as the priestess of Mantinea observed, did not think eros beautiful, but as the beloved who is beautiful. In an unexpected move, however, Augustine surprises us, subverting the Platonic dialectic while remaining focused on the Socratic schema: Augustine locates the subject outside of herself in an exteriority that only the initiative of God can balance. This is the case because Augustine sanctions once and for all the primacy of the need for desire, ultimately subverting the Platonic equilibrium. Eros, who invades all the senses of the body, is called by deafness, blindness, by the formless inconsistency of all that exists. It is the initiative of the Beloved, who transforms need into desire and who attracts toward heaven that which had its origin in lower things. The love that springs from this post-Platonic and post Neo-Platonic reading of memory is another form of love: it is a love from which initiative is subtracted, because this love is but a response. Love is to let oneself be seduced, and God is the great seducer. It is not immediately important to discuss Marion’s perspective, which takes a phenomenological view of Augustine, insisting on his non-involvement with every ontological horizon, as not even being can be included as a name of God. Also, it is not important here, though it is interesting and stimulating, to read into the Augustinian subject ante litteram an alternative to the cogito of Descartes. What is at stake here is neither a matter of philology nor the reconstruction of a history but the sense of the lived experiences that the tradition affords us. For the moment, let us focus on the results made possible by the view I have set forth so far: Since the beginnings of philosophy, amor and memoria, love and memory, appear tightly connected to one another. In Plato, memory has a gnoseological function, which culminates in an ontological function. Memory seizes the idea and love, always supported by a dialectic of need and desire, constitutes the ladder of ascent that is directed to a final encounter with memory. In Plotinus, memory collapses into that which is absent, and love identifies itself with a freely given superabundance that is beyond being and moves toward the One. But in the Greek tradition, love remains a variation of being. In Augustine, because of his novel encounter with Christianity, another love comes to the fore. Love is not only a superabundant grace but also a person-God, who is a seducer that seeks another person. Memory retains the trace of this encounter that I, as a creature, miss. But this love is also successful because the merciful hand of God knows how



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to transform various stages of encounter, even those episodes of flight, into biographical recognition. God is capable of making us take note of this love. WE MODERNS The alter ego of Augustine, Marion would perhaps say, is Descartes. He who yearned to be the first, modern Christian philosopher was probably more a son of the Middle Ages than he was ready to admit, as Etienne Gilson has shown. Descartes was, however, an adolescent son, motivated above all by the principle of separation. What was important for him was the clean break with tradition, to begin again, in an absolute way, as evidenced by his use of hyperbolic doubt. Memory now declines and becomes an auxiliary function that is subjected to the logic of knowledge acquisition, which modern ontology facilitates with its insistence on the primacy of the natural gaze. Together with the decline of memory, we also observe the decline of love. Being and cognitive certainty take their place and do so only through the radical move of Descartes. Nevertheless, one can, despite Descartes’ turn, reverse the aforementioned decline by observing what has been lost. And phenomenology is able to lead us here. Unlike Husserl, however, we must not conceive of phenomenology as a new beginning that is more radical than Descartes’ new foundationalism. Phenomenology, though still a beginning, obtains its own proper radical form by abandoning the Cartesian construction site (to use an expression that Ricoeur employed when referring to Hegel). The same thing happened to Husserl that happened to Descartes: he affected all children of modern philosophy, and yet made no one a disciple. All phenomenology ultimately refers to the Master of Freiburg, yet none properly extend his legacy. Let us, then, begin again, but neither under the sign of memory nor that of being; rather, let us directly begin with love, with that by which I am constituted—and let us take note of the passive form of the verb. In this regard, a passage from the Analogy of the Subject [Analogia del soggetto] comes immediately to mind, which was written by an influential colleague not long deceased, Marco Maria Olivetti.11 With great acuity, he spoke of the deponent subject. He drew from Latin grammar and attributed to subjects what deponent verbs do: they have a passive form but possess an active meaning. Subjects, then, passively assume an identity and their own structural forms configure the subject, the moment they are pushed by an initiative that comes from outside in order to constitute themselves. Marion would say that the subject is adonné and that the whole question of love turns on the question of whether or not someone loves me. Love takes the place of being, l’assurance takes the place of certainty, and phenomenology takes the place of ontology.

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Free from Descartes, though he remains the cornerstone of Marion’s thought, Marion discovered an object that remained unknown to phenomenology, namely, the saturated phenomenon, which breached the very direction of phenomenology itself. Marion’s discovery is not only a step beyond Descartes and Husserl, but, as Carla Canullo’s comprehensive thesis suggests, it is also an opposing move, a move that leads to the reversal of phenomenology.12 A new and beautiful phenomenology of love emerges where the experience of a saturated phenomenon is concretized. Here, we find not only a French countermelody aimed at Descartes, but also, albeit in diminished form, at Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Henry, and Levinas. At certain moments, one has the distinct impression of reading an overturned Kierkegaard, or at least a version of the Concept of Anxiety, but with a completely different solution—one offered by a Kierkegaard that had been liberated from his dependence on Descartes and Hegel. We find objections neither to the robust claims of love nor to the use of alterity as a way of breaking the solipsism of the I. I have, however, some reservations about Marion’s claims regarding the all too quick reduction of ontology and metaphysics to the natural gaze; I also have reservations, albeit small ones, about the gestures through which Marion has freed himself from modernity, as well as the marginalization of memory and its role. SECULARIZATION Let us try something different here, keeping in mind that philosophy always seeks to do differently. “Different” should not be understood as “against.” Though philosophy is critical, it is also faithful to that which can only be said in the first person, and hence, in other or different terms. Philosophy can be spoken otherwise because others have paved the way, created passageways, offered unexpected glimpses. There are perspectives that we cannot take on because we cannot abandon ourselves, nevertheless, we must take hold of these perspectives in order to be ourselves. For Marion, Descartes embodies what we must not do. For me, Descartes embodies what we cannot but be. He is or is not pleasing to us. Descartes is the beginning of modernity, an age to which we cannot but belong. I have sought elsewhere to show how the Cartesian beginning of modernity has burdened us with problems with which we struggle over and over again: the first major problem focuses on a conception of reason that exhausts itself in its attempts to collect certainty and that assumes an all-powerful role of control. But Descartes’ move, which interrupted the flow of the tradition, always through his use of doubt, is truly the inaugural act of modernity—a move from which we no longer can extricate ourselves. In this context, I am



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thinking of the philosophical relevance of secularization, understood not as the concept marked by the dissolution of the sacred into the profane, always from the perspective of continuity, but as an innovative or original formal paradigm that sets aside the metaphysical, religious universe as the unifying schema of a culture. We must, therefore, overcome an obsolete form, which reads secularization as the consummation of contents and as the transference of religious and sacred meanings into immanent meanings, in order to understand secularization as the transformation of a formal paradigm and, more precisely, as the destruction of the religious paradigm, understood as the form capable of unifying under itself, in a comprehensive manner, the multiple senses and meanings in which the life of a collectivity articulates itself. The religion of Christianity knew for a long time how to offer this schema, which gave a unity to the world. If it is no longer possible to presuppose any schema (and no ontology) that could serve as a horizon subject to sense, as Descartes taught us, and if to establish indubitable certainties we need to directly start from a moment of signification that is ascertained from itself, it becomes clear, then, that we not only have before us a newness that has taken on the form of a break, but also that this very caesura impedes the transference of sense in the form of continuity. All becomes construction, a new construction based on the precarious consistency of moments of signification. The cogito becomes, from this perspective, a sort of minimal analogue and an alternative of the a priori argument of Anselm of Bec. But if secularization puts into crisis the schema of Christianity, this does not mean that secularization does not have any consequence for other possible schemas of cultural unification, and this applies to both the pretense of a high or elevated unification, which we find in the politics of modernity, and in the ancient’s elevation of philosophy as unifying. When a world collapses, nothing remains untouched. And a beginning, a new beginning, cannot simply assume the form of radicalization (not even the form, as is obvious, of continuity or progression), nor can it take on the form of a trustworthy bring-up-to-date, an aggiornamento, as the Italians say. A beginning commences after an end has occurred. We cannot deviate away from this moment of struggle, of pain. A beginning, no matter how promising it potentially is, starts with a loss. Whoever does not know this always remains before the beginning. Modernity and secularization have taught us this fact. Perhaps we can begin again, but only if we start with loss. IN PRAISE OF MEMORY It is important to re-turn to memory, probing its interiority, in order to glimpse one of its elements, which we have not yet made explicit. Memory, however,

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fits well with the secularized time of modernity. One remembers only insofar as one is aware that one can forget. We remember, then, only because we have had the experience of having forgotten and, hence, we venture along in an exhaustible resistance against the drift of the flow of time that nullifies the content of experience. In short, we remember from a distance. Just as with the time of modernity, we re-invoke tradition from a distance. Likewise, as is the case with our distance from a text, we are solicited to attempt an interpretation. Secularization, memory, and hermeneutics constitute, in my view, the triptych from which we need to begin again to think and, more specifically, to think love. Let us now focus on memory. As we saw, three types of memory were discussed: In Plato, memory was a gnoseological device that was able to rationally justify learning and apprehension; Plotinus saw memory as an ontological sinking down into an immemorial that was beyond being; and finally, in Augustine, memory is seen as the trace of a forgetting that constitutes our interiority. None of these profound and admirable visions are able to account for the caesuras of history, which Descartes witnessed, nor are they able to impede the caesuras. Descartes, who, in a sense, was the last of the medievals, does not begin, from the aforementioned point of view, namely, ontology; rather, he completely consumes it. Descartes interrupts ontology, and so opens the pathway to a rethinking of the labor of memory, though unwillingly and unknowingly, and though his Meditations often refer, even if in a reverse way, to Plato. Again, memory comes after a loss. But as Schiller taught us, it is also more sensitive and receptive, especially when memory distances us from its originary content. Furthermore, it dislocates us from what appears to be its more immediate content. The sick person has a vivid memory of health or of what she once was and is no longer. She also holds onto the memory. Emotion or the sentiments are extremely sensitive to lost naivety. For example, the vicious person is greatly attracted to innocence. Our age, which has forgotten a unifying sense, multiplies and exaggerates the signs of memory; in this way, it hopes to hold onto meanings in order to ultimately acquire a sense. Yet, even one meaning is sufficient to fulfill a possible sense, but we need memory, which always works at the levels of the present (and not on the past, as it seems to do, and on the fleeting future), for raising up meaning to sense, that is, to a unifying horizon. Memory, as Plato says, is the way to knowledge. But, in modernity, it works differently than Plato had thought, for memory is knowledge through the mediating filter of time. Descartes, who was not very sensitive to the questions of time and history, has nevertheless made us aware of the decisive force of time. In his horizon, as a result, he gives a place to a mechanics without life or a mechanics that is achieved in instantaneous flashes: “I think.”



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But what do I think? I think something that is evident, a new flash that only lasts for an instant or up until its evidence is revealed. And when I think the infinite, namely, God, I then think of a God, who in an instant and for an instant, gives foosball to the world. God gives way to a great machinery that then carries on without life. Time is the great absentee, and so, it is also an impending or imminent presence. Memory is the great absentee that leaves the whole scene to certainty. But Kierkegaard forcefully demonstrates the incomparable anguish of this certainty founded on the self. Instead, memory could emerge from interrupted meanings and move toward achieving a possible sense. It could attempt to unify the lived experiences (Erlebnisse) into an experience (Erfahrung). It could create the passageway of a time, namely, the present, understood as the locus of the crossing of that which has been retained by the past and future expectations or, as I have said elsewhere, as the threshold experience.13 In order to create such a passageway, memory has to come to know that no tradition is a priori, that the woven fabric of time is torn, but for us who remember, we can mend this woven fabric of time, much as artists do when they employ fragments of pain to trace out hopes (e.g., Anselm Kiefer’s poignant interpretation of Federico Vercellone’s work).14 Neither the same emphasis of Plotinus, who tells us about exceeding being and who presupposes a mystical ecstasy, nor the certainty of Augustinian faith, which reads memory as the trace of the divine presence, is necessary here. We still do not know. And the woven fabric torn by modernity cannot tolerate unexpected re-stitching, as phenomenology has rightly shown us. Memory is born through the interruption of time and uses this interruption as an access way: the past, read from the present, acquires depth; the future, which the present awaits, gains consistency; the present, duplicated again by memory, becomes a threshold, a threshold capable of dilation. It becomes the point in which a meaning is tested in order to make sense. Not all meanings withstand being tested. Many fall into ruin, and, attempting a premature experiment, could lead us into hopelessness. But when a meaning succeeds in the enterprise discussed previously, it becomes possible to propose to oneself and another this possibility of meaning or horizon, not as an a priori sacral thing, but as a successful and accessible experience. All that I have said about memory and the interruption of time is an interpretation and, in the last analysis, a risky act on the part of the subject. This is one proposal among many possible ones, and it is neither capable of being valid for everyone nor justifying itself. Certainly, if the horizon we aspire to is one of demonstrable certainties or one of an ontology (that has today become fashionable once again) in which being is a lifeless objectivity, then my foregoing qualification is pertinent. But has not Marion, in his Erotic

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Phenomenon, shown us that the time has come for an ambitious and comprehensive claim? Do we not find clearly suggested, in some way repeated in Descartes’ Meditations, an ambitious analogy to the creation (where the chapters can be viewed as following the six days of creation)? Do we not need, then, a hermeneutic attempt to unpack a global horizon or what I would not hesitate to call an “invention,” understood in the ancient sense of the word as a finding, or even disclosure of something that has yet to be thought, but, which once thought, can be found and tested in experience? The alliance of hermeneutics with phenomenology is essential here because it is thanks to phenomenology that hermeneutics arises. Phenomenology seeks in it a confirmation of its possibility. Invention cannot be, therefore, something that is invented (a trouvaille), nor is it a poetic illusion, a moral fiction. It is, rather, en philosophe, the risk of an expression that is tested by experience. Truth, which is solicited by experience, does not come from experience and cannot be found in it, not even through the refined clause/provision of the suspension of the index of reality (epoché). The phenomenological approach alone seems to me, at least, incapable of understanding both the background of the separation and the distance from which memory arises, as well as the superabundant being that it can obtain through invention. Despite all efforts, the theme of time, even when it is understood as the form of inner time consciousness, does not deliver that decisive relevance that the experience of secularization has taught us. In the same way, the anti-metaphysical critique restricts the proper field of philosophy, on one hand, by decapitating truth from its ontological capacity and, on the other hand, creating outcomes that are foreign to philosophy. Memory, which exercises itself as interpretation, is capable of encountering love. Again, philosophy, understood as the love of knowledge, always already assumed, at least implicitly, that love was its task. We know that love must be understood neither as cause nor as the end of knowing, but as the condition of the whole process. Insofar as knowing is supported by love, that is, transcendentally supported, knowing is an act of freedom. Memory is capable of justifying a knowing that is in time and of inventing for this knowing, through love, a modality that exceeds time. All that Marion has taught us about the marvelous six days of new creation, always under the sign of eros, could be here taken up once again, but this would merely be a banal repetition on my part. The linking, which can be seen as phenomenologically successful, of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and the unifying force of love, which weaves together corporeity and spirituality, can be seen to produce permanent results that we can continue to return to and think about. Love, as Plato intuited, appears as the god of philosophy, who is capable of weaving together distance and closeness, concentration on the self and dislocation in the other, particularity and universality.



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In the aforementioned chiasmi, time furnishes us with an additional destabilizing caducity that wishes to remain. The risky filter of memory gives us a hermeneutical remedy. Even secularization can, in the end, present itself as a chance that does not forever exclude a religious trace; it restores religion to its own role. Religion neither serves nor is the master of philosophy; rather it is an equal peer of philosophy. This is why religion is capable of dialogue and conflict with philosophy. Also, a unity is possible, but this unity takes place for each of us in its own way. Translated from Italian by Antonio Calcagno. NOTES 1 In the few pages of this chapter, it is obvious that I can only attempt here to discuss, in a very brief fashion, what has unfolded through centuries. This chapter is an homage to a master of contemporary thinking and consists of my personal reflections on both history and the thought of this master, Professor Jean-Luc Marion. I ask for the patience of my learned colleagues, whom I trust will know how to integrate into the chapter what is missing, ultimately correcting what is imprecise and completing that which is insufficiently explained. I beg the indulgence of the translator, who has had to translate ideas written and thought in the Italian language into English. I ask all who listen and read this chapter to remember that this chapter must be received as an initial sketch of an argument. 2 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 249D-E. Translation of the author, slightly modified. 3 Plotinus, Enneads, ed. Arthur H. Armstrong, vol. IV (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4. 4 Ibid., 4, 3. 5 Plotinus, Enneads, ed. Arthur H. Armstrong, vol. III (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 5. 6 Ibid., 5, 9. 7 We can think here of plurivocal expressions like étant donné, which serves as the title for one of Marion’s most foundational books and which challenges translators (in Italian the title becomes dato che, whereas in English it becomes being given) because of the chiasmatic intersection of being and giving and because of the intentional transformation of the given or datum, understood in its positivistic or ontological sense, into the gift. The gift constitutes itself without a giver or donnée, without a thing being given: the gift is the absolute model of phenomenological reduction. 8 This is the case even though Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, tries to connect the gnothi se auton of Socrates with the redi in te ispum of Augustine, a relation which can be understood as an ambitious desire to unify Greek thought and Christian philosophy—a desire we find reprised in Modern philosophy, especially by Descartes.

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9 LS, 00. In what follows, I draw upon Marion’s deep analysis of Augustine without mentioning specific references. 10 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), X, 27–8. 11 Marco Maria Olivetti, Analogia del soggetto (Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1992). 12 Carla Canullo, La fenomenologia rovesciata (Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 2004). 13 Ugo Perone, Il presente possibile (Napoli: Guida, 2005); Ugo Perone, The Possible Present, trans. Silvia Benso (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). 14 See the laudatio proclaimed at the 2014 bestowal of the doctor honoris causa to Anselm Kiefer at the University of Turin: Anselm Kiefer, “Anselm Kiefer e le figure dell’immemoriale,” in Inquieto pensare. Scritti in onore di Massimo Cacciari, ed. E. Severino and V. Vitiello (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2015), 293–9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Canullo, Carla. La fenomenologia rovesciata. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 2004. Marion, Jean-Luc. Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008. Olivetti, Marco Maria. Analogia del soggetto. Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1992. Plato. Phaedrus. Edited by Harvey Yunis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Plotinus. Enneads. Edited by Arthur H. Armstrong. 7 vols.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–1988. Schwyzer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Perone, Ugo. Il presente possibile. Napoli: Guida, 2005. Perone, Ugo. The Possible Present. Translated by Silvia Benso. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Chapter 4

Givenness, Grace, and Marion’s Augustinianism Felix Ó Murchadha

It is not surprising that in his later work, the author of Being Given turns to Augustine, the “Doctor of Grace.” Understood as the gift of love, grace can indeed be posited as the core—if not always acknowledged—question for Marion from his early meditations on distance to his later work on love. Furthermore, Marion engages in an Augustinian critique of the “capable ego” from Descartes to Kant. Although Augustine is hardly mentioned within the text of The Erotic Phenomenon, the latter work amounts to a meditation on the words which form a second epigraph in the English (but not French) edition of that book nemo est qui non amet (“there is no one who does not love”). The “gifted” (l’adonné) ego, which is understood as the potential recipient of grace, displaces the capable ego. If the gifted ego is to be understood in Augustinian terms, we must also be aware that Marion is here engaged in a debate which from Descartes and Pascal to Kant and Kierkegaard has marked modern philosophy, namely, the debate between Augustine and Pelagius—or more precisely the Augustinian and the Pelagian approaches to grace. At issue here is a question of disciplinary distinctions between philosophy and theology, but this question relates directly to shifts in conceptions of nature, reason, and faith. In his later work, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant develops a concept that, contrary to Augustine, places grace within the limits of critical reason. For Kant, only critical philosophy, which clearly guards and regulates the difference of sensible and suprasensible, can demarcate between human endeavor and divine grace. By questioning the basis of such a demarcation in an Augustinian manner, Marion problematizes not only the difference between theology and philosophy: through his critique of the capable ego, he undermines the Kantian account of autonomous action and in so doing opens philosophy again to the claims of 65

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Jacobi and Kierkegaard concerning the salto mortale, the leap of faith, which suspends critical reason. In his work Cartesian Questions, Marion dedicates the chapter on “capable/capax” to Henri de Lubac. This chapter describes a transformation of the notion of capacity in the Latin capax as passive receptivity to capacity as power in Descartes and suggests it is a “marginal footnote” to Lubac’s “magisterial and fundamental work” on pure nature.1 Lubac and the nouvelle théologie movement in post-war France were highly influential on Marion’s formation as a theologian and philosopher. In this context Marion is referencing a fundamental theme of Lubac, namely, his contention that the theological notion of “pure nature” is an early modern construct at odds with the thought of Catholic theologians from Augustine to Aquinas. Attempting to protect the integrity of fallen humanity, on the one hand, and the gratuitousness of grace, on the other, Marion’s concept of nature proposes that human beings have two ends: one natural. which can be achieved by a person’s own volition and endeavor, and one supernatural, which requires divine aid. Lubac traces and critiques the development and implications of this theological innovation.2 In this chapter, Marion shows the philosophical effects of Lubac’s critique. Published in the same year as Janicaud’s Theological Turn, this chapter demonstrates the theological background to Descartes’ understanding of the ego as capable, hence as active, and ultimately as sovereign with respect to knowledge. Positioning him between Jansenists and Jesuits, Marion shows how Descartes’ use of capax places him within the theology of pure nature. As Marion points out, Descartes is in line with the theology of pure nature, which distinguishes between two forms of blessedness: that which is within the natural capacity of the human, and that which exceeds that capacity and is thus supernatural. “Capacitas (posse) now defines a naturally self-satisfied power whose self-sufficiency enables it to demarcate itself from unattainable supreme felicity.”3 Augustine is crucial in these debates. The capable ego that Marion is critiquing is a philosophical response to a theological question concerning grace and justification that spans from Descartes to Kant. It is ironically an Augustinian response to a Pelagian question, namely, whether it is freedom or grace, grace or nature, that has the ultimate dominance. Philosophically, the Augustine–Pelagian debate—in its original occurrence as well as its renewal in modernity under different guises—is significant because it addresses what has become a fundamental set of philosophical questions in modernity, namely, those of the autonomy of reason, the nature of the will, and the project of the mastery of nature. Although Augustine refused the assumption of a dichotomy of nature and freedom underlying these questions, the radical modern Augustinian response was to deny human freedom, and it is in reaction to this that a philosophically articulated



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account of the self as a self-sufficient ego could emerge.4 This account was rooted in a Stoic conception of an indifferent, unmotivated will.5 Pelagianism was the conduit of this Stoic self-sufficient ego into Christian thought and hence into Modernity. This Pelagian–Stoic account of freedom understands the self as sovereign with respect to its motivations and its power of choice. The capable self is at root an indifferent self, which is capable of fulfilment and yet (counter to Spinoza) stands in relation to the supernatural, which through grace elevates it to a level incommensurable with its nature. In Kant, the question of human capacity and its relation to grace pursues a Pelagian concept of the moral subject, as one that can be judged only on its own merits and one that can will the good by a choice that is independent of external motivations. Kant’s moral subject cannot be morally obliged to do what it is incapable of doing (in other words, ought implies can). Yet this same self depends on divine grace for salvation and can achieve that justifying grace through no merits of its own, but only through divine benevolence, from a god that owes us nothing.6 While practical reason demands that the self gives the law to itself, the problem of radical evil leads Kant to the view that it can never know that it is successful in doing so. Only an incarnate moral being can be radically evil because such a being is fundamentally conflicted between its own particular embodied desires and interests (selflove) and the injunctions of the moral law.7 Because the self can only know itself phenomenally, the depths of its freedom remain inscrutable to it, as do its inner motivations. Indeed, only God can see and judge those motivations, according to Kant.8 The revolution of the heart, necessary for a conversion to moral rectitude, is a matter of human endeavor, but for Kant, it may not be possible without divine grace.9 Kant is clear, however, that once this revolution has taken place no further grace is necessary for perseverance in moral rectitude. Grace, once given (if given) is sufficient to maintain moral rectitude from then on; the capable ego, which is capable of doing what it ought to do, cannot depend on divine grace to persevere in its obligations even if it may need divine help to orient its heart toward goodness. But the self is incapable of changing the past, even in a moral sense. Past transgressions cannot be made good by present actions and only divine action—action out of benevolence rather than justice strictly speaking—can undo past transgressions and lead to salvation. Kant repeats Descartes’ “pure nature,” distinguishing between the practical domain of human capacity and moral faith in divine grace. This distinction is textually demarcated between the four parts of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, which address human capacity, critical reason, pure nature, and the four parerga, which in various ways concern the supernatural, the supra-sensible, and the actions of divine grace.

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As the capable self of modernity responds to theological thinking on grace, so too does Marion’s account of the self reflect the account of grace found in the “new theology” articulated by Lubac. Marion charts not so much a theological turn, as a philosophical reflection of a turn in theology. In this context, Marion’s phenomenology of givenness can be understood as both critiquing the modern philosophical mirroring of a theological innovation and reflecting that which became the theology of Vatican II.10 Marion’s account of givenness can be reconciled with theology as the discourse on God known through and in grace, but more importantly, givenness as revelation is an account of grace. Marion is in effect repeating Descartes by making a philosophical response to a theological turn, but the turn in question is diametrically opposed to that of early modernity. Marion is responding to the turning away from an account of pure nature. Of course, this theological turn has implications not only for how we see the self but also for the modern division of theology and philosophy and its subsequent fideist implications. Crucial here is the question of desire. The proponents of “pure nature” refuse any account of desire for that which is beyond the natural capacity of fulfilment, because such an account would entail that God owed human beings the means to fulfil a desire rooted in their nature. The new theology understands the human being as having within its own nature a desire for that which it cannot fulfil.11 The account of the self that emerges from the new theology is much closer to that which we find in Augustine’s writings on grace: a restless self, incapable of goodness, beauty, or truth when depending on the sufficiency of its own powers.12 Marion employs the phenomenological reduction to think this “incapable” self. As is well known, he engages in a radicalization of the reduction, a move he views as completing the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Like Husserl, Marion describes the third reduction as an “unnatural habitus of reflection.”13 But unlike Husserl, this third reduction leads back neither to the subject nor to being, but rather to givenness, more specifically gratuitous givenness or grace. The power of Marion’s account here lies not in the addition of another reduction to the phenomenological corpus but rather in the disclosure of the inner logic of the reduction itself. The reduction leads away from the natural directedness of human thought and action and in doing so it uncovers within experience itself (a posteriori) those conditions which make it possible (a priori). This appearance of the a priori in experience reflects the structure of grace—as Rahner says, grace is not experienced as such but always in terms of.14 The difference between the natural and philosophical attitude uncovers through a process of radicalization, characterized by Marion as the epistemic, ontological and erotic reductions, the self-manifesting of manifestation anterior to, and hidden by, the pretensions of the capable ego. That which is anterior Marion names the “pure form of the call,” which is the “originary scheme of the two previous reductions.”15 In Reduction and



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Givenness, Marion understands the self which emerges here as an interloqué, as the one addressed. This figure is to be understood on the basis of the “absolutely other and antecedent the claim convoking me by surprise.”16 Marion does not use theological terms in introducing the interloqué nor does he invoke the notion of grace. Instead, he is setting aside the capable ego of pure nature and arguing phenomenologically for a self that responds to a claim that is absolutely other and for which it “discovers itself as a subject always already derived starting from a relation, a subject without subjecti(vi) ty.”17 Such a subject is the one spoken to, convocated by the call, and in the givenness of that call finds itself as the gifted, l’adonné. Such a self understands itself through its own reception of the gift of givenness. Rejecting Kant’s priority of apperception due to its basis on a prior claim to originality of spontaneity, hence of the capable ego,18 Marion understands the self as the gifted which “receives itself entirely from what it receives.”19 Indeed, Marion describes Kant’s transcendental ego as the “counter-model” to the gifted. Here we are in the logic of grace, of that which turns the heart so as to receive it.20 The ego not only receives the given but also receives itself as recipient of the gift. The efficacy of the call is not simply in letting itself be heard but more originally in giving the self to itself.21 Crucially, the call occurs as a surprise, through which the self is taken over by that which precedes it. The alterity which is opened up here is anonymous in the sense that it precedes any name the self can give it, not because it is pre-linguistic, but because it speaks from a place before the Babel of the self’s responses. The “call gives me to and as myself . . . because it separates me from all property or possession of the proper by giving it to me and letting this proper anticipate its reception by me and as me.”22 In short, the gifted is given to itself as that which is impossible for it to give. That impossibility reveals to the self its dependence on that which comes before it but also meets it on its way. In this way, Marion repeats Augustine’s memoria dei, wherein the self recollects itself as having already anticipated the good and as having been anticipated by it.23 At the beginning of The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion objects to the distinction between eros and agape, where the terms are understood as possessive and gratuitous, rational and irrational. His target in this objection is not so much Anders Nygren as it is Descartes and Kant. The Kantian distinction between a rational love (directed toward the moral law, affecting the ego as respect) and the pathological love (of self and possessable others) is rejected in the name of love, which is only one way/has one sense (sens unique).24 While Nygren castigates Augustine as a major contributor to the undermining of the distinction between eros and agape, Marion reaffirms Augustine by denying any fundamental divergence between these two aspects of love. Toward the end of The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion states that there is no

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“equivocality of love, but instead the strict opposition between the desires for possessable worldly objects, which in no way concern love, and the one way (sens unique) of love, which is recognized in the exercise of the reduction and against the trial of elsewhere.”25 Indeed, far from being driven toward possession, love is liturgically structured toward loss and as such “loving loses nothing from the fact of not being, because it gains nothing from the fact of being.”26 He goes on to say that the lover’s eros “reveals itself to be just as much an oblation and gratuitous as the agape, from which, moreover, it is no longer distinguished.”27 The word “oblation” here is crucial—eros is a selfgiving in response to the other who owes me nothing, the other who gives me myself only through the grace of love. Our very flesh attests to this for Marion: “my flesh experiences itself by receiving itself from another flesh.”28 Furthermore, through the erotic reduction I come finally to recognize myself as already beloved: “the logic of love lead[s] me insensibly, but ineluctably, to comprehend that another loved me well before I loved her.”29 The theme of the relation of philosophy and theology has been in the background of the discussion to this point. It is a question that is raised again and again in discussions of Marion’s work.30 At face value, Marion’s response is straightforward enough: philosophy concerns possibility, theology actuality. The philosopher is concerned with sketching out the possibility of revelation, the theologian is concerned with the accounts of putatively actual revelations.31 In a certain sense, Marion reproduces the approach that inaugurates the philosophy of religion in Kant. However, there is an ambiguity: Does philosophy give us an account of possibility, such that theology has a benchmark against which to judge its own account or does philosophy uncover the possibility of a specific account, namely, the Christian account of revelation in Christ? In other words, does philosophy lead seamlessly to theology or is theology a positive science that has no privileged connection to philosophy? In addressing this question, I will compare Marion again to Kant, specifically in relation to evil. While Kant privileges Christianity, he justified doing so on critical, and, as such, philosophical grounds. Marion, in his book on Augustine, denies—at least with respect to Augustine himself—the providence of the distinction of theology and philosophy.32 More than this, the Augustine book is a “reciprocal trial” that hinges on the post- or non-metaphysical nature of the phenomenology of givenness.33 If the phenomenology of givenness finds confirmation in this reading of Saint Augustine, the thought of the “Doctor of Grace” finds expression in that very phenomenology, such that Augustine points the way toward a post-metaphysical but also post-philosophical and post-theological way of thought. But such thought seems, at least on this reading, to be tied necessarily and not simply contingently to a certain reading of Christianity. The questions of grace and evil are central to testing this possibility and its implications. This theological question of evil inspired the



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great dispute between Augustine and Pelagius, which Kant attempts to place in a philosophical setting while recognizing the “poetic arts” (Dichtkunst) of the priestly religion.34 Furthermore, Kant’s discussion of the radicality of evil necessitates a critical understanding of grace. Kant tells us that radical evil is rooted in the inscrutable depths of our freedom. It is invisible, unknowable, and surprising. The capable ego of the autonomous self as required by Kantian moral law is cut off from itself through the possibility of evil. Importantly, we can read Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in relation to Rousseau. Indeed, the title is taken almost verbatim (whether consciously or not) from “Profession of the Vicar of Savoyard” in Emile, where Rousseau states: “The greatest ideas of divinity come to us by reason alone” (par la raison seule).35 Yet, Kant’s appropriation of Rousseau is not uncritical and the distance from Rousseau can be gleaned in the first pages of Religion. Kant rejects Rousseau’s account of natural human goodness, which he reads as the “priestly religion’s” account of a basic fallenness in human nature. In effect, here Kant places the cultic accounts of the fall against a natural religious account of human goodness. In concluding that the human being is by nature evil, Kant’s account exists within the ambit of the priestly religion (albeit expressed in conceptual, rather than figurative, terms). Despite good dispositions, the human being has a propensity for evil and Kant’s concern in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is to account for this propensity and its overcoming. His focus is not so much on the metaphysics of morals, which is assumed in this book; rather he is seeking to account for evil as a modus of illusion: just as the theoretical use of reason can lead to illusion, the practical use of reason may aim at the good, but the individual often fails to reach the good. The cause of illusion in this case, however, is the reverse of theoretical reason: while practical reason oversteps the limits of human finitude, in theoretical reason, human finitude blocks the full working through of rational consistency. The question then for Kant must be one of accounting for this conflict between reason and that which opposes it in the human self. The locus of this inner conflict is the heart. The conflict between reason and its opposition lies in the essence of reason itself, namely, its universality. Practical reason does not privilege the situation of the self, nor of its own self-interest within that situation. As a sensible being, the human self is placed in a situation of conflict between the universal claims of reason and the particularity of its own being. This conflict concerns the human self in the totality of its being and can be understood as a conflict of love, between self-love and the love of the moral law. When investigating the “aesthetic constitution” or the “temperament” of virtue, Kant discovers that “a heart joyous in the compliance with its duty (not just complacency in the recognition of it) is the sign of genuineness in virtuous disposition.”36

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He goes on to speak of “a joyous frame of mind, without which one is never certain of having gained also a love for the good, i.e. of having incorporated the good into one’s maxim.”37 Such joy and love are not incidental to morality but lie at its core. To follow the moral law in fear and dejection displays a “hidden hatred” of the moral law that is incompatible with the genuine incentive of following the moral law for its own sake, that is, for love of it. The propensity to evil lies in the turning of the heart away from love of the moral law. In its frailty, impurity, and depravity, the heart is turned away from love of the law through self-love. For Kant, this is not a choice between love of the law and self-love, but rather the harmonizing of self-love and love of law. The good heart is healthy in the sense that it has found peace and tranquility in following the moral law.38 Kant speaks of a “radical perversity of the human heart,”39 wherein we find the locus of radical evil, as a product of how the self lives its own sensible and particular being in relation to the moral law. The evil heart is one that lives its own self-love as opposed to the love of the moral law. It is a heart in which the moral law remains alienated and separate from the self. The autonomy of the self is gauged in the heart, through an identity of self-love and love of the moral law. Marion may rarely discuss evil, but his account of the saturated phenomenon opens a manner of understanding it.40 Strikingly, Marion introduces the saturated phenomenon in direct opposition to Kant: the saturated phenomenon is precisely that which does not obey the strictures of critical philosophy. The saturated phenomenon undercuts the Kantian barriers, in both theoretical and practical terms. Theoretically, the saturated phenomenon undercuts the structures of the intellect (Verstand) and in so doing gives that which is irreducible to sensibility in terms of the intuitions of space and time (as understood by Kant). Practically, the saturated phenomenon gives the appearance to that which (for Kant) only reason can direct itself toward. Radical evil, as Kant describes it—as invisible, unknowable, and surprising— has the characteristics of a saturated phenomenon in Marion’s terms. But precisely the manner of Kant’s placement of evil in the will shows, according to Marion, the lack of radicality in his account. More specifically, Kant fails to reach the radicality of Augustine’s reflections, because he fails to see that evil flows from a “perversity of the will that seeks evil for the sake of evil, in full knowledge.”41 For Augustine, the will that pursues evil does not mistakenly pursue a good but pursues evil for its own sake. Such a pursuit, however, is one that enjoys only itself, as willing evil is willing nothingness. Such willing is loving, and as such willing evil is loving evil.42 But what I love I only recognize after the fact: love draws my will such that “the self’s place precedes where I come from.”43 At the close of Being Given, evil emerges in the figure of the “abandoned,” which is the basic transcendental principle of Kant’s



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critical philosophy: that the condition of possibility of the experience of the object is the condition of possibility of the object of experience.44 Marion is concerned here with cases in which the gifted “could or simply would not receive” the given.45 Focusing on cases in which there is an excess of intuition with respect to the saturated phenomenon, Marion discusses those instances in which the gifted “no longer says what its flesh attests.”46 Marion speaks here of the concentration camp, of a suffering “so all-encompassing . . . that one can justly call it absolute . . . a suffering become a world unto itself.” The survivors of such a world, seeing the evil that “saturated them in their flesh” and that could not appear in our shared world, deny and fail to phenomenalize it.47 In a manner resembling radical evil in Kant, Marion speaks of evil as a saturated phenomenon which is given but cannot be phenomenalized due to the finitude of the gifted. Contrary to Kant, Marion understands evil phenomenologically, as beyond good and evil, in the sense that we no longer work with moral categories in the face of evil. Derrida has rightly said that for Kant, the human being is incapable of diabolical evil. This is because Kant understands the human as caught between the good of self-love and the love of the moral law. Evil arises through the subordination of the latter to the former. By rejecting this account, Marion follows a line of Christian thought running from Augustine to Kierkegaard, and this is in line with his undermining of the capable ego. For Kant, as for Augustine, there is no necessary conflict in principle between freedom and grace (as the free act of following the moral law may through the conversion of the heart be aided by grace). However, in practical terms there is a conflict in that it is only through reliance on his own endeavors that a moral subject can hope to be pleasing to God. For Augustine, on the contrary, only through divine grace do we know and act upon what is right. Human freedom is fallen in the sense that left to itself it can only choose sin. But such freedom is not that of an indifferent will; freedom is always operating through desire. Desire either aims toward God, or falls to concupiscence. For Augustine the claim to autonomous reason is in principle not distinct from self-love because it separates itself from divine grace.48 As such, what is denied is the very difference that explains the moral struggle for Kant, and with it the basis of Kant’s distinction between philosophy and theology. Following Augustine, Marion’s “gifted ego” acts neither to fulfil its selflove nor to follow the moral law as commanded by practical reason, but instead it finds a place anterior to this difference in answering a call to love. While Kant finds in the good heart the harmonization of the love of the law and the love of self, for Marion—following Augustine—such a harmonization can be mediated only by a love of God that is a loving of love, which is

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God, and which makes all other loves possible.49 As Marion puts it, interpreting a passage from Book 12 of The Confessions: The creature . . . should not overcome the distraction of time by trying not to yield to spatial (spatializing, spatialized) changes through correction of its nature (Manicheanism), nor by supernatural knowledge (Gnosticism), but by a loving adhesion to God, in which, as an added bonus, it will find cohesion with itself.50

Marion’s account resembles Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, whereby Kant’s distinction of self-love and the moral law is suspended in response to an anterior call.51 Following a phenomenological path, Marion nonetheless speaks the language of existential decision in a situation of paradox. In this situation, the self that is understood as the gifted depends upon a prior grace. This relates directly to Marion’s account of transcendence. Transcendence in phenomenology, he tells us, remains “immanent to the horizon of being.”52 Yet, God is beyond being, is pure transcendence, which means that he “transcends all delimination and therefore all definitions supplied by my finite mind.”53 What this means is that God cannot be experienced or thought, and is beyond all intuition or conceptualization, such that God’s infinity can only contradict our finite knowing of the phenomenon. . . . If incomprehensibility attests to the impossibility of phenomenalizing the infinite, it . . . postulates, on a negative mode, a positive experience of the infinite . . . the impossibility of the phenomenon of God . . . experienced as a counterexperience of God.54

This means that the question of God cannot be settled in rational terms; indeed, it leads reason beyond itself. Echoing Pascal, Marion states: “The question of God survives the impossibility of God. Reason itself requires . . . that we give up a rational account of this paradox: We must either explain it, or give up and give in to it.”55 What is at stake here is made clear when he goes on to say that “God begins where the possible for us ends, where what human reason comprehends as possible for it comes to a halt.”56 If philosophy is concerned with possibility, theological revelation concerns the impossible. But, as philosophy responds to a new theological shift, it is concerned with the lack of possibility within human nature. The self that emerges from Marion’s thought receives itself in a manner expressed by Augustine when he states: “the will of man does not obtain grace through its freedom, but freedom through grace.”57 At the heart of Marion’s account is a logic of grace that is not simply a contingent actuality of Revelation, but is necessary to the erotic reduction itself. The phenomenological account of



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possibility is the possibility of an ego subject to grace, and thus subject to impossibility. This leaves us in a fascinating position. If the capable ego responds to a theological debate, or, as Fergus Kerr puts it, if the death of god was an inside job,58 then Marion’s post-metaphysical world is one that resurrects not the ontotheological God, but an Augustinian God of grace. This account centers on the gift and, as Marion says, the “Freedom of the gift” corresponds to the insufficiency of its reason. Augustine appeals in this context to a theological principle: “Grant what you command and command what you will.”59 But, of course, this theological principle is itself theologically contested. Indeed, it is precisely here that the debate with Pelagius begins. If the freedom of the gift obeys the logic of givenness,60 then how are we to understand the freedom of the gifted? In the tradition of Stoicism and Pelagius, Kant insists that freedom is self-determined by reason, but for Marion, givenness is beyond reason and brings the self to a freedom that is incompatible with the needs of its rational nature. In such a view it would seem that the freedom of the gifted is the freedom of the salto mortale, a leap of faith which loves but needs a divine command to do so with orientation and sense. If this is so, then the phenomenology of givenness, as Marion accounts for it, ultimately depends on the animating logic of grace. The lack of identity of the giver is only a temporary suspension as philosophy reaches its theological fulfilment and the difference of philosophy and theology dissolves post-metaphysically. NOTES 1 CQ, 180. 2 Cf. Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing, 1998); and Henri De Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: The Crossroad Publishing, 2000). 3 CQ, 94. 4 On this question see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 117–43; see also Felix Ó Murchadha, “Sceptical Wisdom: Descartes, Pascal and the Challenge of Pyrrhonism,” in Practical Reasoning and Human Engagement: Language, Ethics and Action, ed. Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 245–66. 5 Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 134–43. 6 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91. On the question of grace and justification in modernity see Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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7 Kant, Religion, 58–9. 8 Ibid., 66. 9 Ibid., 68. 10 See Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie- New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 11 See De Lubac, Augustinianism, 170–2. 12 Cf. Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50: “For it [the mind] is not sufficient to itself, nor is anything at all sufficient to him who departs from Him who is alone sufficient.” 13 RAG, 6. 14 On this issue see Michael Purcell, “Glimpsing Grace Phenomenologically: Prevenience and Posteriority,” Irish Theological Quarterly 73 (2008): 73–86. 15 RAG, 197–8. 16 Ibid., 202. 17 Ibid., 201. 18 BG, 251. 19 Ibid., 271 (translation modified). 20 See Augustine’s discussion of the line from Zechariah: Augustine of Hippo, “Turn to me . . . and I will turn to you” in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, trans. P. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 166. 21 BG, 270. 22 Ibid. 23 Cf. Augustine, On the Trinity, Book 14. 24 EP, 5. 25 Ibid., 218. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 Ibid., 221 (translation modified). 28 Ibid., 181. 29 Ibid., 215. 30 Cf. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 177–83. 31 Cf. VR, “The Possible and Revelation,” 1–17. 32 SP, 9: “I assume the hypothesis that Saint Augustine was brilliantly unaware of the distinction between philosophy and theology because he did not belong to metaphysics.” 33 Ibid., 10. 34 Kant, Religion, 45. In this text Kant is developing an account of the relation between philosophy and theology already worked out in: Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 35 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 295. The defense of a religion of reason, the critique of the diversity of cults, the opposition of reason to enthusiasm—Schwärmerie, l’inspiré—the moral argument for religion, the critique of revelation, in all these respects Kant echoes and develops themes that we find in the “Profession.”



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36 Kant, Religion, 49. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 66: “The inner principle of a contentment only possible for us on condition that our maxims are subordinated to the moral law.” At play here is a distinction that we find in Rousseau between amour de soi and amour propre. 39 Ibid., 60. 40 For a more theologically orientated discussion of this question, see Brian Robinette, “A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘Saturated Phenomenon’ in Christological Perspective,” The Heythrop Journal 48, no. 1 (2007): 86–108. 41 BG, 179. 42 Ibid., 181. 43 Ibid., 184. 44 BG, 309. 45 Ibid., 310. 46 Ibid., 317. 47 Ibid. 48 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, 161: “Human beings do not become free of sin by the Law, but rather by grace.” 49 See Augustine, On the Trinity, Bk. 8, ch. 8: “We . . . love God and our neighbour from one and the same love, but we love God on account of God, but ourselves and our neighbour on account of God.” 50 SP, 250. 51 See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 46–58. 52 IM, 18. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Ibid., 23. 55 Ibid., 24. 56 EP, 25. 57 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, 200. Quoted in: Marion, SP, 188. 58 Fergus Kerr, “Aquinas after Marion,” New Blackfriars 76 (1995): 360. 59 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 202. 60 SP, 106.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Augustine of Hippo. On the Trinity. Books 8–15. Edited by Gareth Matthews. Translated by Stephen McKenna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Augustine of Hippo. On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. Translated by Peter King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Hanby, Michael. Augustine and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2003. Horner, Robyn. Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kerr, Fergus. “Aquinas after Marion.” New Blackfriars 76 (1995): 354–64. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kolakowski, Leszek. God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Lubac, Henri De. The Mystery of the Supernatural. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: The Crossroad Publishing, 1998. Lubac, Henri De. Augustinianism and Modern Theology. Translated by Lancelot Sheppard. New York: The Crossroad Publishing, 2000. Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness: Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Impossible for Man—God.” In Transcendence and Beyond. Edited by John Caputo and Michael Scanlon, 17–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Possible and Revelation.” In The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina Gschwandtner, 1–17. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Marion, Jean-Luc. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Mettepenningen, Jürgen. Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Ó Murchadha, Felix. “Sceptical Wisdom: Descartes, Pascal and the Challenge of Pyrrhonism.” In Practical Reasoning and Human Engagement: Language, Ethics and Action. Edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser, 245–66. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Purcell, Michael. “Glimpsing Grace Phenomenologically: Prevenience and Posteriority.” Irish Theological Quarterly 73 (2008): 73–86. Robinette, Brian. “A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘Saturated Phenomenon’ in Christological Perspective.” The Heythrop Journal 48, no. 1 (2007): 86–108. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Chapter 5

Ways of Being Given: Investigating the Bounds of Givenness through Marion and Husserl Pierre-Jean Renaudie

According to Jean-Luc Marion, phenomenology is to be understood as an attempt to bring the analysis of phenomenon back from a description of what is given within the phenomenon to the description of the various modes of givenness. Instead of presupposing the given as the starting point of description, phenomenology focuses on the appearing of the phenomenon as such, which Marion understands as the moment where the thing gives itself absolutely.1 Consequently, phenomenology does not deal with the given (das Gegebene) but only with the very fact that the given is given, with its givenness (das Gegebenheit), which is understood “as a mode of phenomenality and not as an ontic given.”2 Givenness is nothing but the “style of phenomenalization [of the given] insofar as it is given.”3 This is the reason why Marion claims that phenomenological description requires a third reduction, which is supposed to reconduct the given to givenness and to “unfold” the pure “giving itself” of the phenomenon.4 In order to demonstrate the phenomenological necessity of this third reduction, in Réduction et donation Marion provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenological breakthrough in Husserl. According to Marion, the discovery of categorial intuition in Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation achieves not only a broadening of intuition but a broadening of givenness as such that legitimates the third reduction and provides the ground for Marion’s own phenomenology. The purpose of this chapter is to show that this historical argument misses an important aspect of the phenomenological breakthrough and that a subtler and more interesting concept of the given can be found in Husserl. I will argue that phenomenology does not need to rely on a generalization of the concept of givenness in order to provide us with a faithful description of phenomena. 79

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THE BROADENING OF INTUITION I agree with Marion that Husserl’s phenomenology entails a criticism of the conceptions of the given that presuppose its reducibility to sensibility. However, I would like to emphasize that strictly speaking, this criticism is not yet phenomenological in Husserlian terms. Husserl’s understanding of sensible intuition relies on a criticism of sense data that comes from Stumpf and Von Ehrenfels (and belongs to the history of gestalt psychology). For instance, Husserl draws on the concept of fusion (Verschmelzung), which Stumpf uses to show that sensible contents are not experienced as isolated data, and are already organized prior to our intuiting them. This means that sensibility cannot be reduced to an ensemble of impressions but has its own laws of organization. Elaborating on these analyses, Husserl shows that these laws of organization of sensible contents give rise to a new form of a priori, namely, a material a priori that constitutes the insuperable ontological horizon of any act of consciousness (insofar as it applies to any object that can be intuitively given).5 Two extremely important consequences can be drawn from this point. First, this non-phenomenological analysis of sensibility already discards what Marion calls the “ontic” conception of the given, since it invalidates the opposition between isolated data on the one hand and concepts that supposedly bring them to unity thanks to synthetic acts of consciousness. Consequently, the given can no longer be posited as the first causal element at the beginning of a process of conceptualization. Second, it is clear that the broadening of intuition to categorial intuition in Husserl does not result from the urge to overcome the limits of a conception of the given that identifies it to sense data. The issue that Husserl tries to address is not a restricted conception of the given, as Marion claims. The problem is rather to understand how some linguistic acts of expression can be involved in the perceptual process. This question leads Husserl to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of structure within perception that are irreducible to one another: on the one hand, a strictly sensitive organization of intuition that does not require any particular act of consciousness; and on the other, a completely different kind of intuition that entails some expressive acts and fits the categorial structure of the meaning-intention. THE BROADENING OF GIVENNESS Now, does this broadening of intuition to categorial forms imply a broadening of givenness? Does categorial intuition open the field of experience to modes of givenness that go beyond sensible givenness? In a way, it seems obvious that precisely what Husserl attempts to do in the sixth Logical Investigation



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is to see more than the manifold of things around us, as it is the case in what Husserl calls “simple,” “plain,” or “straightforward” perception (Schlichte Wahrnehmung).6 I do not only see this book but its relation to other objects, the fact that it is on the table, that it is red, and so on. Sensible perception is characterized by its lack of articulation and so by its simplicity, whereas categorial intuition describes a way for the object to be given so that the perception verifies or makes true some propositions that account for the perceived. After all, I do not only see a book, I perceive this book as being on the table, which means that I perceive that it is true that the book is on the table. Perception does not only put me in contact with something, it is able to fulfil some meaning-intentions and to verify the propositions that they express. This particular kind of perception involves a kind of articulation of the perceived that is no longer grounded in the immanent organization of sensible contents or forms (Gestalten) but relies on language’s ability to provide an adequate report or to sufficiently express the perceived (as, for instance, when I say, “I see that this book is red”). However, the description of the relation between the meaning-intention and its intuitive fulfilment enables Husserl to single out the “material—stofflichen—moments” that come to fulfilment directly or straightforwardly, and to distinguish them from meaning forms or categorial forms, which are essentially deprived of such direct fulfilment. Within a statement like “A is on the right of B,” the meanings A and B can be directly fulfilled through perception. It cannot be the case that the “supplementary formal meanings” or categorial structures can be discerned as “on the right of” something else: “only at the places indicated by letters (variables) in such ‘forms of judgment’ can meanings be put that are themselves fulfilled in perception itself (in der Wahrnehmung selbst), whereas it is hopeless, even quite misguided, to look directly in perception for what could give fulfilment to our supplementary formal meanings.”7 Thus, the broadening of intuition in the sixth Logical Investigation relies on the conjunction of two theses that may seem almost contradictory: first, only the material elements of the intention find a corresponding element within perception capable of fulfilling them, whereas the categorial forms do not; and second, categorial forms are nevertheless somehow fulfilled. As Husserl writes, “We have taken it for granted that forms, too, can be genuinely fulfilled, or that the same applies to variously structured total meanings, and not merely to the material ‘elements’ of such meanings.”8 THE UNBOUNDEDNESS OF GIVENNESS Categorial intuition is such that the fulfilment of a propositionally structured meaning-intention happens, even though nothing within perception is likely

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to properly fulfil the categorial forms in the way sensible intuition fulfils the material elements of the meaning-intention. Now, what does this imply with regard to categorial forms? I will now show that two opposite readings of this analysis can be proposed. First, since categorial forms are not fulfilled by sensible intuition, they must be given in a non-sensible fashion, which means that we need to broaden the limits of the concept of givenness. Such interpretation is shared by Marion,9 Romano,10 and Heidegger. As Heidegger remarks: “Within categorial intuition, Husserl succeeds in thinking the categorial as given.”11 According to such interpretation, when I see that the book is on the table, the “being on the table” of the book is somehow given to me, even though it cannot be given by sensible intuition. Marion relies on this interpretation when he claims that the discovery of categorial intuition achieves the broadening of givenness and not merely the broadening of intuition. Hence, “intuition is opened to its ‘broadening’ only inasmuch as it is given first as a mode of givenness.”12 The broadening of givenness is not merely a consequence of the broadening of intuition. Rather, according to Marion, Husserl needs to broaden intuition because phenomenological description is compelled to acknowledge the unboundedness of givenness. As Marion puts it: “The decision that leads to categorial intuition therefore does not arise from intuition itself, but from the excess of givenness over the sensible, over the giving intuition in the sensible.”13 It is this reversal of Husserl’s analysis that provides the true meaning of the phenomenological breakthrough. Accordingly, “The breakthrough does not consist here, either, in the broadening of intuition alone, but in the broadening of the concept of reality or of objectivity to the dimensions of givenness.”14 This point is absolutely fundamental for Marion, since it allows him to downplay the principle of all principles and to prioritize givenness over intuition against Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in La voix et le phénomène.15 As he puts it, “If intuition deserves a privilege, it owes it not to the ecstasy of intentional fulfillment but to its quality as giving intuition.”16 Consequently, phenomenological description can be freed from the limits of intuition and rely on a pure givenness that exceeds what intuition is or is not able to give. Hence Marion’s claim that “givenness is measured only by its own standard, not by that of intuition.”17 This thesis urges Marion to allow an unlimited extension to givenness, since it cannot be limited from the outside by anything, not even intuition. He writes, “If intuition suffers limits (and this, according to all of philosophy, is one of its constitutive characteristics), givenness knows none. What gives itself, insofar as given in and through reduced givenness, by definition gives itself absolutely.”18 However, it seems difficult to understand how the unlimited extension that Marion grants givenness can be compatible with his claim that “the reduction restricts appearing



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to what attains real givenness in it.”19 How are we to make sense of such implicit distinction between real and unreal givenness if we accept Marion’s claim that givenness knows no limits? How can we understand inauthentic givenness if givenness “admits no compromise”?20 To avoid the difficulties raised by Marion’s conception of the unboundedness of givenness, I will now propose a second interpretation of the broadening of intuition, following a substantially different path. In order to put forward the broadening of givenness beyond sensibility that categorial intuition is supposed to achieve, both Heidegger and Marion stress the importance of the analogy between the categorial and the sensuous in Husserl’s reasoning, which leads them to somehow disregard or neglect their opposition. As Heidegger writes, “By what path did Husserl arrive at categorial intuition? The answer is unmistakable: since categorial intuition is similar to sensuous intuition (namely, as giving), Husserl reaches categorial intuition by way of an analogy.” Categorial intuition is “made analogous to sensuous intuition.”21 For this reason, “for Husserl, the categorial (that is, the Kantian forms) is just as given as the sensuous.”22 Three important arguments can be raised against this interpretation. First, such analysis neglects a fundamental thesis of the Logical Investigations, namely, the irreducibility of meaning to intuition.23 Marion acknowledges the fundamental “excessiveness” of meaning, but not its specificity; the meanings cannot be fulfilled by direct intuition and yet are still somehow given. In this acknowledgment, Marion relies on the same interpretation of the analogy between the sensuous and the categorial that Heidegger was making: the broadening of intuition is in fact a broadening of givenness so that even categorial meanings can be given. They are “just as given as the sensuous,” although they require a non-sensible mode of givenness.24 If Husserl stresses, however, the irreducibility of meaning to intuition, then the analogy cannot mean that there is a non-sensible form of givenness. On the contrary, it means that there is an insuperable distance between sensible and categorial intuition so that categories will never be able to be given, although there is something like categorial perception. In support of the first argument, one must keep in mind that in the Logical Investigations, the distinction between sensuous and categorial intuition relies on a distinction between two opposite kinds of acts: sensible and categorial. Sensible intuition is a straightforward act that has an essential phenomenological character that cannot be founded on any other act.25 Such “founding acts” are opposed to categorial acts, which are always founded and require a founding act as the basis on which they can be performed. Unlike material meanings, categorial forms cannot be directly fulfilled by perception and their fulfilment entails a mediated or indirect relation to sensible acts. Thus, categorial acts are essentially grounded on straightforward acts, which Husserl

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maintains as the basic acts for any perceptual givenness. Consequently, if we are to acknowledge a broadening of intuition, this broadening must maintain some insuperable sensible constraints over categorial givenness; categorial intuition makes sense only insofar as it is grounded on sensible intuition. Sensible intuition reconducts givenness to its ontological conditions, for being given is still fundamentally being given as a sensible being. Straightforward perception is identified by Husserl as the only originary giving act, characterized by both its logical simplicity and foundational primacy. This is why Husserl never writes that the categorial is given by intuition (nor in any other way). Perception does fulfil some meaning-intentions that involve some categorial forms, but it does not mean that these forms (e.g., the “being on the table” of the book) are strictly speaking given. We must then put forward a third argument in favor of an alternate reading of the broadening of intuition based on a fundamental distinction between irreducible ways of being given. In the intuitive fulfilment of a meaningintention, the categorial form is not strictly speaking given but only “putatively given”; as Husserl writes, it is perceived “as given.”26 It is fundamental to understand that being “putatively given” is not a way for something to be given; otherwise, the phenomenological specificity of the categorial acts would be lost and categorial forms would be perceived as sensible objects. If we want to preserve the particularity of categorial fulfilment, we must acknowledge that it is not a mere mode of givenness. With categorial intuition, perception fulfils the intention as if the categorial meanings were given, which stresses very clearly that they are precisely not given. Accordingly, the sixth Logical Investigation does not attempt to demonstrate that even the (non-sensitive) categorial elements of the meaning-intention come to givenness within a particular kind of intuition. On the contrary, it shows that perception does not need to actually give all the elements that are intended through the meaning-intentions in order to fulfil them. CONCLUSION Two conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. First, if Husserl’s breakthrough in the sixth Logical Investigation brings out an original kind of intuitive fulfilment that broadens the sphere of intuition to categorial forms, it nevertheless maintains a rather classic conception of the given, grounded on sensibility and the laws of the material a priori. Second, the originality and radicality of this breakthrough consists in the extension of the given beyond givenness, thanks to categorial intuition. Categorial forms are fulfilled by intuition as if they were given, although they are never actually given in the strictest sense of the word. Rather than re-conducting the given to its



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givenness, the phenomenological breakthrough allows a conception of the given that does not need to involve any moment of givenness whatsoever. What Husserl will later call the pre-given is a good example of such a conception of the given that does not need to presuppose any actual givenness: as in the sixth Logical Investigation, the given, rather than givenness, appears as the insuperable horizon of phenomenality. NOTES 1 IE, 24: “No being would appear without giving itself or finding itself given, thus without being articulated according to the fold of givenness.” 2 RG, 20. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 BG, 2, 15; ED, 6, 26. According to Marion, “la réduction ne réduit jamais qu’à la donation—ne reconduit qu’à elle et surtout à son profit. . . . La réduction restreint l’apparaître à ce qui en lui atteint à une véritable donation. . . . La réduction exerce comme l’office d’un rabatteur du visible vers la donation.” 5 I cannot have the intuition of a surface without a color, or of a tone without intensity: a sensory quality can only exist as qualifying an extension. These a priori laws are not only valid for the sensible contents of intuitive representations but are necessarily true for any object. They are not the laws of our representations but the very laws of being: to represent something by itself always requires that we represent it “as something existing by itself, as existing independently from all other contents.” To think of something is always to think of it as something that can be given and that obeys to the material laws of intuition. 6 Edmund Husserl, Husserliana (Louvain: Husserl Archives, 1950), XIX/2, 676. 7 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:276. 8 Ibid., 280. 9 RD, ch. 1: “La percée et l’excédent”; and RAG. 10 Claude Romano, Au cœur de la raison (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 11 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 66. The very same analysis can be found in RAG, 13: “Of the categorial, as universal essence, there is datum, and intuitive datum.” 12 RAG, 33. 13 Ibid., 36: “If intuition becomes categorial, it is because Being gives itself, and not because Being is given by virtue of categorial intuition.” 14 Ibid., 37: “The stake of the Investigations, particularly of the Sixth, has less to do with categorial intuition than with what it points to without itself realizing it—the broadening of presence, understood as objectivity, according to the excessive measure of givenness.” 15 Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

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16 BG, 17 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.: “To give itself admits no compromise, even if in this given one distinguishes degrees and modes: every reduced given is given or not.” 19 Ibid., 15, emphasis added. 20 Ibid., 17. 21 Heidegger, Four Seminars, 66. 22 Ibid. 23 See, for instance, Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 6 §63, 312, where Husserl emphasizes the irreducible gap between meaning and intuition and stresses the autonomy of meaning: “The realm of meaning is, however, much wider than that of intuition, i.e. than the total realm of possible fulfilment.” 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., §47–48. 26 Ibid., 278.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomenon. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Husserl, Edmund. Husserliana. Louvain: Husserl Archives, 1950. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 2001. Marion, Jean-Luc. Réduction et Donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989. Marion, Jean-Luc. Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997. Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness. Translated by Thomas Carlson. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Reason of the Gift. Translated by Stephen Lewis. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Romano, Claude. Au cœur de la raison. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

Chapter 6

On the Threshold of Distance:1 The Origins of the Gift-Question in Marion Ryan Coyne

When did the question of the gift first take shape in the writings of Jean-Luc Marion? We take for granted that Marion’s work elevates the gift and givenness to the point where they no longer function merely as objects of philosophical inquiry, but rather as the site in which philosophy itself is held to account. But when exactly did this occur? How, and under what conditions, did Marion first open this site? In treating this issue, one must differentiate the inquiry concerning the gift from the gift itself. Marion has always insisted that the gift itself has no origin, that its self-giving character remains foreign to the ontological categories of production and causation: “the gift decides itself.”2 For this reason, givenness does not indicate “so much the origin of the given as its phenomenological status.”3 But if the gift is intrinsically anarchic, the same obviously cannot be said for its inquiry, which must catch sight of the gift from within a history that conceals it. Though the terms gift and unconditional gift appear in Marion’s early writings, the basic premise of Being Given, published almost thirty years into his career, is that we still lack “an appropriate, if not a specific concept of the gift.”4 The interval between the initial appearance of the term and its conceptualization presents us with a dilemma. The challenge in pinpointing the breakthrough that set Marion on the path to givenness lies in the variety of possibilities for its origin: perhaps the decisive breakthrough occurred in Being Given itself, which thinks the gift under the rubric of givenness. Perhaps instead it was Marion’s articulation of the third reduction, which universalizes givenness as “the first level of all phenomenality.”5 Christina Gschwandtner argues that Marion’s “definition of metaphysics, his judgment of its limitations,” along with the outline of his way of overcoming it, “are all developed first in [his] study of Descartes.”6 Perhaps, then, we should look for the initial breakthrough already in the pages of his earliest treatises. 87

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It is clear, however, that Marion’s way of questioning the gift involves circumscribing modern metaphysics in a distinctive manner. Let us recall that for Marion the end of metaphysics is “not an optional opinion, but a fact of reason.”7 The question of the gift is intrinsically tied to this fact of reason; its advent coincides with the discovery that metaphysics can be assigned an iconic function in pointing beyond itself, toward what exceeds its limit. Marion first ascribes this function to metaphysics in The Idol and Distance, in which he claims that we can bring the gift into view “only if certain thinkers permit us to do so.”8 The bulk of this treatise consists in readings of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Denys the Areopagite, while the studies framing these readings uncover the iconic function of metaphysics, first, by demonstrating that what Marion calls “distance” remains present yet concealed within metaphysics as ontotheology; second, by demonstrating that distance as such—or withdrawal as the form of divine revelation—can and must be superimposed upon the concepts of difference and alterity in Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. This superimposition yields a conjunction between philosophical logic and that other discourse “foreign to onto-theology”9 which speaks from the site of distance and which can thus lay bare the idolatrous dimensions of metaphysics. In what follows, my goal is to show how this conjunction furnishes Marion’s initial basis for questioning the gift. In describing its conditions of possibility, I shall highlight the forcefulness of Marion’s interpretation of metaphysics in The Idol and Distance. For it is precisely where he remains silent in confronting three major interlocutors—Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida—that he decisively alters our way of approaching them, no less so than where he intervenes explicitly in their texts. I argue that the conjunction of distance and metaphysics outlined toward the end of The Idol and Distance is overlaid upon the absence of a specific term that is crucial to one of these interlocutors—a term which Marion does not name as such, but which must be displaced in order to question the gift as such. Thus, in pinpointing the origin of the gift-question in Marion, we can do no better than to name the unnamed term upon which it is imprinted in The Idol and Distance. THE FORMAL STRUCTURE OF THE GIFT-QUESTION The phrase “question of the gift” appears verbatim in the opening lines of Marion’s 1994 essay “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift.”10 There its usage does not imply a break between the gift and givenness, as though the inquiry into the former could be isolated from the latter: “Is it not astonishing that the question of the gift comes to the forefront when we deal with philosophy of religion?”11 What Marion finds astonishing is that the question of the gift takes shape, isomorphically, in two distinct modes



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of inquiry. The first mode, the philosophy of religion, treats revelation as appearing “in the mode of what gives itself,”12 and is thus entirely preoccupied with the gift. The second mode, philosophy proper, is also concerned with the gift under the guise of revelation. Phenomenology exhibits this concern by establishing as a principle that a phenomenon must be able to give itself in order to appear. To the degree that revelation exemplifies that which appears in the mode of what gives itself, phenomenology necessarily “traces the only possible path”13 toward the gift as the definitive trait of every phenomenon. Marion thus argues that phenomenology must concern itself with revelation in order to think phenomenality as such, while the philosophy of religion must appeal to givenness in its dealings with revelation. Having established this isomorphism, Marion then devotes much of his 1994 “Sketch” to dispelling Derrida’s alleged objections to the gift, claiming that they facilitate, rather than contest, its reduction to givenness. The formal structure of the gift-question, however, is already set by the time Marion turns his attention to Derrida. This structure follows from the bond we mentioned previously—namely, the bond between a mode of inquiry that understands revelation in terms of the gift (the philosophy of religion), and a separate but related inquiry that seeks the gift by means of revelation (phenomenology). This bond serves as Marion’s lodestar, as it orients his search for a radical or unconditional phenomenality liberated from every qualification imposed upon it by metaphysics. The gift-question is thus the question concerning unconditional appearance, the event whose meaning cannot be determined by appealing to horizonal intentionality. This question, spelled out at length in Being Given, is genealogically linked to the Seinsfrage or the question of Being. Heidegger famously spells out the formal structure of this latter question in the opening pages of Being and Time: “Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its Being as it is.”14 Here, investigation, as a mode of cognizant seeking, has three parts: that which is asked about, that which it interrogates, and that which is to be found out by the asking. In Being and Time, Heidegger asks about Being, he interrogates entities, and he ultimately aims to grasp the meaning of Being. Or rather he aims to identify “the horizon in terms of which this meaning is to be grasped and fixed.”15 As early as 1930, Heidegger came to doubt that the Seinsfrage was primarily cognizant in nature. That is, he suspected that the inquiry into Being itself did not need to rely upon entities. This shift set in motion a series of transformations that led Heidegger to increasingly frame the primary target of his investigations in terms of the withdrawal of Being. Marion’s gift-question resumes the trajectory that led Heidegger beyond the Being of beings toward Being itself. And yet in Marion’s case, extending

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the reach of this inquiry beyond the Being of beings entails radicalizing the Husserlian insistence upon phenomenal givenness. Indeed, Marion reframes the Heideggerian Seinsfrage in two main ways. First, he suggests in Reduction and Givenness that the existential reduction achieved in Being and Time fails to yield the phenomenon of Being, and that his failure leads Heidegger to uncouple the truth of Being from the truth of the Being of beings.16 Second, he argues in The Idol and Distance and in Being Given that Heidegger’s later inquiry into the event of appropriation, or the impersonal es gibt, touches upon the enigma of givenness, yet it ultimately resolves this enigma in a facile manner by conflating Being with eventhood. In both of these interpretations, Heidegger is said to recoil from givenness while ignoring the ways in which the question of the gift threatens to undercut the question of Being. Heidegger, in other words, is accused of thinking the gift without givenness, whereas Husserl is said to think givenness without the gift. The latter assertion is stated clearly in Being Given, exemplifying Marion’s approach to Husserlian thought in general: “If Husserl broached the question of being only confusedly or insufficiently, at least he always envisaged it in terms of the authority that was for him originary: givenness.”17 In this manner Being Given extends the argument launched in Reduction and Givenness, according to which the transcendental reduction could never succeed in freeing phenomenality from the strictures imposed upon it by modern metaphysics. The issue for Marion is thus how to play Husserl and Heidegger against each other—first, by employing Husserl as a corrective against the speculative excesses of the later Heidegger; and second, by invoking the Heideggerian thought of the es gibt as a bulwark against the dogmatism inherent in the Husserlian doctrine of intentionality. The first section of the 1994 “Sketch” reflects this dual approach. It places in stark relief two aspects of the gift-question that repeat and destroy the 1927 formulation of the Heideggerian Seinsfrage. On the one hand, when Marion asks after the free emergence of phenomena, he leaves open the possibility that true freedom of appearances emerges from beyond, or at least apart from, Being. In its scope, the question of the gift is said to surpass even the most radical version of the Seinsfrage, but only by insisting that the selfshowing of phenomena is the term of all inquiry. On the other hand, when Marion argues that revelation offers the only possible path toward givenness, he assigns to revelation a role that is analogous to the one that Heidegger assigns to entities in Being and Time. That is, revelation becomes for Marion something akin to that which is to be interrogated or what Heidegger calls the Befragte. And it does so from the side of philosophy proper, not just from the side of the philosophy of religion. It thereby takes on an exemplary status even within a discourse that is not already committed to the actuality of any revelatory event. Thus, in 1994 the question of the gift emerges as such in



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the assignment of philosophy to think revelation as the path to pure givenness. This implies that if we wish to identify the origins of the gift-question in Marion, then we must determine when, how, and why Marion first came to see philosophy as principally assigned to the revelatory event. The standard approach to this issue is arguably the one spelled out by Dominique Janicaud. Seeking to undercut the “postmetaphysical character” of Marion’s phenomenology, Janicaud focuses on the third reduction, which “permits us to imagine a relation of inverse proportionality between reduction and givenness.”18 For Janicaud the third reduction is the mechanism by which Marion surreptitiously translates Christian theologemes “into the phenomenological field.”19 This implies that the crucial moment in Marion’s corpus is actually the final chapter of Reduction and Givenness. There, Marion counters Heidegger by insisting that profound boredom reaches far enough to liberate Dasein from having to respond to the claim of Being. Drawing from Levinas, Marion then suggests that this claim never measures up to what he calls the pure call. The pure call, Marion writes: “does not pronounce one call among other possibilities to the benefit of a particular authority so much as it performs the call as such—the call to render oneself to the call itself, with the sole intention of holding to it by exposing oneself to it.”20 Janicaud interprets this invocation of a pure call as clear evidence that the third reduction bids farewell “to the stuff of phenomena”21 while passing over into an implicit, but unmistakable, theology of revelation. Regardless of what one thinks of it, Janicaud’s approach has succeeded in directing attention toward Reduction and Givenness, as though this text determines more than any other the way in which Marion configures philosophy and theology. But since Marion’s argument that philosophy is obliged to confront revelation predates this treatise, any attempt to adjudicate the relation between these two discourses, let alone to fault Marion for allowing theology to intrude upon philosophy, must situate the third reduction as part of a larger trajectory. On the very first page of The Idol and Distance, Marion ties together two modes of questioning revelation in a manner that anticipates and thereby confirms his approach in the 1994 “Sketch.” The first mode arises from his assertion that “what the last (or next-to-last) metaphysical word calls ‘the death of God’ does not signify that God passes out of play but indicates the modern face of his insistent and eternal fidelity.”22 What Marion labels the “death of the death of God”23 consists essentially in asking how far one can go in reinterpreting divine absence and withdrawal as the primary forms of revelation. For Marion, absence and withdrawal are defining features of our contemporary experience of revelation—an experience that is rooted in the founding event of Christian faith: “absence . . . pertains to what God says of Himself in his revelation through the Christ: namely, that it is from him

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that all paternity, in heaven and on earth, receives its name.”24 Thus, in this first mode of questioning revelation, Marion takes for granted that the logos tou staurou or word of Christ exceeds the limits of metaphysics. The second mode of questioning revelation is so tightly interwoven with the first that it is difficult to recognize it, let alone to disentangle it from the aim of uncovering the modern face of divine fidelity. Marion launches this second mode in the following sentence: “The only thing I will try to say here is this: that the Trinitarian play repeats in advance all of our desolations, including that of metaphysics, in a seriousness that is all the more serene, and in a danger that is all the more serious, insofar as they issue from love, from its patience, from its labor, and from its humility.”25 Let us be clear exactly what is at stake in this sentence. If the first way of questioning revelation urgently reinvests the death of God with a theological significance stemming from the word of the cross, the second way of questioning revelation arises in conjunction with the claim that it is possible to reinterpret the founding event of Christianity as if it repeats in advance the desolations of metaphysics. Whereas the first inquiry adopts the guise of Trinitarian theology, the second inquiry need not exhibit this same theological exigency. And whereas the first inquiry sets up theology as post-metaphysical, the second one need not contribute to the attempt to overcome metaphysics. This is not only because the assertion about Trinitarian theology is put forth as a matter of fact, meaning that it remains adjacent to the programmatic aim of establishing theology as a tool of critique rather than its object. It is also because this assertion rightly portrays as a fact an entirely ambiguous feature of modern metaphysics— namely, that in its origins, identity, and even in its limits, metaphysics continuously rediscovers the ways in which its script is repeated ahead of time within its (real or imagined) religious archives. One need not follow Marion in approaching modern metaphysics “tangentially, from the angle of its lines of defense,” or “expose oneself to what no longer belongs to” metaphysics,26 in order to grant the legitimacy and pertinence of this second inquiry. Likewise, one need not “take onto-theology into view starting from what, in Christianity, might escape it”27 in order to grant the legitimacy of Marion’s assertion that the foundations of revealed theology in its Christian guises are rediscovered, time after time, by those who wish to reinvigorate modern philosophy. It matters little whether we are talking about the incarnation in general, the crucifixion in particular, or the presence of the spirit among a remnant of the faithful. Since Kant, metaphysics has so often rediscovered its silhouette outlined in the Christic event that one is entirely justified in claiming that this event repeats in advance all of its desolations. For Kant there is an intrinsic connection between the ideal of the incarnate God and the historical effectiveness of practical reason. Revealed religion is not only the seed from which practical reason arises, but it is also the



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embryonic form in which mature reason is fostered in history.28 The genetic link between the two means that reason will always be able to find itself repeated in advance in this form. It also means that the structure of repetition remains pertinent to the self-understanding of reason even when this form seems to have been discarded. In his early theological writings, Hegel grants that modern philosophy remains in thrall to the Trinitarian play. In giving philosophical existence to the moral precept of sacrifice, Hegel maintains that the pure concept “must re-establish for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively reestablished in the whole truth and the harshness of its Godforsakenness.”29 Later on Hegel contends that the uniqueness of the Christian religion lies in the fact that it contains “cognition within itself essentially” and moreover that this religion “has stimulated cognition to develop in all its consistency as form.”30 This implies not only that the Christian religion repeats in advance the dialectical progression of spirit in its entirety, but also that this religion determines ahead of time the forms that discordance may take within this progression. It would not be difficult to compound these citations with an endless array of others drawn from the tradition from Kant to the present that Marion wants to upend. The point is simply that when Marion tells us at the outset of The Idol and Distance that the only thing he will try to say is that modern metaphysics finds itself anticipated by the Trinitarian play, he does not necessarily speak from outside metaphysics. Instead he exhibits one of its most uncanny features. And he does so by design: in order to situate himself at the outermost limit of the tradition, Marion must demonstrate that the question of revelation has two locations, that it can and must be located simultaneously in two sites. One of these sites is foreign to philosophy proper, whereas the other coincides with its prehistory. In interweaving the two, Marion is already on his way to the gift-question. But this interweaving greatly complicates every possible reading of The Idol and Distance. For if there are actually two inquiries into revelation running throughout it—and if these two inquiries rarely appear as two separable strands—then we are obliged to approach every instance in which Marion invokes the conceptual anteriority of the Trinitarian play as doubly encoded, and thus as simultaneously implicated and exempt from his professed commitment to speak in favor of the logos tou staurou. THE DOUBLE ENCODING OF REVELATION There are times when Marion seems to signal the double encoding of revelation, especially in describing his approach to distance. For instance he

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initially catches sight of distance at the outer edge of metaphysics, which suggests that distance is foreign to ontotheology, and yet he insists as well that distance plays at the very center of ontotheology: “Distance shall become inchoatively intelligible to us only if we discover it starting from ontotheology itself and from its most identifiable state.”31 Such an approach allows Marion to “rediscover”32 the theological situation of Paul in his speech to the Athenians, even as it allows him to show that distance takes on the characteristics that metaphysics ascribes to difference. The double encoding of revelation is a mark of precision, a sign that Marion takes seriously the demand to straddle the border of metaphysics. At the same time, however, this approach makes it virtually impossible to determine in any given instance which of the two inquiries into revelation takes precedence. It is difficult, in other words, to ascertain whether in any given instance the insight that metaphysics is anticipated by the Trinitarian play arises from the attempt to interpret metaphysics “starting from the Christianity made manifest by the apocalypse of Christ,”33 or whether Marion’s description of this apocalypse is fully governed by the philosophical “place where we are,” from which we “undoubtedly”34 cannot escape. This impossibility counts as a real strength of the five individual studies comprising The Idol and Distance. And this strength is particularly evident in the second study, the reading of Nietzsche. At its outset Marion claims to approach Nietzsche starting from distance—that is, starting from the perspective in which paternal withdrawal is a manifestation of divine fidelity. He insists that the Nietzschean death of God “maintains its power only over a vain idol of that which God, if he ‘is,’ is not.”35 As a result, the death of God opens, rather than closes, the site of distance. Although this reading is thus deeply informed by the first mode of questioning revelation, it hinges upon the presentation of crucial evidence that is highly relevant to the second mode as well. The evidence I have in mind appears in section 6, entitled “The Christ: Evasion of an Outline.” Marion opens the section by quoting from the Wahnbriefe that Nietzsche wrote in late 1888 and early 1889, including his famous letter to Georg Brandes, dated January 4: “To my friend Georg! You have discovered me, it was a game to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me . . ./ The Crucified.”36 Marion then proceeds to offer the following provisional thesis: “Jesus, as the Christ who dies on the cross, perhaps offers the unsurpassable figure, even for Nietzsche—especially for him—of the unavoidable trial imposed by man’s meeting with the divine. The fact that, for him, the divine is principally and finally called ‘Dionysus,’ underlines all the more the fact that a name, a place, and a figure, remain to be located in which the one who receives the divine might emerge. Among the names that Nietzsche gives to the divine and to himself, that of the Christ dominates.”37 The provisional thesis is put forward due to the multitude of “correspondences, transcriptions,



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and displacements”38 characterizing Nietzsche’s relation with the biblical text in general and with the figure of Christ in particular. This thesis is then confirmed through a close reading of Nietzsche’s final texts—not only in the case of the Wahnbriefe but also in Nietzsche’s willingness in The Antichrist to play the figure of the crucified Christ against the psychological misunderstanding of being Christian. Marion carefully indicates that the real payoff to his reading is not that Nietzsche himself “undertook consciously to repeat the mystery of Christ.”39 It is rather that “the coherence of the Nietzschean text, including the plunge into darkness, becomes visible”40 by laying bare its so-called Christic structure.41 On this basis Marion contends that while Nietzsche succeeds in evacuating Christianity of its value, he cannot undo or dislodge the anteriority of the Christic event as the underlying aspect of all historicity. For this reason Nietzsche fails to think this event as the site in which the death of God takes root. Christ thus “remains the typical and ultimate place”42—Marion twice calls it the obligatory place43—to which Nietzsche is drawn each and every time he announces the end of Christianity, plunging into the darkness of his Dionysian ecstasy. The question of the gift takes shape in The Idol and Distance starting from this insight. That is, the question first begins to take shape with the assertion that philosophically speaking, Christ remains for Nietzsche the obligatory place of all thought. If there is something like a breakthrough to the giftquestion in The Idol and Distance, then it must be attributed to Marion’s reading of Nietzsche for a number of reasons. For one thing, this reading marks the first time Marion succeeds in showing how and why modern metaphysics is principally concerned with revelation—even and especially when it seeks to rid itself of revelation once and for all. This concern is imposed upon Nietzsche in direct proportion to his desire to exit metaphysics by tracing its limits. For Marion, Nietzsche cannot think through the fact that the figure of Christ remains unsurpassable for him. This is precisely why he cannot interrogate revelation philosophically as repeating in advance even his most strident attack on Christendom. Second, the allegedly Christic structure of the Nietzschean text allows Marion to think distance as prior to its metaphysical configuration. Third, Nietzsche exemplifies for Marion the ways in which distance is replicated by every attempt to eradicate it. After Nietzsche, Marion contends, one is obliged to acknowledge that the Christic event is destined to reemerge as the obligatory site for thinking. In this manner, the reading of Nietzsche marks a first breakthrough on the way to questioning the gift, even though this question does not appear as such within its pages. This is because distance is not the sole basis for questioning the gift. In order to exhibit the gift as such, Marion must advance from establishing the underlying presence of distance in metaphysics (via Nietzsche) to

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exhibiting its paternal element (via Denys the Areopagite and Hölderlin). This element is secured as such in the final essay of the treatise. Marion sets the stage for it in crucial ways by demonstrating that, for Hölderlin, receiving the gift involves the withdrawal of the giver. The term “gift” first appears in The Idol and Distance in connection with Hölderlin, who bears witness to the fact that Christ himself experiences divinity “as the freedom of a gift received from the Father and returned.”44 Glossing the fragmentary hymn from 1802 entitled Der Einzige, Marion claims that Hölderlin determines the concept of paternity in terms of withdrawal: “withdrawal, as distance, constitutes the sole place and mode in which the Son is united with the Father all the more insofar as he receives definitively from the Father the ability to distinguish himself forever from Him.”45 Further, Hölderlin acknowledges that paternal withdrawal “deploys the gift in its singularity to the point of giving to the beneficiary the gift of appropriating it to himself.”46 The fact that Marion’s reading of Denys further reinforces the bond between paternity and the gift reinforces the expressly Christian dimensions of distance in its paternal element. In the context of Hölderlin and Denys, however, it remains unclear precisely how Marion coordinates these dimensions with modern metaphysics. Thus, we must look to the fifth and final study of the treatise, entitled “Distance and Its Icon,” to see how the gift-question emerges in connection with the closure of metaphysics. PATERNITY AND THE DEDUCTION OF DISTANCE In the brief Interlude preceding “Distance and Its Icon,” Marion indicates that the study articulates a univocal concept of distance in two ways: first, by testing distance against the question of Being; second, by letting distance “explain itself in relation to what one calls the overcoming of metaphysics”47 in Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. The fifth study thus functions as a kind of deduction, in the sense that it justifies the application of distance as a concept to certain phenomena while simultaneously defending its legitimacy on historical grounds. The deduction hinges upon the paternal element in obvious and nonobvious ways. On the one hand, Marion employs the Pauline notion of kenosis in a manner that allows him to express the relation between the Father and the Son in terms of distance. Marion first employs the phrase “unconditional gift” when he applies it to kenosis in describing its removal of every restriction that one might place upon revelation: “Kenosis sets no condition for revealing itself, because in that revelation it gives itself and reveals nothing other than this unconditional gift.”48 Thus, the question of the gift, as the question concerning the unrestricted givenness of a phenomenon, first arises explicitly in the service of deducing distance. On the other hand,



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Marion employs paternity in a nonobvious way when he implicates it in describing how distance makes itself known in metaphysics. For this reason, the concept of paternity deployed in The Idol and Distance cannot belong solely to the word of the cross. More than any other concept, it is enjoined to reflect the double encoding of revelation. This dual function of paternity is made clear on the first page of The Idol and Distance. There Marion stipulates that “absence . . . pertains to what God says of Himself in his revelation through the Christ: namely, that it is from him that all paternity, in heaven and on earth, receives its name.”49 This statement grounds The Idol and Distance as a theological enterprise, and yet it also specifies precisely which dimension of the Trinitarian play Marion has in mind when he claims that this play repeats in advance the desolations of metaphysics. One can thus take up this theological grounding in one of two ways: either from the side of metaphysics, or from that which contests it. In other words, one could utilize this grounding to demonstrate the fundamentally Trinitarian derivation of paternity, or one could utilize it to demonstrate that all modern philosophical accounts of paternity are invariably repeated in advance by “what God says of Himself in his revelation through the Christ.”50 Marion concedes the legitimacy of both approaches, though his strategic interest lies mainly in contesting metaphysics. And though he does not acknowledge it explicitly, “Distance and Its Icon” combines these two undertakings in constituting the phenomenon of the gift. Paternity first factors in this discussion when Marion broaches the asymmetry of distance. Distance, he writes, “ensures communion only between terms whose separation it provokes.”51 One of the terms in distance designates the site that humanity occupies, whereas the other term is something that human beings can approach “only within a communion that is traversed by separation.”52 The latter term hearkens back to the modern face of revelation as withdrawal. This term retreats from us, thereby opening “the separation that discovers there its own horizon.”53 What Marion calls the “paternal horizon”54 of distance ensures that the far term of distance “removes itself . . . from any inquiry that would claim to objectivate it.”55 This implies that paternity furnishes the basic criterion for questioning every phenomenon that remains unobjectifiable, unrepresentable, and even unthinkable. Although it is not difficult to see that distance (as described in these terms) maps onto the Nietzschean death of God, Marion’s primary concern in the fifth study is to show that the concept of distance maps onto Heideggerian Being. Here the deduction of distance is complicated by the fact that early on Heidegger avoids using the term “distance” (Abstand) as a categorial determination of Dasein. Instead he sticks with the term “de-severance” (Entfernung)56 while describing the spatiality of being-in-the-world. As de-severant, Dasein overcomes the distance separating it from other entities, bringing

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them close as they are disclosed in their Being. It is only in his later works that Heidegger begins to adopt the language of distance—a transition Marion exploits in order to show that the ontological difference can be reinterpreted in terms conducive to showing that paternity is the form in which distance remains hidden within metaphysics. This argument radicalizes the trajectory Heidegger follows after Being and Time. A decade or so after its publication, Heidegger rehabilitates the term Abstand as an ontological predicate.57 In so doing, he argues that modern science as Machenschaft or machination destroys our capacity for authentic transcendence by forcing upon us the insurmountable experience of what is Abstandlose,58 or that which comes to presence without distance. The implication is that distance as Abstand is synonymous with Being. More precisely, distance for Heidegger designates the truth of Being as holding itself back, abandoning beings to themselves. Heidegger invokes distance without dwelling on its privation only when discussing the last god in Hölderlin: “How remote from us is the god. . .? So remote is the god that we are unable to decide whether he is moving toward or away from us.”59 Marion’s concept of distance resolves this indecisiveness that Heidegger registers in Hölderlin. Marion repeatedly tells us that God moves toward us by virtue of his moving away from us. More importantly, Marion envisions a possibility that never occurred to Heidegger—namely, that the paternal element of distance must be disengaged from the trajectory that leads from Being to the event of appropriation. As this possibility brings Marion closer to Levinas and Derrida than to Heidegger, it is not surprising that Marion invokes the authority of the former two figures to justify the act of disengaging distance from ontology. Significantly, Marion invokes their authority without mentioning the Levinasian concept of paternity. And this initial silence with regard to Levinasian paternity—a silence that Marion breaks years later, briefly and in critical fashion,60 though without altering the position spelled out in The Idol and Distance—invites further reflection here. Given the careful attention Marion pays to paternity in Hölderlin, as well as its refusal in Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is virtually impossible to mistake the absence of any substantive discussion of Levinasian paternity for an oversight. Moreover, the fact that Marion does not mention this concept does not indicate its irrelevance to the designs of the fifth study. Rather, it perhaps suggests that distance cannot be superimposed upon the Levinasian text in a manner that is strictly analogous to its use in other instances throughout the treatise. The question thus becomes why Levinasian paternity does not awaken the “echo”61 between distance and metaphysics, why it cannot be assigned an iconic function. This question is especially pertinent in the light of the fact that the impulse driving Marion to link paternity with the Christic event is closely related to the one that initially drove Levinas to articulate its philosophical significance.



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Levinas recognized very early on that he could use paternity to separate himself from classical philosophy in general and Heidegger in particular. In the Carnets de captivité he explicitly acknowledges the stakes of paternity: “In classical philosophy paternity is exhausted by the notion of the cause. See Aristotle. I go against all of this in setting up paternity as an original relation.”62 In the 1944 notebooks he writes the following: “An essential element of my philosophy—that by which it differs from the philosophy of Heidegger—is the importance of the Other. . . . Moreover [my philosophy] follows the rhythm of Judaism—by means of paternity—as a general sentiment. The patriarchs and their flock—children—prophets.”63 A decade later, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas defines paternity as “the primary phenomenon of time in which the phenomenon of the not yet is rooted.”64 Paternity is not simply biological fecundity, or the means by which the “I” survives itself in the form of the child, but rather it designates the first inklings of a messianic futurity. The relation with the child is for Levinas a relation with an absolute future—a future that resides in the “I” without being reducible to it. Hence, the child is not simply my child or the self in the guise of the other. Rather, the child signifies a future in which my Being is implicated but which I cannot recapture as my “self.” The child is thus the element of my life extended beyond itself, the form of an ecstasy reaching beyond the time that remains for me. In short, paternity is an original effectuation of time that cannot be integrated into mineness. Because it remains “irreducible to the power of the possible,”65 the “true adventure of paternity” consists in a movement of transcendence beyond “the very substance of potentiality-for-being”66 toward “him who transcends,” that is, toward a “not-yet” that will never resolve itself in the present. According to Levinas, the son “resumes the unicity of the Father,” while nevertheless remaining “exterior to the Father.”67 The filial “I” thus refers to a being that is capable of a fate other than its own, a being that lives from a term that absolves itself from the very relation it makes possible. In four crucial ways, Marion’s concept of paternal withdrawal tacitly repeats its Levinasian counterpart. First, in each case it is a question of delineating the unconditional anteriority of paternal withdrawal—a withdrawal that absolves itself from every relation. In fact, when Marion disengages distance from ontology, he cites Levinas as his authority. On two occasions Levinas uses the phrase “absolute distance”68 in Totality and Infinity to describe the radical separation between the same and the other. On one of these occasions, while indicating that there is no perspective from which one can coordinate the same and the other, Levinas defines metaphysics “as a relation in which the terms absolve themselves from the relation, and remain absolute within the relation. Without this absolution, the absolute distance of metaphysics would be illusory.”69 Marion adopts a similar approach when he

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maintains that the paternal element of distance disappears in its very apparition—an apparition thus marked as indefinite—and discovers in this indefiniteness “its own horizon.”70 Second, for both Levinas and Marion, paternal withdrawal bestows the power of giving. The entire latter half of “Distance and Its Icon” seeks to isolate the question of the gift from the ontological frame Heidegger imposes upon it. Marion insists that the gift is its own index: “To receive the given as given amounts finally to receiving the giving as the manner of the given, no longer only as the origin or the ontic event of its presence.”71 Similarly, paternal withdrawal for Levinas “accomplishes goodness: above and beyond the sacrifice that imposes the gift, the gift of the power of giving, the conception of the child.”72 Third, in each case the anteriority of paternal withdrawal destroys the categories of classical metaphysics. Levinas insists upon this not only in the Carnet de captivité but also in Totality and Infinity, where he maintains that the concept of fecundity “breaks up reality into relations irreducible to the relations of genus and species, part and whole, action and passion, truth and error.”73 Levinas claims that fecundity modifies the self-affection of the “I” in such a way as to require entirely new categories. The same is true in Marion’s attempt to open a non-metaphysical approach to God by destroying the Heideggerian category of ethos. While this gesture leads Marion to disavow the notion of a divine abode, it also allows him to rethink the notion of intellectual habitus in terms of the self-indexing character of the gift. In both instances, the destruction of classical categories is accomplished by a return to religious sources. For his part, Marion recognizes this return in his critique of Levinas: “that which speaks in Totality and Infinity is not being, nor phenomenology, but through them, the word of the prophets and the revelation of the Law; one would miss everything in not hearing them there, present as a second voice.”74 Likewise in the final pages of “Distance and Its Icon,” Marion indicates that the affinity between distance and metaphysics becomes apparent only in a relation of obedience to the Christic event. The specificity of paternal withdrawal in Marion undoubtedly comes down to the difference between Christian proclamation and the anteriority of the Jewish voice. And yet the difference disappears when it comes to delineating revelation philosophically. Hence, the fourth and final point of correspondence. Levinas and Marion use the concept of paternity to show that expression is the essence of manifestation: “The absolute experience,” Levinas writes, “is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses.”75 The same coincidence of content and modality characterizes the gift for Marion, as he argues that “language . . . expresses itself in distance, just as it receives itself from distance.”76 If the paternal horizon escapes all representation, it is precisely because this horizon marks the point at which expression and what is expressed coincide with one another.



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Given these points of correspondence, it is significant that Marion explicitly engages Derrida instead of Levinas on paternity. It is Derrida, he contends, who forecloses the paternal question, as the thought of différance allegedly sees in the concept of paternity nothing other than nostalgia and the longing for lost presence. It is thus Derrida whose usage of paternity marks the last instance in which metaphysics suppresses distance. The criticisms that Marion directs at Levinas are much less pointed, or rather more muted. They portray distance as building upon rather than contesting Totality and Infinity. For Marion, Levinas inverts the ontological difference, thus failing to overcome it. Moreover, Levinas’ thought of alterity remains insufficient and thus in need of supplementation and elaboration. The fact that both criticisms are advanced in the absence of any engagement with Levinasian paternity must be interpreted according to the double encoding of revelation, as I have described it thus far. If we approach this absence from what exceeds metaphysics, then it seems to complement and support the iconic function Marion assigns to the metaphysical tradition in general. At the same time it seems to indicate the presence of another kind of remainder within this tradition, one that cannot be assigned an iconic function. At this level Levinasian paternity may serve as a type or an allegory for the repetition that overtakes it and thereby displaces it. Thus, it is not absent so much as it is overwritten, reinterpreted as an allegory from the perspective opened by the Christic event. By contrast, if we approach this absence from the side of philosophy proper, then the criticism Marion directs at Levinas must be sharpened so as to include his claim that modern metaphysics finds itself repeated in advance by the Christic event. Here we must admit, however, that Levinas anticipated this criticism. In the sixth Carnet de captivité, in a passage from 1994, Levinas writes the following: “Let’s stick with the example of what belongs to Christianity in the interpretation of the humanity of the human. The human in its entirety is lodged within the categories of Catholicism. But while we others remain on the surface of these categories, it gives off a sense of fire and blood, the mystical sense and the transcendent, lodging everything that is human at the level of these categories.”77 This passage provides a clear indication that Levinas begins with the premise that modern conceptions of the human are saturated with Christian significance, and that they all derive from Christian categories. Is this not the major premise of The Idol and Distance as well? The fact that this premise is shared in common, or in trust, between these two thinkers allows us to follow up Marion’s remark that the Levinasian concept of alterity stands in need of further clarification. Why is it that Marion finds it necessary to go beyond Levinas in underscoring the paternal element of distance? It is precisely because Levinas himself forestalls the paternal question at a moment when he refuses to recognize

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distance itself as an element of habitus or inhabitation: “The relationship of the I with the non-I produced as happiness which promotes the I consists neither in assuming nor in refusing the non-I. Between the I and what it lives from there does not extend the absolute distance that separates the same from the other. The acceptance or refusal of what we live from implies a prior agreement.”78 If there is one point that distinguishes Marion’s concept of paternity from that of Levinas, it is precisely that absolute distance can and indeed does intervene in the relation between the “I” and what it lives from—and that it does so precisely in the form of paternal withdrawal. The divergence is slight yet crucial. The “I” for Marion is given to itself as abandoned by an absent term, and yet unlike in Levinas, this absent term designates in Marion nothing other than the “life of my life” (vita vitae mea)79—the source from which the “I” lives as being given, or as Marion puts it, being “interlocuted.” By contrast, Levinas denies that absolute distance intervenes between the “I” and the source of its vitality. He argues instead that the concept of absolute distance is misused when applied to the realm of vitality, and he remains suspicious of any attempts to reconfigure the ipseity of the “I” in terms of it. CONCLUSION With this divergence in mind, we can identify the conceptual origins of the gift-question, its conditions of possibility, in three points. First, Marion faults Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida for essentially repeating Nietzsche’s refusal to acknowledge the Christic event as the hidden ground of the death of God. In The Idol and Distance, this critique is the first conceptual condition of possibility for questioning the gift. That is, one must recognize the exemplary status of Nietzsche’s refusal in order to see why it is necessary to question the gift. Next, the deduction of distance in its paternal element establishes a phenomenological criterion for questioning the gift. For Marion the gift alone bestows the capacity to receive it, and along with this, the capacity to question it. The gift imposes itself upon the “I” only to the degree that the “I” finds itself given. The question of the gift is thus no different than the question concerning the absolute distance that intervenes between the “I” and its source of vitality. Its second conceptual condition of possibility is thus the transposition of absolute distance into the “I” as the form of its self-relation. Finally, I stated at the outset that Marion’s conjunction of distance and metaphysics is overlaid upon the absence of a specific term. Having identified this term as Levinasian paternity, we can acknowledge that its displacement and allegorization are the effects of linking distance with the Christic event. This is the effect Marion must pay for thinking distance with and beyond Levinas, yet with and against Heidegger. It is also a sign that in questioning the gift,



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Marion repeats in his own way the vision of philosophy Levinas expresses in his Carnets: “The relation between religion and reason is not a problem that belongs to the philosophy of religion. It is philosophy itself.”80 NOTES 1 The title of this chapter is taken from the last line of Jean-Luc Marion’s SP, 456: “Et dès lors, Descartes nous resterait une sentinelle, elle aussi contournée mais toujours debout, sur les marches de la métaphysique, au seuil de la distance.” 2 VR, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift,” 91. 3 IE, “Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy,” 25. 4 Ibid., 81. 5 Ibid. 6 Christina Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 12. 7 MP, 578. 8 ID, xxxvii. 9 Ibid., 19. 10 VR, “Sketch,” 80. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 81. 14 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 24. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 See RG. 17 BG, 31, emphasis added. 18 Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 56. 19 Ibid., 51. 20 RG, 197. 21 Janicaud, “The Theological Turn,” 63. 22 IAD, xxxv. 23 Ibid., 1. 24 Ibid., xxxv. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 19. 27 Ibid., 21. 28 See Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Mere Boundaries of Reason,” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 29 G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190–1.

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30 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 25. 31 IAD, 20. 32 Ibid., 23. 33 Ibid., 21. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 32. 36 As quoted in IAD, 52. 37 IAD, 56. 38 Ibid., 59. 39 Ibid., 61. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 59. 42 Ibid. 43 See IAD, 56. 44 Ibid., 109. 45 IAD, 115. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum Press, 1990), 297. 46 IAD, 124. 47 Ibid., 197. 48 Ibid., 215. 49 Ibid., xxxv. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 199. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 201. 55 Ibid. 56 See, for example, Heidegger, Being and Time, 138–44. 57 See, for example, Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Physis,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Martin Heidegger: Pathways, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202. 58 See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, GA 7, ed. F. W. von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000) esp. 167–8, 179, and 183. 59 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniella Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 20. 60 See FP, 80–81, in which Marion discusses the ambiguity of Levinasian paternity: “la fécondité ne peut par définition pas individualiser le père, ni l’enfant, pas plus qu’elle ne nomme la mère. La paternité [levinasienne] dissout donc le nom proper du fils (ou de la fille) dans l’anonymat qui régnait déjà sur l’eros.” 61 Ibid., 200. 62 Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Bernard Grasset/Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 2009), 129 (translation mine).



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63 Ibid., 134 (translation mine). 64 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 65 Ibid., 267. 66 Ibid., 269. 67 Ibid., 278. 68 Ibid., 36 and 143. 69 Ibid., 64. 70 ID, 199. 71 Ibid., 235 emphasis added. 72 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 269. 73 Ibid., 276. 74 ID, 219–20. 75 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 64–5. 76 ID, 205. 77 Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 151. 78 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 143, emphasis on “absolute distance” added. 79 See Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006), 166 (Book 7, chapter 1); see also SP, esp. 56–101. 80 Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 287.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006. Gschwandtner, Christina. Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence and Concept of Physis.” Translated by Thomas Sheehan. In Martin Heidegger: Pathways. Edited by William McNeill, 183–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Vorträge und Aufsätze, GA 7. Edited by F. W. von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniella Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion and Selected Poems. Edited by Eric L. Santner. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Continuum Press, 1990.

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Janicaud, Dominique. “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. Translated by Bernard G. Prusak. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.” In Religion and Rational Theology. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Levinas, Emmanuel. Carnets de captivité et autres inédits. Edited by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Paris: Bernard Grasset/Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 2009. Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology.” Translated by Thomas A. Carlson, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4 (1994): 542–91. Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy.” In In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift.” In The Visible and Revealed. Translated by Christina Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida. Paris: J Vrin, 2012. Marion, Jean-Luc. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of St. Augustine. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Part II

PRESENT OPENINGS

Chapter 7

Reading Textual Dramatics: Marion, Levinas, and the Interplay of Affection and Reason Stephen E. Lewis

Anyone who wishes to approach the relationship between the thought of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, is faced with an extraordinarily rich array of possible starting points for comparison, contrast, critique, and philosophical development. To begin with, while the relationship involves two French philosophers of different generations (Marion was born in 1946, the same year in which Levinas, born in Lithuania in 1906, was returning to French academic life after spending World War II as a prisoner of war), the discussions and debates between them go both ways, so that lines of influence must be drawn from the younger thinker (Marion) to the older, as well as from the older to the younger.1 Of course, after having considered such avowed influences, there are others to consider that have been treated or addressed more discreetly elsewhere: influences of a religious nature, for instance, passing back and forth between the foremost French Jewish thinker of one generation and the foremost French Roman Catholic philosopher of the next, each working with attentive patience on the borders between philosophy and theology; or conceptual proximities that interweave complex patterns of religious, exegetical, philosophical, and even psychological (indeed, potentially psychoanalytic) dimensions. I am thinking here of each philosopher’s profound concerns with paternity, filiation, and sexual difference, concerns that are clearly related, but at the same time strikingly different.2 In many ways, and especially given the multilayered richness of the relationship, the study of the interplay between Marion and Levinas has only just begun; as a result, what might be philosophically at stake in the study of the relationship is not yet entirely clear. A number of shrewd and insightful studies have been produced in English of Marion’s relationship to the thought of Levinas, motivated principally by a desire to defend Levinas against 109

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Marion’s criticisms or “corrections.” Christina M. Gschwandtner, has in three different articles assessed Marion’s characterizations and critiques of various features of Levinas’ philosophy—for example, Marion’s critique of Levinas’ relative success in overcoming ontological difference, his critique of Levinas’ description of the Other’s individuality in his account of responsibility and substitution for the Other, and his critique of the extent to which the human other and God are sufficiently distinguished in this account—and in each case found Marion’s critiques wanting.3 Such efforts to adjudicate the accuracy and fairness of Marion’s claims about and representations of Levinas’ thought are certainly worthwhile, and my goal here is not to contest them. Instead, I will make an initial foray into what might be philosophically at stake in investigating the relationship between Marion and Levinas through an examination of what I find to be an especially interesting aspect of an adjudicatory approach: namely, the strong, yet suppressed, emotion that frequently seems to motivate it. Defending (or attacking) a philosopher’s work is typically motivated by one or more fundamental desires—the desire for justice, the passion for truth, or the sense of the dignity or even heroism inherent in a way of thinking. However, for some reason these fundamental motives, if they are acknowledged at all in an academic article, often emerge only briefly and usually at the end, where they cannot be developed or investigated. Yet they clearly originate in the writer’s experience of reading the works of the thinkers under consideration. This observation leads me to inquire into the way in which a philosopher’s writing engages the reader to feel for (or against) him or her, and how a fuller consideration of this affective dimension of philosophical writing can clarify what is philosophically at stake in the study of the history of philosophy. To pursue this question with regard to the work of Levinas and Marion, I will bracket considerations of accuracy and fairness and instead shift attention to what I term the comparative dramatics of these two philosophers’ projects. In other words, I will attempt a way of reading their work that takes its affective impact seriously, in order to focus on the ways in which each philosopher elicits emotion in the reader and, through that elicited response, shapes or even stages a philosophical drama in which the reader participates, aware of the interplay between his or her affection and reason. In their own ways, the respective philosophies of Levinas and Marion each stage a dramatic movement from being to beyond being. To the degree that it is possible, I want to try to record the affective response in which our rational attention and application as readers to these bodies of thought is embedded. My hypothesis is that the practice of reading with attention to drama, emotion, and reason will yield insights that allow us to be clearer about overarching assumptions and aims operating in



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each thinker’s work. Such assumptions and aims might be insufficiently revealed and discussed when our focus on the relationship between the two philosophies is restricted to adjudication. Before proceeding, I should mention some of the limits I am presuming for my reading method. The intention here is not to confuse or blur the lines between literature and philosophy, especially when the blurring of the lines is not the intention of the authors. In his interviews with Dan Arbib, Marion makes clear his view that poetic writing and conceptual writing are irreducible. He says, Words or concepts—you have to choose. The logics are not the same. In both domains [poetry and philosophy], something is given to see, but it is not given to see by the same means or through the same methods. To claim to move from one logic to the other is perilous. [. . .] In my opinion, conceptual literature is a name for bad literature; and, inversely, non-conceptual philosophy stands for bad philosophy. The poem and the concept do offer two registers of manifestation, but they are registers that remain irreducible. [Le mot ou le concept, il faut choisir. Les logiques ne sont pas les mêmes. Dans les deux domaines [poésie et philosophie], on donne à voir, mais on ne donne pas à voir avec les mêmes moyens ni suivant les mêmes rigueurs. Prétendre passer d’une logique à l’autre est périlleux. [. . .] Bref, une littérature conceptuelle, à mon avis, désigne une mauvaise littérature; et, inversement, une philosophie non conceptuelle indique une mauvaise philosophie. Poème et concept offrent bien deux registres de manifestation, mais qui demeurent irréductibles.]4

Similarly, Levinas, who abandoned drafts of two novels he wrote early in his career, did not understand himself to be writing literature when he was writing philosophy. But this irreducibility between the two “registers” should not preclude our attention to the place, and even the structuring role, of drame or “intrigue” in philosophical thought—two words that Levinas, for his part, was not at all shy about employing or locating at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. As Jean-Luc Nancy’s Preface to the third volume of Levinas’ Œuvres complètes notes, very early on Levinas understood his philosophical writing as in some sense the report and the record of the lived drama or “intrigue” of life.5 And while these words may not be ones we tend to come across frequently when reading Marion’s texts, the dramatic sense is certainly present there—it is clearly thematized, for instance, in “The Silence of Love,” which opens The Erotic Phenomenon and sets out the philosophical import of shifting from speaking with the supposedly neutral “I of the philosophers” to an “I” that thinks and speaks “about what affects me as such and constitutes me as this particular person,” and in so doing, “say[s] I in [the reader’s] name.”6

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My focus here on drama will not be primarily sociological or concerned, for instance, with the professional stylistic and formal conventions of philosophical writing that are in evidence in the work of Levinas and Marion. I will also avoid using this way of reading to judge which philosophy is better or more successful. Consideration of tone, style, and form, to the extent that these are discussed here (and limited space prevents too much attention, unfortunately), will be primarily for the purpose of seeing how the works create or elicit in the reader the effects and responses that they do. For practical purposes, and because I think this pairing works well to disclose the aforementioned assumptions and aims, I will be limiting my attention to aspects of Levinas’ essay “God and Philosophy,” and to two moments in Marion’s book The Erotic Phenomenon. Because Levinas and Marion are, of course, both thinkers of the “beyond of being,” each paying particular attention to the encounter with the other, we tend to find many of the same emotions present in the experience of reading both writers. Frequently, in order for the arguments to be compelling and convincing, the reader needs to be led to feel a strong desire for liberation from the dominance and the falsifying effects of being, and this emotional yearning for liberation is often heightened in the texts of these two writers through an association of purity and goodness with the beyond of being. However, we shall see that the difference between the two writers lies in the places or roles available in the narrative for the reader to attach these emotions. To see what I mean, let us consider a famous passage from “God and Philosophy.” In prose that at moments reminds one of the language of a medieval morality play, with personifications named Love, Eros, Desire, the Desirable, the Undesirable, the Good, the Infinite, and so on, Levinas leads the reader to strip away all associations of pleasure, satisfaction, presence, and being from the Good that has nevertheless lured him: To be good is a deficit, a wasting away and a foolishness in being; to be good is excellence and elevation beyond being. Ethics is not a moment of being, it is otherwise and better than being; the very possibility of the beyond. In this ethical turnabout, in this reference [renvoi] from the Desirable to the Undesirable, in this strange mission commanding the approach to the other, God is pulled out of objectivity, out of presence and out of being. He is neither object nor interlocutor. His absolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility—the non-erotic par excellence—for the other. And it is from the analysis just carried out that God is not simply the “first other,” or the “other par excellence,” or the “absolutely other,” but other than the other, other otherwise, and other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical obligation to the other and different from every neighbor, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of his possible confusion with the agitation of the there is [il y a]. This is the confusion wherein substitution for the neighbor gains



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in disinterestedness, that is, in nobility; wherein the transcendence of the Infinite thereby likewise arises in glory. It is a transcendence that is true by way of a dia-chronous truth and, being without synthesis, it is higher than the truths lacking enigmas. In order that the formula, “transcendence to the point of absence,” not signify the simple explicitation of an ex-ceptional word, it was necessary to restore this word to the meaning of every ethical intrigue, to the divine comedy without which this world could not have arisen. A comedy taking place in the ambiguity between temple and theater, but wherein the laughter sticks in your throat at the approach of the neighbor, that is, of his face or his forsakenness.7 Être bon c’est déficit et dépérissement et bêtise dans l’être; être bon est excellence et hauteur au-delà de l’être—l’éthique n’est pas un moment de l’être—il est autrement et mieux qu’être, la possibilité même de l’au-delà. Dans ce retournement éthique, dans ce renvoi du Désirable au Non-désirable—dans cette mission étrange ordonnant l’approche d’autrui—Dieu est arraché à l’objectivité, à la présence et à l’être. Ni objet, ni interlocuteur. Son éloignement absolu, sa transcendance vire en ma responsabilité—le non-érotique par excellence—pour autrui. Et c’est à partir de l’analyse qui vient d’être menée que Dieu n’est pas simplement le ‘premier autrui,’ ou ‘autrui par excellence’ ou l’ ‘absolument autrui,’ mais autre qu’autrui, autre autrement, autre d’altérité préalable à l’altérité d’autrui, à l’astreinte éthique au prochain, et différent de tout prochain, transcendant jusqu’à l’absence, jusqu’à sa confusion possible avec le remue-ménage de l’il y a. Confusion où la substitution au prochain gagne en désintéressement c’est-à-dire en noblesse où, par là même, la transcendance de l’Infini s’élève en gloire. Transcendance vraie d’une vérité dia-chrone et, sans synthèse, plus haute que les vérités sans énigme. Pour que cette formule: transcendance jusqu’à l’absence, ne signifie pas la simple explicitation d’un mot ex-ceptionnel, il fallait restituer ce mot à la signification de toute l’intrigue éthique—à la comédie divine sans laquelle ce mot n’aurait pu surgir. Comédie dans l’ambiguité du temple et du théâtre, mais où le rire vous reste dans la gorge à l’approche du prochain, c’est-à-dire de son visage ou de son délaissement.8

At the risk of vulgarizing this complex (and masterfully written) passage, I would like to focus on the dramatic choice of perspectives—being good “in being” versus being good “beyond being”—that is set up in the first, rather Pauline sentence (an echo of 1 Cor. 1:25?), and then attempt to trace how, through the deployment of positives and negatives, through additions and subtractions, the text leads the reader in and out of possible positions of emotional insertion into the text. Within being, “to be good” is disadvantageous; it is stupidity (“bêtise”), it involves decline, fading and wasting away—it constitutes ignoble loss. By contrast, being good in the position beyond being is “otherwise and better.” Initially, the choice does not seem terribly dramatic. But immediately, lest the reader start to experience emotionally a certain sense of affluence, growth, and emergence from solitude (into dialogue) by identifying with the

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choice “beyond being,” Levinas makes clear that the “turnabout” by which being is relegated in favor of “beyond being” involves a “strange mission.” It is a sending (missio) by a God who “is pulled [or torn—est arraché] out of objectivity, out of presence and out of being” by this very turnabout. “[God’s] absolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility— the non-erotic par excellence—for the other.” The drama is engaged, but it is rather paradoxical because the typical motives of a hero on a quest are deflected or denied. The “strange mission” is that of pursuing the other to the point of substitution—but this is a pursuit without desire, without any pounding of the heart, without hope (of benefit or pleasure or satisfaction), seemingly even without any sense of attraction. Indeed, this is a pursuing that takes place from within the disorienting effects of the disorderly commotion of the il y a, that is, unsupported structurally by any sense of correspondence with the environing world. And yet, the text states, the more disinterested the substitution for the other—the more it is a movement toward the other stripped of any motive of attraction—the more it gains in “nobility.” This “divine comedy,” in which God takes on true transcendence beyond being and in so doing, forbids every trace of interest, of yearning for satisfaction, of hope for communion from our sense and image of life lived with “desire for the Good,” contrasts starkly with Aristophanes’ “Comedy” of love in Plato’s Symposium, which Levinas mentions a few pages earlier.9 God’s comedy—His retreat into transcendence—brings no happy ending for me, and I find myself, writes Levinas, “in the ambiguity between temple and theater,” choking on my laughter “at the approach of the neighbor.”10 This choking on my laughter is especially evocative: it suggests that the position of being held hostage to the other, the result, as it were, of the choice beyond being, is never disambiguated once and for all. I will never live up to it; the joke will always be on that part of me that remains within being and unable fully to will the ideal. The reader’s experience here of being initially faced with a choice, and then an attempt to insert him or herself into the position of the accusative “me” who is defined in response to the other’s demanding call, is emotionally draining: within the space of one short paragraph I was powerfully lured and then undone, with new, previously unsuspected aspects of this undoing unfolded before me almost sentence by sentence. Once I have made the choice of trying to be good “beyond being,” I never catch up with myself and become settled. Levinas writes a few pages later in “God and Philosophy:” Responsibility does not let me constitute myself into an I think, as substantial as a stone or, like a heart of stone, into an in- and for-oneself. . . . This is a responsibility that does not leave me time: it leaves me without a present for recollection or a return into the self.11



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It is with good reason that Levinas employs the term “traumatism”12 to describe this “awakening” to the Other beyond being—this is something that the sensitive reader indeed undergoes, at least to some extent, in the very experience of reading the text. It is an essential part of the difficulty of reading Levinas. An emotional corollary to this traumatic, disturbingly “comic” effect of the reading experience is the yearning to find, somewhere in the text, a place where the purity of an ideal is at least honored without resistance. The text guides this emotional yearning toward the Other, who is gradually revealed to be sufficiently distant from my self-centered designs on him, and therefore able to shine with glory. Between the theater and the temple crops up the approaching face of the other, and I am stopped in my laughter and in my tracks by the purity of his incomprehensibility.13 The text has been written to engage my self-centered or being-centered desire with a choice, only to then tear away or undo my motives—my pursuit according to what I pick out for myself—so as to hollow me out for reception of the commanding call of the other. As the hollowing out is never complete, my suffering of “trauma” from the approach of the neighbor will likewise never end (or ought never to end). This is central to the dramatic experience of reading Levinas. There are moments in the experience of reading the texts of Marion that approach the “traumatic” experience of reading Levinas; often, these moments similarly involve the experience of having one’s attachment to thinking according to being undone. However, ultimately I do not find these moments in Marion to be truly traumatic, as they are in Levinas, because the ascetic experience of encountering the infinite within finite existence described in Marion’s texts is giving, rather than solely subtractive. The protagonist of Marion’s narrative, the gifted, after having been undone, finds himself buoyed up by another protagonist: givenness itself. Unlike the Levinasian il y a, the experience of being as completely anonymous, givenness in Marion is the resource capable of revivifying the gifted when he or she fails to live as response to what is given. Givenness seems to have a therapeutic effect that allows for incremental growth and discovery in a way that is not possible, as far as I am currently able to see, in Levinas’ texts. There are many episodes in the lover’s itinerary in The Erotic Phenomenon that could demonstrate this therapeutic experience of givenness; I would like to focus on two. The first is the moment when the lover has stalled in his amorous progress because of his discovery that the eroticization of the flesh, which in its finitude is subject to suspension, proceeds automatically most of the time. He realizes that this automaticity prevents him from reaching the beloved in person. The eroticization of the flesh, characterized by automaticity, would thus have nothing to do with love: “the disappearance of [the person from eroticization in favor of a pure anonymity of another

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in general] would radically forbid me from loving him or her.”14 Marion explains further: [I]f we remain apart from one another, if I do not succeed in manifesting myself in person to the other, nor she to me, this is not the result of a bad or weak will, but of a more original gap—the gap that each of us has within ourselves. For my eroticized flesh remains apart from me myself in person, as does hers from her person. Each of us must remain, whether he wants to or not, short of the person of the other, because first of all, our eroticized flesh keeps each of us short of our own respective person. And I know quite well this impossibility, which results from my very finitude: on the one hand, I identify myself with and through my flesh, which individualizes me in the final instance (§22); on the other hand, my flesh, when it is eroticized in contact with another flesh, engages automatically (§27), until the process is suspended of itself (§26)—my flesh thus escapes from my decision and my will . . . thus eroticized and finite flesh contradicts the person in me. . . . Who, in the white light of orgasm, can claim to have experienced (let us not say to have seen) any person unsubstitutable as such? Who can assure (or assure oneself) that a person is distinguished there as such, and manifested there in his or her individuality? Can I myself claim that I manifest myself as such there, in the evidence of my final individuation? Without a doubt, no one can claim here the status of a person. On the contrary, I have always, if for only an instant, and even in the greatest outbursts, experienced the residual and heartbreaking gap between the other and I, the simple double of a more awful gap—that between my own flesh and my own person.15

The drama involved in reading this section of the work lies in the way it disrupts and threatens the initial dramatic plot-line of the text, which opened with the ego’s entry into the erotic reduction. That initial drama, parallel in many ways to the Levinasian drama that begins with the move beyond being, is truly a new story for the ego: it crossed an initial gap when it moved into the question, “Does anyone out there love me?”; and then it regrouped to ask “Can I love first?” a question that renewed the world (space and time), the ego itself, and the other, each discovered to be different than they were before love bloomed. Then, with the passage into the advance and the mutual giving of flesh, further discoveries ensued. (Again, there is a parallel here with the Levinasian drama, except that the capacity for narrative to register the “content” of the discoveries in Levinas’ essay was limited by the extreme distance of the Other—any discoveries about the other, and about the self in responding in responsibility to the Other, are not recorded.) But now, in the passage from Marion that I have just quoted, the experience of the gap between lovers and between the lover and his or her own flesh threatens the very continuation of the drama of the erotic reduction. There is



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the dawning possibility that love is hopelessly fragmented and fragmenting, that it fails to form unity or communion among lovers in person, that there is nothing further to discover, and therefore that, retrospectively, everything that has occurred up to this point could be emptied of its significance or its relevance for thought. In particular, if love does not reach and unite our persons, the aspects of love in which the infinite seemed to be breaking into finite life—the advance, the eternity of the oath—are in danger of losing their worth. This passage occurs three-quarters of the way through the book, after a number of apparent accomplishments, including the emergence from and progress beyond several dead ends. This raises a further dramatic question: How many times can we fail in our attempts to think through a phenomenon before we conclude that there is a fatal flaw in our human rationality, our world, or both? Was the advance in thought that I took myself to be experiencing, where the text was offering up discovery after discovery as I gave myself to it, ultimately for naught? In the passage from Levinas, the way forward over the initial gap between being and beyond was opened by the call of the other, rendering the subject the other’s hostage. In the case of Marion’s text, the way forward after this apparently tragic end to the initial drama of the text only appears after the ways of exploiting the gap within myself and between myself and the other— the different figures of deception—have been explored. Gradually, it turns out that there is no part of the erotic phenomenon that is useless, that will not ultimately serve the effort to think love successfully. But this success is not due first and foremost to superior intelligence, or the supreme will to make it all cohere. Instead what arises is the realization that when eroticization becomes “free,” it “give[s] more than what it appeared to give.”16 In a sense, we discover that we have been suspended over a gap that was full rather than empty: Thus, while conducting my whole meditation upon the lie and assuming that one cannot phenomenalize the personhood of the other (nor, for that matter, my own [personhood]) in eroticized flesh, I learn to my surprise from the most resolute actors in this aporia (the jealous and the hateful) that the person still remains, if only negatively, on the horizon of eroticization, and thus of the crossing of flesh. I also verify this lesson directly, since the personhood of the other summons me insofar as I miss it—and I miss it because of the erotic reduction (§6). . . . If I gave up on the flesh and the crossing of our flesh, I would lose not only the flesh, but also all possible phenomenality of the other, in fact every possible path toward her personhood. Thus it is necessary to find, inside the very field opened by the eroticization of the flesh, a new way of making use of it, one that this time does not obscure the faces or the persons of which I there gain a presentiment.17

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This discovery of a new way to “make love” within the very field opened by the eroticization of the flesh, which Marion calls “free eroticization,” is just one example of many in The Erotic Phenomenon in which the erotic reduction itself gives the solutions to the problems that arise during loving. The more we delve into loving, the more it heals us and, in a sense, itself, or at least our reasoning about it. My failure is not the last word. Such is the therapeutic effect of the givenness of love. Perhaps the most striking instance of this therapeutic giving from out of the phenomenon of love to occur in the text takes place only pages from the end, when “a third and final formulation” of the erotic reduction “is called for.”18 Marion writes: Just as [the erotic reduction] opened with the question, ‘Does anyone out there love me?’ posed by vanity (§3), in order next to be radicalized by the question ‘Can I love first?’ which was imposed by the lover (§17); so, now that the lover’s advance (§18) inverts itself and proceeds first from the other and no longer from me, it is necessary to think the erotic reduction beginning from the accomplished lover, beginning from the other and no longer from me, beginning from the adieu and not from repetition. This final swing of the center of gravity can be expressed thus: ‘You loved me first.’ . . . I discover, in my impetus and in the degree to which I throw myself into it, that this very advance does not belong to me and that I do not inaugurate it, but that, instead, it was expecting me, it draws me upward and supports me, like the air gives rise to a flight, or water supports swimming. . . . By walking blindly on the way of the erotic reduction, in fact, I had, doubtless from the outset, already found what I thought only I was searching for; or that, more exactly, what I was searching for had already found me and guided me right to it. When I was advancing bewildered in my own advance, a blind lover not knowing whom to love or how, doubtless there were other lovers, senior to me, watching me, looking after my steps, and loving me already, without my knowledge, in spite of me. In order for me to enter into the erotic reduction, it was necessary for another lover to have gone there before me, a lover who, from there, calls me there in silence.19

The dramatic discovery here is that the fullness we are suspended over is peopled with what might be called a communion of lovers, perhaps analogous to the communion of saints. My point is perhaps a simple one, but nevertheless fundamental: we have to notice that the experience of reading this text is dramatic, and that the drama involves finding limitation consistently overcome by the excess or surplus hidden within the erotic phenomenon that the reader advances into with the speaker. In a sense, this surplus is always forgiving: it corrects and guides when one is open to receiving it; it nurtures thought, not by inspiration or elevation above the phenomena investigated, but by supporting reason in its weakness, always calling the thinking reader to attend



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to his or her experience of what is outside, elsewhere burgeoning around her or him. At an emotional, affective level, the reader of Marion’s text comes to understand a sort of mercy within the reality that feels qualitatively different from the severe ascesis he or she must endure in order to remain true to the Other within the reality described by Levinas. If I am right that the reading experience needs to be taken into account when we critically discuss and compare the works of philosophers—that is, if it is true that we need to attend closely to what it feels like to enter into the horizon of the work, feeling ourselves moving about in the emotional patterns of the thought—this is due, I think, to the fact that our reasoning is always affective. Claude Romano has written that “the phenomenological method takes as a fundamental presupposition that a good description not only takes the place of understanding, but is this understanding itself. To describe a phenomenon beginning from itself is to understand, with regard to it, all there is to understand.”20 What I am suggesting here is that our experience as readers of the dramatic elements in such descriptions is central to how this understanding works. Understanding always involves affection and reason, therefore the role of our emotional attunements to the dramatic performances present in even the smallest descriptions should be fully acknowledged in our comparative and critical judgments of these curious things we call philosophical texts. Without this integration, we risk losing our sense of why we are trying to think through philosophical writing in the first place. NOTES 1 Professionally speaking, Marion has followed the same French academic itinerary as Levinas, with university appointments at the Université de Poitiers, the Université Paris X-Nanterre, and culminating with the appointment to the chair of metaphysics, previously occupied by Levinas, at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). (Levinas was at Poitiers beginning in 1961; he then moved to Nanterre in 1967 and to the Sorbonne in 1973.) See RC, 57–60, and Séan Hand, introduction to The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 2. Marion himself reviews some of the key moments in his philosophical conversation with Levinas—the back and forth movement of influence mentioned previously— beginning at least as early as 1977 and continuing until Levinas’ death in 1995, in two of his essays on Levinas. The first is NIO, subsequently included as chapter IV in FP, 59–73. There Marion outlines in the first section (Figures, 59–61) the stages in the public debate between himself and Levinas regarding the relative success of Levinas’ efforts at surpassing the ontological difference through ethics, which begins with Marion’s criticism of Levinas on this point in ID, 268, and proceeds to a response in the form of a clarification from Levinas in Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002), with

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certain moments in DSE in between and a culminating settlement in Marion’s “Note sur l’indifférence ontologique” itself. Similarly, a second essay, DI, sets out the stages in a public conversation between the two thinkers about the role of love in individualizing the other, a conversation that begins with Marion’s critique of Emmanuel Levinas in IA, and culminates, at least explicitly, in an exchange of comments reported in the final pages of DI (implicit continuations are sure to be found in PE and LS). 2 For example, Marion’s implicit dialogue with Levinas’ philosophical approach to paternity can be seen as early as 1977 in ID, 109–76, and as recently as CN, 162–73. 3 See Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Ethics, Eros, or Caritas?: Levinas and Marion on Individuation of the Other,” Philosophy Today 49, no. 1 (2005): 70–87; Christina M. Gschwandtner, “The Neighbor and the Infinite: Marion and Levinas on the Encounter Between Self, Human Other, and God,” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 231–49; Christina M. Gschwandtner, “ ‘À Dieu’ or from the ‘Logos’? Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion—Prophets of the Infinite,” Philosophy, Theology: Marquette University Quarterly 22, no. 1–2 (2010): 177–203. Also, see Lisa Guenther, “ ‘Nameless Singularity’: Levinas on Individuation and Ethical Singularity,” Epoché 14, no. 1 (2009): 167–87. 4 RC, 21–22, my translation. 5 See Jean-Luc Nancy’s preface to Emmanuel Levinas: Œuvres complètes, tome 3: Éros, littérature et philosophie (Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC, 2013), 13, where, with regard to the importance of the word “drame” for Levinas and its relation to his writing of both fiction and philosophy, Nancy quotes Levinas from En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger: “Le commerce avec autrui se constitue dans un jeu d’intentions. Moi-même, en tant qu’homme concret, historique, je suis le personnage d’un drame qui se constitue pour une pensée”; and considers this line from Levinas’ 1934 text: “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme”: “La vérité n’est plus pour lui [l’homme] la contemplation d’un spectacle étranger—elle consiste dans un drame dont l’homme est lui-même l’acteur” (14). Regarding the word “intrigue,” see Nancy’s discussion, 15–16, where he states that “ce terme dont Levinas fera un usage lui-même polymorphe et qui est une catégorie prégnante du roman, désigne le ‘nœud de relations,’ de la ‘proximité, ce contact inconvertible en structure noético-noématique’ ” (here Nancy quotes from Levinas’ “Langage et proximité,” in En découvrant l’existence). 6 EP, 9–10. See also the much earlier essay GP, 141, where we read that “[Christ’s commandments are] directives [that] must be executed, or performed: the text and the roles must be played, or performed. The play must be staged . . . Christ’s departure [His Ascension] allows for performing of the instructions in full responsibility, but the instruction to love has the disciples do the very thing that Christ accomplished; the disciples become actors of charity, no longer passive and obtuse spectators of Jesus.” The “theological” point here in no way discounts this passage as an example; the play is staged—the only question is one’s acknowledgment of it, and one’s agreement to participate, or not. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).



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8 Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 2nd ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992), 114–15; and Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 69–70. 9 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 67; Levinas, “Dieu et la philosophie,” 111. 10 Ibid., 67 and 112. 11 Ibid., 71 and 117. 12 Ibid., 66 and 110. 13 See also Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort, le temps, ed. J. Rolland (Paris: Grasset, 1993), 205; or Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 175. 14 EP, 154. 15 Ibid., 156–57. 16 Ibid., 180. 17 Ibid., 179–80. 18 Ibid., 214. 19 Ibid., emphasis added. 20 Claude Romano, Event and Time, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gschwandtner, Christina M. “Ethics, Eros, or Caritas?: Levinas and Marion on Individuation of the Other.” Philosophy Today 49, no. 1 (2005): 70–87. Gschwandtner, Christina M. “The Neighbor and the Infinite: Marion and Levinas on the Encounter Between Self, Human Other, and God.” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 231–49. Gschwandtner, Christina M. “ ‘À Dieu’ or from the ‘Logos’? Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion: Prophets of the Infinite.” Philosophy, Theology: Marquette University Quarterly 22, no. 1–2 (2010): 177–203. Guenther, Lisa. “‘Nameless Singularity’: Levinas on Individuation and Ethical Singularity.” Epoché 14, no. 1 (2009): 167–87. Levinas, Emmanuel. “L’intentionalité de l’amour.” In Prolégomènes à la charité. Paris: La Différence, 1986. Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Séan Hand. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. 2nd ed. Paris: J. Vrin, 1992. Levinas, Emmanuel. Dieu, la mort, le temps. Edited by J. Rolland. Paris: Grasset, 1993. Levinas, Emmanuel. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Levinas, Emmanuel. De l’existence à l’existant. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002.

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Marion, Jean-Luc. L’idole et la distance. Paris: Grasset, 1977. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Note sur l’indifférence ontologique.” In Emmanuel Levinas. L’éthique comme philosophie première. Edited by J. Greisch and J. Rolland. Paris: Le Cerf, 1993. Marion, Jean-Luc. “D’autrui à l’individu.” In Emmanuel Levinas, Positivité et transcendance, suivi d’Études sur Levinas et la phénoménologie. Edited by Jean-Luc Marion. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000. Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Gift of a Presence.” In Prolegomena to Charity, 124–52. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. Le phénomène érotique: six méditations. Paris: Grasset, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. Au lieu de soi: l’approche de Saint Augustine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida. Paris: J. Vrin, 2012. Marion, Jean-Luc. La rigueur des choses: entretiens avec Dan Arbib. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Preface to Emmanuel Levinas: Œuvres complètes, tome 3: Éros, litérature et philosophie. Edited by Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Bernard Grasset/ IMEC, 2013. Romano, Claude. Event and Time. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

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The Moving Icon: Critically Seeking the Aesthetic in Marion and Finding a Phenomenological Alternative with Husserl Jodie McNeilly In his “Translator’s Introduction” to The Idol and Distance, Thomas A. Carlson points out Jean-Luc Marion’s insistence that there be a clear distinction made between his theological and phenomenological projects.1 In this, and Marion’s earlier text God without Being,2 the “icon” and “idol” are standalone theological concepts elaborated to preserve the much-needed “distance” between humans and God to overcome conceptual atheism: the death of the death of God. Even though Marion does announce as early as God without Being that the icon and idol are two conflicting phenomenologies, and goes on to describe with distinctive thoroughness the idol in the first two sections,3 it is not until The Crossing of the Visible that he attempts a more integrated approach in describing the icon and idol,4 claiming both theological and phenomenological authority in their conceptualization. In this shorter text, we find a more refined schematization of the movements between the “visible” and “invisible” than in God without Being, where he tackles the metaphysical and ontological problems of being in order to ensure the irreducible distance as part of his theological project. By The Crossing of the Visible, Marion presents a more complex and detailed phenomenological account of the movement of the icon in order to show just “how it [the icon] escapes the catastrophic consequences of the idol.”5 In this chapter, I will problematize Marion’s elaborate conditions that account for the icon beyond theological doctrine. I will show how certain issues in these conditions dilute the phenomenological work that Marion attempts in The Crossing of the Visible, and how they accentuate the authority of scripture from which Marion ultimately does not stray.6 I will discuss how his maneuver to flesh out the “visible–invisible” structure and the unique choreography of the icon through the pictorial analysis of paintings, spanning 123

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a period between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, raises questions of whether he can: (1) refuse an aesthetic model or theory; or (2) gain from a phenomenological aesthetics in his account of the icon. I intend to follow two lines of argumentation to enable this discussion, of which the first is the “Aesthetic Argument” that leads to the second “Phenomenological Alternative.” To begin, let us consider Marion’s crafting of the visible–invisible schema as it is developed in The Crossing of the Visible. The intricate connections traced between these two spaces gives rise to specific traits and processes where we either freeze by gaze in the dazzling brilliance of an idol: the absolute threshold of visibility without depth; or climb from one realm to the other in a crossing of gazes to gain access to the infinite through the icon. The circulation of gazes that Marion describes raises for me these two theological questions: (1) Why was it necessary to develop the complexity of this structure for the movements and transitions of the idol and icon if indeed they are weaker versions of the one true “impetus”—“the invisible holiness?”7 (2) Is the visible–invisible schema an elaborate prop to provide a structural basis to experiences of the icon and idol outside of traditional Christian doctrine, as the Second Council of Nicaea handed it down? If we can agree that the second question entails a legitimate relocation of the icon and idol discussion beyond Church doctrine, why does it matter that he constructs this border of phenomenality: a crease where the transitional movements of crossing, climbing, presenting, and revealing, paradoxically unite (via visibility) and separate the visible and invisible to reinforce the much-needed distance for God to be otherwise than Being?8 It would matter if Marion is giving experiential weight to a metaphysical something that cannot, and should not, be directly experienced, nor “conditioned” by human thought in any way. For as Katherine Tanner points out: “Phenomenology [will then] become the instrument to measure the immeasurable—God! [And so] Marion cannot sustain God’s unconditionality,” as this is a position that undermines his theological project.9 It is also important if “Marion defines icons as that which ‘alone deserve and demand the veneration of the faithful,’ but still refuses any aesthetic-based reasoning to account for the faithfuls’ encounter with the Holy.”10 In God without Being, Marion notes: [T]he icon is defined by an origin without original: an origin itself infinite, which pours itself out or gives itself throughout the infinite depth of the icon. This is why its depth withdraws the icon from all aesthetics: only the idol can and must be apprehended, since it alone results from the human gaze and hence supposes an aisthesis that precisely imposes its measure on the idol.11



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In Marion’s own words, the idol and not the icon is apprehended through “aesthesis,” and yet the icon deserves the “veneration of the faithful”; And it is a veneration based on “feeling,” not just mere opinion, or an assertion of epistemic belief. Furthermore, Marion’s first move to save the icon from the consequences of the idol is to (by temporarily repairing “breached horizons”) follow Levinas in reversing the aim of intentionality. He argues that the gazes of the painter and believer/spectator of the icon can only ever freeze shallowly in the idol. Their gazes are truncated in the visible, while the gaze that does cross the visible and invisible originates from “elsewhere,” from an infinite depth. It is a gaze “whose invisible strangeness saturates the visibility of the face [/icon] with meaning.”12 Marion’s phenomenology is an attempt to reinterpret the principle of the horizon: the very way that things themselves are made visible. Starting with Husserl, Marion “recognises as inadequate” Husserl’s particular horizon of “objectivity” in philosophy, but even more so for theology which is “acknowledged as a nonobjectifying knowledge.”13 Always thinking the object is for Marion limited to the “objective of objectivity,” a constraint on “things” being “given only in the form of their constituted objectification.”14 That Husserl, in Marion’s eyes, not only fails to dissolve the idea of presence but “repeats the constitutively metaphysical definition” of it, opens phenomenology to projects that attempt to go “beyond or short” of the constitution of the object; Levinas’ reversal of intentionality being one such enticing attempt. A second target for Marion is Heidegger and his “horizon of Being,” which is rejected on the grounds that the neutrality of Being in its appearance is as “individualistic” as it is extremely atheistic.15 Dasein, according to Marion, “remains haunted by [Husserl’s transcendental] I,” so much so that Heidegger’s project also fails in its return to Being to open the “‘new beginning’ for philosophy” that phenomenology had so promised.16 And so it is with Levinas’ “horizon of ethics” that Marion sees the first movement for a radical transgression of the phenomenological horizon, the “phenomenon of the face of the other” being the kind of opening that is closer to (though not close enough for Marion) the “possibility of revelation” than objectivity or Being.17 But the problem I wish to respond to here is not Marion’s Levinasian reversal of intentional gazes that comes from the infinite aimed at a passive ego, or the hyperextended third reduction to self-givenness that also composes this picture;18 it is the denial of an aesthetic approach in what appears to be an aesthetic-based undertaking. Even if in this reversal of intending gazes where the meaning of the icon (that which constitutes it thus and so) originates from somewhere beyond the painting, Marion cannot—based on his and doctrinal acknowledgments from the seventh session of the Second Council of Nicaea—diminish the phenomenological aspects of the venerating spectator.

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As Marion suggests, for an icon to be an icon, there needs to be a believer who avows a constituting force in his or her gaze. Rather than keeping with the reversal of intentional gazes, Marion curiously turns his attention to the painted icon as an art historian would, and does so indirectly by looking at non-icon-based paintings, thus setting up a triangulated “aesthetic” structure between the artist, spectator, and artwork. I will now turn to my first thread of argumentation to demonstrate just how Marion participates in the aesthetic to account for the icon. THE AESTHETIC ARGUMENT Marion insists in the opening sentence of the preface to The Crossing of the Visible that he will not engage with aesthetic theory for it implies an entanglement in “long aporias.”19 He goes on to say that “the question of painting does not pertain first only to painters, much less only to aestheticians”; but then says “it concerns visibility itself, and thus pertains to everything—to sensation in general.”20 Clearly, Marion wants to engage phenomenology (“the way of philosophy today”) on this point because theology is not enough.21 On first glance, Marion’s avoidance of aesthetics in contemplating the visibility of authentic painting and the faithful’s encounter with an icon is a strategic way to steer clear of representation and the rendering of a potential icon into a problematic idol. However, the icon and idol in this text are rigorously developed through an analysis of the image and painting, fitting neatly into what we might understand as traditional aesthetics. I see two ways of addressing the aesthetic in Marion’s work: the first is through aesthetics as we understand it in relation to art, the art tradition, and pictorial analysis; and the second in terms of the classical Greek sense of aísthēsis: to perceive with one’s senses. Concerning the first, Marion does not proceed by grounding his pictorial analysis of paintings from the Western art tradition in the usual understanding of perspective. Rather, he analyzes the concepts of the visible and invisible, and their correlates idol and icon, in terms of “perspectivalism”: phenomena are always already “a priori condition[s] of experience.” He says: “Perspective, beyond its historical aesthetic meaning, produces the phenomenality of phenomena: by it, the invisible of the gaze is sketched out, arranging and displaying the chaos of the visible as harmonious phenomena.”22 By creating continuity with experience, rather than as an aesthetic technique, Marion is able to undertake his pictorial analysis of key paintings across several centuries in order to re-situate the painter, painting, and spectator in particular intentional relations with each other. Marion analyzes Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino’s (Raphael’s) Marriage of the Virgin (1504), Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of the Betrothal of the Arnolfini (1434), Albrecht Dürer’s Lamentation of Christ (1500), and Joseph William



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Turner’s The Passage of Mount St. Gothard (1804), eventually turning his attention to the Moderns: Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and to the later action paintings of Jackson Pollock, where “painting consciousness requires not an object but simply the action of painting.”23 Perspective disappears along with experiences that intend objects in Marion’s analysis of Simon Hantai’s Tabula (1974): “the visible frees itself for itself, as contrary to the consciousness that perceives it, since in fact the gaze understands very quickly in front of the canvas, ‘that there is nothing there to see.’ ”24 And once Marion arrives at the end of this broad, somewhat arbitrary historical journey of the canon, we are to understand the non-objectivity of the Suprematist square that was “issued from nothing other than its own invisibility.”25 Marion claims to have established a new relation between the visible and invisible, which places them together on the “stage permanently,” and to have effectively drawn out the distinctive “traits” of an icon.26 But all traits aside, has he transcended the aesthetic in developing the visible–invisible correlate of the historical and evaluating techniques of the Western Art canon? Ultimately, Marion needs to protect Church doctrine. Since scripture is the “fundamental authority,” it motivates an absolute reduction to Christian values and stories, and so is the mode within which Marion and other Christian phenomenologists operate. But as The Crossing of the Visible attempts to flesh out a depth structure for invisibility and the icon through the visible, my central question and point in this discussion is: should Marion engage, or not engage, with an aesthetic theory? Arguably, Marion must engage with or accept that there is already an aesthetic theory or model operating at some level in his analysis: first, because he relies upon an analysis of painting and picturing to establish the phenomenological aspects of the icon in contradistinction to the idol; and second, because he relies upon a strict aesthetic feeling of veneration for confirming an icon when viewing an authentic painting. Marion does not intimate which aesthetic theories are entangled in “long aporias” and argues toward phenomenology as the leading philosophy of the now. On this basis, I introduce Hans Georg Gadamer’s tripartite model of aesthetic play, in order to consider Marion’s analysis in phenomenological terms. HANS GEORG GADAMER ON PLAY According to Gadamer, the ontological status of an artwork and its hermeneutic significance is a study of the mode of being of the artwork: the self-presentation of an artwork in its representation. Where representation is intended, the true nature of a painting, dramatic play, music, or dance is the presentation of its representation and not the thing it is representing. The naturalistic sketch of a tree as the presentation of a representation, and

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not the tree out there in nature, is the mode of being of that artwork. The multi-directedness of a representation means that the artwork is representing for someone and cannot be understood simply as a case of mimesis, nor is the “mode of being of the artwork itself” in the spectator’s consciousness or attitude.27 On Gadamer’s account, aesthetic understanding is possible only through the play of a presentation between artist (production), work of art (the work), and spectator (reception). These three players form an intersecting tripartite structure as a model for understanding aesthetic experience— experience importantly, given that the artwork must present to someone. Phenomenologically speaking, play transforms into a structure, and thus possesses its own essential structures that ultimately can be described. A useful diagram identifying these three delimited regions is sketched in figure 8.1. Traditionally the relationship between production, reception, and work has been emphasized differently within aesthetic theory. The overlapping central union of all three spheres on the diagram visually represents Gadamer’s position. This segment also represents Marion’s conceptualization of the idol. All three players are in play, spectating the surface dimensions of a painting: the excess saturation of the visible. When all that can be made visible appears in a painting, “it is thus the invisible that is lacking there.”28 These are ripe conditions for the painter to paint what is intended to be seen from their seeing; for the spectator to be dazzled by the contents of that visibility; and the artwork to self-present in its own presentation: the tripling forces of aesthetic play. But what becomes of the icon in this aesthetic modelling that readily describes the idol through painting? Could it simply be that one of the three spheres is emphasized? On Gadamer’s account, the icon will not work as an emphasis of one or two, or all three. Marion indeed accounts for the painter, the painting, and role of the spectator in the conversion from idol to icon; but the overlapping of these three spheres is not the play that Gadamer suggests

Figure 8.1.  Model representing Gadamer’s tripartite structure of aesthetic understanding.



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for the self-presenting of an artwork in its representation. Interestingly (and as an important, undeveloped aside), this self-presenting is close to Marion’s self-giving/self-manifesting thesis for all phenomena (both Gadamer and Marion come to this through Heidegger). But the role of the icon, working from its invisible depths to cross-gazes with the spectator/believer, complicates aesthetic play, and, most resolutely, the role of painting in Marion’s reasoning toward the non-metaphysical ontotheological validity of the Holy through icons. The crunch here is that the icon, as Marion develops it in The Crossing of the Visible, ultimately undermines itself. It resists the most phenomenological of aesthetic theories (Gadamer’s) that could support both Marion’s pictorial analysis of painting and movements between the invisible and visible. The icon cannot work in a Gadamerian sense; it cannot be likened to the thing represented: the presentation of the representation. What is strikingly damaging to the phenomenological elaborations that Marion makes is precisely his adventure into the aesthetic domain—arguably difficult to avoid given that icons as holy images are artworks! And yet, he is not wrong to reject an aesthetic model in order to develop the icon in the manner which he does. And so, on the basis of recasting Marion’s theory of the idol and icon in Gadamerian terms, it appears that he could indeed be right that the icon cannot participate in the aesthetic. But, in the light of our second understanding of the aesthetic as “aesthesis” (relating to the senses), Marion is hard-pressed not to delve into some form of aesthetic reasoning to account for “general sensation” in veneration. On his definition, the faithful conditions the icon through certain sensations and feelings of veneration, and never through “adoration.” The latter would amount to idolatry: idols are the object of desire or expectation. But how does he arrive at this feeling of veneration? Does he do so phenomenologically, or only theologically, as the Second Nicene council determined in 787 BCE? This entirely depends upon what one understands as phenomenology. If we are turned toward the thinking of Husserl, one could ask: What would a phenomenological analysis of the feeling structures of veneration look like? How can they be described? I will raise this problem for Marion in the form of an alternative phenomenological view of the icon with my second thread of argumentation. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVE If it is not possible to provide a phenomenological “aesthetics” of the icon in Marion’s philosophy, how might we undertake a phenomenology of the feeling structures of veneration in the faithful? My contention is that the movements of the icon and idol are the result of a complex intentional process for the believer. This intentional process produces readily describable structures

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openly determined within a “horizon of objectivity” that does not close down all possibility in an object-limit as Marion charges, but is indeed the main horizon for tracing the contours of possibility’s own limits. This is a horizon that encloses each and every thinker within the tradition post-Husserl, but many of these thinkers nonetheless abandon Husserl’s phenomenological method because of the edges of this objectivity.29 Even religious experiences that suggest a possibility beyond objectivity derive themselves—whether conceptually, imagistically, or somatically—within, or at the borders of this frame. They are encounters which are more or less limited and debilitated by the high expectations of the radical idealizing of possibility than the evidencing of objectivity alone. To phenomenologically approach phenomena of this kind, it is arguably more legitimate to embrace the possibilities within objectivity than to “reach,” “broaden,” or “break” into the murky darkness with new routes that are negative appraisals of the constituting processes to be discussed in this chapter. When religious belief (and/or faith) is constituted by images (as in “imagistic” constitution), they play an essential role in stimulating perceptual depth and movements in acts of devotion. I will now take up an aspect of Husserl’s “belief and being modalities” outlined in Ideas I in order to consider these movements using a phenomenological view alternative to that of Marion. Working through Husserl’s series of belief and being modalities that emerge eidetically in relation to his intentionality structure of the noesisnoema correlate from Ideas I, we come to a special case that “occupies a completely isolated place” in its relation to the series: the “neutrality modification.”30 Neutralization is a universal modification of consciousness that does not belong specifically to the sphere of belief.31 Neutralized modifications are all “consciously there although not in the manner of something actually thought of, but instead as something merely thought of as in ‘mere thought.’”32 A good example of mere thought in Husserl is the phenomenological reduction where a parenthesizing process of “putting-something-outof-action” takes place.33 Neutralized consciousness does not “play the role of a believing for what is intended to” because mere thoughts, on both sides of the correlate, are neither positable nor predicable.34 Included in Husserl’s neutrality modifications for “normal perception” are the “depictured realities” of an image. When we apprehend an external picture (like a painting) we “advert” (turn our attention) to the “realities presented in the picture, reaching beyond the perception of the picture as an object to permit ‘something else.’”35 The image presentation does not exist, and it does not not exist; it is also not in any other positional modality of belief as can be determined by the belief and being series. Rather, there is consciousness of it “quasi-existing” in the neutrality modification of being. But what can the neutrality modification of perception mean for religious faith when it



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is a movement constituted through visual representations and/or images in the mind? Hindu devotion “is the work of the body and the imagination, both held as sacred and both powerful avenues to the Divine.”36 Hindu faith is constituted largely through pictorial images. In fact, compared to other religions, the Hindu is so replete with a wide variety of images that they do not ask whether a God exists, but “what are the least inadequate ways of picturing” them.37 If, for example, a believer apprehends a painting of the Hindu God Rama, it is dually constituted as both a physical object (paint, canvas) and as a “depictured reality” (a God as a type of man). Their regard is turned not toward Rama, as an object but “to the realities presented in the picture.”38 The “founding noesis” of intentional consciousness (perceiving the picture) mediates a depicturing process of “similarity” that brings “something else” to the perception. A Hindu brings to the picture ideas of Rama from descriptions in the Ramayana and attributes qualities and characteristics from other gods in the Hindu pantheon. These ideas and attributes are not fully posited in the sense that presents Rama as existing, but he does exist as a depictured reality in terms of what is brought repeatedly to the representation in instances of “something else.” There is a confluence of founding noesis to mediate a depictured reality of Rama possessing a “quasi-existence.”39 Here, the structural modification of neutralization takes faith further from positional belief and closer to “mere thought,” giving a quasi-existence to the thing merely thought. The similarity thesis in depicturing the reality of Rama, or any god for that matter, presents a unique perspective on the role of idols and icons in discussions narrating our relation to the divine. Husserl’s “similarity thesis” as it operates in neutralization offers a different characterization of the irreducible distance between God(s) and us. The imaging is founded noetically in the perceiving and grafted upon by subsequent perceptions stirred by this adverting to something else. Considering this in relation to visual representations and the example of Rama taken previously, a believer perceptually attributes certain humanly aspects to the god also, but not in the sense of “creating an idol” with false ideas or images. Rather, in their adverted attention, they see and intuit something else within a horizon of nested intentionalities. This thought ties in with Husserl’s later concept of a plus ultra in perception: “every perceptual givenness is a constant mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity, a givenness that points to new possible perceptions.”40 In the ongoing play of the familiar and unfamiliar during imagistic constitutions of the faithful, their experiences are dynamic instances of sensuous veneration, stirring deeper interactions between epistemic, imagistic, and aesthetic-based perceptions. On this alternative phenomenological view of pictorial consciousness, Marion’s much-needed distance between beings and God is recast with a

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conception of the idol that is not reduced to excessive visibility and “familiarity” without depth, nor solely reliant on the self-revelatory presence of an infinite that transpierces the visible with its gaze through the icon.41 Husserl’s pictorial view does not resort to a pictorial analysis bound by the Western tradition of art that, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, creates issues for Marion if he wants to “withdraw the icon from all aesthetics.”42 Neutralized belief provides a phenomenological analysis of the conceptual and image-based idol that is well “graven” within the philosophy of religion,43 and relocates the icon to the side of the believer as a movement of faith in the imagistic constitution of religious belief. Thus, it is only in a return to the experiences of the faithful that the feeling structures of veneration can be described, and the icon accounted for in Marion’s hoped-for terms. NOTES 1 IAD, xi. 2 GWB. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 COV. 5 Ibid., 68. 6 Ibid., 85. Ultimately, Marion grounds these concepts in the Christological hypostatic union. In the closing paragraphs to COV he arrives at the “ultimate icon,” arguing that the “visible–invisible” relation helps to reveal “what neither one of them can manifest on its own: the charity that provides the impetus for the transition itself, as movement from the son to the father” 7 Ibid. 8 For Marion, presentation has a revelatory meaning; the icon makes present the Holy One. See COV, 77: “The icon does not represent it; it presents—not in the sense of producing a new presence (as in painting) but in the sense of making present the holiness of the Holy One.” 9 Christina M. Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 153. 10 COV, 68. 11 Ibid., 20. 12 GWB, 21. 13 COV, 14–15. 14 RAG, 2. 15 Heidegger’s Seinsfrage undergoes earlier criticism from Marion in GWB. Here, Marion argues that Heidegger has not gone far enough with his overcoming of metaphysics when God still figures as a “supreme being [who. . .] assures the ground . . . of all other derived beings” (xxi). He goes so far as to say that “Heidegger could indeed run the risk of a gnostic drift, even of an ‘ontologist’ idolatry, whose famous ‘God alone who can save us’ bears all the ambiguities” (xxii).



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16 RAG, 2. 17 COV, 15. 18 See RAG. 19 COV, ix. 20 Ibid., my emphasis added. 21 Ibid., ix. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid., 19. 26 Ibid., 20. 27 This section is developed from my reading of Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004). 28 COV, 6. 29 See John E. Drabinski’s “Sense and Icon: The problem of Sinngebung in Lévinas and Marion,” Philosophy Today vol. 42 (1998): 47–57. Here Drabinski indicates that there is a twofold sense of Sinngebung in Levinas’ work. While Levinas “demonstrates once and for all that Sinngebung is a product of the philosophy of the Same” in Totality and Infinity, in “Reflexions sur la ‘technique’ phenomenologique” he wants to say that all empirical givens are the work of sense-bestowing consciousness including those of the “ethical problematic” of self and other: “how I am given to myself as for-the-other is a sense bestowed upon me from the other” (47). 30 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, trans. Frederick Kersten (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 257. The belief and being modalities are as follows: the belief series originates with the “primal form of the mode of believing,” belief “certainty.” This “proto-doxic” belief is unmodifiable and “unmodalised,” that is, it cannot be cancelled out by any other perception. Although, in the “modification series” of belief, it can change “into the mode of mere deeming possible or deeming likely, or questioning and doubting” (250). Likewise, and in correlation, the being modalities also refer back to the primal form of being-certain (“noematically certain and actually existing”), in their modifications of “possibly existing,” “probably existing,” “doubtfully and questionably existing” (251). The belief and being modalities are an important series in thinking through the movements of faith and doubt in religious experience. It is the purpose of this chapter to focus only upon the related, special case of neutrality modification. 31 Ibid., 257. 32 Ibid., 258. 33 Ibid., 258; see Marcus Brainard, Belief and its Neutralization: Husserl’s System of Phenomenology in Ideas I (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). 34 Husserl, Ideas, 259. 35 Ibid., 262.

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36 Stephen P. Huyler, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1994), 12. 37 Jean Holm and John Bowker, Picturing God (London: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1994), 3. 38 Husserl, Ideas, 262. 39 Ibid. 40 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 48. 41 Marion, COV. 42 Ibid., 20. 43 Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benson, Bruce Ellis. Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry. Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Brainard, Marcus. Belief and its Neutralization: Husserl’s System of Phenomenology in Ideas I. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Drabinski, John E. “Sense and Icon: The problem of Sinngebung in Levinas and Marion.” In Philosophy Today vol. 42 (1998): 47–57. Gadamer, Hans George. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. Gschwandtner, Christina M. Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Holm, Jean and John Bowker. Picturing God. London: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1994. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Translated by Frederick Kersten. Dordrecht, Boston, MA; and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983. Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translated by Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht, Boston, MA; and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Huyler, Stephen P. Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1994. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Chapter 9

Love without Bodies Cassandra Falke

“Love without Bodies,” the title of my chapter, refers both to my main inquiry and to an important distinction that Marion makes between the body and the flesh. For him “flesh” refers to the sensing body, through which we find the shape of who we are and experience life. He uses the term “body” to refer to the thing-ness that we corporeally share with non-sensing things like trees and pencils.1 The flesh is also that through which we love, and I want to ask, in the light of Marion’s distinction between the flesh and the body, does love require bodies at all? After all, according to Marion, once loved, “I no longer consider myself here as a physical body that would be situated among other physical bodies” but experience my body as a transformed “glorified” and “eroticized flesh.”2 This inquiry has arisen from a larger inquiry into the value Marion’s ideas have for the study of literature. His 1996 work The Crossing of the Visible describes approaching painting as idol or icon, and in the process illuminates possible ways of reading literature. Even more valuable is his more recent book, The Erotic Phenomenon. Here, Marion articulates a phenomenological grounding that enables us to see more clearly the role that literature plays in our lives. In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion proposes an “erotic reduction of the ego to the lover.”3 He offers the erotic reduction as a correction to the epistemological reduction (I think therefore I am) and the ontological reduction (I perceive being, therefore I am),4 arguing that while these reductions can provide us with the certainty of our existence, they cannot rescue us from vanity. “Certainty befits objects,” but we are not objects.5 We never experience our own corporeality as though our bodies were sense-less objects, but always only as the flesh through which we love and are loved. When the ego rises up in the flesh, feeling itself, open to the world, it wants to know, not 135

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“Am I?” or even “What am I?” but “Why am I?” According to Marion, only the possibility of love provides an answer. “Who can hold seriously,” he writes, “that the possibility of finding oneself loved or hated does not concern him at all? One has only to try it: the moment he walks this line, the greatest philosopher in the world yields to dizziness.”6 Steadying himself then, Marion proposes the erotic reduction: I love therefore I am. Even more precisely: already loved, I love and long for love, therefore I desire my life to continue. If, as Marion asserts, we are lovers first, and our experience of selfhood in the flesh depends on our status as lovers, then what role does literature have in our lives? Reading proceeds by means of the flesh. I hold the book in my hand. My gaze wanders over the page. I experience the fear of pain or anticipation of pleasure along with characters because of my flesh’s own experience of pain and pleasure. But, of course, I do not fear or anticipate in the same way that I would if it were my own flesh about to experience pain or pleasure. I can experience sorrow over Jane Eyre’s hunger as a schoolgirl or Allan Quartermain’s thirst in the desert while sipping a milkshake. This curious dual experience of, on the one hand, an imagined experience of the flesh based on memories of past hunger or thirst, which coincides, on the other hand, with an actual experience of the flesh in the present, seems to imply that the reading experience opposes an imagined flesh to our lived flesh and that it therefore separates us from the basic experience of in-the-flesh selfhood that we gain through love. However, since we become ourselves, as flesh, by sharing language, imagination, and experience with those we love as well as through physical touching, reading offers a somewhat parallel process to the discovery of our selves through the other. Marion’s explication of the erotic phenomenon must contain within it the seed of an aesthetics if it is as primary as he claims. And, indeed, I think one response to the call issued in The Erotic Phenomenon needs to be the articulation of a new phenomenological aesthetic. The full articulation of such an aesthetic must take place elsewhere,7 but a potential objection to such an aesthetic rises up almost immediately, and it is the goal of this chapter to overcome that objection. The problem is this: literary characters, paintings, poems and other works of art are not persons. They do not, therefore, invoke the responsibility that we owe to other people. This responsibility includes the Levinasian injunction not to kill, but it also includes a reception of the other’s counter-intentionality—the acceptance of the other as uniquely and wonderfully given.8 As non-people, paintings and poems cannot be killed. They can be destroyed or abandoned, but it would be monstrous to push too far the analogy between killing a person and destroying a painting.9 They cannot be killed because they have no bodies, or, to be more precise, they have no flesh. They cannot feel what



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we do to them. The question then arises, to what extent can we love something without flesh? In the three sections of the chapter that follow, I take a dialectical approach to this question, first using other scholars’ writing about the flesh and the body as Marion describes them to interrogate and sharpen my own sense that love, in its reliance on the flesh, relies on the body also. The next section discusses how the erotic phenomenon can clarify the relationship between the bodiless pseudo-love we feel for artworks and the embodied love we feel for people. The third section makes Marion’s own work my interlocutor as I consider whether his examples of love that exceeds embodiment also exclude embodiment. This discursive framework retains some of the form of the reading process as an engagement with counter-intentionalities since it is this experience of reading that I discuss. I persist in using the word “body” rather than flesh for the moment for two reasons. Firstly, although the most crucial line of inquiry for an aesthetics born out of the erotic reduction will be how our love of paintings or poems without flesh relates to our love of people, the question that has persisted thus far in studies of Marion scholarship has been love’s relation to the body. Secondly, previous explorations of phenomenology and literature have tended to ignore the body’s connection to the flesh. Phenomenologically oriented literary scholars have marveled, rightly, at a text’s similarity to “the consciousness of another” and even asserted that this consciousness is “not different from the one I automatically assume in every human being I encounter.”10 But this is imprecise. A book’s “consciousness” differs from a person’s precisely in that the flesh that the language of a book claims to reveal has no body. When Wallace Stegner describes the “lonely sound of dripping water,” no real ear hears a sound.11 LOVE AND THE BODY Flesh is one of the main figures of the saturated phenomenon elaborated in In Excess. Marion argues there that the ego becomes a self by means of the flesh: “The ego only fixes itself when it takes flesh,” he writes, and again, “My flesh assigns me to myself.”12 The flesh that allows us to take selfhood distinguishes itself from our bodies, but clearly also depends on them. Marion dismisses the question of whether the flesh arises from the body as unimportant, but not because the flesh somehow floats free of the body. Rather, the body, as a thing different from the flesh, is phenomenologically unavailable for consideration.13 In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion returns to the question of the flesh’s role in self-becoming. The cover of the English edition features the dimly lit torso and outstretched hand of a naked woman, suggesting that readers will find not only a reparation for “the silence of love”

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in philosophy, but also an account of love that attends to hips and hands. The Erotic Phenomenon meets this expectation, going further than In Excess and specifying that I receive myself in the shared eroticization of two people in the flesh. Here, in becoming myself “it is also necessary to succeed in transcribing in my own flesh that of the other.”14 Several scholars feel that Marion’s theorization of the flesh in these two books is inadequately or inconsistently theorized. John Milbank and Beáta Tóth both worry that Marion renders the body unnecessary in his account of love—that, in Milbank’s terms, Marion “ignor[es] the mediation of spatial encounter” and “shared concrete mutuality.”15 In his essay “The Gift and the Mirror,” Milbank articulates what he refers to as a completion and modification of Marion’s phenomenology.16 Tóth, in “Love between Embodiment and Spirituality,”17 similarly identifies “what is missing” from Marion’s account of love.18 Both worry that Marion does not discuss enough “the specific, sensed surface of the body.”19 Tóth seeks to fill this gap using Pope John Paul II’s “proper theological anthropology of embodied erotic love.”20 Milbank draws on a sociological concept of habitus, which he defines as “a shared microculture” manifesting in things (things in his vocabulary; bodies in Marion’s), the “local cultivation of a world” that itself declares love.21 Noting the invocation of anthropology and sociology, one might wonder if Milbank and Tóth’s frustrations are directed through Marion and at phenomenology itself.22 Shane Mackinlay critiques Marion more on his own philosophical ground, but he finds Marion’s account of the flesh in The Erotic Phenomenon to be “confused.”23 He writes: In the first meditation, Marion proposes that I receive myself from my flesh; then, early in the fourth meditation, he proposes that I receive myself from another’s love, and later in the same meditation proposes that I receive myself from another’s flesh. This confusion undermines the clarity with which he proposes the absoluteness of flesh in Being Given and In Excess.24

Each of these scholars makes a different objection to Marion’s writing about the flesh. Mackinlay, as the preceding quote indicates, sees Marion’s inclusion of another’s flesh in the process of self-creation as inconsistent with the self-giving nature of one’s own flesh rather than seeing here an elaboration of several steps in a process that does not always complete itself. Tóth celebrates Marion’s prioritization of love, but longs for the conceptual boundaries that Marion rejects. She is especially eager to express more concretely the difference between the words of “love making” and other speech. Milbank applies his broader mistrust of receiving phenomena without concept to his reading of The Erotic Phenomenon. He argues that the “double passivity” that characterizes the erotic reduction “excludes bodily and visible interference,” which



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is to say bodily and visible specificity, to the extent that it does not “differentiate between the disinterest of love and the indifference of cruelty.”25 For Milbank, we cannot intuit someone, knowing that we do not know how to aim at the mystery of another person. We must have some understanding of what another person is—beautiful, compassionate, determined—before our openness to them can be called love. Reading these critiques and re-reading Marion, I cannot escape the impression that these scholars, particularly Tóth and Milbank, have been offered a gift (if I can use some of Marion’s favorite language) and refused to open it until they know more about what is inside. Marion has said that the erotic phenomenon may be fully accomplished by two people in the flesh; but Milbank wants to know how, and what they will then do, and how they will prepare to do so again. Marion has said that we can make love with our words, but Tóth must know which words. That answer is not for us to decide beforehand. Even in the moment of love’s accomplishment, these answers bring with them so much more than concepts. The experience of love unfolds as a saturated phenomenon, so it definitively exceeds whatever conceptual boundaries we might hope to impose on it beforehand. Every time, it is characterized by a willingness to yield to the beloved’s intentionality, but to qualify beforehand on what terms we are willing to yield would be to take the danger out of love, and that is something that Marion bravely refuses to do. Milbank fosters a fundamental disagreement with Marion over the latter’s a priori recognition of givenness. He has elsewhere associated Marion with an “immanentist atheological ontology” rather than concede the possibility of a philosophically adequate phenomenology.26 Their fundamental disagreement on this point forbids Milbank’s acceptance of Marion’s writings on love from the beginning. However, this disagreement is particularly instructive for the question of love’s relationship to literature. Milbank describes eloquently the possibility of cultivating life with the beloved as “a shared habitus,” which declares love “through its love and transformation of things, including the bodies of the lovers.”27 He offers this as though in conflict with Marion’s view of love as “accidental mutual self-abandonment.”28 But Milbank’s interpretation of Marion here seems to mistake the part for the whole. I can imagine, can even enact, a love that includes mutual self-abandonment and the cultivation of a shared habitus. Abandonment could be offered spontaneously and a shared habitus conscientiously cultivated without the two cancelling each other out. The reason Milbank’s “alternative” vision of love (which actually turns out to be an “also possible” vision) is so valuable for the inquiry into love and literature is that it articulates the extent to which we can make love with both books and people and throws into relief the love that is unique to people. In its supposed contrast to “mutual self-abandonment,” the love Milbank describes traces the boundary of what books offer.

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John Berger, a great consecrator of things to love’s purposes, has a blind character announce: “More than anything else, birdsongs remind me of what things once looked like.”29 A sentence like that can change my already rich relationship to birdsong and the things I visually associate with it. The experience of reading To the Wedding will come upon me now at the sound of birdsong, just as the sound of birdsong (a thrush) came to my memory as I read. The two experiences can open each other to new phenomenological horizons of memory and association in the same way that the sight of my husband’s gloves can. To the Wedding and I can create a shared habitus. Novels, in particular among literary works, offer this opportunity because they often immerse readers in a richly described world. However, the manner in which books share a habitus with me differs significantly from the manner in which my husband and I share a habitus. Any spontaneity and any abandonment that happens in my relationship to the novel, unlike my relationship to my husband, happens only on my side. The novel will not abandon itself to me, but rather restrains itself through the solidity of its inked-letter body. It invites me to a meaningful love, where new affections can attach themselves to things because of its influence, but in this bookish love I see the body as separable from the flesh. Without the mediation of two people in the flesh, the shared habitus cannot imply a truly shared life because the shift in two intersubjective selves that “sharing” implies happens only to one self. The ability to mutually abandon ourselves and the inviolable relationship of flesh with our bodies (not the bodies of things like gloves or birdsong) turn out to be the two most important distinctions between the love a book inspires and the love of another person. LOVE AND ART In this section, I discuss the erotic reduction in more detail and clarify the limits, within this reduction, of a disembodied love for books. The attempt to uncover a relationship between phenomenology and literature is not new. Heidegger questions “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1935. In 1960, Gadamer investigates how art relates to understanding in Truth and Method. Wolfgang Iser and Georges Poulet both wrote explicitly about the phenomenology of reading in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in phenomenology’s earliest stages, interacting with art is privileged as a mode of perception that anticipates phenomenology’s shift away from the natural attitude. Husserl compares the aesthetic viewpoint that art invites to the phenomenological one in his 1907 letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Art, like phenomenology, invites us to set aside the “natural stance of mind” in which “things . . . stand before us in a sensual way.”30 He implies that all forms of art have this ability



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but refers specifically to an example of literary art.31 In the natural attitude, “the things of which actual scientific discourse speaks, are posited by us as realities, and acts of mind and will are based on these positings of existence: joy—that this is, sorrow, that this is not, which, that it could be, etc.”32 Here Husserl suggests that within the natural attitude we struggle to engage the things of the world without imposing on them our own desire. An ontological view of that which is, is not, or could be becomes too easily entangled with an ideal projection of how we desire them to be. Husserl harkens back to Kant in implying that desire is incompatible with an aesthetic view.33 Husserl feels that the aesthetic gaze, here aligned with the phenomenological gaze, escapes desire. He suggests that the aesthetic and phenomenological gazes can also be epistemological. He writes: “The artist who ‘observes’ the world in order to gain ‘knowledge’ of nature and men for his own purpose relates to it in a similar way to the phenomenologist.”34 Recently criticism has returned to these topics, investigating phenomenology in literature as well as articulating phenomenological approaches to literature. Marion’s phenomenology can contribute uniquely to this re-emerging discourse because it provides a thorough philosophical grounding while still recognizing the singularity and unpredictability of the experiences that art can offer. Marion, like Husserl, seems to accept the nearness of the artist’s and the phenomenologist’s view. After all, his early articulations of saturated phenomenality privilege painting and credit painters with a superior ability to see those realities that are hidden from view. However, unlike Husserl, Marion separates the phenomenological reduction from both epistemology and ontology. He replaces both of these reductions, as already mentioned, with the phenomenologically articulated erotic reduction. He explains the erotic reduction unfolding like a conversation between two people. Recalling the stages of this imaginary conversation makes it easier to see, in phenomenological terms, how far into the erotic reduction reading literature can take us. The erotic reduction begins when, seeking protection from vanity, we ask first: “Does anyone out there love me?”35 In every case, someone has or does or will, but we cannot rest in the apparent security of this. If we wait for confirmation of another’s love, then we have entered a conditional exchange, and love is unconditional. So, one must ask instead, “Can I love first?”36 We must commit to loving first, or we cannot love at all. When we find that we are not only answering “yes” to this in the abstract but have actually opened ourselves to the unpredictability of our beloved, we find that love overwhelms us. Marion calls this “the lover’s advance.”37 Having made the lover’s advance, we are “within” the erotic reduction. When we reach this point with those whom we love in person, we realize that we are in the presence of a specific alterity capable of loving us. We relate to one another, perhaps through the gaze, perhaps through the flesh,

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and accomplish the crossed phenomenon that rescues us from the vanity of the epistemic or ontological reductions. We answer the question “Can I love first?” in the affirmative, but realize that our love’s fulfillment can only be accomplished if the other has taken the same risk. We then arrive at the realization: “You loved me first.”38 As ever-imperfect lovers, we cannot rest in this. We are always working on love and letting someone’s love work on us. Consequently, we may lose this assurance and seek it again, from the same beloved or a new one, but we remain somewhere within the erotic phenomenon. For “to give up on asking the question ‘Does anybody love me?’ Or above all to give up on the possibility of a positive response implies nothing less than giving up on the human itself.”39 Reading literature carries us far enough to love first. In reading we yield our intentionality to a voice from outside our “egological sphere.”40 The book we read provides an intentionality and signification that imitate the counterintentionality of another person just enough to help us practice the initial yielding act that puts us within the erotic reduction. Following the lover’s advance, Marion says the decision to love “will invade me with an affective tonality that is powerful, deep, and durable, and which, little by little or quite brutally, will contaminate the totality of my inner life: not only my emotional but also my intellectual life, not only my conscious but also my unconscious life.”41 Books can offer us this overwhelming experience if we decide to let ourselves be “contaminated” by their unpredictable effect. We might even say that some of us have made this reckless decision with regard to Marion’s own works, that we have committed ourselves to being overwhelmed and changed by them. Philosophy, however—even that most intimate of varieties, phenomenology— communicates through understanding. And understanding, as Marion points out, must be universalizable in order to facilitate rational communication.42 Being universal, philosophical understanding lacks the individuality that is necessary to initiate the erotic phenomenon. Reading fiction and poetry, in contrast, encourages us as readers to let ourselves be overtaken emotionally and intellectually because they call to us with an individual voice. They portray physical, emotional, and intellectual elements as fully integrated, and through the narrator or lyric speaker they voice a counter-intentionality that offers more than just understanding. The Erotic Phenomenon itself begins by tracing this difference between philosophy, which communicates concepts, and poetry and novels. “Poetry,” Marion writes: “can tell me about the experience I have not known how to articulate, and thus liberate me from my erotic aphasia. . . . The novel succeeds in breaking the autism of my amorous crises because it reinscribes them in a sociable, plural, and public narrativity—but it will never make me understand what really and truly happens to me.”43 While



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this differentiation between reading processes establishes the need for a book like The Erotic Phenomenon, which does explore the concept of love and does seek to make it understandable, it also begins to clarify the role that literature can play in our lives as lovers. By offering more than understanding, by confronting us with a whole way of seeing and experiencing the world, literature invites the lover’s surrender. The Erotic Phenomenon makes clear, however, that in order for our love to achieve the full crossed phenomenon that truly characterizes the erotic reduction, the signification that comes from the other cannot come from a book. It must come from something “capable of not giving itself.”44 Books cannot choose not to give themselves. Also, books have a body, as already mentioned, but they lack flesh. Marion asks what if “having to choose between the flesh (and thus the eroticized flesh) on the one hand and the person on the other, I opted for the person without the flesh—what would I be left with?” “Very little,” he concludes, for “if I gave up on the flesh and the crossing of our flesh, I would lose not only the flesh, but also all possible phenomenality of the other, in fact every possible path toward her personhood.”45 A book’s lack of flesh ultimately disqualifies it from personhood. As obvious as this statement may sound, it is worth making. Phenomenological explorations of literature have thus far skirted the question of what difference our bodies make to us as readers by referring to persons only as so many disembodied consciousnesses. The implicit disembodiment of people maintained in Poulet and Iser (or their relations Fish and Booth) makes the case more compelling for a book shaping us during reading as though it were a person. But then the abstracted one of literary criticism becomes again the embodied I that must stop reading to eat lunch, maybe with a real friend. It is the flesh that makes the experience of reading available for love and the love of real others that enriches reading. If a theory fails to recognize the flesh’s essential unifying function between these experiences, then it will not support any argument for reading influencing our life after a book is closed. The erotic reduction can be fulfilled at lunch with a friend, at home by the fjord with a lover, with my (specific) book in my (specific) lap. It can be fulfilled in an inspiring diversity of ways, but it cannot be fulfilled by means of reading. The crossings of the lovers’ gaze and lovers’ flesh operate as powerful figures in The Erotic Phenomenon. As figures, their incarnated performance reminds us of the interdependence and radical passivity of love. But they are more than figures. As events, the crossing of the gaze and the crossing of the flesh are essential to the completion of the erotic phenomenon. Marion writes that “without this shared eroticization,” love’s oath would remain “an abstract linguistic performance, which would not phenomenalize itself anywhere and would not individualize me any more than anyone else.”46

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The language and physical body of a book can never offer the uniqueness of the bodies through which we find our flesh. Lacking the ability to deny our advance, lacking flesh, lacking the uniqueness of an embodied person, a book, it appears, is unable to help us complete the erotic reduction that it helped us begin. LOVE BEYOND THE FLESH Before asserting this too confidently, however, I must consider the voice of my strongest interlocutor, Marion himself. At times Marion assumes that we can love someone who is not physically present. I will spend the last section of this chapter asking whether these instances of love without the presence of two bodies and two fleshes indicate a more general possibility that love can be fully accomplished without the encounter of the conjoined flesh. After all, we have established that Milbank’s suggestion of expressing and reinforcing love through a shared habitus is not incompatible with the erotic reduction. It also seems clear that Tóth’s supplementation of Marion’s phenomenology with an “anthropology of the heart” and “anthropology of the body,” while not unwelcome, enunciates only one of the possibilities of love that Marion describes. There remains the possibility, suggested by Mackinlay, that Marion contradicts himself in his writing about the flesh. Perhaps he says that the conjoining of two fleshes is necessary but refers somewhere to an example that counters this. The most likely places to seek such a counter example would be his descriptions of love when the beloved is physically absent, love after the beloved’s death, and the love of God. Discussing how we love when our beloved is away, Marion argues against the possibility of auto-eroticization, saying that “I affect myself without exception, in my own flesh, through the other” even if “I imagine her. . . . The absent one remains ever present, with an irreducible and indispensable alterity, even when the alterity remains simply fantasized.”47 This sounds at first like an instance of love through the imagination alone. We can think here of Abelard and Heloise loving each other through letters and through imagination. We could even think of the daily separation of running off to work or school or play. We love through those daily absences. In a particularly beautiful passage in The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion writes: “The lover never finishes telling himself of the beloved, telling himself to the beloved, and telling the beloved to herself.”48 The first of these actions—telling oneself of the beloved—carries on when we are alone. But these times of loving the other by oneself follow and precede moments of embodied love. Never reaching completion because they are created as they create us, our loving



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relationships are forever renewing themselves in the face of absence as long as we both love. The death of the beloved provides another, more radical example of love that continues in spite of bodily absence. Marion states quite clearly that “If the other is dead, I can, as lover, still love her, since I can love without reciprocity.”49 Indeed, to love at all, we must love without hope of reciprocity. And although through the death of the beloved we lose the possibility of renewing the erotic reduction in the flesh, we remain, by having loved, secure within it. We are always still the self that the other gave us through his or her flesh. Marion writes: lovers “do not promise one another eternity, they provoke it and give it to one another starting now.”50 All acts of love are already eternal. This is possible because, unlike the ontological reduction, the erotic reduction does not “belong to the horizon of being.”51 So even when the beloved has passed beyond the edge of being, he or she remains secure within the boundary of love. Marion even privileges love beyond death as the most forceful realization of “the other as the saturated phenomenon par excellance” because “only the one who has lived with the life and the death of another person knows to what extent he or she does not know the other.”52 In the final, most radical example of love through bodily absence, Marion discusses the love of God. God reveals himself in his very self as “the one and only love, that which we also practice.”53 And crucially, Marion follows God’s love through the same steps in the erotic reduction that we follow with our neighbors and beloveds, including a kind of crossing of the flesh. At the end of The Erotic Phenomenon, he writes that God plays the lover, like us—passing through vanity (idols), the request that one love him and the advance to love first, the oath and the face (the icon), the flesh and the enjoyment of communion, the pain of our suspension and the jealous demand, the birth of the third party in transit and the announcement of the eschatological third party, who ends up by identifying himself in the incarnated Son.54

The Eucharist is here represented as the mutual moment of embodied commitment to the other, wherein we recognize that we receive ourselves through the body of Christ. One wonders if the bread and wine here stand in the same relation to the crucifixion and resurrection as speech does to the crossing of the flesh, if that which we take as the body and the blood gains importance by losing signification, adequate signification of love and God both being impossible. Regarding the relationship between speech and the flesh, Marion writes that “every great suffering, and thus every true climax remain mute” because there are not words to signify the erased phenomenon of what has just passed.55 However, following the crossing of the flesh, my lover and I have become “partners of a privilege of worldly inexistence,” and we speak

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to affirm this partnership “even though we speak of nothing.”56 Similarly, in the Eucharistic crossing of the flesh, the content of what is said is empty, is even emptiness. It says jointly, “I give to you the body and blood that took flesh only to be given,” and it refers back to Christ’s most complete embodied self-giving. In each of these three instances—the temporary absence or death of a beloved, the love of God—the crossing of the flesh marks the completion of the erotic phenomenon. Even if the beloved knows that such a crossing can never occur again, he or she remains permanently changed by the crossing that has happened. “I will never lose what I had to become” to love another,57 whether I have confirmed that love through an open conversation and handshake or through years of shared marital life. When Marion discusses making love through language, it is the language of lovers who have completed the erotic reduction through the flesh.58 That flesh may be distinguished from the body that gives rise to it but cannot somehow break free of the body. There can be bodies with no flesh, but we cannot take flesh without a body. If love depends on the flesh, as it does in every case, then it depends on our dear and fading bodies as well. Tóth is correct when she writes that “it is the analogical sameness of all modes of love which safeguards love’s ‘univocity.’”59 But the “sameness” of our loving encounters is not the anonymous crossing of two “unilateral [acts of] self-giving” as Milbank supposes.60 Marion does not describe these acts of self-giving in anything other than abstract terms because physical acts of love beggar description. We are endlessly creative in our enactment of them, and the situations that give rise to them are as myriad as the people on the planet. Events of love are singular. How could they not be when every event of love involves two people whose incomprehensible resemblance to God renders them incomprehensibly unique?61 How could they not be when each curve of a fingernail, every angle of a collarbone is unique in our bodies? It seems then that Marion is right not to define more specifically the role that the “specific sensed surface of the body,” as Milbank calls it, plays in the erotic reduction. Speaking with one voice, love nevertheless uses our bodies to say something new every time. CONCLUSION Before closing, I should perhaps anticipate an objection to the idealization of the body in love that the preceding description of love’s singularity might be seen to imply. What if love and the flesh have a less-than-idealized body to work with? We all risk love in a state of physical decay. What can love



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say with the flesh in pain, the exhausted flesh? As Christian Wiman writes, pain “islands you. You sit there in your little skeletal constriction of self—of disappearing self—watching everyone you love, however steadfastly they may remain by your side, drift farther and farther away.”62 He is describing the pain of a cancer pushing from inside his bones. How can that flesh—his flesh, our flesh in moments of pain—experience itself as “eroticized flesh”? Marion claims that eroticized flesh no longer feels itself to inhabit the spatiotemporal isolation of a single body, but that it finds itself in the flesh of the other. However, the other does not feel pain. The “I” does. At first, it seems that there is no way for love to reach the island where pain places us. However, Marion’s distinction between the eroticized flesh and the flesh that we find through the beloved makes clear that, during pain and exhaustion, our love still renews itself by means of the flesh—not eroticized flesh but the flesh of one still experiencing a renewal of the erotic reduction. The term “eroticized flesh” describes the flesh engaged in reaching toward the other’s flesh, a reaching fueled automatically by the flesh itself.63 Marion notes that “Flesh cannot be eroticized infinitely,”64 and pain evokes the finitude of the flesh’s eroticization. That is not to say that pain renders the flesh unloved or unloving. The characteristic of flesh in love is not automatic eroticization, but non-resistance: “For the growth of one [lover] is made as the passivity of the other provokes it.”65 When we are in pain, then, when our flesh feels only our body’s exhaustion, our beloved’s non-resistance to our physical experience keeps us secure within the erotic reduction. The flesh that experiences pain cycles through an experience of automaticity that the beloved cannot share. The automatic proceedings of the flesh, in this case, isolate rather than unite, but just as love can traverse the alienation of the beloved’s death, it can traverse the alienation of pain. It cannot alleviate it, but love’s ability to reach through pain is already miraculous and is enough. Wiman himself describes this miracle with an authority that only his singular experience of divine and earthly love through pain could countenance: “Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering. . . . Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death even—possible. Human love can reach right into death, then, but not if it is merely human love.”66 What then of the poor disembodied poem? Can we say it has any place in the grand eternal acts of love that Wiman and Marion both indicate flow from Christ? What of the novel, which I can prop my feet on if I wish for all its stingy dimensionality? “All poetry, at its core,” according to Marion, “arises from the erotic and leads back to it.”67 Literature, at its core, can, I think, carry us back toward the erotic phenomenon that is always already the eternal and meaningful part of our life, but it always directs us beyond the pages of

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a book, beyond the lines of the poem, back toward those embodied beloveds through whom we discover and create our selves. NOTES 1 IE, 84. Marion’s writing about the flesh draws on the work of Michel Henry. See Kevin Hart, “Introduction,” in Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, ed. Kevin Hart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 32. 2 EP, 128–9. 3 Ibid., 128. 4 Ibid., 21–24. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Ibid., 26. 7 My book attempts such an articulation: Cassandra Falke, The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 8 EP, 103. 9 Ibid., 100; IE, 126. Marion does introduce this analogy when he discusses the French word “kill” in IE, but he makes clear that “the face alone signifies to me, in speech or in silence, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” 10 Georges Poulet, “The Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1, no. 1 (1969): 54. 11 Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 144. 12 IE, 90. 13 Ibid., 88. 14 EP, 123. 15 John Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror: On the Philosophy of Love,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 262. 16 Ibid., 284. 17 Beata Tóth, “Love between Embodiment and Spirituality: Jean-Luc Marion and John Paul II on Erotic Love,” Modern Theology 29 (2013). 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Milbank, “The Gift,” 266. 20 Tóth, 34. 21 Milbank, “The Gift,” 265. 22 Ibid., 284. Milbank complains that “Pure phenomenology seems to exhibit a kind of nominalist bias insofar as it seeks a rhapsodic knowledge of love simply in terms of love.” 23 Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomenon, and Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 141. 24 Ibid. 25 Milbank, “The Gift,” 303. 26 John Milbank, “The New Divide: Romantic versus Classical Orthodoxy,” Modern Theology 26, no. 1 (2010): 33.



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27 Milbank, “The Gift,” 265. 28 Ibid. 29 John Berger, To the Wedding (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995), 40. 30 Edmund Husserl, “Letter to Hofmannsthal,” Site Magazine, 2009, 2. 31 Husserl seems to be referring here to Kleine Dramen, a play by Hofmannsthal. My thanks to Kevin Hart for alerting me to this letter, which he also mentions in “It/ Is True.” 32 Husserl, “Letter,” 2. Emphasis added. 33 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45–52. 34 Husserl, “Letter,” 2. 35 EP, 22, 214. 36 Ibid., 72. 37 Ibid., 82–9. 38 Ibid., 215. 39 Ibid., 21. 40 Ibid., 102. 41 Ibid., 95. 42 EP, 39; IE, 97. 43 EP, 1. 44 Ibid., 103. 45 Ibid., 179. 46 Ibid., 121. 47 Ibid., 123. 48 Ibid., 210. 49 Ibid., 193. 50 Ibid., 209. 51 Ibid., 193. 52 IE, 126. 53 EP, 221. 54 Ibid., 221–2. 55 Ibid., 144. 56 Ibid., 145. 57 Ibid., 188. 58 Ibid., 135–50. 59 Tóth, “Love Between Embodiment and Spirituality,” 31. 60 Milbank, “The Gift,” 262. 61 RML, 31. 62 Christian Wiman, “Mortify Our Wolves: The Struggle Back to Life and Faith in the Face of Pain and the Certainty of Death,” The American Scholar, Autumn 2012, https://theamericanscholar.org/mortify-our-wolves/. 63 EP, 138–43. 64 Ibid., 143. 65 Ibid., 119. 66 Wiman, “Mortify Our Wolves.” 67 EP, 148.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, John. To the Wedding. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hart, Kevin. “It/Is True.” Studia Phaenomenologica 8 (2008): 219–39. Hart, Kevin. “Introduction.” In Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, edited by Kevin Hart, 1–40. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 139–212. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. Husserl, Edmund. “Letter to Hofmannsthal.” Translated by Sven-Olov Wallenstein. Site Magazine 26–27, 2009. Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History 3, no. 2 (1972): 279–99. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Mackinlay, Shane. Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomenon, and Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Resting, Moving, Loving: The Access to the Self according to Saint Augustine.” The Journal of Religion 91, no. 9 (2011): 24–42. Milbank, John. “The Gift and the Mirror: On the Philosophy of Love.” In CounterExperiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, edited by Kevin Hart, 380–411. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007. Milbank, John. “The New Divide: Romantic versus Classical Orthodoxy.” Modern Theology 26, no. 1 (2010): 26–38. Poulet, Georges. “The Phenomenology of Reading.” New Literary History 1, no. 1 (1969): 53–68. Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. New York: Vintage, 2014. Tóth, Beata. “Love between Embodiment and Spirituality: Jean-Luc Marion and John Paul II on Erotic Love.” Modern Theology 29 (2013): 18–47. Wiman, Christian. “Mortify Our Wolves: The Struggle Back to Life and Faith in the Face of Pain and the Certainty of Death.” The American Scholar, Autumn 2012. https://theamericanscholar.org/mortify-our-wolves/.

Chapter 10

“As an Orpheus of Phenomenality . . .”1 Kevin Hart

Right at the start of L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) Flaubert depicts the young Frédéric Moreau on the good ship Ville-de-Montereau as it leaves the Quai Saint-Bernard in Paris on its way to Nogent-sur-Seine. Frédéric falls into talking with an older man wearing strange red boots, but their conversation is interrupted when this gentleman is called downstairs to attend to his wife who has become upset. Walking back to his seat Frédéric opens a gate that leads to the first-class section of the boat, and then, the narrator tells us in a short dramatic line, “It was like an apparition” [Ce fut comme une apparition]. There is a colon and beneath it an explanation of the shock that Frédéric has received: She was sitting in the middle of the bench, all alone; or rather he could not see anybody else in the dazzling light which her eyes cast upon him [il ne distingue personne, dans l’éblouissement que lui envoyèrent ses yeux]. As he passed, she looked up [elle leva la tête]; he bowed automatically; and when he had walked a little way along the deck, he looked back at her [il la regarda].2

The event comes completely out of the blue. Beforehand, Frédéric has been strolling around the ship, and has seen three cabinet-makers in overalls, a harpist, the captain, and a couple of sportsmen with their dogs. Yet he does not see Madame Arnoux so much as receive something like an apparition of her. She is not an arrivée but an arrivage; she floods Frédéric with intuition that overflows any concept he might have (e.g., “woman”), and the whole event that he bears is less an “experience” than a “counter-experience,” for the light that is cast upon Frédéric is no object.3 Jean-Luc Marion reminds us of this passage in 2003 when distinguishing between “what we see” [ce que nous voyons] and “what appears” [ce qui 151

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apparaît].4 Madame Arnoux is not just seen by Frédéric, as the cabinetmakers and the other people are; rather, she appears to him.5 There is a sense in which this is almost an apparition in the Catholic sense of the word—she is Marie-Angèle Arnoux, after all, and Flaubert clearly intends a certain irony at the expense of Frédéric and believers alike—but Marion is well within his rights to regard Flaubert as indicating that Madame Arnoux is a phenomenon for the young man. She is not a mere appearance but is the manifestation, the sudden unfolding, of a reality. A reality, as Husserl makes plain, it is the transcendence of the other person that yields the basis of the objectivity of the world about us.6 “Ce que nous voyons, ce qui apparaît” was presented in the same year that Le phénomène érotique (2003) was published, and in some ways the example drawn from Flaubert is a coda to the book. In Le phénomène érotique as well as in the essay that followed it Marion evokes what happens when one is in love: “The other is phenomenalized in the exact measure according to which the lover loves him or her and, as an Orpheus of phenomenality, tears him or her from indistinction and makes him or her emerge from the depths of the unseen.”7 It is a striking image. What happens—or does not happen—when someone or something does not appear and is merely seen? Marion tells us that the object does not “draw the gaze, does not focus it, does not captivate it”;8 and this emptiness, he says, “refers to . . . the phenomenality of the object.”9 The object which we see but which does not appear is in fact only pre-seen [prévu]; it is anticipated, perhaps, but does not light up, as phenomena do when one’s gaze rests on them. What shows itself first gives itself, Marion insists, but in order for something to show itself it must show itself to someone and it requires that person’s gaze, indeed a gaze that has been purified.10 Otherwise, the phenomenon is merely pre-seen.11 This element of being pre-seen is the ground of “objective knowledge,” of the available, of what Heidegger discusses by way of equipment that has not broken down, and what Marion figures as common-law phenomena. In contrast, the Virgin, an angel, or one’s beloved appears, is saturated with intuition—whether sensuous, categorial, or eidetic—and when that happens there can be no question of mastery by a concept or set of concepts. Saturation may not always be complete: doubtless Frédéric does not receive everything, or perhaps not even very much at all, of Madame Arnoux. Reduction is an ongoing task, not something one does just the once. Of course, that Madonna, angel, or beloved can also disappear; being is always in danger of being diminished, overlooked, neglected, impoverished, and this is perhaps especially true of the being of a gift, such as occurs on the Ville-de-Montereau, and the being of love; and Marion will surely add that love is in danger of being reduced to its being and so not be fully given.12 The expression “Orpheus of phenomenality”13 is far from entirely reassuring, for in no story that comes to us from classical antiquity does Orpheus ever



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return his beloved to the sweet light of the world. Plato has Phaedrus tell us in the Symposium 179d that Hades fools Orpheus by showing him merely an “apparition” [φάσμω] of Eurydice and judges that the poet lacks the spirit to die for love, as Alcestis did.14 Ovid, who bequeaths us the strongest version of the story in his Metamorphoses, insists that when Orpheus turns to gaze directly upon his dead wife she is returned to the dark world forever.15 One might say that L’Éducation sentimentale shows us the loss of the beloved in another way entirely. For we remember the end of the novel: “When they returned, Madame Arnoux took off her hat. The lamp, standing on a console table, lit up her white hair [éclaira ses cheveux blancs]. It was like a blow full in the chest.”16 Such is the long-delayed counterpart to the quasi-apparition on the Quai Saint-Bernard; this second apparition, one that does not require any qualification, is the forcible appearing of something new to Frédéric. Is it the sour victory of time over physical beauty? Or is it the loss of love? Or is it a final confirmation that Frédéric’s gaze has never been anything but the male gaze? The beloved is phenomenalized in love, to be sure, but that also happens to a degree with infatuation, fascination, obsession, and lust. Ἔρως and ἀγάπη are not always one. The lover must be vigilant to discern whether he phenomenalizes by virtue of love or by something else. When reading the page of Le phénomène érotique that I have quoted it is hard not to recall Maurice Blanchot meditating on the gaze of Orpheus in L’espace littéraire (1955), and since Blanchot’s evocation of Orpheus’ gaze goes in a quite different direction from Marion’s I should distinguish the two in order to avoid any possible confusion.17 For Blanchot, the story of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld is to be read as an allegory of creativity; the poet must not seek to look directly at what attracts him—Eurydice or, by extension, whatever inspires him—since what attracts does so only in withdrawal.18 The work is lost, he thinks, in linking desire to inspiration; it becomes fragmentary. (Such is the use Blanchot makes of the story of how Orpheus dies by being torn to pieces by Thracian Maenads.) The gaze that seeks to encompass the beloved ends with a poem, to be sure, yet in the end the poet is left with a text filled with its own knowledge, which the poet has never had himself, and which is no more than the shadow of that lack of actual, lived knowledge “changed into a gaze”19 that stares emptily back at poet and reader alike. The very nature of writing, Blanchot suggests, means that the phenomenality of the world cannot be captured in words. Blanchot freely acknowledges that one may well wish to “take the side of things,” as Francis Ponge does, but in writing about a pebble the poet immediately loses its stoniness and gives us instead its shadow. The writer’s anguish may be posed as a question, “How can I recover it, how can I turn around and look at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists after?”20 Yet words have phenomenality—indeed, materiality—of

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their own, even though Blanchot inclines his ear more to Mallarmé than to Heidegger on this issue (and bypasses Victor Shklovsky for whom the aim of art is “to make the stone stony”).21 Blanchot may not hear Mallarmé speak of the ideal flower but he certainly hears tell about its absence: he holds that words can give us only the absence of what they signify and not the being that they indicate.22 Accordingly, as we have heard, words also have a gaze, what I have elsewhere called a “dark gaze,”23 one that never quite settles on us but always approaches us and exposes us to the endless passing of being into image and back again. It is not surprising that when Blanchot speaks of reduction it is a leading back from being to this anterior perpetual circulation of being and image, what he calls “the Outside.”24 For Marion, however, the lover and the artist increase the phenomenality that is available to us by attending to what appears. They do not experience the world so much as let it manifest itself in counter-experience.25 The lover, like Frédéric, is given a phenomenon that overwhelms him, and the painter—Marion concerns himself primarily with the visual arts—similarly “increases the quantity, I might say the density, of the visible, that is to say of the world’s phenomenality.”26 Both do so by the quality of their attention on something that signifies for them. I would like to spend some time pondering how Marion thinks of phenomenality, how it is related to love, and how phenomenology, which Marion has helped to invigorate in our time, can guide us to respond to what we honor Orpheus for singing, namely, lyric poetry.27 In his Amsterdam Lectures of 1928, Husserl repeats what had long been a doctrine of his, that intentionality, “being conscious of something,” is “the essential character of mental life.”28 He says by way of example that “love is of something.”29 Yet he concludes his account of intentionality in a surprising manner. “In a way, and perhaps stretching the point a little, one can say of every mental process that in it something is appearing to the particular ‘I’ insofar as the ‘I’ is somehow conscious of it.”30 Nothing escapes intentional life, neither the transcendent nor the immanent, and the point is stretched only insofar as Husserl bypasses the possibility of nonintentional life, as it discloses itself in ὕλη, including the drives and emotions we associate with the erotic.31 “Accordingly,” he continues, “phenomenality, as a characteristic that specifically belongs to appearing and to the thing that appears, would, if understood in this broadened sense of the term, be the fundamental characteristic of the mental.”32 Phenomenality belongs to one’s purified experience of something as well as to what is being experienced; it is a hybrid.33 Nonetheless, if we take conscious life in a broader sense than psychologists are used to doing, we pass from intentionality to phenomenality as the mark of the mental. Husserl had made almost the same point a few years earlier in his lectures on phenomenological psychology over the summer of 1925. Then he said



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that in performing the ἐποχή all of one’s personal mental life as exercised when in the natural attitude is reduced (i.e., led back) to phenomenality: we pass from the natural attitude to reflecting on our subjective experience of the world, a correlation of noesis and noema. This is not mere subjectivism, for, as he indicates, this experience is the consequence of transcendental— phenomenological reduction.34 There is no phenomenality without reduction unless it is already immanent in psychic processes: adding numbers provides one example and imaginative acts offer another. Phenomenology is an arduous curriculum that teaches how to see better, but one does not always have to open one’s eyes to follow it. “Wherever in the world we find ourselves,” Adolf Reinach says, “the doorway to the world of essences and their laws always stands open to us.”35 For all that, phenomenology for Husserl, at least at this stage of his thought, principally involves a passage from transcendence to immanence (the intentional object is irreal, however) and, when brought home to transcendental consciousness, it calls for eidetic reduction so that it has intersubjective significance. Phenomenality is given to the fullest extent possible only after two reductions have been effected (or three if one separates the phenomenological and the transcendental); and it presumes a division between subject and object, albeit one that is never clean and continuous by dint of intentionality. Between 1925 and 1928 there appears Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), and there we find a quite different understanding of phenomenality,36 one that derives somewhat ingeniously from an Abbau of the word by way of the two Greek words that combine to compose Phänomenologie.37 That Husserl was taken aback by this new understanding is clear from his annotations to Sein und Zeit. “This is entirely too simple,”38 he notes in the margin beside Heidegger’s formulation. All the same, let us see how Heidegger reaches his formal sense of “phenomenology.” “The expression ‘phenomenology’ may be formulated in Greek as λέγειν τὲ ϕαινóμενα, where λέγειν means ἀποϕαíνεσΘαι,” Heidegger tells us.39 This is a peculiar first move, since as Heidegger knows full well, Johann Heinrich Lambert coins the word in his Neues Organon (1764),40 and although the neologism is Greek it originates and remains in the context of German thought.41 In his correspondence with Lambert, Kant calls phenomenology “a quite special, though purely negative science” that precedes metaphysics; and there is no reason not to think that for Lambert and Kant (and thereafter for Hegel and Husserl) the word Phänomenologie is formed from ϕαινóμενα and λόγος, thereby meaning the study of phenomena.42 For Husserl, unlike Lambert and Kant, the new way of philosophizing has universal scope, and, unlike Hegel, Husserl does not have to harmonize phenomenology and logic since transcendental logic is a part of phenomenology.43 Yet Heidegger insists that Phänomenologie must derive from λέγειν, to pick or gather, rather than λόγος (and, to leap for a moment

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to English, therefore be kin to “anthology” rather than, say, “anthropology”). Phenomenology would thus be a bringing together of phenomena, a laying out of them in a pattern that manifests what has been collected. Even were we to agree to all this, which would be quite a lot to ask, Heidegger would still need to find a link between λέγειν and ἀποϕαíνεσΘαι. He does so by way of Aristotle, specifically by reference to Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας 17, where we find a discussion of everyday demonstrative talk, λόγος ἀποφαντικός, in which claims of truth [ἀληθεύειν] and falsity [ψεύδεσθαι] are made;44 and it is easy enough for him to indicate that ἀπο + φανσις literally means “showing from,” since ἀποφαντικός derives from the verb ἀποφαίνειν, “to display or show forth.”45 To speak, in the self-reflexive sense of ϕαíνεσΘαι, is to let something show itself, and to do so ἀπο, from itself. So demonstrative speech is not at heart a matter of abstract logical reasoning in the medieval sense of ratio, Heidegger maintains, but is more primary: it is a pointing to something in the world that thereby becomes manifest in and through the speech. (As he says in an early seminar, “we see through language,”46 that is, by means of it. It is not merely a matter of assertions, which are not fundamental in speech, but of talk [Rede], which bespeaks ways of being. Could anything be further from Blanchot’s Mallarmé?) Having leagued λέγειν and ἀποϕαíνεσΘαι, Heidegger is now able to conclude his characterization of Phänomenologie in Sein und Zeit. It means, he says, “αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα—to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”47 Phenomenality, for Heidegger, is therefore coordinate with the phenomenon, not with transcendental experience of it, and when Husserl judges Heidegger’s formulation to be “too simple” it is undoubtedly because the subjective pole has been lost and, as we shall see, a distinction between two sorts of being has been set aside. Yet Heidegger has warrant in Husserl’s early work, before the notion of constitution was elaborated, to do as he has done; the “breakthrough”48 of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1901) involves thinking of intuition as the givenness of what is meant, and not any active consciousness of this givenness. Only with an objectifying act does what give itself show itself.49 The question of being faithful to Husserl or of departing from him, which characterizes Heidegger and Marion, turns ultimately upon which stage of Husserl’s work one takes to define classical phenomenology. At any rate, if we pass from the purely formal account of Phänomenologie that Heidegger develops and ask him what a phenomenon is we shall get a different answer than the one that Husserl offers, at least in Ideen I (1913),50 namely, that “φαινόμενoν initially means nothing other than a distinctive manner of an entity’s presence.”51 Strictly speaking, τὰ ϕαινóμενα are τὰ ὄντα52 when the latter answer to the question “How?” instead of to the questions “What?” and “Why?” Heidegger uses phenomenology as a way



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to ontology, but in “an entirely different sense” than the one commended by Husserl.53 If both philosophers are committed to the protocol “So much appearance, so much being,” it is Husserl who insists that “real being” subsists only in “absolute being,” that is, in transcendental consciousness, and Heidegger who holds that being is to be uncovered in beings only once they give themselves.54 Phenomenology, in Heidegger’s refiguring of it, seeks to uncover the being in beings, and the self-manifestation of being is precisely Heidegger’s reinterpretation of phenomenality. Phenomena are no longer to be grasped as objects, since there is no subject that is given the role of constitution; the realm of phenomenality is extended from objects to being. Doubtless this reinterpretation could have been developed without an extensive detour by way of Aristotle and the contentious philological analysis of the word “phenomenology.”55 Yet Heidegger wished at all costs to avoid the massive heritage of German Idealism and its prolongation into Neo-Kantianism, which he thought crushed Husserl despite the master’s insistence on philosophizing without untested presuppositions, and to ground himself on a more primal relation to being.56 So he needed to find the basis for phenomenology in Aristotle who, he thought, recovers some of what Plato lost of being as a coming into presence in his theory of the forms. The detour is worthwhile for another reason: it enables Heidegger to emphasize language as a medium for our perception of beings and, because of this medium, the possibility of deception (and self-deception) at all moments. To uncover the being in beings needs a prompt of some sort, and at first Heidegger acknowledges the point by using Husserl’s language of reduction, though not without changing its sense and function. No longer is reduction to be a matter of leading transcendent objects back to transcendental consciousness and shifting one’s attention to the very acts of transcendental consciousness that constitute phenomena. Instead, it is a passage from beings to being, and the shift is to be motivated not by ἐποχή but by fundamental attunements: dread of death and deep boredom both erode our enthrallment to the world and make us sharply aware that we are thrown beings whose being is an issue for us.57 Where Husserl seeks to purify one’s attention by mental ἄσκησις, Heidegger maintains that one becomes attuned to being by dark moods coming upon one. They are neither subjective nor objective; they envelop us and are anterior to intentional life; and while they can be hidden they cannot be completely overcome. A mood [Stimmung] attunes [be-stimmt] and permeates [durchstimmt]; it is part of care, Dasein’s central structure of being-ahead-of-itself, being-already-in-a-world, and beingalongside-beings.58 Other moods can disclose being; for the Greeks there was astonishment [θαυμάζειν, Verwunderung], and for us there are fright [Erschrecken], restraint [Verhaltenheit], foreboding [Ahnung], and timidity

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[Scheu], though none of these is sufficiently fundamental to disclose our thrownness in the world. Angst and Langweile will do it, however. Even the contemplative disposition commended by Husserl is a mood, although it was not recognized as such by him; for the phenomenological attitude bespeaks tranquility [Ruhe]. That said, Heidegger gives no attention to something important for Husserl, namely, that one can switch attitudes moment by moment. I can pass from the natural attitude to the theoretical attitude and from there to the phenomenological attitude. That Marion draws deeply from Heidegger’s reinterpretation of phenomenality, and from his account of deep boredom as a fundamental attunement, is well known, although the story is told in less detail than one would like.59 It is a tale of reductions, of recognizing that Husserl initiates reduction from outside being, that Heidegger does so from beings, and that Marion himself performs it in response to the pure call.60 Much could be said of this quest romance for Fraulein Gegebenheit, the beloved of all red-blooded male phenomenologists, but I confine myself to Marion’s insistence on the virginal purity of the call as quickening the third reduction that yields givenness in as complete a manner as possible. Marion inherits the figure of call and response, as it is treated in modern philosophy, from Heidegger, Gadamer, and Lévinas, though for him it is neither the call of being nor what comes to us from the enigma of the other person.61 Jacques Derrida and François Laurelle have criticized Marion for covertly identifying the pure call with the Call of the Father, though this claim can be justified only if one insists on interpreting his strictly phenomenological insights by way of his more theological writings, which are marked by his proximity to Pascal (for whom ennui, when properly understood, leads to God).62 We need to consider the pure call as a phenomenological given. The pure call is that of self-givenness. Since it is anterior to anything shown or heard, it can have no semantic content and is anonymous. Its “purity” is justified by its self-givenness [Selbstgegebenheit], which does not presume any agency, which is prior to any conscious act, and which is known only in l’adonné’s response. This purity does not render it irreducible in Husserl’s sense, since for him, at least after 1913, only “absolute being” is irreducible, but it is certainly incapable of being further reduced.63 Marion, of course, would not accept a distinction between absolute being and real being in the first place, for l’adonné has no absolute being and, to the extent that he looks to Husserl, he returns to the author of the Logische Untersuchungen and especially Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907),64 where the ego is grasped by way of intentional consciousness, and not to Ideen 1 (1913) where the distinction between the two modes of being is drawn.65



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Marion is able to think the “pure call” by radicalizing elements drawn from Husserl and Heidegger. Deep boredom does not simply enable us to pass from beings to hear the call of being, for in that dire state one has no desire to respond to the claim of being and one has no investment in any “there.”66 Yet Dasein is not to be thought by way of place in any geographical sense, and we may say, more precisely, that in profound ennui one does not even care for “the openness where beings can be present for the human being, and the human being also for himself.”67 Here one might well pause and, once again, set Marion beside Blanchot who does not evoke Pascalian ennui so much as ordinary human suffering, which stalls one’s awareness of the direction of time.68 For Blanchot, when we suffer physically we slip from being to the Outside, which lacks any purity at all (it is a “sordid absence,” “suffocating condensation”);69 and after our reading of boredom and suffering as urging us forward on our quest romance we might ask ourselves how, at the end of the journey, we could tell if we hear the call of givenness or the call of the Outside. As soon as that question is posed, another quickly follows: What is there that could justify the absolute anteriority of either givenness or the Outside? What could properly claim to be the final stage of phenomenology’s great quest, Marion’s “third reduction” or Blanchot’s “infinite reduction”? At the end of the day should we have secured phenomenality or evacuated it completely? In order to gain purchase on these questions, I continue to ponder Marion’s program of radicalization of his predecessors, and turn this time to what he learns from Husserl. Since for Husserl all ontologies fall before reduction, Marion argues, we cannot say strictly that reduction comes from within the sphere of being.70 Yet Husserl would insist that reduction is nothing if not a movement of real being to absolute being. Marion’s Husserl is less close to Husserl himself than to Eugen Fink’s revision of his Doktorvater where reduction presumes pre-existent constitution [“vor-seienden” Konstitution] in order to forestall the charge of circularity in performing reduction.71 As we know from his annotations to the VI. Cartesianische Meditation, made from 1933 to 1934, Husserl distances himself from Fink’s conclusion and maintains that phenomenology does not need a point d’appui in the meontic. For reduction does not proceed in the one stroke. With ἐποχή and then with the beginning of reduction one glimpses the transcendental horizon, which becomes ever clearer the more reduction one performs.72 Similarly, one might argue, in aid of Marion, that a pure call may not be heard all at once, and that responses to it are not always quick or continuous, and that givenness does not give itself in the one move: the call is to come away from metaphysical figures of being to the pure phenomenon, to reduce until no more reduction can be made. Saturation can occur with a trickle, a flow, and then a flood;

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and, of course, one might never get to the stage of even a flow, or a flood might dwindle to a trickle. The temptation to follow Fink into the meontic is a strong one not only for Marion but also, in a quite different way, for Derrida; after all, “pre-existent constitution,” along with Jean Hyppolite’s idea of a “subjectless transcendental field,” is the very basis for la différance.73 Yet there is no need to dip one’s toe into the abyss when theorizing reduction, and perhaps no pressing reason to find only an endless circulation of being and image at the end of the quest. In considering reduction we need to reflect on what motivates it and where it leads, and the main history, of which Marion relates a version in his account of the first, second, and third reductions, is of a movement within. Augustine heralds it when he writes, “Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth”74 [Noli foras ire in te redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas]: a remark that Husserl prized. That inward movement can be to transcendental consciousness as an aspect of empirical consciousness (Husserl) or as distinct from it (Fink), to that structure of doors and windows that is Dasein (Heidegger) or to its progeny, the overwhelmed Secretary of givenness that is l’adonné (Marion).75 Prompts to be welcomed into immanence, openness, or receptivity can be various, from mental ἄσκησις to suffering or mood (and, one might add, imagination, meditation, and prayer). And it must be said that all things need to be nudged in order to become phenomena: otherwise they do not appear and are merely pre-seen, as Marion says. Yet there are cues to reduction that do not strictly originate in the self, and in his account of the erotic reduction Marion alerts us to one of them. The erotic reduction proceeds in three stages, two pressing questions and one assurance: (1) Does anyone out there love me?, (2) Can I love first?, and (3) You have loved me first. Erotic reduction therefore comes from outside the self, “from elsewhere, being toward and for that which I am not.”76 One might say, if one follows Lévinas (as Marion does, though with all due caution with respect to the erotic), that it comes from “outside being,” since the other person is not strictly a being but an enigma. One might demur about the radicalization of erotic reduction, its second stage, and say that love very rarely acts in an “on-off” way. When one loves first it is seldom as Frédéric loves Madame Arnoux (if indeed he does when he sees her on the ship). I do not doubt in the slightest that, as Shakespeare’s Biron says, “A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.”77 Flaubert clearly knew that, and his contemporary, Anthony Trollope, knew it too, as we surmise when he quotes the line with respect to the beautiful, though sometimes cruel, Signora Madeline Neroni. Yet the narrator of Barchester Towers (1857) also speaks with stout British common sense on the degrees of love: “How many shades there are between love and indifference, and how little the graduated scale is understood!”78



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Sometimes one’s beloved appears only slowly, perhaps by way of φιλία or στοργή, and sometimes the love that is shared is neither pure ἔρως nor pure ἀγάπη. Sometimes one’s beloved does not appear only in perception; she can appear in anticipation, in hypotheses, in memory, and, of course, in phantasy, before or after or while she appears in flesh and bone. Phenomenality varies according to the regions of being, the ways in which phenomena give themselves. We think of perception as having a privilege with respect to phenomena and even if we are right to do so we should not thereby overlook the phenomenalities of anticipations, memories, and images.79 If artists and lovers increase the phenomenality in the world, it is not always in perception; our anticipations, acts of remembering, and imagination can be enriched by attention to being saturated as much as our perception. With regard to literature, Blanchot will tell us that the writer is only ever approached by the Outside, that it can never be a phenomenon, yet he perhaps restricts “phenomenon” so that it does not apply to that region of being where being becomes image. If I am drawn into the imaginary—if I am reading Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, for example—nothing will actually touch me other than a page that brushes or even cuts my fingers, but I am nonetheless touched by what I encounter when reading those pages: Madame Arnoux appears to me in my imagination, in a quasi-time, as a meaning, though not as a being I can meet on the street. According to Husserl, I can have a fulfilling intuition of “Madame Arnoux” by imagining her.80 Perhaps I can even be saturated with intuitions of her, though not quite as Frédéric was. With regard to love it must be acknowledged, I think, that the lover who does not anticipate, remember, and imagine, who does not cultivate phenomenality in all the ways in which the beloved is given and in which she shows herself by way of the lover’s response, is no lover to prize highly or for long. The questions posed on behalf of Blanchot and Marion would need to be replaced by others. Husserl never conceived of leaguing phenomenology and reading texts in any clear and definite way. His concern was, if anything, to reduce natural language as thoroughly as possible so that, freed of materiality and ambiguity, one could see phenomena through it. His students, Roman Ingarden and Heidegger, took an interest in the question, however, albeit in very different ways.81 When showing how phenomenology could help us to read Paul’s letters, Heidegger opened a path for theology that has been allowed to grow over until quite recently; and when he turned to read the German poets he did not forget the phenomenology he had forged in and around Sein und Zeit, even though he sometimes went beyond it.82 Think of his remark in “Das Wesen der Sprache”: “If our thinking does justice to the matter, then we may never

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say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives—not in the sense that words are given by an ‘it,’ but that the word itself gives [das Wort selber gibt]. The word itself is giver [Das Wort: das Gebende]. What does it give? To go by the poetic experience and by the most ancient tradition of thinking, the word gives Being.”83 It might be said that, with Blanchot and Derrida (and all who have followed them, even Michel Henry), readers of poetry have expected poetry to evacuate being as well as phenomenality, the main reason being that one region of being, writing (in its quasi-transcendental sense as well as empirical moments), has been allowed to master all others.84 Such an approach to poetry runs against the common experience of those who read it, for whom, if anything, poetry overflows even a highly intentional consciousness. Attention to the many modes in which givenness occurs could well enable us to read poetry better than we do. In conclusion, and only by way of indication of themes already broached, including Marion’s insight that poetry sometimes combines two or three sorts of saturation, I would like briefly to read a poem by Geoffrey Hill, a poet who, so far as I know, has no knowledge of or interest in the phenomenological tradition, though one who, early on, responded to the story of Orpheus.85 As in other poems, Hill is highly critical in “Orpheus and Eurydice” of the attempt by poets to write about the dead, to turn human anguish into art.86 “Love goes, carrying compassion/To the rawly-difficult,” he writes, and then reflects acerbically on Orpheus as he plays his lyre and sings: “His countenance, to his hands’ motion,/Serene even to a fault.”87 The “rawly difficult” is approached in another manner in a much later poem, the twenty-eighth lyric of Odi Barbare (2012): Broken that first kiss by the race to shelter, Scratchy brisk rain irritable as tinder; Hearing light thrum faintly the chords of laurel Taller than we were. Fear to have already the direst choosing, Sixty years spent as by procrastination. Answer one question, this is all I need, so Speeding denial. Ancient question haunting the Platonist: can Spirit ransom body, and if so could I Rise again in presence of your devoting Sorrow to sorrow? Quick, is love’s truth seriously immortal? Would you might think so and not be this other



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Finally known only through affirmation’s Failing induction. What though, wedded, we would have had annulment’s Consummation early, and though in darkness I can see that glimmerous rim of folly Lave our condition, Had we not so stumbled on grace betimely In that chanced day brief as the sun’s arising Preternaturally without a shadow Cast in its presence.88

This much is clear right away: the poet has lost his beloved, first in life and perhaps also in death, and he seeks to recover her insofar as he can; and so the lyric is, in its own way, a re-launching of the Orpheus myth. (There is a twist, for the beloved does not appear before the poet, except in the very writing of the poem, but rather the poet longs to appear before the beloved.) Much could be said about the poem—its formal qualities as a revival of Sapphic meter by way of Sir Philip Sidney not being the least of them89—but my reading of it shall be strictly limited by the expression I have taken from Marion’s Le phénomène érotique, namely, “Orpheus of phenomenality.”90 What appears for Hill and the reader in this poem? What must he and we learn to bear? Odi Barbare XXVIII concerns an event, a first kiss that, sixty years beforehand, was interrupted by a burst of “Scratchy brisk rain” and that has overflown any and all intentional aims, certainly by the poet and surely by his beloved as well. The intuition in play is sensuous (the kiss, the rain, the light, the laurel); it is categorial (more than the perceptual is registered); and it is eidetic, for Hill sees the structure of the event, passion enflamed in a rain shower. It embraces almost all of a long life, the “fear” to choose for or against a particular woman as a wife in the shelter and decades of “procrastination” before asking the right questions of her. The event shows itself in memory not as complete but as radically incomplete: the poet has never asked a crucial question of his lost beloved, has put it off until now when old age makes it urgent. In fact, three questions tumble out one after another in the present moment, all of them eliciting what we might call a post-erotic reduction: “can/Spirit ransom body [?],” “if so, could I/Rise again in presence of your devoting/Sorrow to sorrow [?],” and “is love’s truth seriously immortal?” If Hill is a Platonist (presumably a Christian Platonist), inheriting an ancient question, he was clearly not presenting himself as a Platonic lover sixty years

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before. Can the human spirit, perhaps purified by penance, redeem an impetuous act of the flesh, undo a mistake of a lifetime before and, in particular, supplicate the one who has been hurt by that very act? There was a truth in the loving act: does it last forever, though, as the Platonizing Fathers teach, or should we not take such theology at all seriously? Only the beloved, imagined now to be in the realm of spirit, can answer these questions, testify to the truth of love, which for the poet can only be affirmed—solemnly declared to be so but not known to be so—on the basis of past experience and therefore not able to be certain. (Husserl would think the issue less about induction than about fulfillment: none of the intentions in the questions can be fulfilled. For his part, Heidegger might ask if there is an element of self-deception in the very posing of the questions.) On the day of their first kiss, it now becomes clear, the couple “stumbled on grace,” meaning both that they chanced upon unmerited favor and that they fumbled the favor offered to them. Either way, the marriage failed and was dissolved; and now the possible world that would have been actual if the marriage had been annulled earlier rather than later offers a flickering light in which their two broken lives are bathed. Nothing here is anything like the first or second apparition that Frédéric beheld. In asking ourselves what appears in this poem, our best answer will not be the flesh of the beloved, as in Flaubert’s novel. Hill’s lost beloved, like Eurydice, says nothing, and we see nothing of her. What manifests itself, rather, are the painful, irresolvable consequences that attend a single, fleeting event of long ago, whether the kiss and the taking shelter were indeed a moment of grace that was given or a moment in which the couple stumbled, perhaps not being in love but instead taking themselves to be so, or being in love but not being able to weigh love sufficiently well. We can think, with Blanchot, of the woman and the love evoked by Hill as lost only if we hold phenomena not to give themselves in words; but if we follow Heidegger rather than Mallarmé we shall remain in the kingdom of phenomenality. In Hill’s lyric the phenomenality in question is less that of the density of the visual than the anguish of not being able to master even an apparently small and wonderful event. Like all strong poets, Hill increases the phenomenality of the world. Certainly he makes the brisk rain, the light and the laurel appear, not all at once, to be sure, but over the course of several readings. These sensuous things are not what are most important in the lyric, however. For in Odi Barbare XXVIII it is the “direst choosing”91 prompted by a kiss that is made to appear, along with its consequences. Appearing, too, is the imaginative act of other lives that the couple could have lived, had their trying marriage been annulled earlier rather than later, a speculation that offers no more than “a glimmerous rim of folly,”92 though one with some power to console. Being is always in danger, being in love is always



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in danger, and given the strength of perception in human life, anticipation, memory, and imagination are perhaps most in danger, precisely in danger of being occluded by perception. The kingdom of phenomenality is a large one indeed, and Hill, like other poets, teaches us that it reaches far beyond what we see, touch, smell, hear, and taste. NOTES 1 EP, 80. 2 Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2004), 8. Because I orient myself with respect to Frédéric Moreau and Orpheus in this chapter, I shall use the male pronoun throughout. 3 For the distinction between arrivé and arrivage, see NC, 184, and for counterexperience: NC, §10. Marion’s discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s lyric “A une passante” is relevant here. See NC, ch. 5. 4 WS, 153. 5 In the original French text, delivered at the Collège iconique à l’Ina (Paris), Marion misquotes Flaubert and has the narrator say, “Ce fut une apparition,” CNV, unpaginated. The error is picked up in the discussion following the talk by JeanPierre Lecouey, who notes that the “comme” contains Flaubert’s characteristic irony. Unfortunately, the error is not remarked in the notes to the English translation. It is corrected, however, in a revised version of the talk: CNV. 6 See Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 495. 7 EP, 80. 8 WS, 153. 9 Ibid., 154. 10 Heidegger reminds us that manifestation for the Greeks was quite different. See Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 36. 11 On the idea of the “pre-seen,” see also NC, 167, 198. 12 I allude to Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être en danger (Paris: Cerf, 2011). 13 EP, 80. 14 Plato, Symposium, 179d. 15 Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 1–85. 16 Flaubert, Sentimental Education, 453–54. 17 Maurice Blanchot, “Orpheus’s Gaze,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 171–76. 18 Ibid. 19 Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 332. 20 Ibid. He alludes to Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), especially “Le Galet.” Levinas takes a rather different approach to art, also

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based on shadow, in Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 76–91. 21 Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12. 22 See Stéphane Mallarmé, “Avant-dire au ‘Traité du verbe’ de René Ghil,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), II, 678. 23 See Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 24 See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 303–4. See also my essay: Kevin Hart, “Une réduction infinie,” in Cahiers de l’Herne: Blanchot (2014), ed. Éric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté (Paris: L’Herne, 2014), 323–28. 25 See BG, 215–19. 26 WS, 164. 27 The first question in the discussion following Marion’s presentation Ce que nous voyons et ce qui apparaît raises the question of arts other than painting. Marion makes some remarks about music but says nothing about literature. 28 Edmund Husserl, “The Amsterdam Lectures,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), ed. and trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 217. Husserl introduces the doctrine of intentionality in his Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), II, Investigation V. 29 Ibid., 218. 30 Ibid. 31 See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. I, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), §85, 207. 32 Husserl, “The Amsterdam Lectures,” 218. 33 Husserl acknowledges the ambiguity of “phenomenon” as early as 1907, and makes it plain that the preferred sense is that which is found in the immanence of intentional consciousness. See Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 11. 34 Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 179. 35 Adolf Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” trans. Dallas Willard, The Personalist 50 (1969): 211. We might be merely standing before a mailbox. (Reinach devoted an entire semester of teaching to a phenomenology of the mailbox.) 36 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). 37 See Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept Formation, trans. Tracy Colony (London: Continuum, 2010), §5. 38 Edmund Husserl, “Marginal Remarks on Being and Time,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger



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(1927–1931), ed. and trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 293. 39 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 58. 40 Johann Heinrich Lambert, Neues Organon (Leipzig: Teubner, 1764). 41 See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 42 See Immanuel Kant, “Immanuel Kant to Johann Heinrich Lambert, September 2, 1770,” in Correspondence, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 108. Heidegger quotes Kant to Lambert in Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 3. 43 On Hegel’s task, see Jean Hyppolite, Existence and Logic, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 44 Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), §17. 45 See Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, §2(b). 46 Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 22. Heidegger takes up this view in later works. See in particular, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens (Heraklit). 1943. 2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos, 1944, GA, 55, ed., Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), 179–80. Also see in this regard, Marion, who tells us that “givenness is fulfilled in words,” in GH, 19. 47 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 58. 48 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Hamburg: Meiner Felix Verlag GmbH, 2013). 49 See Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, Investigation 5 §§ 37–43. 50 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologishen Philosophie (Hamburg: Meiner Felix Verlag GmbH, 2009). 51 Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 6. 52 Ibid., 10. 53 Husserl, “Marginal Remarks on Being and Time,” 296. 54 For the distinction between “real being” and “absolute being,” see Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 110. For the protocol see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 103; and Heidegger, Being and Time, 60. 55 Yet Heidegger continues to contrast the Greek sense of manifestation with the Kantian and post-Kantian sense, which requires a subject. See Heidegger, Four Seminars, 36. 56 See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being,’ ” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 44. 57 See Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 21.

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58 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 73. See also 81. 59 See GWB, ch. 4, and RAG, ch. 6. 60 See RG, 165. 61 See NC, 36, 136. 62 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52 n.; and François Laurelle, “L’appel et le phénomène,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 96, no. 1 (1991): 37–38. Jean-Louis Chrétien develops a theological version of the model in his The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). For Pascal on ennui, see Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 2005), 181. 63 The motif of the irreducible is somewhat more complex than Husserl admits. See my essay, Kevin Hart, “The Irreducible,” Parrhesia 24 (2015): 17–37. 64 Husserl, “Die Idee der Phänomenologie,” in Logische Untersuchungen. 65 Husserl, Ideen. 66 RAG, 196. 67 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 120. 68 See Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 44. 69 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 242–43. 70 I assume that Marion has in mind a passage such as can be found in Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. III, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. Ted Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 76. 71 See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method with Textual Notations by Edmund Husserl, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. 149. 72 See Husserl on Fink: Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 33 n. 88. 73 For Hyppolite’s remark, see Jean Hyppolite, Husserl: Les Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie No. III, ed. M. A. Bera (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1959), 323. 74 Augustine, “Of True Religion,” in Earlier Writings, ed., trans. and intro. John H. S. Burleigh (London: SCM Press, 1953), 262. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 157. 75 I take the apt description of Dasein from: Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark RafterySkeban (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 11. 76 EP, 24–25. 77 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 4: 3, l. 338. 78 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, ed. Robin Gilmour (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 211. The citation of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost occurs on 358. 79 On the phenomenality of anticipation, see Jean-Yves Lacoste, La phénoménalité de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2008), ch. 6.



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80 See Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, Investigation VI § 19. 81 See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, trans. George G. Graabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); and Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 82 See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), Part II, and, for example, Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeil and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 83 Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” 88. Marion cites the passage in GH, 19. 84 See Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, trans. Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 43. 85 See PG, 57. Marion details the four modes of saturation in his BG, 23–24. 86 I explore this motif in Kevin Hart, Poetry and Revelation (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ch. 5. 87 Geoffrey Hill, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952– 2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33. 88 Hill, Broken Hierarchies, 862. Originally the first line of the final stanza read, “Had we not so stumbled on grace, beloved,” Geoffrey Hill, Odi Barbare (Thame: Clutag Press, 2012). 89 See Sir Philip Sidney’s lyric “If mine eyes can speake to doo harty errande,” which originally appeared in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. It is reprinted in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 30. 90 EP, 80. 91 Hill, Broken Hierarchies, 862. 92 Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. De Interpretatione. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Augustine of Hippo. “Of True Religion.” In Earlier Writings. Edited and translated by John H. S. Burleigh. London: SCM Press, 1953. Blanchot, Maurice. “Orpheus’s Gaze.” In The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, 171–76. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Blanchot, Maurice. “Literature and the Right to Death.” In The Work of Fire. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, 300–49. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. The Call and the Response. Translated by Anne A. Davenport. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

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Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method with Textual Notations by Edmund Husserl. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Flaubert, Gustave. Sentimental Education. Translated by Robert Baldick and Rev. Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin, 2004. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Hart, Kevin. “Une réduction infinite.” In Cahiers de l’Herne: Blanchot, edited by Éric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté, 323–8. Paris: L’Herne, 2014. Hart, Kevin. “The Irreducible.” Parrhesia 24 (2015): 17–37. Hart, Kevin. Poetry and Revelation. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Heidegger, Martin. “The Nature of Language.” In On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being.’” In On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Revised Edition. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeil and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters. Edited by Medard Boss. Translated by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept Formation. Translated by Tracy Colony. London: Continuum, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Henry, Michel. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Translated by Karl Hefty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Hill, Geoffrey. Odi Barbare. Thame: Clutag Press, 2012. Hill, Geoffrey. “Orpheus and Eurydice.” In Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012. Edited by Kenneth Haynes. Oxford University Press, 2013. Husserl, Edmund. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. Husserl, Edmund. Husserl: Les Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie No. III. Edited by M. A. Bera. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1959.



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Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Translated by John Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. Husserl, Edmund. “The Amsterdam Lectures.” In Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer, 263–423. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Husserl, Edmund. “Marginal Remarks on Being and Time.” In Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927– 1931). Edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologishen Philosophie. Hamburg: Meiner Felix Verlag GmbH, 2009. Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen. Hamburg: Meiner Felix Verlag GmbH, 2013. Hyppolite, Jean. Existence and Logic. Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Ingarden, Roman. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Translated by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Kant, Immanuel. “Immanuel Kant to Johann Heinrich Lambert, September 2, 1770.” In Correspondence. Translated and edited by Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skeban. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004 Lacoste, Jean-Yves. La phénoménalité de Dieu. Paris: Cerf, 2008. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Être en danger. Paris: Cerf, 2011. Lambert, Johann Heinrich. Neues Organon. Leipzig: Teubner, 1764. Laurelle, François. “L’appel et le phénomène.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 96, no. 1 (1991). Levinas, Emmanuel. “Reality and its Shadow.” In Unforeseen History. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Avant-dire au ‘Traité du verbe’ de René Ghil.” In Oeuvres Completes. Edited by Bertrand Marchal, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being: Hors-Texte. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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Marion, Jean-Luc. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. “What We See and What Appears.” Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. In Idol Anxiety. Edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, 152–68. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Marion, Jean-Luc. Givenness and Hermeneutics. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lafouge. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013. Marion, Jean-Luc. Ce que nous voyons et ce qui apparaît, overture de François Soulages. Brysur-Marne: INA Éditions, 2015. Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Phenomenology of Givenness.” In Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. Edited by Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett, 40–64. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Marion, Jean-Luc. Negative Certainties. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Charles Martin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by Roger Ariew. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 2005. Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Christopher Gill. Toronto: Penguin, 2003. Ponge, Francis. Le parti pris des choses. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Reinach, Adolf. “Concerning Phenomenology.” Translated by Dallas Willard. The Personalist 50 (1969): 194–221. Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Sidney, Philip. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by William A. Ringler Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. Edited by Robin Gilmour. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Part III

BREACHING FUTURE HORIZONS

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Discovering Human Insufficiency with Marion: From Vanity to Weakness of Will Jennifer Rosato

The student in the middle of the back row: her book is open, but her eyes are glazed over and her pen has stopped jotting down notes. She was engaged at the start of the class, but the lesson has ceased to interest her, and in her boredom the conversation around her seems pointless, superfluous, or vain. Previously, she wanted to understand what was on page 30, but her desire has receded. It seems impossible that page 30 or her efforts to understand it could possibly matter, either in the meager arc of her own life or in the vast forward march of the universe. Not every idle daydream leads us to see the world and human activity as empty or meaningless. In God without Being, however, Jean-Luc Marion proposes that the attitude of boredom, by rendering us indifferent not only to this or that object but rather to all that is, can lead us to such an experience of what he calls the “vanity” of the world. It is this concept of vanity that I investigate here, focusing on God without Being and The Erotic Phenomenon. Though the discovery that “all is vanity” can arise from boredom and lead to melancholy, Marion outlines a positive, fruitful outcome of the experience. Vanity, by revealing the insufficiency of being, helps us see that the assurance for which we long—that is, the assurance that our own activity in the world matters—is made possible through love. Finally, I argue that Marion’s description of Augustinian weakness of will in In Place of the Self is noticeably similar to the account of vanity, insofar as both are experiences of human insufficiency that provoke us to realize that assurance and purposeful human action are guaranteed only by a gift of love.

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GOD WITHOUT BEING: VANITY AS A “NEGATIVE WAY” BEYOND ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE Vanity, when it is introduced in chapter 4 of God without Being, appears as the key non-theological answer to the question of how we could approach a God who is beyond being (or, rather, how such a God could approach us) if human understanding can access objects only within the horizon of being. Idolatrous concepts of the divine, which pretend to fix God within philosophical thought, litter the ontotheological tradition of medieval and modern metaphysics—so much Heidegger has already shown us. According to Marion, however, Heidegger himself commits idolatry by subordinating God to the thought of being. Yet one must wonder whether it is possible to avoid this second—Heideggerian—“idolatry,” according to which God is thought on the basis of being.1 After all, is it possible to think outside of being? Is a conceptual icon really possible, and if so, how? In Denys’ Treatise on the Divine Names, Marion finds evidence that it is possible to praise God according to a name that would not subject him to the concept of being. Meanwhile, he discovers Scriptural examples of privileged instances in which the ostensibly all-important difference between being and nonbeing becomes irrelevant, insofar as both are subordinated to a higher instance: the gift, which delivers being. As gift, “all of ontological difference would find itself reinscribed in the field of creation.”2 Thus both Scripture and Denys provide evidence that the gift is in some way prior to being, so that it would be possible to name God according to an icon of pure gift, agape, love. Yet it remains to inquire how we might discover this gift as such. Though Scripture and Denys can convince us that it is possible, at the limits of speech, to glimpse the conceptual silence wherein the inability of being to exhaust God reveals itself, we must still ask ourselves how this possibility becomes actual. How does God become revealed as love beyond being, according to an unspeakable agape that overflows his idolatrous names (e.g., the supreme being, or the being causa sui)? In God without Being, Marion proposes two different routes toward this gift: first, a “negative way,” which is through vanity; and, second, a “dogmatic way,” through the Eucharist and the confession of faith.3 Since vanity is my theme here, I will not discuss the “dogmatic” route to the gift, except to echo Marion’s own claim that this route is offered by Christian theology and thus can be described but not justified from within philosophy.4 As I read Marion, vanity realizes the approach toward the gift precisely because vanity is the discovery that the horizon of being is insufficient. What I mean by “insufficient” must be explained. First, let me clarify that in the experience of vanity, being itself does not become inadequate to the task of



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bringing particular beings to conceptual visibility. To the contrary, being remains the condition of understanding; all objects that are must be revealed as existing. Yet in vanity this very conditioning of all things by the horizon of being shows itself to be insufficient precisely insofar as the horizon of being does not reveal the emotional and spiritual meaning or significance of the world, since this significance appears only insofar as the world is loved. As Marion puts it: vanity is “a gaze that discovers the world as being beyond Being/being without seeing it loved—by Gxd.”5 Hence the insufficiency of being that is revealed in vanity is not a lack of any thing; rather, the insufficiency of being is the way in which all things, even those we know and understand very well, seem lacking if or when they are not loved. Let us examine the phenomenality of the experience that Marion proposes. As Marion describes it, vanity “strikes the world”6 when it is seen from the attitude of boredom. Marion claims that boredom is important because it is an indifference to all things that renders us indifferent to ontological difference: in boredom, it does not matter that things are or are not. Here, the question of being, so important in Heidegger’s account of the human person, seems trivial. On Marion’s account, boredom is distinct from both annihilation, which destroys or denies, and nihilism, which devalues the highest values by uncovering their foundation in the will to power. By contrast with these attitudes, the gaze of boredom does not destroy or annihilate, devalue, or uncover; it merely turns away, dismisses, “withdraws from every interest that would make it enter among (inter) beings (interest).”7 Boredom is also distinct from Heideggerian anxiety, which reveals nothingness and thereby prepares the way for the thought of being. Unlike anxiety, boredom does not provoke interest in ontological difference but rather distracts and diffuses such interest; far from highlighting the nothing on the hinter side of being, boredom “sees all and nothing, all as nothing, all that is as if it were not.”8 Under this gaze, the distinction between being and nonbeing is suspended, rendered unimportant: in boredom, we simply do not care whether or not that being is. This indifference to ontological difference, brought about by the gaze of boredom, is vanity. Although vanity, like boredom, is a fully natural experience, Marion does appeal to Scripture in his description of it because, he proposes, a particularly apt articulation of vanity can be found at the start of Ecclesiastes: Now, this text reveals to us the sentence that, no doubt, best sustains the moment reached by our meditation: ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Qoheleth. ‘Vanity of vanities, and all [is] vanity! What advantageous difference for man in all the labor by which he labors under the sun?’9

From this point on, Marion’s description of vanity is pursued by way of meditation and exegesis on this classic Judeo-Christian articulation of

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the experience. Vanity, according to the text, has no limit; it affects “all,” although this “all” must not be understood as the totality of being. Rather, the text invokes all that is insofar as it is creation; as Marion puts it, “not as being, but as created, the world appears as a whole.”10 Indeed, one is tempted to say that the experience of vanity is just the experience of seeing the world as creation, and therefore as contingent, superfluous, and even frail: Striking with vanity therefore amounts to placing in suspension, to leaving the case (of all) in suspension . . . [S]uspension itself marks everything with the indication of caducity—all becomes caduke. Not that all disappears or falls, but all can fall and disappear; this great propensity cannot be summarized in a final and irremediable moment; it saturates each instant and each fiber of permanence in presence; the possibility of falling penetrates the caduke itself, even and especially when it does not fall; it appears caduke precisely because it does not fall in that instant, while it could and will have to.11

Hence, to see the world according to vanity is for all beings, and indeed being itself, to appear as perishable and temporary. Marion reiterates the point by likening vanity to a spirit or wind that blows, thereby dissipating a breath. The droplets and particles that compose the breath are not destroyed, but the “cohesion, the consistency, the opaque compactness”12 that had, perhaps, given it the appearance of stable substance are gone. Alternately, one might say that the true nature of the breath—that it is not a permanent substance, but rather a fleeting amalgam of near-weightless particles, a presence in flux—is revealed when the wind disperses it. Just so, vanity disperses the apparent permanence of being’s presence, revealing the contingency of all that is and opening access to the source beyond being through which “each instant and each fiber of permanence in presence”13 remain. If the experience is provoked by boredom, Marion proposes that it can mature into a deep melancholy, as in Dürer’s famous engraving,14 wherein our gaze on all things sees them as if they were not, aiming at an absent and unseen vanishing point somewhere beyond the world.15 If we grant that this vision of the world penetrated by vanity can be realized through boredom, we must still be puzzled by the perspective that this experience presupposes. From what perspective, we ought to ask, can it become possible to see the whole world as suspended in this way—that is, to see the totality of being and the entirety of human labor as uninteresting, unimportant? Doesn’t this vision presuppose a view of the world from a point exterior to it, an inhuman point of view? Indeed, on Marion’s account, vanity points toward this exteriority—inhuman only in the sense that it would be divine. Vanity, then, is a moment in which the human gaze, which sees only according to the horizon of being and from within the world, is put out of play. Although vanity itself suggests that the exteriority of the world appears



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caduke, it also offers by way of negation a glimpse of an alternate, positive vision of the whole. As contingent and unloved, the world appears vain, but if, perhaps through Scripture, we can imagine it loved and pronounced “good,” this vanity would be conquered; hence vanity reveals the significance of love by its very absence.16 Indeed, that vanity and love can each throw one another into clearer relief is evident in mundane experience, as when a woman deeply in love with a man experiences the rest of the world as vain; all that matters is the presence of the beloved and anything associated with it.17 Alternately, when she is apart from her beloved the whole world is covered in vanity because of her beloved’s absence.18 When love presides over the world, things and their ways of being present are significant, and matter deeply to us—as perhaps they should. Yet when love is absent, as in boredom or melancholy, our very indifference to things reveals their deep vanity, or their radical dependence on a love beyond being. THE EROTIC PHENOMENON: VANITY AS THE ROUTE TO THE EROTIC REDUCTION In the preceding section, I argued that the concept of vanity appears in God without Being as an answer to a question: how is it that we are moved beyond the horizon of being in order to catch a glimpse of love that overflows ontological difference? When vanity appears again at the beginning of The Erotic Phenomenon, it answers a slightly different question: how is it that we are moved beyond the epistemic and ontological reductions, wherein things are given to us as objects and beings, in order to perform the erotic reduction? To be sure, the question of a reduction more radical than the epistemic and ontological reductions is not new in The Erotic Phenomenon. Indeed, it is a central theme of Being Given. In that text, Marion suggests that phenomenology in its Husserlian and Heideggerian modes has exerted the same idolatrous domination on phenomena in general as theology in its metaphysical mode does on God. By subjecting phenomena to horizons of objectness and being, phenomenology has failed to admit phenomena unconditionally “as what they give themselves—givens, purely.”19 Yet it remains an open question in Being Given as to how a move beyond the illegitimate restraints set up by the phenomenologist’s customary horizons is or can be brought about. Certain phenomena, Marion argues, themselves overflow those restraints and thereby demand that we admit them as pure givens. In the opening passages of The Erotic Phenomenon, however, Marion seems to suggest that there is a quite common experience that affects all phenomena, including my own self, and which forces

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us to acknowledge the deep insufficiency of the epistemic and ontological reductions: this is the experience of vanity. That vanity points beyond the horizons of object and being is established by an opening meditation on the human quest for knowledge, and, ultimately, for certainty. Metaphysics, Marion proposes, sets out in pursuit of certainty and does not return empty-handed: we ourselves certify objects in knowing them, while our own activity of thought delivers that great Cartesian certainty that the ego is, so long as it thinks. This supposed certainty, however, fails to satisfy, because it ignores the doubts that matter most. As Marion puts it: The only inquiry whose result would truly matter to me would tackle the possibility of establishing some sort of certainty about my identity, my status, my history, my destiny, my death, my birth, and my flesh, in short about my irreducible ipseity.20

In the face of scientific and metaphysical inquiries that establish irrelevant and distant certainties, vanity easily strikes. It is enough, suggests Marion, for us to raise a simple question—“What’s the use?”—whereupon it becomes clear that the certainty of objects, and indeed the certainty of my own existence, simply do not reassure me. As in God without Being, vanity here is an experience of the contingency of all that is, a disquietude that suggests all is pointless, lacking in meaning. Without yet seeing things in the world as loved, we nevertheless experience the insufficiency of all our knowledge of them either as objects or as modes of being. The desire for “assurance” against vanity—that is, the demand for a good answer to the question “What’s the use?”—is precisely what triggers the erotic reduction. It is through the proverbial eyes of love that the phenomena of the world escape vanity and are seen as fruitful rather than futile, valuable rather than pointless, desired rather than contingent. Thus, Marion distinguishes between the desire for certainty, to which the epistemic and ontological reductions respond, and the desire for assurance against vanity, which prompts the erotic reduction. Although in both God without Being and The Erotic Phenomenon, vanity affects all that is, in the later text Marion emphasizes the way in which vanity strikes me in particular. Assurance against the question “What’s the use?” would be assurance against the vanity that, first and foremost, affects the phenomenon that I am to myself. Hence, Marion claims that in the erotic reduction, “I must discover myself as a given (and gifted) phenomenon, assured as a given that is free from vanity.”21 If objects are struck by vanity, they nevertheless remain objects—insufficient and contingent, but still present. Likewise for myself, Marion proposes, for when I am struck by vanity I retain the certainty of being an ego, an object in the world, a being among others. The insufficiency of this certainty, however, is felt even more keenly in my



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own case than in the case of objects. The demand for assurance arises most in reference to myself, because I simply cannot reduce myself to the mode of an object or a being among others without “giving up on the human itself.”22 The assurance that my existence is not in vain is pursued by means of an erotic reduction, which directs me outside of myself and toward someone who could love me: “For me,” Marion writes, “to be signifies nothing less than to be-loved. . . . Why can’t I accept being except on the express condition that someone loves me? Because in my being I only resist the assault of vanity under the protection of this love, or at least its possibility.”23 As the argument of the text proceeds, we discover that although I enact the erotic reduction by asking “Does anybody love me?,” only the question “Can I love first?” will direct me to the assurance I seek.24 When I do make a lover’s advance and discover my beloved, I successfully defend myself against vanity, since through love I conquer the looming contingency and irrelevance of my own being. In the “crossed” erotic phenomenon, I encounter the other in giving myself to him, and discover myself as his gift.25 None of this, however, should suggest that vanity is completely overcome once the erotic reduction is successfully accomplished and love gives me, fully human and fully individual, to myself. The text proposes that the relationship between vanity and the erotic reduction is complex. At times, Marion indicates that the erotic reduction confronts or wards off vanity; at other times, he suggests that vanity accomplishes or is brought about by the erotic reduction.26 Here it is helpful to remember that love and vanity also contest and reveal one another in God without Being. Vanity strikes all that is, mocking my concern with the knowledge of the world and my existence in it, simply by reminding us that “the certainty of my existence is never enough to make it just, or good, or beautiful, or desirable—in short, it is never enough to assure it.”27 In the erotic reduction, a response is launched: if I succeed in making love, I do discover myself as a gift of the beloved—as just, good, beautiful, and desirable. Yet successfully made, this love reveals more clearly that without it, all the certainties that make up the world of objects—their position in time and space, and my position as an ego among them—are “destitute.”28 It is only through love that the phenomena here and there, now and then, you and me show themselves; once we see this, the certain but unloved objects of the world seem all the more vain. FROM VANITY TO WEAKNESS OF WILL In the Foreword to In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, Marion comments that in developing his reading of Augustine’s Confessions,

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he saw himself as testing “the hermeneutic validity of the concepts givenness, saturated phenomenon, and the gifted”29—key concepts that are developed in his recent works in phenomenology. Among these concepts, Marion does not mention vanity, and, indeed, vanity does not play a central role in the book on Augustine. This decision might seem strange, since it is possible to find vanity within the Confessions. Indeed, in Book IV of the Confessions, Augustine’s description of his experience following the death of a friend seems to match Marion’s account of vanity quite well.30 Reflecting on his loss, Augustine seems to repeat the Qoheleth’s discovery that all is vanity: “I was wretched,” writes Augustine, “and every soul is wretched that is bound in affection of mortal things: it is tormented to lose them, and in their loss becomes aware of the wretchedness which in reality it had even before it lost them.”31 Meanwhile, Augustine reports that following the death of his friend he “hated all places because [my friend] was not in them.” Here, the reader of Marion immediately recalls §5 of The Erotic Reduction, which describes how the erotic reduction provoked by vanity radically reorganizes space according to the proximity or absence of the beloved.32 The world appears worthless when Augustine is not able to experience it with his beloved friend: “Whatever I looked upon had the air of death. . . . The things we had done together became sheer torment without him.”33 Indeed, even Augustine’s own life—that is, the certainty of his own existence—fails to provide assurance since he “thought of [his] soul and his [friend’s] soul as one soul in two bodies; and [his] life was a horror to [him] because [he] would not live halved.”34 Thus, in Book IV of the Confessions, grief seems to provoke an experience of vanity, according to which the certainty of self proves inadequate and the priority of love over ontological difference is revealed.35 I will not speculate on Marion’s decision not to focus on this part of the Confessions in In Place of the Self, except to note that this absence does fruitfully force us to look elsewhere in order to discover where and how the erotic reduction functions in Augustine’s text. In fact, although vanity as such is absent from In Place of the Self, it is nevertheless apparent in Marion’s analysis that the discoveries vanity provokes are central Augustinian concerns. Hence, for example, the analysis of memoria in Augustine reaches a conclusion that might just as easily have come from The Erotic Phenomenon: The assurance of my essence, which does not follow from certain knowledge of my existence, does indeed befall me but from elsewhere than my own intentional thought, starting from an unshakable alterity, that of my own desire. For it does not come from me but imposes itself on me.36

As in the book on love, the request for assurance here is answered by a desire “to which precisely I respond,” yielding “a strictly erotic certainty.”37



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Yet whereas the path to this conclusion in the earlier work proceeds through vanity toward the “crossed” phenomenon of lovers who offer signification to one another, in the analysis of Augustine it is reached by the discovery within memoria of an “immemorial” desire for beatitude that weighs on thought without becoming thinkable. We should be careful not to conflate these two distinct paths. Nevertheless, we should also notice that the demand for assurance provoked by vanity is not, at the end of the day, so very different from the longing for beatitude revealed as the immemorial. Both accounts figure the deep insufficiency of self-awareness in order to show us who we are, and both insist that this insufficiency is overcome only through an erotic certainty, an assurance achieved not through knowledge but through love.38 It is not, however, in the analysis of memoria but rather in the discussion of temptation and weakness of will that the strongest Augustinian parallel to vanity can be found in Marion’s text. In order to see this, we must reflect on the structure of vanity that has already been described. First, on Marion’s account, vanity strikes insofar as the meaningful cohesion of the world (and my place in it) dissipate in front of the question “What’s the use?” Second, as a result of this experience, vanity provokes the discovery that these phenomena, myself above all, are made significant through love, which determines phenomenality apart from those horizons. In the Augustinian description of weakness of will, each of these notes—first, a discovery of the self’s insufficiency and then an appeal to love that reveals meaning—is repeated in a unique key. In Augustine’s experience, the assurance that is initially lacking and later given is the assurance that human activity is not in vain. First, there is an experience in which self-certainty is destabilized and I encounter my own insufficiency to present world and self as meaningful phenomena: for Augustine, this is the experience of temptation and the insufficiency of the will to overcome it. Reading Augustine, Marion discovers that temptation, or the ever-present possibility of sinning, marks human life as such. Both before and even after conversion, temptation presents itself as a burden that forces me to decide myself again and again, revealing the instability of the self. The persistence of temptation erodes any pretense of self-cohesion and self-certainty. “Temptation thus,” writes Marion, “imposes on me the possibility, itself inevitable and permanent, of a self-decision.”39 In the face of this burden, I discover with Augustine that I am not able to enact the required self-decision. Although in the face of temptation I would like to will the good—indeed, even though I will to will the good!—I discover the weakness of my will, which is capable of commanding everything except its own movement. Augustine himself, points out Marion, “is astounded by his difficulty, indeed by his impossibility to will and be resolved”40 once he endeavors to decide himself in favor of the good. This indecision does not,

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despite appearances, indicate the presence of two wills within a human person.41 Rather, as Marion reads Augustine, what is revealed in this weakness of will is a “shortage” or “insufficiency of the will”; though the will has sufficient power to command the movements of my body, it is simply too weak to will itself, or to take up the burden of self-decision on its own.42 As I read it, this weakness of will is quite close to an experience of vanity: in it, I experience human action in general, and my own initiatives in particular, as pointless, insufficient, vain. In both experiences, all possibility of answering the question “What’s the use?” on the basis of my own resources recedes. My will, through which I would like to certify the phenomenon that I am to myself, proves insufficient; my own power to will seems useless in the face of the burden of temptation that it is too weak to conquer. As Marion puts it: “I enter into temptation, paradoxically, because I cannot do my own will because my will is not its own.”43 And what is the use of my actions, my willing, if I cannot choose between good and evil—if precisely at the key moment of temptation I lose the privilege of deciding myself? Like vanity, weakness of will helps us discover the true source of selfassurance. Just as vanity becomes a negative way to discover God as love beyond being, and gives way to an erotic reduction wherein the self is assured as a gift of love, so too does weakness of will resolve itself in an erotic gift. The monstrosity of a will that cannot will itself, on this account, is the result of our own weakness in determining our loves; indeed, in many cases we do not even know what we love until our will has already led us to enjoy it.44 Yet we discover with Augustine that despite this weakness, we do will, since and insofar as God gives us the will we lack. The paradox of the will’s weakness is resolved, then, by a gift of love, wherein God’s loving advance toward me gives me to love despite my own insufficiency to do so. Hence, Marion argues, Augustine’s prayer, “‘Give what you command’ supposes that to love and what I can love is given to me— namely, that which can make me love.”45 The “gift to love,” perhaps better known as a grace, does not interfere with my will but rather accomplishes it, and thereby “decides the self” by making it possible for me to will—that is, to love—truly.46 It is not hard, I think, to see in this Augustinian accomplishment of the will through God’s grace an instance of the erotic phenomenon that assures me against vanity. As in the erotic phenomenon, I achieve the assurance of self that I seek only by effectively loving or willing, and I discover that “the erotic history” whereby I become an ipseity sufficient to love or will unfolds only through the love of the other.47 I can answer the question “What’s the use?” because I come “to will what is given to me to love”; I am interested again in



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all that is and can overcome the temptation to refuse it, because it is given to me to see all creation as beloved.48 CONCLUSION In the preceding, I have traced Marion’s account of vanity from God without Being to The Erotic Phenomenon. An apparently negative experience of indifference to all that is, vanity nevertheless enables us to discover that the assurance for which we long—that is, the assurance that the world and our activity in it matter—is given through love. Though vanity might seem to be absent from Marion’s In Place of the Self, I have argued that weakness of will is an Augustinian parallel to vanity, insofar as both are experiences of human insufficiency that cause us to realize that assurance and purposeful human action are guaranteed only by a gift of love. This parallel, I propose, not only helps us to appreciate the rich coherence of Marion’s thought but also suggests that there are multiple “negative ways” to the gift, and more work to be done by phenomenologists in describing those ways. NOTES 1 GWB, 44. 2 Ibid., 109–10. 3 This method of distinguishing between the two ways in which the gift may be approached comes from: Ibid., “Preface to the English Edition,” xxiv. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 132. 6 Ibid., 128. 7 Ibid., 118. 8 Ibid., 119. 9 Eccles. 1: 2–3, as cited in GWB, 120. 10 Ibid., 122. 11 Ibid., 126–7. 12 Ibid., 125. 13 Ibid., 127. 14 Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia, 1514, engraving, The British Museum. 15 Ibid., 132–4. 16 Ibid., 131. 17 Ibid., 137–8. 18 Ibid., 135–6. 19 BG, 320.

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20 EP, 16. 21 Ibid., 22. 22 Ibid., 21. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid., 22 and 72. 25 Ibid., 103, cf. 37–40, 101–12. 26 E.g., “the erotic reduction confronting vanity,” Ibid., 28; “I experience the vanity that this question [the central question of the erotic reduction, ‘Does anyone love me?’] attempts to ward off,” Ibid., 37; “On principle, vanity thus extends universally. Effectively, it accomplishes the reduction upon all the regions of the world and their borders,” Ibid., 29; “all the facets and beings visibly present . . . find themselves rendered destitute, struck with vanity by the erotic reduction,” Ibid., 34. 27 Ibid., 22. 28 Ibid., 29, cf. 29–40, 129–35. 29 SP, xiv. 30 Thank you to Jeffrey Kosky for pointing out to me this parallel between Confessions Book IV and Marion’s account of vanity. 31 Augustine, Confessions, 2nd ed., trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2006), 60. 32 Ibid., 59; EP, 29–32. 33 Augustine, Confessions, 59. 34 Ibid. 35 To be sure, in claiming that the certainty of his own existence fails to assure Augustine in Confessions IV.6.11, I do not mean to suggest that what is at stake here is the certainty of an ego as such. Indeed, Marion convincingly argues that Augustine never posits an ego that is certain to itself (cf. SP, 56–68). Marion argues that despite certain well-known parallels between the Meditations and Augustinian texts, “it behooves us to doubt that Saint Augustine anticipated the Cartesian cogito” (SP, 59). A first distinction between Augustine and Descartes is that the certainty acquired through the activity of self-reflection, for Augustine, “does not bear so much on being [as in Descartes] as on life” (SP, 59). A second is that while the cogitatio establishes, for Descartes, that there is an ego known by itself, for Augustine it establishes only that I am a question to myself (quaestio mihi) (SP, 62–64). 36 SP, 84. 37 Ibid., 84, 87. 38 Ibid., 87. 39 Ibid., 150. 40 Ibid., 164. 41 Ibid., 170–1. 42 Ibid., 171–2. 43 Ibid., 169. 44 Ibid., 184. 45 Ibid., 186. 46 Ibid., 186, 188–9. 47 EP, 195. 48 SP, 190.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. Confessions. Second Edition. Translated by F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006. Dürer, Albrecht. Melancholia, 15. Engraving. London, The British Museum. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Marion, Jean Luc. Being Given. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean Luc. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Chapter 12

Marion’s Spirituality of Adoration and Its Implications for a Phenomenology of Religion Christina M. Gschwandtner

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of religion is most fundamentally motivated by what might be called a “negative” claim. There is a deeply apophatic tenor to his work that insists on God’s utter transcendence and tries to protect the divine against idolatry: the idolatry of the causa sui, of ontotheological metaphysics, of the Nietzschean death of the Platonic god, and of Heidegger’s even higher idolatry that makes God subject to Dasein or the Fourfold. What is maybe less familiar and less obvious in Marion’s work is a more “positive” impetus: not just a rejection of idolatrous language about God but also an affirmation of how the divine might be approached. Marion’s phenomenology of religion, I want to suggest, can be read as a spirituality of adoration. In La rigueur des choses Marion comments several times on the importance that contemplation or silent prayer before the sacrament holds in his life.1 In one instance he explains this more fully: The discovery of the prayer of eucharistic adoration was a fundamental thing. Maxim Charles insisted on this point: It is a form of objective prayer, of objective mysticism. Its goal is to achieve or develop (in the photographic, psychological, and almost phenomenological sense) the link between, on the one side, biblical texts that convey God’s words or often Christ’s words, and, on the other side, a totally real, but perfectly silent, presence. The whole work of contemplation consists in making these two coincide or at least to bring them closer together. It consists in putting into focus what will make presence speak, what will give to the words their referent. It is a labor of attention, of concentration, but one that is essentially de-subjectivizing, where the I is erased before the one whom it observes speaking. That was a real and great discovery for me. The spiritual life, especially in the catholic religion, seems to privilege interiority in opposition to the exteriority of action (apostolic or secular); but one must make it more than a subjective counterpart of what is real and is found in the world, 188



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with all attendant ambiguities. Yet, with eucharistic adoration, a fundamental psychological change takes place, since it is a matter of placing words into the mouth of a reality, if I can put it like this, or of causing the words spoken to be really those said by Someone who is here now, before me, infinitely more than me. This makes the spiritual life first of all essentially dialogical—and not monological—and then shows it to have norms; it is neither arbitrary nor a daydream. That was the first discovery.2

The spiritual life, then, can be examined objectively as a kind of labor or effort that brings together the internal and the external and makes Christ present in prayer. It follows certain guidelines and involves a re-situating or even loss of the self before the Other. Marion goes on to spell out as a further consequence the realization that God is not far away in some other world, but that God is already present: This inversion of the relation of inclusion has a major significance, for the spiritual life becomes the objective space where everything else takes place and not a part, a margin, or a limit of the experience of the world. The consequence [of this] for intellectual life is not minor: One can no longer place speculative theology or neutral rationality to one side and the spiritual life to the other, but the same place encompasses both. It does so in such a way, that any number of difficulties disappear entirely: the concern to figure out whether one is in a good spiritual disposition or is experiencing dryness, whether one ‘has faith’ or not, whether one is in a state of enthusiasm or depression—they all become secondary phenomena that change nothing about the substance of the matter.3

Marion attributes to this fundamental realization the insight that the question of God’s existence is unimportant and secondary to the question of whether I can exist. Everything, in fact, is found at the interior of God to the point that “the idea that there is anything outside of God has no meaning at all.”4 Marion depicts this as a Copernican revolution motivating his work, especially The Erotic Phenomenon. At a later point in the interviews, he once more points to the experience of Eucharistic adoration as particularly determinative for his life and interprets it as affirming that “the present [in the sense of gift] gives presence”5 and links it again to a concern with love or charity.6 In this chapter, I will argue that this focus on adoration is not merely a determinative personal experience. Rather, what might be called a “spirituality of adoration” permeates and fuels Marion’s work from beginning to end and significantly colors what it says about the divine and religious experience or experience of revelation. Adoration will turn out to have several characteristics: It is grounded in a gift of love characterized by complete kenosis or self-emptying and constitutes a similar kenotic response of self-abandon (or loss of self) to the singular (generally divine) other. Marion’s work can be shown to define the human most essentially as homo adorans, as being turned

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toward the divine in loving devotion. Recognizing the importance that the role adoration plays as a goal in Marion’s work more generally helps resolve some questions that otherwise would remain puzzling. It does, however, speak of religious experience in a particular way and hence has significant implications both for his own version of phenomenology of religion and for philosophy of religion more generally. LARVATUS PRO DEO AND CAPAX DEI: MARION AND DESCARTES Marion’s work on Descartes is still not being studied enough in the Englishspeaking world, which is unfortunate because ignoring his writings on Descartes presents a misleading picture of his work. As a result, some important presuppositions that are laid out far more fully in his various examinations of Descartes than in the more explicitly theological or phenomenological writings are missed. One might be surprised to hear the words “spirituality” or “adoration” in connection with Descartes, who is usually regarded as the thinker single-handedly responsible for modernity, for the Enlightenment, for abstract rationality, and for all the ills variously attributed to it, including, of course, supremely, the Cartesian subject. Part of the impetus and goal of Marion’s work on Descartes has been precisely to dispel, or at least heavily qualify, this simplistic image of Descartes and to provide a much more nuanced picture. In Marion’s work, we discover a Descartes who is deeply concerned with preserving and honoring the transcendence and alterity of the divine, even with veiling our free access to God, our hubristic assumption that we know and can say any number of things about the divine. Similarly, Marion uncovers a Descartes who counsels humility, engages in prayer, and is attentive to the passivity of our emotions. Indeed, sometimes it is not Descartes but a contemporary or preceding figure who expresses Marion’s emphasis best: for example, often Pascal is juxtaposed to Descartes and in those cases Marion tends to side with Pascal over Descartes.7 While Descartes as a figure plays an ambivalent role in Marion’s work, Marion’s overall work on Descartes and the Cartesian context certainly bears the same tenor as his later theological and phenomenological work in several important ways. Two citations from Descartes can help situate our reading here. Let me begin with a relatively unknown passage, but probably the one that Marion has cited most frequently in his writings, namely, the lines from Descartes’ 1630 letter to Mersenne: The mathematical truths that you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. Indeed to say that



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these truths are independent of God is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject him to the Styx and the Fates. Please do not hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom.8

This quote shows the more “negative” and more obvious tenor of Marion’s work: the desire to protect the divine from idolatrous naming. In this case, such idolatrous naming, represented by Mersenne, Kepler, Galileo, Bérulle, and others, amounts to univocal naming of God (in an epistemological, ontological, or spiritual sense) that would make the divine subject to human reason or attribute the same sort of being to God as to all other beings. The non-idolatrous position, here represented by Descartes, insists on the creation of the eternal truths: they are dependent on the divine and in no way superior to God. Besides his detailed discussion of the issue of the creation of the eternal truths and their centrality for understanding Descartes’ project in Théologie blanche, Marion has devoted at least two further essays to this citation from the 1630 letter to Mersenne and also mentions it frequently in other contexts.9 He argues that this thesis is central to Descartes’ work and that its rejection by subsequent thinkers determines the history of metaphysics in an important fashion. This reaches its height in Leibniz: “It is not only Descartes who finds himself criticized [by Leibniz], it is his entire opening of metaphysics that is closed: the principle of reason closes what the creation of the eternal truths had attempted to open: the unconditioned instance of the infinite (and hence the unrepresentability of the idea of the divine).”10 The creation of the eternal truths serves as key not just for understanding Descartes but also for indicating what motivates Marion’s own work—on Descartes and more generally—that is, the protection of the incomprehensibility and infinity of the divine. And yet, how is that protection best accomplished and what sort of results does it have? A second quote from Descartes may help us answer this question. This is a far more well known, but often dismissed, passage from the end of the Third Meditation, where Descartes ends his reflection in a prayer of adoration: But before examining this point more carefully and investigating other truths which may be derived from it, I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God; to reflect on his attributes and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this light so unspeakably great, so far as the strength of mind, which is to some degree dazzled by the sight, can bear it. For just as we believe through faith that the supreme happiness of the next life consists solely in the contemplation of the divine majesty, so experience tells us that this same contemplation, albeit much less perfect, enables us to know the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life.11

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For those familiar with Marion’s work, this is a striking passage because it employs all the language Marion generally uses to describe the saturated phenomenon: The “beauty” of “God’s light” is so “unspeakably great” that our sight is “dazzled” by it. And yet, what is the result of this overwhelming experience? It leads to “contemplation,” a “contemplation of the divine majesty,” to “wonder and adoration.” Most of the discussions of Marion’s work have focused on the intense and incomprehensible nature of the saturated phenomenon. But if it is, even to some extent, inspired by a reading of Descartes, this citation may well give us an indication of what our attitude in regard to God or to the saturated phenomenon should be. So far, this is merely a tantalizing suggestion, but it can be confirmed by other aspects of Marion’s work. At the very least, these two passages provide a hermeneutic lens to what permeates Marion’s work as a whole: on the one hand, a focus on protecting the transcendent from any sort of blasphemous or idolatrous language, and, on the other hand, a more “positive”12 focus on cultivating a position of adoration and worship vis-à-vis the divine with the implication that such a position facing the divine in adoration is the most appropriate, indeed the only adequate, stance before God. Needless to say, the two complement each other in significant ways. The desire to protect God from inappropriate naming, such as the univocal naming Descartes and Marion reject, arises out of and leads to an attitude of adoration. Descartes’ prayer of adoration is completely congruent with his insistence on the creation of the eternal truths. To make God subject to geometry, in contrast, would mean to move from contemplation to comprehension, from adoration to idolatry. This hermeneutic lens helps us understand why Marion’s Descartes is sometimes the hero and at other times the villain of the story. Descartes’ notion of the infinite, for example, is judged as an escape from metaphysics, while his naming of God in terms of perfection or omnipotence, especially as they are manifested in the proof of the Fifth Meditation and that of the causa sui, as articulated in the Replies to the Meditations, are firmly metaphysical as they establish a doubled ontotheology, one grounded on the ego as supreme being, the other on God.13 Positively speaking, “Descartes’ approach” “opens metaphysics to incomprehensibility,”14 while the rationality attributed to the divine by Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz (and, more negatively, at times also by Descartes) displays a “closure” of metaphysics, which aims “to include God within its empire.” The “thought of the infinite,” as it is articulated by Descartes but subsequently forgotten by the tradition— with the possible exception of Pascal and Kierkegaard—seeks to open metaphysics toward the divine, instead of closing him up within it.15 Indeed, in On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, Marion completes his discussion of the role of the causa sui in Descartes’ multiple attempts to name God (and before



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moving to Pascal as the “overcoming” of Cartesian incoherence on this matter) by saying: And if the Cartesian names of God are organized in a confused complex of contradictions, this is not because Descartes lacked conceptual power or conceptual rigor; on the contrary, it is because he dared to face up to the contradiction that is necessarily imposed on the finite by the infinite advancing upon it—and to which, perhaps, only a certain conceptual madness can testify without being unworthy of it. Before God, reverentially, and as a rarity among the metaphysicians, Descartes stands hidden—he does not keep secrets, nor does he sneak away, but hides his face before that of the infinite—larvatus pro Deo.16

The ego finds itself confronted and interlocuted by the divine other. Its response before the divine is both a masked advance (larvatus prodeo) and a veiling before the divine (larvatus pro Deo).17 This then is not just an attitude of dissimulation or negation, but it is also an advance and an exposure, a reverence before the infinite.18 It is precisely this loss of the self in adoration before the divine that leaves metaphysics destitute in On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism. And we can already see here (especially in his analysis of Pascal) the way in which this attitude toward the unnamable infinite also has implications for the human self as resulting from the practice of contemplation or adoration: By a strange substitution, one that manifests the admirable commercium, the I/ego, which is lost in passing from the second to the third order, is in return received from Christ as an infinitely loved self—on the sole condition that it infinitely abandon its thought I/ego, for the sake of acknowledging, thus loving, only the I of Christ as the sole “center.” In this exchange, man loses an I/ ego, finite in the second order and unjust in third, so as to win a self infinitely loved in the third. He abandons a finite sufficiency or else a “tyranny” in order to receive a just and infinite self through grace.19

While we cannot here discuss the important distinction between the three orders, to which Marion returns over and over again in his work, we can at least see that already his discussion of Descartes and Pascal displays the structure of the later articulation of a self devoted in love, abandoned to the other, given over to and ultimately received by the divine. Marion makes a similar point in the first two essays of On the Ego and on God, where he reflects on the dialogic nature of Descartes’ work. He argues that Descartes always proceeds by eliciting questions and responding to them. Marion argues that this is true not just of the Meditations that were printed together with questions and replies from others, but constitutes a broader pattern characteristic of Descartes’ work. Descartes always solicited questions

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to his work, sometimes before publication, sometimes afterwards, and often printed these objections or questions and his replies to them together with the work to which they respond. Thus, his philosophy emerges as continually in dialogue, always already a response to another. Marion concludes: “Far from being soliloquy or solipsism, Cartesian thought, insofar as it obeys a logic of argumentation, is inscribed at its very origin in the responsorial space of dialogue.”20 This dialogic structure for Descartes’ work opens the space for openness to another. Marion shows this in more detail for the Second Meditation, where the ego finds itself confronted with another (exterior self, evil demon, God) and thus holds a secondary position of responding to the other. The Cartesian ego emerges as an interpellated, interlocuted, essentially responsive one: “The ‘me’ and the ‘I’ exchange their functions only in not confusing them—they are organized following another logic, that of the originary interlocution.”21 The passage from the end of the Third Meditation where Descartes stops to adore the greatness of God fits precisely into this pattern. This connection between adoration and loss or reorientation of the self is most fully articulated in an important analysis, which Stephen E. Lewis and Derek Morrow have already highlighted:22 namely, the discussion of the capax dei in an essay in Cartesian Questions that also reappears in Marion’s later work. In the essay “Of What Is the Ego Capable?,” Marion traces a shift in meaning in the Latin word capax/capacitas to the French translation of capacité (capacity), which moves from capax, as an openness to the divine, to capacité as a human power or ability focused on and proceeding from the subject.23 The locus of power shifts from the divine to the human at the same time as a focus on adoration is displaced by a desire for comprehension. The “capacity” to be receptive to the divine becomes a much more forceful human ability to know the divine. A careful reading makes abundantly clear that this is not merely a statement about changes in language, but that Marion’s later work seeks to recover this notion of the self as open to the divine and receiving even its “capacities” from God. It is a stance of active receptivity, not of passivity.24 It grounds the abilities of the human in a prior gift from God. It is precisely God’s abundant gift of love and the unknowable, incomprehensible, unconditioned character of the divine that gives rise to the human response of adoration and contemplation: “Spiritual progress thus depends upon capacity, although capacity does not deploy a desire that could reach divinity by means of power. Conversely, capacity uses desire only to open itself to the dimensions of the gift that is all the more freely given and transcendent as it always surpasses our expectations.”25 And yet even contemplation becomes subverted in later thinkers into an attempt to comprehend God.26 Interestingly enough, especially in the light of his more recent reading of Augustine’s Confessions, Marion concludes this early essay with a reflection



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on the meaning of capax dei in Augustine, where this expression clearly designates an openness to the divine gift.27 This receptivity enabled by grace becomes the condition of possibility for welcoming the divine, which gives rise to a desire for God, itself grounded in human lack of power and loss of self-dependence.28 The spiritual path enabled by this divine gift of capacity or possibility orients the human toward the divine: “The very failure of his powers places man at the limit, where the objective lack of satisfaction of subjective desire summons him or her to a silent encounter with the wholly other.”29 Here the dialogic situation is even more explicitly one of contemplation and adoration of the divine. And Descartes’ position is again ambivalent: While to some extent he consolidates the shift of the meaning of capacity from receptivity to power, he himself continues to maintain that God’s gift is only received by grace and cannot be gained through human power. And the final arbiter on whether Descartes is to be read positively or negatively is always in terms of his stance in regard to the divine. When Descartes maintains divine incomprehensibility, human vulnerability, and a spirituality of adoration, he is lauded. When he advocates a self-sufficient ego exercising power over objects and incapable of approaching any other as a genuine other, he is criticized.30 The call and response structure, with which we are familiar from Marion’s phenomenology, characterizes his reading of Descartes also. And yet, examining this reading allows us to “thicken” this structure with greater meaning: The call comes from the incomprehensible, infinite, divine other and enables a response of loving adoration. The human, then, as emerges from Marion’s work on Descartes, is ultimately homo adorans, made for worship and devotion. Such adoration reorients me, empties me of myself, but at the same time gives me the capacity to respond to the divine other. CONTEMPLATING THE ICON AND THE LANGUAGE OF PRAISE: MARION AND THEOLOGY The emphasis on adoration as the primary stance toward the divine and as redefining the self is just as prevalent in Marion’s more explicitly theological work, such as in Idol and Distance and God without Being, and also in his many essays in Communio, some of which are now collected in The Visible and the Revealed and Le croire pour le voir (“Believing in Order to See”).31 I will focus again on a couple of sample texts for working this out more fully. In Prolegomena to Charity we have several instances where the self is seen to live “as if,” to absorb evil, to be entirely open to the gaze of the other in love. True to its title, several chapters in this book focus on analyses of love: Reaching God means love and self-surrender.32 To believe is to

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abandon oneself to the gift of love.33 The only “evidence” for Christian faith is provided by the excessive love shown by the Son’s kenosis on the cross.34 True love means exposure of my gaze to that of the other,35 an “unconditional surrender” to the “unsubstitutable other.”36 One of the central reasons for Marion’s focus on adoration emerges here: It is not simply a desire to protect the divine transcendence, but it is also a response to God’s immanence in the utter self-emptying of the Son, willing to go to the cross, to take our sin and pain on himself.37 The spirituality of adoration is, one might say, the flip side of kenosis, the only appropriate response to the Son’s sacrifice of self-givenness. Love is obviously always a central topic here and one might suggest, a claim to which I will return momentarily, that Marion’s writings about love actually encapsulate exactly this attitude of homo adorans: love is total devotion to the other; it culminates in adoration. In The Crossing of the Visible, this attitude of adoration is maybe the most explicit, because Marion uses precisely the complete devotion and divestiture in prayer before the icon as an antidote to the demise of the image in contemporary society.38 The person at prayer stands in adoration before the divine. Marion is clear that veneration of an icon is not to be confused with adoration or worship (latreia) of the divine.39 Rather, via the veneration of the image and passing through it, the adoring gaze exposes itself to the divine. The icon makes visible Christ’s holiness40 and thereby allows holiness to ascend and return “to the Holy One.”41 Hence glory is not located in the icon itself, but is deferred to God and “makes present the holiness of the Holy One.”42 Icons point beyond themselves: veneration of the icon ascends to the prototype and ultimately leads to adoration of the invisible holy one.43 At stake here is clearly not just a protecting of God from idolatry or blasphemy, but an active positive move to adoration of the Holy Other.44 In prayer one allows oneself to “be pierced by another gaze.”45 Adoration in prayer is “the veneration of my own gaze climbing, across this type, toward it.”46 This leads, as the title of the book implies, to a crossing of the visible and the invisible. The invisible, incomprehensible, divine other is seen obliquely via the gaze that aims at me and pierces me through the icon, thus allowing me to respond in veneration and to encounter the divine across the distance always maintained in this prayer of adoration: “In the icon, the visible and the invisible illuminate each other via a fire that no longer destroys but rather lights up the divine face of humans.”47 In this book Marion focuses primarily on the icon and does not explicitly contrast it to the idol, but one may well say that the difference between idol and icon is precisely a difference in adoration: in the idol we ultimately adore ourselves, the idol reflecting our own capacity in an invisible mirror, while in the icon I adore the other who displaces and envisions me. It opens up access to the invisible precisely via adoration of the invisible across the icon.



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We know this already, of course, from the discussion of idol and icon in God without Being, where the reversal of gazes pierces my idolatry and vanity, envisions me, and reorients me. But how does this reversal occur? It happens via loving adoration, via a total focus on the divine that eliminates all other concerns, reorients time and space, renders other occupations meaningless. They regain meaning only as the light of the divine love falls on them and illuminates them. While melancholia darkens all being, adoration brightens it—one might say “dazzles” it, as Descartes is dazzled by the divine greatness. Most of the seemingly endless discussions about God without Being have focused on Marion’s argument against idolatry and blasphemy, his desire to free the divine from ontological language, whether that of Aquinas, of Nietzsche, or of Heidegger. This is obviously not wrong: Marion does indeed stress that the discourse about divine names shows the impossibility of any grasp or comprehension of God,48 but he also insists that such discourse is reborn as “enjoyment, jubilation, praise.”49 The icon does not just introduce distance, but it makes proper contemplation possible.50 Marion does indeed focus on the need for silence in the face of divine transcendence,51 but he also stresses that it is “mystical experience” and prayerful adoration that makes one a theologian.52 It is quite right that he shows us that faith is not predicative language and not about argument,53 but he also insists that the ecstatic discourse performs the confession of faith.54 Indeed, the text ends with a reference to martyrdom as opening access to see the glory of God via complete self-abandonment.55 While the apophatic aspect of Marion’s discussion has been abundantly highlighted and discussed, the side that calls us to adoration has not received as much attention. The mysterium tremendum, as even Otto already stressed, inspires not only dread but also fascination. It does not just forbid idolatrous naming but also attracts the loving gaze of devotion. Similarly, in the even earlier text Idol and Distance, Marion does not merely insist that there is no naming suitable to God but also calls us to meditate on transcendence.56 It is the distance that allows us to receive ourselves by naming God non-idolatrously.57 The book culminates in a discussion of prayer, which both “acknowledges the unthinkable,”58 and also traverses distance, enabling it to “receive the unthinkable as the Requisite of a Goodness that is itself hyperbolic and therefore unthinkable.”59 Indeed, “prayer performs distance.”60 Even the somewhat problematic language of hierarchy, which Marion adopts from Dionysius, serves to stress this: Hierarchy aims, therefore, to produce relation with God. The sacred, or rather holiness. . . . Does not dissimulate its origin so much as it manifests itself in and as its completion. Holiness issues from the origin and leads back to it. The sacred order, far from concealing the secret dignity of the origin, produces

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holiness—places it forward—at the ultimate limits of the order. Hierarchy must be understood, more than as a sacred principle, as the origin of holiness.61

Holiness, then, is not only the kind of sanctity that stresses God’s utter distance from everything else, but it is also an invitation to relationship. And Marion already speaks of the gift and of kenosis in this early context, stressing that the Son receives himself from the Father in the gift via the distance of kenosis.62 In prayer we can receive the “gift of kenosis.”63 This crossing of distance ultimately culminates in praise.64 Here Marion first lays out his account of praise as performative language, which he develops more fully in the discussion with Derrida that finds its fullest articulation in the final chapter of In Excess.65 This well-known discussion is read primarily, and obviously not incorrectly, as motivated by the desire to protect God’s name—a motivation that stems even from Derrida’s own play on words in Sauf le nom, referring both to a “saving” or protecting of the name and a silencing or erasing of the name. Marion similarly says that “to speak properly of God, there is never any proper or appropriate name.”66 Yet, he suggests that there is a way around idolatrous predicative language. Drawing on Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, he articulates a “third way” where it is “no longer a matter of saying (or denying) something about something, but of neither saying nor unsaying. Rather, one is referred to the One no longer touched by any naming. One no longer speaks the referent, but the speaker is pragmatically referred to the inaccessible Referent. It is solely a matter of un-naming.”67 Marion’s discussion here has been read primarily in terms of the implications it has for appropriate and inappropriate speech about the divine. And much of Marion’s analysis supports that reading: “In this way, supposing that praise attributes a name to a possible God, one should conclude that it does not name God properly or essentially, nor in presence, but that it marks God’s absence, anonymity, and withdrawal—exactly as every name dissimulates every individual, which it merely indicates without ever manifesting.”68 Yet, it is worth pointing out that at the same time his discussion describes a positive attitude before the divine. Prayer is not merely about protecting the divine, but about orienting us toward God in praise.69 Even theology is then not just about guarding against blasphemy, even if that may appear the main result at first glance: It is not much to say that God remains God even if one is ignorant of God’s essence, concept, and presence—God remains God only on condition that this ignorance be established and admitted definitely. Every thing in the world gains by being known—but God, who is not of the world, gains by not being known conceptually. And the Revelation of God consists first of all in cleaning the slate of this illusion and its blasphemy.70



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Although this may well be read as a refusal of being able to know God: “God therefore can be known only as not being known,”71 it is at the same time a description of how we are to approach the divine, namely, in a humble attitude of adoration, where the tables are turned: “For the Name no longer functions by inscribing God within the theoretical horizon of our predication but rather by inscribing us, according to a radically new praxis, in the very horizon of God.”72 Marion himself stresses this shift from speaking about God to speaking to God: “Concerning God, this shift from the theoretical use of language to its pragmatic use is achieved in the finally liturgical function of all theo-logical discourse.”73 He also clarifies that this is not merely about incomprehensibility and a refusal of all concepts but also about an approach to the divine that gives God to be intuited in some fashion: “God remains incomprehensible, not imperceptible—without adequate concept, not without giving intuition.”74 The point of theology is not only to guard and protect the divine but to expose oneself in adoration to the divine gaze, to focus all our energy on divine contemplation and praise. Ultimately we are not merely to guard the divine Name against blasphemy or idolatry—as if we were actually capable of such protection—but we are to “dwell” in the Name as we honor it with our adoration.75 Marion resumes a discussion of praise in his book on Augustine,76 where he most explicitly speaks of it as liturgical in his engagement with Augustine’s work: “Praise thus sets forth the liturgical condition for the possibility of recognizing creation—even if afterward and almost anachronistically, one can obscure the praise and posit creation as an ontic commencement.” Liturgy hence becomes the condition for theology: “This question asks about the liturgical and therefore theological conditions for the praise of God and considers creation only as an output of the hermeneutic operation of praise—in and through the interpretation of heaven and earth as created and as silently proclaiming not themselves but God.”77 Here even more explicitly he acknowledges that praise opens us to God and analyzes it in terms of the space we make for God, which ultimately amounts to our finding our place in the divine.78 Because “I lack access to myself,”79 I must arrive in God “by praise.”80 Praise comes forth from the site of confession: “No gnostic temptation can insinuate itself here, therefore, since the contemplation, even purely intellectual, of God remains marked by the distance of the created from the uncreated, a distance that does not so much safeguard the divine privilege as it maintains the created in its possibility of praising. Thus, confessio alone unites with God, not mere knowledge, which remains only a means and a mode of it.”81 Contemplation re-situates us and enables our praise. For Augustine, it is creation that opens the space for confession.82 Marion interprets this as being given to oneself as a gift by God.83 His analysis culminates in an analysis of the “idipsum” for the name of God, which he equates with

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private and public praise.84 And it is in this adoration of the divine that we are given our own place. I find the “self’s place” ultimately within God.85 Even Marion’s more polemical pieces make this obvious. What is the task of the baptized Christian? It is worship, not the militancy of the lay person advocated by Catholic Action and various other groups or polemics resulting from Vatican II. What is the future of Catholicism? Conversion of the individual into the likeness of Christ.86 Marion argues strongly against militancy, ideology, and clericalism, even the post–Vatican II “promotion of the laity”87 and instead insists on the “dignity” of the “poor baptized.”88 We must be converted and convert the world to Christ, there is no other requirement for the Christian life.89 God’s self-givenness as supreme and bedazzling saturated phenomenon renders us destitute and reveals us to ourselves.90 The appropriate response to the fully abandoned phenomenon of the Eucharistic gift is similarly adoration and devotion.91 In fact, as I have tried to show elsewhere, Marion’s repeated discussions of the Eucharist make much more sense when one reads them as analyses of Eucharistic adoration rather than as a description of the liturgical event of Eucharistic participation.92 Reading Marion’s more theologically oriented work as an attempt to articulate a spirituality of adoration provides a unifying lens to what often appear as disparate themes: the discussions of idolatry, of prayer before the icon, of love as a crossing of gazes, of non-metaphysical naming, of Dionysian distance, of the Eucharist and the baptismal calling, of Christ’s kenotic response to evil. They all serve in different but complementary ways to guide us to adoration of the divine by emptying us of our desire for autonomy and control and by re-situating us before God in an attitude of devotion and contemplation. The divine kenosis in Christ leads on the one hand to a rejection of idolatry, of any naming of God that would seek to comprehend the divine in a concept, and on the other hand to adoration, the devotion of love that grows out of self-abnegation and a turn to the divine. The human in prayer before the icon, engaged in praise and hence raised toward God, the baptized Christian being continually converted, especially as abandoned to the Eucharistic gift, is most profoundly homo adorans. Theologically speaking, Marion’s work advocates a spirituality of adoration that depicts the human as turned toward the divine in loving contemplation. PHENOMENA OF REVELATION AND THE ADONNÉ: MARION AND PHENOMENOLOGY How does this focus on a spirituality of adoration help us understand Marion’s phenomenological project more fully? Although Marion’s phenomenology of givenness can certainly be read as a way to articulate the impact of



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the excessive alterity of the wholly other upon consciousness—just as his analysis of Descartes can be read primarily as a theology that has been whitened out or as his theology is commonly read as protecting the divine against blasphemy—that is ultimately an incomplete reading. It must be complemented by a reading that sees how the saturated phenomenon also functions as an invitation to adoration. The saturated phenomenon is, like Descartes’ encounter with God, bedazzling and overwhelming; it renders us blind and mute, crushed, even erased. Why is the saturated phenomenon depicted as an excessive gift that overcomes and bedazzles us, that gives us more than we can contemplate or bear? It may well be because it functions as an invitation to adoration, is like the excessive gift of the divine for whom devotion and adoration is the only appropriate response. The phenomenon is saturated, crosses all boundaries, defies all univocity, all prediction, all preparation, all causality, because it acts on us like the divine does for Descartes and Pascal, reverses perspectives like the icon approached in prayer, opens the space where one can be addressed by the wholly other. And yet, that does not mean that no response to this overwhelming experience is possible. If there were no response, there would be no phenomenon, the encounter would not have been phenomenalized. How is it phenomenalized? In devotion and adoration. The theology of kenosis becomes a phenomenology of givenness, the reception via adoration becomes the self after the subject, the crossing of gazes across the icon becomes the crossing of gazes and the crossing of flesh in the erotic phenomenon. This is an absolutely crucial point, because it helps us rethink the activity/ passivity distinction often made in the secondary literature on Marion and gets beyond the either/or categories usually applied to it: either the subject is in total control and imposes its intentionality on the object or the phenomenon is in total control and imposes itself forcefully on an entirely passive intuition. Neither of those are correct depictions of Marion’s notion of the self, although one should admit that occasionally Marion’s language does tend in the latter direction and that this is exacerbated by the choice translators have to make about whether to render se donner as “being given” or as “giving itself.”93 The translation issue is particularly relevant in this context because one option is passive, implying that the phenomenon is “being given” to the recipient and thus signals some source beyond them both, someone who is doing the giving, and the other is strongly active, implying that the phenomenon “gives itself” and hence acts entirely from itself and from its own initiative, making it sound rather like an anthropomorphized subject. But of course the French holds both of these meanings together and does not decide between them. Understanding the self as one who has been granted the capacity to adore the divine, as one receptive to the divine gift of love, responding in turn by adoration and total devotion helps us get beyond the passive/active

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distinction. This is more clearly marked in Marion’s texts than one often supposes from reading the secondary literature. Already in Being Given he says that “beyond activity and passivity, reception gives form to what gives itself without yet showing itself.”94 Similarly, in In Excess he points out: “L’adonné is therefore characterized by reception. Reception implies, indeed, passive receptivity, but also demands active capacity, because capacity in order to increase the measure of the given and to make sure it happens, must be put to work—work of the given to receive, work on itself in order to receive.”95 Even the language of anamorphosis, which suggests that the painting “imposes” a point of view on the viewer, is subtler than a simplistic reversal of power or control: clearly the painting does not walk around and give orders; rather, it has been painted by a painter and been hung in a particular place, which now functions such that it can be fully seen only from a particular location. It is not that the painting exercises some sort of explicit control over the viewer; after all, we can simply decide not to bother going to see it. Rather, in order to receive it, in order to look at it and be fully exposed to what it gives to see, I must (quite actively) put myself into a certain situation and see it from a particular place.96 Marion himself insists that “there is nothing like a simple choice between ‘activity’ and ‘passivity,’ with no other option . . . l’adonné operates according to the call and response and manages the passage of what gives itself to what shows itself: neither the one nor the other corresponds to these categories. ‘Passivity’ and ‘activity’ intervene only once the characteristics of the devoted are misconstrued.”97 The adonné emerges as a self devoted to the phenomenon in silent adoration, a devotee given over to veneration and worship. This is particularly visible in the response to art: we are stunned by its beauty, must go to see it again and again, must bear its dazzling brilliance. The devoted contemplates, adores, even worships, but this is not mere passivity, but active devotion, openness, receptivity. At the same time, kenosis becomes the very paradigm for the human being. We find our true self by being entirely emptied of ourselves, completely exposed to the saturated phenomenon, and reoriented to silent adoration. We become the empty screen or canvas on which God paints a new imago dei, one that would reflect the divine supremely in ever new creative colors, as the painting of a great artist is called by the artist’s name: this is a Rembrandt, this is a Cézanne. This total self-emptying and utter givenness to the other is deeply marked by the Christian notion of divine kenosis, which also carries over to Marion’s account of love.98 Marion’s work on the erotic phenomenon should not be read as an embrace of total passivity but rather as one of active receptivity. Indeed, adoration and kenosis may well be the most appropriate ways of describing Marion’s account of love, which seeks to transcend the fleshly reality of the erotic encounter with the faithful commitment of “making love” through speech.99



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I must say “here I am,” make myself available, in a totally personal way.100 Love turns out to be kenotic abandonment, where I commit myself entirely without expecting any sort of response at all. Love also requires the move to infinity, where I recount the other’s story in an endless hermeneutic and uphold the other’s memory via loving interpretation.101 The other is only individuated as a person if I manage to uphold the gap of distance and simultaneously traverse it through a speech that gives the other his or her flesh. I am faithful to the other by giving the other assurance of his or her faithfulness. The claim Marion sustains throughout the book and makes most strongly in conclusion, namely, that all love must be expressed univocally and that there is ultimately no distinction between divine and human love, further reinforces this. Human love is ultimately like divine love, inasmuch as it devotes itself entirely to the other and abandons itself in a complete gift of self. Marion summarizes his insights as follows: The lover, he or she who preeminently renounces possession and reciprocity by taking his or her advance, nevertheless does enjoy, does eroticize through speech, jealous demands, too, and sometimes runs away. But this same lover, who enjoys and possesses, nonetheless succeeds in doing so by forgetting and abandoning him- or herself first: in general and in principle by his or her advance; next, and more precisely, by eroticizing first the flesh of the other and not his or her own . . . by conferring unilaterally upon the other the faithfulness that the other cannot promise.102

Thus, eros and agape are identical. Indeed, one might suggest that the primary reason why The Erotic Phenomenon finally culminates in love of the divine is not because Marion is unacceptably smuggling theology back in by the backdoor, but rather because love as adoration of the human only would ultimately be idolatrous and thus must be grounded in adoration of the divine.103 This brings us to the phenomenon of revelation. Although Marion consistently reiterates the emphasis on divine apophasis and inaccessibility or incomprehensibility,104 he also insists on the possibility of describing an encounter with the divine phenomenologically. What might such an encounter look like? It is obviously a saturated one, a confrontation with bedazzling excess. In Marion’s description of the phenomenon of revelation in Being Given, that moment when all four aspects of the saturated phenomenon come together in a doubling to the second degree, the supreme paradox of paradoxa,105 the phenomenon of revelation “suspends perception in general, beyond the difference between hearing and sight, because it results from the thorough saturation of the figure of Christ.”106 As proof he cites the reaction of the disciples to the transfiguration, when the disciples fall to the ground in terror, and indicates that this reaction culminates in terror of the resurrection. But terror is only one side of the coin, the other is adoration. The call of this

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supremely saturated phenomenon becomes visible in the response of wonder and amazement that compels total devotion and abandon—as Caravaggio has portrayed it so eloquently in “The Calling of St. Matthew.”107 One may say, then, that Marion’s phenomenology to some extent “secularizes” this attitude of adoration as the essential stance of the human being vis-à-vis what comes in utter excess and unbearable abundance. Marion repeatedly claims that the phenomenon of revelation is merely the logical outcome of the phenomenology of givenness and provides broader insights about phenomenality: “Thus, beyond the question of the possibility of religion, the religious phenomenon poses the question of the general possibility of the phenomenon. . . . The religious phenomenon becomes a privileged index of the possibility of phenomenality.”108 And this high point, this privileged index, is reached in an attitude of adoration that empties us of ourselves and orients us toward the divine, which is our most proper calling and true fulfillment. The new self is most essentially adonné, entirely devoted, given over to, even addicted to the saturated phenomenon. The adonné is most supremely homo adorans. IMPLICATIONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION What are some of the implications of this spirituality of adoration for theology and phenomenology and, especially, philosophy of religion? Marion argues that the account of the saturated phenomenon of revelation is determinative for a phenomenology of religious experience, that it is the only way to describe the saturated phenomenon of revelation. Although he repeatedly reminds us that he is only describing a possibility, and not claiming any actual occurrence of such a phenomenon, he contends most strongly that “if an actual revelation must, can, or should have been given in phenomenal apparition, it could have, can, or will be able to do so only by giving itself according to the type of the paradox par excellence—such as I will describe it.”109 Indeed, it provides a convincing account of religious experience in the mode of adoration, of the kind of spirituality that is captured by that particular approach to the divine. This kind of spirituality is expressed especially well in Eucharistic adoration as everyday practice or Bernard de Clairvaux’s account of love, the dark night of the soul in John of the Cross or the Cloud of Unknowing, and the spirituality of divine ascent of mystical theology in John Climacus and Dionysius. And yet, is this intensely personal encounter with revelation that results in an attitude of total devotion and adoration really the only way in which revelation is manifested? While it may well describe the spirituality of Therèse de Lisieux or Julian of Norwich extremely well, it appears



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to have little to say about Jean Vanier or Dorothy Day. It may well speak insightfully about Teresa of Avila’s levitations and personal prayer but is less adequate to account for her tremendous reforming work and her emphasis on poverty and social justice. It hence seems to miss at least some dimensions of what religion does in and to people. It is not clear, for example, in what concrete ways religion might be transformative beyond losing one’s self-sustenance and being re-situated for adoration. (Obviously, Marion does understand it to transform us, but he says very little about how and toward what religion transforms us.) Revelation does not say anything about commitments to work for peace and justice in the world, which surely are a significant aspect of the message of religion and of the phenomenality of religious experience. It describes, I would say, one particular type of religious phenomenality—a tremendously important and powerful type to be sure—but not all of religious experience. A phenomenology of religious experience, even a phenomenology of Christian experience, should be broader and make space for many types of spirituality. It should be able to give an account also of Teresa’s “God who walks among the pots and pans” or the kind of spirituality (e.g., that of the Jesuits or in a different way of the Franciscans) that finds God in all things. If, then, the adoration of the saturated phenomenon arises out of a particular type of spirituality, namely, a spirituality of adoration or contemplation, other types of spirituality may well have to be described differently. What is especially troubling about this particular type of spirituality is that it seems so intensely singular, focused primarily on the encounter between divine and human gaze. Only two gazes—one divine, one human—cross through the icon or meet each other in loving adoration.110 The contemplation of the Eucharistic host is an intensely personal affair, even when it is practiced in a room full of people. It provides little account of the dimension of participation in the larger ecclesial community and in the liturgical context of the Eucharist. This spirituality seems mostly a spirituality of the individual, not an account of communal spiritual experience, such as in liturgy.111 Yet, religion is first and primarily a communal experience, expressed in cult and ritual. Only in the modern West have we been able to separate spirituality from religion, turning faith into a merely private affair. There is a real need, it seems to me, for analyzing the more communal aspects of religion in phenomenology of religion and not focusing merely on private spirituality or mystical experience as the paradigm for all experience of the divine. Yet, while this certainly seems to be Marion’s preferred version of spirituality or religious experience and the one that marks his work throughout, he does occasionally give indications of what a more communal account might look like. For example, already in Idol and Distance he gestures briefly toward the plural in his analysis of Dionysian hierarchy, which he suggests

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contains a model of “spiritual intelligibility of the community of saints.” Dionysius, claims Marion, Deploys in intelligibility the most concrete logic of a double solidarity, in charity as in its refusal. Here, each person relies rigorously on the other, since the gift of grace arrives only through redundancy [or re-giving]. The other becomes my neighbor since grace comes to him only inasmuch as it can, through me and, so to speak, as me, reach him or miss him. Each man becomes, for the other, a sacrament of the Christ, or of his absence. Each person becomes ineluctably responsible for his neighbor and offers on his face the sole vision of God that the neighbor will perhaps ever see. . . . There is nothing more concretely and profoundly inscribed in the Christian event.112

This seems to suggest that we are intimately connected to each other and experience Christ or even the phenomena of the gift or of charity (often identical for Marion) only in and through the other, that is to say, together, in community. The neighbor is here strictly speaking in the singular, but as each of us is neighbor to each one, a plurality of believers seems implied. This is only a brief comment about a connotation of hierarchy in Dionysius and Marion does not pursue it further, but it does suggest a connection between love of God and my relation to the neighbor that occasionally reappears in other places in Marion’s work. In an essay on the resurrection in Prolegomena to Charity, Marion returns to this theme. The kenotic tenor of what we have examined as Marion’s more general “spirituality” is evident throughout this book and this particular chapter. We are to become Christ, Marion insists, imaging and even impersonating Christ as an actor does in a commedia dell’arte.113 And yet, here Christ’s presence is given as gift in the reality of the Church: “Henceforward the disciples, that is the Church, that is to say humanity, finally reconciled with its destiny, no longer has but one function and one mission in a thousand different attitudes: to bless, so as thereby to welcome and acknowledge, the gift of the presence of God in and as his Christ.”114 The disciples receive Christ’s blessing, but they also pass it on. Christ disappears in the gesture of blessing (as at Emmaus), precisely so that we might now make the gift visible in us by continuing Christ’s blessing.115 Christ’s departure enables the disciples to perform him, to “become the actors of charity” and to take on the role of Christ.116 It allows believers to enter into the life of the Trinity: “If Christ leaves, it is in order to free the trinitarian site for the disciples.”117 This is accomplished in love: “The disciples must play the role of Christ by loving each other mutually to the point of making Christ recognizable in them.”118 Even in their mission the disciples are united as brothers in the trinitarian life opened to them by Christ. Here the Christian believer functions as one of the disciples, as a member of the believing community, as part of the body



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of Christ. The implication seems to be—although Marion does not elaborate it—that making Christ present is done in community and that the plural setting is necessary for Christ’s gift to become revealed fully and to be received adequately. And such reception occurs precisely through passing the gift of Christ’s “presence” on to others. Several other articles, which like this one were originally published in Communio, speak of the life of the church, of the future of Catholicism, and of the meaning of baptism. In these essays the ecclesial community is either presupposed or directly addressed and they hence contain a plural dimension (although Marion still often employs the singular). For example, Marion speaks of the “eminent dignity” of the baptized community (“baptized” is usually in the singular within the article but presumably refers to all the baptized), arguing that “baptized” is sufficient as a definition of the Christian and that language that distinguishes between clerics and laity is deeply problematic for its militancy, its elitism, and its implied clericalism. The role of the baptized is to be transformed into Christ and to transform the world, all others and all else, into Christ. All that is needed for this is the sacraments, not some special task force. The vocation of the priest is not about power or control or a special position of authority, but merely about serving the baptized through the administration of the sacraments. Here, the plural ecclesial community is clearly meant. Marion reiterates these claims about the church and the role of the Christian in several other articles dealing with Catholicism as well as in his conversations with Dan Arbib, who asks him repeatedly for an assessment of the state of Catholicism in France today. Marion seems overall quite optimistic about the current condition of the Catholic Church or more generally the future of Christian faith. He defines its goal and purpose consistently in terms of conversion of self, other, and world into Christ, often employing Eucharistic language, such as being incorporated into Christ’s body. This incorporation through the vehicle of the church applies to more than merely private contemplation of the sacrament—it suggests that communal participation in the ecclesial body is part of the Christian’s identity as a baptized believer and that it involves participation in the Eucharistic liturgy as it is practiced within the community. Probably the clearest exposition (although it is still rather short) of a plural dimension to spirituality or to a phenomenology of religious experience can be found in Marion’s analysis of Augustine, who, he claims, writes not only for himself and for God but also for the community of readers: of his own religious community and of the larger Christian community, including us today. Confession of sin and praise both operate on personal and communal levels. And indeed Augustine is not just confessing his own sins and personally praising God but wants to lead his readers to do so as well, to become part of a community of praise. Praise thus has here a liturgical dimension:

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“The others, those who read, intervene neither in the role of censors nor as amateurs but as brothers in a community that crosses time and space because it is defined first of all as liturgical. Thus the literary act also takes on a radically liturgical standing because it aims to sustain for the readers (in the same way as for the author) the initial confessio.”119 The final three books of Augustine’s work are definitively plural and communitarian. And Marion concludes: “Thus, the two successive parts of the Confessiones, far from weakening its unity, demonstrate it: what is going on is not merely a matter of collectively beginning again the affectus toward the at first individual confessio, nor merely of extending the confessio to the communal liturgy, but of pursuing it across the times through the community of readers united to the confessio of Saint Augustine—united by it and for it.”120 A third function of interlocution is introduced: the dialogue is not merely between the self and God but also includes the third or the collective. And yet, this collective serves a particular purpose in Augustine’s work, or, more correctly, the work serves a particular purpose in regard to the plural other, namely, to lead others to praise: “Augustine does not speak so as to say to the other something about something . . . nor even so as to say something to God . . . rather he speaks to the other so as to make him speak to God”—the point is to “make God praised by the readers and not by myself alone.”121 The Confessions is a text that moves its readers to praise God. The other appears here not as an object, but is manifested as a face. This face is seen from and through God: we have no access to the other (human) except through God. “The other becomes visible, even for me, in the light projected upon him or her by the gaze of God and not my own.”122 Despite the plural or communal dimension there is, then, no direct access here to the other and the relation between God and self is still primary. In Marion’s reading the Confessions “tends to establish precisely God as the closest, more interior to me than my own interiority, and consequently more interior to the other than himself. Whence the paradox that our strangeness in each other yields to the double intimacy of God to each of us. Between the other and ego there is God, but between ego and God no other assures the mediation, since no mediation is required.”123 Although there is an erotic reduction at work here, in Marion’s view, this is still primarily expressed in the divine and (singular) human encounter, whereas the human–human encounter is secondary and derivative.124 A shared human–divine encounter is rarely even envisioned: the models are always about a relation between the self and God, or an encounter between self and others, not about the communal self and others relating to or encountering God together. Interestingly enough, that is precisely what Marion had already outlined in a much earlier chapter where he wondered whether there is any room for the other in Descartes. He concludes that the Meditations leave no such room: all others



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are turned into objects under the ego’s control, representations derived from the ego. And yet, an alternative might be possible via charity. Marion writes: That is, the charity by means of which we seek God causes, because of God himself, to also seek all [other] men; and we do so only as a consequence and imitation of the love that we know God has for them. Thus, loving others does not result from a direct relation between the ego and others since, as we have seen, this relationship is regulated by the logic of representation, which reduces the other to a simple represented object, thus an alienated one, and prevents the strict love of an other. Loving others results from an indirect relation, mediated by God, between others and the ego: The ego loves God and knows that God loves other men; thus, imitating God, the ego loves these other men.

Marion calls this “the theoretical function of charity: The other can be loved only if the ego gives up trying to represent it directly and accepts aiming for it indirectly through the unobjectifiable par excellence—that is, God.”125 Thus, whether analyzing Descartes or Augustine, or doing theology or phenomenology (e.g., in the Erotic Phenomenon), any allusions to others (in the plural) only occur in the context of love of God, which is primary and determinative. Maybe it is true that we can genuinely love others only if God’s grace works through us and enables us to do so, but this certainly does not yet provide us with a real phenomenological explication of how a plural religious experience, such as liturgy, functions, or how the communal religious context shapes and situates individual experiences of the divine. We have hints, then, primarily in Marion’s more explicitly theological writings, of what such an account of a more plural religious experience would look like. It would be liturgical; it would seek to manifest Christ by being transformed into him; it would lead others to also praise and adore God. It might thus be possible to envision a shared devotion or to work out the social and political implications of being transformed into an icon of Christ. So far these remain brief allusions and they are at times compromised by the singular directionality of a possible self-other-God relation. So far for Marion it always proceeds through God to the other; I can only love the other if I first love God. The opposite direction, my love for the other leading me to God or the possibility that the love of others for me might open me to the divine love, has not yet been explored. If truly “the idea that there is anything outside of God has no meaning at all,”126 then surely we are all in it together. A genuinely plural dimension, a description of experience that is in its very experience plural and cannot be experienced in the singular, thus also awaits further explication. A phenomenology of “us” rather than of “the third” or “the other” (in the singular) is still required, especially if we want to give a faithful account of religious experience—but also for other intense plural experiences, such as concerts, sports events, family celebrations, or,

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more negatively, events such as war or terrorism, and so forth. While I can only experience my own flesh and probably only provide an account of my own consciousness, many phenomena appear and fully give themselves from themselves only in a plural fashion and are received as such only if I experience myself as a part of a group instead of a lone “self.” Maybe this is one of the places where phenomenology must still become more attentive to how things give themselves entirely from themselves and to the way in which they give themselves. NOTES 1 RC, 41, 42, 52, 187; RT. 2 Ibid., 52–53. 3 Ibid., 53. 4 Ibid., 54. 5 Ibid., 187. 6 Ibid., 188. 7 EG; DMP. See especially chapter 4, “Pascal and the ‘General Rule’ of Truth” in EG and the final part of DMP. 8 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. 9 EG, 103–38. 10 Ibid., 137. 11 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 35–36 (italics added and translation slightly modified). 12 The language of “negative” and “positive” is somewhat misleading here, because I certainly do not intend to imply that they align in some straightforward fashion with apophatic and kataphatic theology. I merely intend to suggest that while Marion’s phenomenology (or even his theology) has been primarily read as being about God’s utter transcendence and a denial of any concepts for the divine (which it surely is to some extent), it can also be read as concerned with God’s immanence and with a possibility of an encounter of the divine. 13 This is worked out in great detail in DMP. 14 EG, 124. 15 Ibid., 138. 16 DMP, 276. 17 In the context of the narrower discussion of the Second Meditation, Marion already points to the notion of the “larvatus prodeo” (being masked before God), but here interprets it as a move that also masks the divine: God is hidden. 18 Falque suggests in “Larvatus” that this represents Marion’s own attitude vis-à-vis the relation between philosophy and theology. He essentially calls him to give up



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his mask and refusal and instead to expose his theological commitments freely. See Emmanuel Falque, “Larvatus pro Deo: Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology and Theology,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 181–99. He develops this more fully in the chapter on Marion in his recent Combat amoureux, where he distinguishes Marion’s type of spirituality from a different kind. Emmanuel Falque, Combat amoureux: Disputes phénoménologique et théologiques (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 137–93. While I did not get the idea for my paper from Falque (having already explicated it to some extent in my Degrees of Givenness in the discussions of prayer and Eucharist), there are significant parallels between his position/explication and mine. 19 DMP, 333. 20 EG, 41. 21 Ibid., 28. 22 Stephen E. Lewis, “The Lover’s Capacity,” in Selected Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. John R. White (Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2010), 226–44; Derek J. Morrow, “The Cartesian Metaphorization of Capax/Capacitas,” in Selected Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. John R. White (Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2010), 72–98. 23 CQ, 67–95. Marion also argues that at the same time the meaning of “power” as attributed to God changes from a focus on God’s power drawing the human to a divine “ability” to be known by the human. Thus, as the human becomes more active, the divine becomes more passive. 24 This is tremendously significant because as both Lewis and Morrow show, it provides a much more complex picture of Marion’s version of “the self that comes after the subject,” namely, one in which the self is neither passive nor active. Many of the more recent commentators frame the question and critique in terms of activity versus passivity, but this really misses the point of Marion’s proposal, as he himself has also pointed out in an important footnote to the “Banality of Saturation.” I will return to this later. 25 EG, 87. 26 Ibid., 94. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Ibid., 89. 29 Ibid. Marion carries this argument further in his most recent book on Descartes, PP, where he defines Cartesian thought even more radically as passive in the sense of responsive. He interprets Descartes’ account of the passions of the soul as one in which the passions are derived and display a passive capacity, that is, a receptivity. For example, he explains that “the passivity of thought attains thus its accomplishment: even the ‘movements of the will in which love, joy and sadness, and desire consist,’ in short all the main passions (and hence really all the passions) are subverted into a passivity come from elsewhere. The passions make even the will, which nevertheless defines what is most proper to me, passive” (243; see also 260, 268). Marion also provides an analysis of generosity, in which “devotion culminates in charity” (259). 30 See especially “Does the Ego Alter the Other?” in CQ, 118–38.

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31 IAD; GWB; PC; VR; CV, now published in translation as BS with Fordham University Press. 32 PC, 61. 33 Ibid., 64. 34 Ibid., 67. 35 Ibid., 99. 36 Ibid., 101. 37 This is worked out the most fully in: PC, “Evil in Person,” 1–30. 38 COV. 39 Ibid., 77. 40 Ibid., 72. 41 Ibid., 76. 42 Ibid., 77. 43 Ibid., 78. 44 Ibid., 83. 45 Ibid., 86–87. Indeed, Marion insists repeatedly that “the glory received is immediately transformed into the paradox of a glory transmitted and lost; indeed, the icon deserves veneration only insofar as it shows an other-than-itself and thus becomes the pure type of the prototype, toward which it does not cease to return absolutely.” 46 Ibid., 87. 47 Ibid. Translation modified. 48 GWB, 106. 49 Ibid., 107. 50 Ibid., 24. 51 Ibid., 53ff. 52 Ibid., 155. 53 Ibid., 183. 54 Ibid., 189, 195. 55 Ibid., 197. 56 IAD, 152. Marion briefly discusses this in terms of spiritual life and spiritual experience. Ibid., 150. 57 Ibid., 153. 58 Ibid., 160. 59 Ibid., 162. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 164–65. 62 Ibid., 174. 63 Ibid., 166. 64 Ibid., 184ff. 65 IE. 66 Ibid., 139. 67 Ibid., 142. Translation modified. For a much fuller discussion of Marion’s use of Dionysius and Gregory, see Tamsin Jones’ excellent treatment in A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).



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68 Marion, In Excess, 143. 69 Ibid., 144–45. 70 Ibid., 150. 71 Ibid., 154. 72 Ibid., 157. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 160. 75 “The ‘non’ of the so-called negative theology does not say the Name any more than do the ‘names’ of the affirmative way. For if no one must say the Name, this is not simply because it surpasses all names, passes beyond all essence and all presence. In fact, not even not saying the Name would suffice for honoring it, since a simple denegation would still belong to predication, would again inscribe the Name within the horizon of presence—and would even do so in the mode of blasphemy since it treats it parsimoniously. The Name must not be said, not because it is given for the sake of our saying it, even negatively, but so that we might de-nominate all names of it and dwell in it.” Ibid., 162. 76 SP. 77 Ibid., 237. 78 Ibid., 238. 79 Ibid., 240. 80 Ibid., 242. 81 Ibid., 248. 82 Ibid., 252. 83 Ibid., 286. “Let us note the essential point: according to my love, dwelling varies. But for me it is not a question of changing my dwelling but of changing in me the dweller who comes to take place in me: charity takes place in me by occupying me in place of the world. It gives me to make me its place, to give place to it.” Ibid., 282. 84 “Consequently, just as idipsum forces itself upon us as indisputably the central term (for my private praise, as for that of the liturgical community), so, too, does it turns out to be difficult to translate.” Ibid., 296. 85 “And as I am (myself, ego) that which I seek (the self’s place), since I am what I love, it follows that I will never cease coming to the self’s place, to the degree that I bury myself in the incomprehensible into whose image I understand myself. There where I find God, all the more as I continue to seek him, I find myself all the more myself as I never cease to seek that of which I bear the image. In the self’s place there is not a shape of consciousness, nor a type of subjectum, but that unto which the self is like and refers.” Ibid., 312. 86 CV, 123. 87 Ibid., 87–88. 88 Ibid., 77–100. And yet, we also see here Marion’s almost exclusive focus on the life of the individual that goes without saying in most of his other works, but here emerges in the context of a discussion of the church and of Catholicism. He argues against various Roman Catholic organizations and stresses that Church is not an institution and that the baptized person does not live in church but in Christ (CV, 108).

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This is obviously right, but it is striking that Marion over and over again speaks more of personal spirituality than of communal worship, including when he discusses the sacraments and especially the Eucharist. The only exception is when he discusses the role of the bishop in a relation to the baptized community. He insists, for example, that the baptized person does not need power, but that the fullness of trinitarian life in Christ is given in baptism and that no more is needed (Ibid., 107). See also his discussion of the role of the bishop in GWB, 152–55. 89 CV, 90. 90 Ibid., 146. 91 Ibid., 192. 92 See the final chapter of Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 93 Most translators have gone with “gives itself” as Marion in his initial articulation stresses the “self” of the phenomenon, especially in his critique of Husserl and Heidegger in Being Given. 94 BG, 264. 95 IE, 48. 96 Marion’s aesthetics, which we cannot possibly discuss in detail here, may well be said to advocate a similar position of adoration. This is obvious from the earliest texts in the COV to the discussion of Rothko and Klee in chapter 3 of IE, all the way to the recent book on Courbet. It is not incidental that several of Marion’s discussions of art end up being reflections on chapels, sites of adoration, and that his heaviest censure of a painter comes down to the painter’s unworthiness to create a place for the blessed sacrament. While this may seem like a minor side comment, I think it is extremely revealing about Marion’s intuitions about what ultimately matters in all this. 97 VR, 174. 98 This is particularly obvious in his application of Dionysian apophasis to the language of erotic attraction: “We must conclude that erotic speech cannot be performed without the language of spiritual union of man with God. . . . One can be surprised at this, but one can hardly contest it” (EP, 149). “And the theological lexicon would correspond almost to the hyperbolic way, where I aim at the other only through the process of excess endlessly taken up again, and of accomplishment without accomplishment, at the risk of never comprehending her, except to comprehend that this incomprehension alone is fitting” (Ibid., 150). 99 “The lover gives honor to love by thus remaining faithful to it—faithful to the originary paradox of the advance.” Ibid., 174. 100 Ibid., 169. 101 IE, 127. 102 EP, 221. 103 What I find particularly dangerous here is an apparent slippage toward an identification of the divine and the human that seems increasingly common in some contemporary theology and is also infecting philosophy (particularly displayed by Michel Henry). Despite all his insistence on God’s transcendence and holy otherness, Marion increasingly moves to claiming of the human—in the image of God—many



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of the things he initially only claimed of the divine, such as being defined by love rather than being, being incomprehensible, and so on. Here he says that we must accept ourselves as gift and as unknowable (CV, 125). A similar parallel emerges in his discussion of the saint. A saint is someone invisible, someone who cannot be identified. While here the move seems to attribute true sainthood only to Christ, it blurs the line between Christ and the human saint in a similar way. “Holiness, even that of Christ, even that of the resurrected, remains by definition invisible” (Ibid., 214). The strict rule of phenomenality, Marion argues, requires invisibility of sainthood (Ibid., 216). Similarly, in his book on Augustine he claims that the human is utterly different from any other living being, that humans are “holy,” and that they are alone icons of the invisible God (SP, 259). He probably carries this furthest in Negative Certainties, where he attributes the “undefinability” of the human person explicitly to being made in the divine image. 104 VR, 63. 105 It has “all four senses of the saturated phenomenon. . . . The manifestation of Christ counts as a paradigm of the phenomenon of revelation according to the paradox’s four modes of saturation,” that is, being unforeseeable, bedazzling/unbearable, absolute, and irregardable/unenvisageable. BG, 236. 106 Ibid., 238. 107 Ibid., 282–84. Marion insists on this repeatedly: it leads to abandon (Ibid., 308ff); counter-gaze and mutual regard (Ibid., 318); requires love (Ibid., 324). 108 VR, 18, 19. 109 BG, 235. 110 EP, of course, as a whole attempts to provide an account of the human other, but this relation of eros between two individuals is not an account of community, even if very briefly at the end of the discussion the possibility of the third enters. In terms of a consideration of religious experience, an exact parallel is established between the love of a single self for God and the love of a single lover for the human beloved, but that is obviously not an account of a communal encounter with the divine, such as it might occur in liturgy, for example. Although Marion’s account of eros certainly clears his phenomenology of any suspicions of solipsism that might have been (and were) raised early on, it does not provide an account of community, whether “secular” or “religious.” 111 Marion is not alone in this emphasis on the individual. In fact, even Jean-Yves Lacoste’s phenomenology of liturgy ultimately is about singular “being-before-God” and to some extent the same can be said of Chrétien’s and Falque’s descriptions of religious being. I have worked out these critiques in several other places, so I merely indicate the parallel and larger pattern here. 112 ID, 169. 113 PC, 144. 114 Ibid., 130. 115 Ibid., 136. 116 Ibid., 141. 117 Ibid., 143. 118 Ibid., 144.

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119 SP, 39–40. 120 Ibid., 40. 121 Ibid., 47. 122 Ibid., 50. 123 Ibid., 50. 124 It is striking that all the citations about a plural or communal dimension are from the introduction to the book; there is no extended discussion of liturgy or the other or shared praise in Marion’s book itself, even when considering the latter chapters of the Confessions, which supposedly speak of community. It is not incidental that the book’s title is “In the Self’s Place” and not something more plural. 125 CQ, 138. 126 RC, 54.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Vols. 2–3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991. Falque, Emmanuel. “Larvatus pro Deo: Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology and Theology.” In Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, edited by Kevin Hart, 181–99. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007. Falque, Emmanuel. Combat amoureux: Disputes phénoménologique et théologiques. Paris: Hermann, 2014. Gschwandtner, Christina M. Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Jones, Tamsin. A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lewis, Stephen E. “The Lover’s Capacity.” In Selected Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc Marion, edited by John R. White, 226–44. Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Marion, Jean-Luc. On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.



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Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Marion, Jean-Luc. On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandter. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. Le croire pour le voir. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Marion, Jean-Luc. La rigueur des choses: Entretiens avec Dan Arbib. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur la pensée passive de Descartes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Rigor of Things. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Morrow, Derek J. “The Cartesian Metaphorization of Capax/Capacitas.” In Selected Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc Marion, edited by John R. White, 72–98. Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2010.

Chapter 13

From Negative Theology to Hermeneutics: Marion as Interpreter of Saint Paul Claudio Tarditi

FROM NEGATIVE THEOLOGY TO THE SATURATED PHENOMENON Throughout the history of Western culture, philosophy and religion have often been in conflict. This conflict developed in several different ways. On the one hand, philosophy rejected religion as a misleading superstition (especially during the French Enlightenment), an instrument of power and control over masses (according to Marx’s definition of religion as the “opium of the people”), or the lowest level of knowledge destined to be overcome by science (following Comte’s positive philosophy). In other cases, philosophy attempted to assimilate religion as one of its inner aspects or phases, as occurs, for instance, both in Spinoza’s concept of substance and in Hegel’s notion of the Absolute Spirit. On the other hand, religion also attempted to subordinate philosophy to faith: one can find this attitude in Thomas Aquinas’ theory of philosophia ancilla theologiae, as well as in Kierkegaard’s “absolute relation to the absolute.” With respect to the history of this conflict between philosophy and religion, a decisive role is played by two particular approaches: the “ontological argument” for God’s existence, proposed by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078, and the so-called negative (or apophatic) theology, diffused in the sixth century after Dionysius the Areopagite and including authors like Scotus Eriugena, Moses Maimonides, Meister Eckart, and other philosophers rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition. Whereas the former is traditionally interpreted—rightly or not—as a philosophical attempt to subordinate religion to rationality and logical argumentation, the latter is usually considered as an affirmation of the supremacy of faith over human reason, which is definitely inadequate to deal with the question of God. Accordingly, the ontological argument influenced 218



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Modern thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, whereas negative theology mostly influenced the anti-rationalistic line of Christian thought as well as orthodox theology, such as Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and Kierkegaard. In short, throughout the Renaissance and Modernity, the ontological argument has been linked directly to metaphysical rationalism, whereas negative theology became a synonym of a mystical discourse about God. This situation substantially changes after the so-called crisis of metaphysics and ontotheology. According to Martin Heidegger, the history of Western metaphysics is characterized by a progressive forgetting of the ontological difference between Being and beings. In his view, beings can be saved from oblivion by a certain variety of poetic language that is capable of conceiving of the “new gods to come,” rather than philosophy, whose essential task is to deconstruct the Western metaphysical tradition and its ontotheological concept of God. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s relation to experiences of faith remains ambiguous, since, on the one hand, he states that Being and God are not to be confused,1 while, on the other hand, he argues that the word “God” means nothing but Being.2 Accordingly, the critique of ontotheology must address the underlying ambiguity about the connection between thought and faith. It is a matter of fact that a number of scholars, such as David R. Law, Sean J. McGrath, Laurence P. Hemming, and Kevin Hart,3 emphasize Heidegger’s closeness to negative theology, especially because of his poetic and somewhat mystical language and style. This interpretive attitude strongly influenced the French “negative theology renaissance,”4 so as to give rise to a well-established conviction that conceiving of God after ontotheology necessarily implies a retrieval of negative theology. And yet, such a retrieval of negative theology in contemporary philosophy does not imply the exclusion of a rational comprehension of reality and faith experience. We can find this in phenomenology. The phenomenological tradition, in all its manifold paths, always questioned the possibility and the structures of experience of the external world, focusing on the problem of the constitution of intentional subjectivity and its relation with phenomenality in general. By doing so, it attempted to develop a theoretical model and a new paradigm of rationality in order to offer a radical alternative to metaphysics. In my view, given that the main task of phenomenology is to clarify the structures of experience in general, and that faith is a particular form of human experience, it is not possible to exclude a priori the possibility of a phenomenological description of the experience of faith. Such an exclusion would represent an unfounded positivistic misinterpretation of Husserl’s work. Indeed, the fundamental openness of Husserlian phenomenology to the problem of religious experience is testified to by a number of

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extremely important works by Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Jean Hering, and Rudolf Otto.5 More recently, Marion’s phenomenology of givenness reinterpreted negative theology by providing an original account of Revelation as a saturated phenomenon. The aim of my contribution is to demonstrate that Marion’s philosophical-theological reflection about the necessity to bridge the traditional faith-reason opposition by the figure of Revelation as a saturated phenomenon and a new conception of subjectivity is deeply influenced by Saint Paul’s Letters. In order to verify this main argument, I assume the following operative hypotheses: 1) Transcendental phenomenology is not suitable to describe the experience of faith, insofar as it is based on the phenomenon’s reduction to the sphere of intentional pure consciousness. This Husserlian choice derives from the unquestioned equivalence between the concept of experience (in the broad sense of Erfahrung) and the phenomenological notion of lived experience (Erlebnis); in fact, if the lived experience indeed constitutes an experience, it is not sure at all that every experience is reducible to a lived experience with its noetic-noematic structure of correlation.6 Yet, this could be the case for faith experience. Husserl’s basic choice has two main consequences. First, every noematic signification is characterized by its Gegenständlichkeit, namely, its objectivity. Accordingly, all types of experience not including the possibility of an intentional relation between noetic act and noematic polarity are excluded from phenomenology. Second, transcendental ego is considered the phenomenological condition of each meaning (this is what Husserl calls “phenomenological idealism” from Ideas I onward). Without the ego, no manifestation is conceivable. 2) Marion’s phenomenology of givenness deconstructs the transcendental model of phenomenology by upsetting Husserl’s notion of subjectivity with the figure of the gifted, that is, the one who receives him/herself by receiving every manifestation as a totally free event. In this perspective, it is no longer the intentional subject that constitutes phenomenality but on the contrary, it is givenness that constitutes the gifted. As a consequence, Marion conceives of givenness as the paradox of a “saturated phenomenon” in which intentional consciousness loses its priority, whereupon phenomenality and givenness manifests in its eventual dynamic. Under these premises, I will provide a clarification of how and to what extent Saint Paul’s Letters influence Marion’s phenomenological and hermeneutical project of overcoming both metaphysics and transcendental phenomenology by the notion of saturation. This does not imply that Marion attempts to



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translate Husserl’s thought into a theological framework.7 Rather, it simply means that Saint Paul’s Letters are sources of inspiration for Marion’s consideration on a number of crucial problems related to one of the main questions he addresses in his philosophical work, namely, the possibility to overcome the ontotheological concept of God. LOGOS OF THE WORLD AND LOGOS OF GOD According to my interpretive hypothesis, Saint Paul’s Letters play a decisive role in both the genesis and the development of Marion’s phenomenology of givenness. While one could find a number of references to Saint Paul throughout his entire oeuvre, I will focus in particular on God without Being (1982), and In the Self’s Place: The Approach to Saint Augustine (2008), in order to demonstrate how Pauline thought constitutes a real Leitmotiv for Marion’s philosophical and theological account of God. In my view, the influence of Saint Paul’s Letters on Marion is particularly remarkable with respect to two topics: (1) the relation “human Logos”–“Logos of God,” and (2) the notion of “invisibility.” My aim in this section is to provide a clarification of the former, whereas I will focus on the latter in the following. According to Marion, the main outcome of the radical opposition between “human Logos” and “Logos of God”—strongly emphasized by Saint Paul so as to put into light how each term appears as “foolishness” in the eyes of the other8—is the possibility of a new “logic of givenness” as an alternative rationality to metaphysics. If Paul discusses with the Athenians, he speaks in the name of Logos. Similarly, when he preaches the “madness of the Cross” against the Corinthians’ worldly—that is, rational and metaphysical— culture, he still speaks in the name of Logos. How could one conceive of this form of alternative rationality from a phenomenological viewpoint? With respect to this opposition between “Logos of the world” and “Logos of God,” Marion discusses a passage from 1 Corinthians, where Saint Paul states: For consider your call, brethren, namely, that there are not [among you] many wise according to the flesh, not many powerful, not many well born. But God chose the foolish things of the world, God chose them to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world God chose to confound the strong, God chose the ignoble things of the world and the contemptible things, and also the nonbeings, in order to annul the beings—in order that no flesh should glorify itself before God.9

In the light of this passage, one can easily notice how Marion identifies the “foolishness” of the “Logos of God” with its radical indifference to the ontic difference between beings and nonbeings,10 as well as the ontological

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difference between beings and Being. Such an indifference first manifests itself in that God can choose that which is not as if it were; as a consequence, for God, that which is nothing is as if it were. Moreover, “the indifference manifests itself in a second fashion: that which is can be, for God, as if it were not; the fact of being a being . . . in no way insures against the nothing: just as nonbeing, once chosen, is discovered as if it were, so being, once annulled, is discovered as if it were not.”11 On closer inspection, Marion finds in the quoted passage from Saint Paul a decisive impulse to develop his phenomenology of givenness as a radical overcoming of Heidegger’s account of ontological difference. Indeed, according to Marion’s interpretation of this Pauline text, beings are “distracted” by God inasmuch as they become free from any direction or meaning. Marion concludes: To distract being hence would signify nothing less than driving it to distraction by rendering it free from Being, . . . dissociating it from Being. In other words, annulling the fold that bends being to Being, removing being from that through which it is, Being, spreading or unfolding being outside of its unique and universal meaning, that it is. . . . The distraction of the “wisdom of the world’ ” (philosophy) by the “wisdom of God” is accomplished in a distortion of the fold being/Being that determines being without recourse to Being: indifference to ontic difference, but also to ontological difference.12

Nevertheless, Saint Paul’s Letters are relevant not only for Marion’s critique of ontological difference but also with respect to the genesis of his account of givenness. Indeed, once affirmed that “in him [God] we live, and move, and have our being,”13 Saint Paul emphasizes that all these things God “gives” us.14 In other terms, “Paul does not maintain that we are by, because of, or after God who would himself also be a being . . . God comprehends our Being of beings, in the sense that the exterior exceeds the interior. . . . This divergence does not have the function of establishing any inferiority whatsoever, but of clearing the space, precisely the distance, where the gift is spread out.”15 As a consequence, givenness crosses the difference between Being and beings. More precisely, givenness opens ontological difference in an instance that remains unspeakable according to the language of metaphysics. Marion concludes: “To open Being/being to the instance of a gift implies then, at the least, that the gift may decide Being/being. In other words, the gift is not at all laid out according to Being/being, but Being/being is given according to the gift. The gift delivers Being/being.”16 This is an extremely important point, given that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness will develop in his additional works precisely as an attempt to overcome Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as well as Heidegger’s thought of Being.17 Starting from



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Saint Paul’s conception of beings and nonbeings as depending on God’s will, Marion develops his idea of givenness as an originary donation in which the difference itself between beings and Being is put into play and launched into its destiny. In other words, givenness liberates beings from Being or, more precisely, liberates the relation between beings and Being from ontological difference. Reciprocally, in liberating beings from Being, givenness is finally liberated from ontological difference: “Being/being is distracted by the gift that precedes it and that abandons ontological difference to it only in that it first annuls it.”18 Furthermore, the Pauline distinction between “Logos of the world” and “Logos of God” also strongly influences Marion’s account of subjectivity. In fact, such a distinction allows him to recognize the consistency of Saint Augustine’s view, according to which man remains unknown to himself despite being the most present thing to his mind: “Man, what an immense abyss.”19 According to Marion, Augustine states that man’s certainty of existence does not imply a precise understanding of his essence. The only thing man knows is that he is, but he has no knowledge of who he is, and even whether or not his ego consists in Being. More closely, what the Cartesian certainty of existence offers to man is the awareness of his anonymity. Accordingly, Marion concludes: “I am, therefore I remain what I am but without essence, without identity, without name even. I am, but just enough to sense that I am not myself.”20 In Marion’s view, such an anonymity leads Augustine to a forced reading of a passage from 1 Corinthians: “You, O Lord, you judge me because if ‘nobody among men knows the things of man except the spirit of man which is in him,’21 nevertheless there is something of man that even the spirit of man, which is in him, does not know, but you, Lord, you know all the things that you have done.”22 Accordingly, Marion states that 1 Corinthians 2:11 does not lead to Augustine’s conclusion of an unknowable essence of man, unknowable except for God alone. Provided one does not truncate it, as Saint Augustine does, this text has an entirely different intention: just as only the spirit of man knows himself, so only the Spirit of God knows God. Therefore, since we have received this spirit, we can somehow know God.23 For the sake of clarity, one could argue that, whereas Augustine interprets this Pauline passage as an admission that it is impossible for the human being to know its own essence, Marion argues that a correct exegesis would demonstrate a clear analogy between the spirit of God and of the human being through which the human could receive the gifts of God. Nevertheless, this knowledge is to be understood according not to the metaphysical “Logos of the world,” but to the paradoxical “Logos of givenness.” In other words, the human being is not a cogito able to establish its own identity by itself, but he or she has to receive his or her subjectivity from “somewhere else.”

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TOWARD A HERMENEUTICS OF INVISIBILITY Marion’s reading of Pauline texts is also focused on the problem of visibility in connection with invisibility. Marion develops his account of visibility in God without Being by introducing the notions of the idol and the icon. I contend that there is no need for an in-depth description of these two concepts, as there is excellent secondary literature on this point. Instead, I will attempt to clarify how the distinction between the idol and the icon is reinterpreted in his later texts as “topics of the phenomenon,”24 or, in other words, as a sequence of different degrees of saturation of phenomenality. While the idol does not present a high level of saturation, since it appears as the full visibility of a mirror reflecting the subjective gaze, the icon reveals a very high degree of saturation (although not the highest overall, which is represented, in Marion’s view, by Revelation), because of its capacity to transform the subjective gaze into the response of the gifted to the originary call of invisibility. Nevertheless, one must not forget a highly relevant remark Marion introduces at the very beginning of God without Being: the idol and the icon are not two classes of objects, sharply divided, but two manners or degrees of phenomenality apt to reciprocally drift into one another.25 This means that the degree of saturation is not an intrinsic quality of idols or icons, but it depends entirely on the type of gaze directed at their image. On the one hand, if the gaze comes from a transcendental subject attempting to constitute the image as pure visibility, it will cover the saturation and turn the image into an idol reflecting the subjective gaze itself. As Marion explains in Certitudes négatives,26 this constant possibility of falsifying saturation constitutes the essence of idolatry. On the other hand, if the subject forsakes all pretense of supremacy over phenomenality and considers itself as having been gifted, it can experience the icon’s gaze, beyond whose eyes the unenvisageable opens the infinite field of invisibility. As a result, in my opinion it is possible to maintain that the distinction between idols and icons is a matter of interpretation. Or, rather, an authentic interpretation is accomplished only if the interaction between phenomenality—in the icon’s case, the image of a face—and subjectivity is shaped as a relation between a call and a response. Hence, abandoning his transcendental posture, the gifted is able to interpret the originary icon’s invisibility as the infinite and inexhaustible saturation of any horizon of visibility. In the end, it is enough to follow only a few passages from God without Being to become aware of how Marion demonstrates the hermeneutical potential of his account of the idol and the icon in his interpretation of some passages from Saint Paul’s Letters.27 As I will demonstrate, these passages do not represent a kind of application of Marion’s account of the icon to Paul’s Letters. Rather, in his view, they offer the confirmation that in the New Testament there lies both the possibility of a radically different



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kind of gaze and the progressive awareness of the deep connection between visibility and invisibility. In the first chapter of God without Being, Marion states that “the formula Saint Paul applies to Christ, ‘icon of the invisible God,’28 must serve as our norm; it even must be generalized to every icon.”29 In this passage Marion emphasizes the Pauline idea of the “invisible God” as reachable only through the icon of Christ. This means that this latter does not lead God to visibility but reveals him as infinite invisibility. In this sense, Christ is an icon of God, because through his face the human being can receive the infinite divine gaze as a totally free gift, by which he is no longer constituted as a subject but, indeed, as a gifted. However, the most relevant hermeneutical aspect of this passage concerns the necessity to apply the relation between the icon and the invisible to all icons. In other words, the icon is taken out of its theological context, with the result that it reveals its phenomenological fruitfulness. For instance, it becomes a true keystone of the experience of otherness in general. Conceiving of otherness as radically as possible means to conceive of it as infinite invisibility, that is, as displaying the structure of the icon. On the contrary, trying to reduce the other to its immediate visibility amounts to a complete loss of its radical alterity. In this way, the other becomes our idol of alterity. More precisely, if my gaze fixes the face of the other and attempts to constitute it as full visibility, I will distort it into a mere idol mirroring my own subjectivity. Rather, if I accept its manifestation without fixing it in an objective concept, I will be able to respond to its originary call, “face to face, person to person.”30 In my view, this new possibility toward conceiving otherness in a way that exceeds metaphysics represents the main result of Marion’s account of the icon.31 Indeed, a few lines further on, Marion quotes another passage from 1 Corinthians, which is even more explicit about the icon’s effects on subjectivity: “We all, with face unveiled and revealed, serving as optical mirror to reflect the glory of the Lord, we are transformed in and according to his icon, passing from glory to glory, according to the spirit of the Lord.”32 Accordingly, the subject turns itself into the gifted only by reflecting the divine invisible light that is the gaze of God emanating from his icon. Furthermore, the strong influence of Saint Paul’s Letters on Marion’s theory of the icon in God without Being is testified by the following two passages, which restate the transiency of the world and the possibility of a radically different kind of gaze. The first passage is known as the figure of as if: I tell you brothers, the moment is limited: it remains therefore that those who have wives should be as if they had no wives, that those who cry should be as if they were not crying, that those who rejoice should be as if they were not rejoicing, that those who have commerce should be as if they did not possess,

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and that those who make use of the world should be as if they did not make use of it. For the figure of this world is passing away.33

Although commentators usually discuss the structure of “as if,” whose importance is to be sought in the moral warning to follow Christ’s poverty and to abandon all worldly concerns, Marion emphasizes the last sentence, “for the figure of this world is passing away,” precisely because the “figure of this world” is directly linked to his interpretation of the idol. In other words, what is passing away is “this world,” whose visibility depends directly on the subjective gaze. As long as we treat beings as mere objects of our power of vision and constitution, we contribute to the construction of the idolatrous figure of this world. In Marion’s view, this latter can be overcome by another sort of vision that no longer depends on the subject but rather emanates from the icon. For this reason Marion quotes Saint Paul again: The invisible things of God, since [and by the fact of] the creation of the world, can be seen in the mode of spirit, in the works, and also the eternal power and divinity of God: such that they, men, cannot plead their cause, since having known God, they did not glorify him as God, nor did they render him thanks, on the contrary they went up in smoke by their thoughts, and their unintelligent heart was darkened. Pretending to be wise, they became fools—were distracted.34

Here, Saint Paul is very explicit and provides a decisive contribution to Marion’s account of the relation between visibility and invisibility. The invisible God becomes somehow visible not in the idolatrous shape of a full visibility completely liable to the control of the subjective gaze, but rather in the invisible spirit, which, through the icon’s eyes, manifests itself to man and, demanding his response, transforms him into a gifted. Those who resist such an infinite gaze and attempt to submit it to their subjective power of constitution fall into idolatry. They find their “heart”—but one could also add “their sight”—darkened and “distracted.” Their attempt to control the icon’s gaze, that is, to reduce it to an object to be intentionally constituted, leads them to betray and falsify the invisible root of every manifestation. Eventually, in the Acts of the Apostles during Pentecost the spirit comes pouring down over the Apostles’ heads35—it manifests without taking a visible or objective shape, since the spirit opens and inaugurates a radically different kind of vision of the world, with no need to be visible in its turn. If the Apostles had distorted the coming of the spirit into a visible figure, they would have created an idol to be venerated and, at the same time, they would have avoided the call emanating from the infinite gaze of God. In this case, the spirit would have been completely falsified and his invisible source of visibility would have been flattened on the idol’s face, fully visible but without profundity. Thus, Saint Paul’s Letters constitute not only one of the most relevant texts in Marion’s theological education but also the first hermeneutical testing



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ground for his phenomenological description of idols and icons. Accordingly, Saint Paul plays a decisive role in Marion’s perspective not only from a theological point of view but also in his phenomenological project toward overcoming the Husserlian model of visibility. In this sense, Marion’s path begins from Husserl and, through a deep confrontation with Saint Paul, leads to a hermeneutical phenomenology of invisibility. One will find a sketch of this hermeneutical phenomenology in the last chapters of Certitudes négatives, where the distinction between objects and events is expressed. In my perspective, these two phenomenological notions represent the natural outcome of Marion’s conception of the idol and icon as exposed in God without Being. In a decisive passage, Marion states: “The distinction between the modes of phenomenality (objects and events) can be articulated in a series of hermeneutical variations . . . having ontological authority on beings’ phenomenality. It only depends on my gaze that even a stone could once appear as an event . . . or, on the opposite, that God himself could sometimes appear as an object (for instance in case of idolatry or totalitarianisms).”36 Thus the distinction between objects and events is in fact grounded on variations of intuition, or rather on a series of “hermeneutical variations.”37 The more a phenomenon appears as an event, the more it is saturated with intuition. The more it appears as an object, the more it is deprived of intuition. In opposition, one could argue that since in Marion’s view these hermeneutical variations have “ontological authority”38 on phenomenality in general, they run the risk of reintroducing the transcendental subject, as precisely the one who presumes to fix the norm of all manifestation. According to Marion, this risk remains unavoidable: our attitude toward phenomena is ultimately free, as it depends on our decision to receive them as events to be interpreted (e.g., the event of the icon as well as the event of alterity) or to struggle to constitute them as objects (as happens in the case of idolatry). Nevertheless, from a strictly phenomenological perspective, an event can be interpreted only by a gifted, since the transcendental subjectivity cannot have access to a non-objective phenomenon, but rather it continually attempts to attain the full visibility of transparent objects throughout its scientific evidence. As a result, when a transcendental subjectivity encounters the icon, in most cases it will reduce its infinite gaze into an idol. On the other hand, according to Marion, the object does have a double possibility: to be perceived and precisely constituted as an object (as it happens in most cases) or to be interpreted in its turn as an event. In short, the object can be constituted as such or interpreted as an event, whereas the event is uniquely commensurable with the hermeneutical practice of phenomenology by a gifted, since its reduction to an object ultimately represents its falsification. In conclusion, these textual analyses provide us with good reasons to suspect that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness is deeply rooted in his philosophical reading and interpretation of a number of passages from the Pauline

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Letters. In other words, for Marion, Saint Paul’s texts constitute a deep contribution to the overcoming of ontotheology toward a new phenomenological framework within which Being is no longer conceived as the originary and ultimate horizon of phenomenality, and where visibility and invisibility deeply interact. Upon closer inspection, the overcoming of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology leads Marion to his distinction between Being and givenness/ gift, and on the other hand, between the idol and the icon not as two classes of objects, but rather as two modes of phenomenality. As explained, it is precisely in this context that Saint Paul’s Letters have a strong influence on Marion’s perspective, for they are the first and main hermeneutical testing ground for his theory of the saturated phenomenon. Accordingly, beyond the domain of objectivity, one can have access to a different kind of experience, whose phenomenality is only conceivable as pure gratuity and whose “counterexperience”39 contradicts the finite conditions of the subjective experience. NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking: Essays, trans. James Hart and John Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 22. 2 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 267. 3 Cf. for instance David R. Law, “Negative Theology,” in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 48, no. 3 (2000), 139–56; Sean J. McGrath, Heidegger. A (very) Critical Introduction (Cambridge: W. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008); Laurence P. Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); and Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign. Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 4 As is well known, throughout the 1970s and 1980s a sort of Negative Theology Renaissance took place in France, whose main exponents are Jean Délumeau, Jean Daniélou, and Jean-Marie Lustiger. Although one can find some traces of negative theology in Jacques Derrida’s works, it is mainly through Marion’s early thought, deeply influenced by Lustiger and Daniélou, that the discussion on negative theology developed within contemporary French philosophy. 5 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington: ICS Publications, 1989); Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (London: SCM Press, 1960); Jean Héring, Phénoménologie et Philosophie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1926); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 6 Claude Romano, Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 7 Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn,” ed. Bernard Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 3–106.



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8 1 Corinthians 1:18–24 (New International Version). 9 1 Cor. 1:26–29 (New International Version). 10 1 Cor. 4:17 (New International Version). 11 GWB, 89. 12 Ibid., 91. 13 Acts of the Apostles 17:28 (New International Version). 14 Acts 17:25 (New International Version). 15 GWB, 101. 16 Ibid. 17 BG. 18 GWB, 101. 19 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 446. 20 SP, 67. 21 1 Cor. 2:11 (New International Version). 22 Augustine, Confessions, 150. 23 1 Cor. 2:11–12 (New International Version). 24 BG, 221–33. 25 GWB, 7. 26 CN. 27 Saint Paul’s quotes are drawn from The Holy Bible. New International Version (Lutterworth: The Gideons International, 1988). 28 Colossians 1:15 (New International Version). 29 GWB, 17. 30 1 Cor. 13:12. Quoted in GWB, 22. 31 Concerning Levinas’ influence on Marion, see Joeri Schrijvers, “Marion, Levinas and Heidegger on the question concerning ontotheology,” in Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010), 207–39. 32 2 Cor. 3:18. Quoted in GWB, 21. 33 1 Cor. 7:29–31. Quoted in GWB, 127. 34 Romans 1:20–22. Quoted in GWB, 130. 35 Acts 2:1–4 (New International Version). 36 CN, 307. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 VR, 134.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. The Piety of Thinking: Essays. Translated by James Hart and John Maraldo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Translated by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Héring, Jean. Phénoménologie et Philosophie religieuse. Paris: Alcan, 1926.

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Janicaud, Dominique. “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn,” edited by Bernard Prusak, 3–106. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Translated by Thomas Carlson. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Romano, Claude. Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Main. Translated by Bernard Noble. London: SCM Press, 1960. Schrijvers, Joeri. “Marion, Levinas and Heidegger on the Question Concerning Ontotheology.” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 207–39. Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington: ICS Publications, 1989.

Chapter 14

An Excess of Happiness: The Approach of Marion Jeffrey L. Kosky

My theme in this chapter is the phenomenon of happiness as it might appear in phenomenology such as it is practiced by Jean-Luc Marion. This is, I admit, an odd theme to choose when discussing Marion’s work, for the phenomenon of happiness is not all that insistent in it. It is also not found in the work of very many other practicing phenomenologists. The consequences of this absence are perhaps not unlike those Marion indicates have befallen love, and one might say of happiness what he says about love in the opening pages of The Erotic Phenomenon. Having been left without a concept by philosophers of the twentieth century, the phenomenon was left to the margins of what appears, becoming perhaps a mere appearance, suspect of excessive subjectivism or delusions. Deserted, the phenomenon of happiness was claimed by other discourses and industries: most notably, by the teachers of methodic programs for “self-actualization,” by the self-indulgent and desperate “sentimentalism of popular prose,” and by the glamour of “the idol industry”—phrases Marion uses to describe the discourse on love.1 The discourse on happiness has made it so potent and widespread a cultural symbol that I am now a failure if I do not succeed in one or the other projects of making myself fulfill this “duty to be happy.”2 The result is that “happiness” may very well be as prostituted a word as Marion says “love” is. I admit as much. My choice of words is not felicitous, and there is much in Marion’s oeuvre to suggest that retrieving a phenomenon of happiness is not only a fool’s errand but also a mistaken reading of that œuvre. It is obvious that the more important, more fundamental, indeed more originary theme in Marion’s work is love. This poses a significant obstacle to constituting a phenomenon of something like happiness, for there is no reason to think love and happiness compatible. Common sense and everyday life surely tell us that love risks loss and frustration, exposes us to insecurity and 231

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fear, submits us to demands we cannot silence and cries we cannot comfort— our own and those of others. The facts given in love do not always make for what the common sense teachers of happiness would call a “good life.” Well aware of this, common wisdom, concerned to secure a happiness, counsels a measured, calculating love, investing where it is sure of its returns. Such a love is deliberate (willing only on the basis of certainties already established in thought) and intentional (measured by its aim at securing the objects of its happiness). And it is not only this common wisdom that sees the obstacle posed to happiness by the truth of love. Marion’s own erotic reduction confirms it— though in order to invert the primacy and insist not on the disaster of happiness wrought by love but that love measured by happiness is the end of love. Nobody, no ego at least, he claims, would reduce himself to the situation of love if he wants to be certain of his happiness, for “in the natural attitude, the least unhappy seems to be the one who loved the least, or who stopped loving earlier—because he has lost less, and suffered less when love disappeared.”3 I, the ego, will cut short love, pull back from the extremities of the erotic reduction so as to lose less and therefore be happier. Marion’s point indicates that the happiness of the ego is won by possession, having rather than lacking, keeping rather than giving up. These so-called positive outcomes are threatened by dwelling in the truth of love, for one remains in love all too often even after its gifts have been lost or taken away, and even when the gifts are never had, one finds oneself still in love. What ego would be happy with that? There is thus an apparent contradiction between happiness and love that makes it uncertain that the phenomenon of happiness will appear in truth if we follow Marion in practicing a reduction to the erotic truth. Marion encounters this contradiction at least twice in the course of the meditations (or should we say confessions?) making up The Erotic Phenomenon. The first appearance of happiness arises with the phenomenon of “the happy idiot,” the second with consideration of a supposed “happy love.” In the first case, it is a matter of happiness in another, whereas the second case is concerned with the happiness of the I that is still an ego even if no longer enjoying assurance in its certainty. In both cases, the erotic reduction’s advance entails a reduction of happiness and its subject. That happiness would have no place in the erotic truth is confirmed explicitly when Marion speaks of a happy love as no love at all: “Could such a ‘happy love’ closely controlled by reciprocity, remain happy? In any case, it could not remain a love, because it would fall directly under exchange and commerce.”4 The reciprocity that destroys love intervenes “because one assumes, without proof or argument, that it alone offers the condition of possibility for what the ego understands by a ‘happy love.’”5 In other words, the conditions for the realization of happiness (reciprocity, getting back equal to



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or greater than what I put in) block access to love. These conditions reside in the primacy of the ego whose interests and intentions precede and constitute the phenomenality of love. These intentions are expressed in the question “Does anybody out there love me?”—a question indicating that the ego’s aim at security of a certain assurance has preceded the appearance of love and established the preconditions for it. The ego who intends happiness will take the risk of love only if it is not one—that is to say, only if this ego is first assured that he will be loved in return. But such a love, Marion states directly, is a calculated business affair: while happy, it is no love at all. This happiness must be reduced in the name of love. The other case of happiness also indicates its foreignness to the erotic truth. The “happy idiot,”6 that other who is apparently loved by all can love himself happily, too. At issue here is the phenomenon of happiness in another. The “happy idiot” appears to possess himself lovingly because he knows himself to be lovable, as proven by the love that everyone else and fortune show to him. But the erotic logic that proves him happy, according to Marion, is the very game that I, the ego, cannot play. Unable to find assurance that anybody out there loves me, I, the ego, find myself an unlovable self—and hence appear to myself in hatred, self-hatred. This hatred will not bear the appearing of a happy love such as that of this idiotic other who seems so deluded as to enjoy it. Marion writes: “My hatred for myself will not put with the illusion and imposture of love that the happy idiot thinks he bears toward himself as a consequence of that which he imagines to come to him from elsewhere. . . . My hatred knows the lie.”7 What the ego cannot give to itself (assurance of love) it surely cannot admit to be constitutive of the other, seeing as its selfconstitution accompanies the constitution of all the phenomena that appear to it. The phenomenon of happiness that appears to have been given in the case of this other is deemed an illusion, a lie, or a deception. One thinks here perhaps of that paragon of hatred: the underground man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and his childhood comrade Zverkov. Zverkov plays the role of “happy idiot” whose naive and idiotic happiness the underground man cannot bear and so hates. As constituted by the ego, this case of a love that gives happiness (Zverkov) is manifest immediately in the phenomenon of my hatred for it (the underground man’s description of him).8 The selfpossessed ego will not let a happy love appear, immediately transforming it into hatred, for it does not love it. As such, the phenomenon of the other’s happiness appears in the ego’s hatred, not love. And yet, despite the apparent contradiction between the erotic reduction and the phenomenon of happiness, I believe that Marion’s phenomenology offers rich resources for the description of this phenomenon. The phenomenological reduction is after all supposed to be a way back to the appearing of phenomena, not their elimination. Marion has always insisted as much. How

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a phenomenon like happiness might appear along the course of his reductions is what I hope to explore in this chapter. In the end, I believe, the erotic reduction proves to give an excess of happiness, appearing there where the egological reduction falls short. A brief word before continuing. It is undoubtedly true that Marion’s phenomenology is more devoted to love than to happiness, and it is not obvious that happiness is even a concern for it. To this extent, the chapter that follows does not explain Marion’s work so much as it interprets it in the light of my own concerns. At the same time, however, a close and careful reading does find that the word and related terms do appear in the text and not always with the negative sense noted previously. The phrase used in the subtitle of this chapter, “the approach of Marion,” should be read with an emphasis on the famously ambiguous genitive: it means to indicate that this is as much a chapter on how Marion approaches the phenomenon of happiness as it is a chapter on how I approach his work. Whether or not my interpretation says something important about his work by disclosing unexplored horizons in which it might be embedded remains for others to decide. A first indication of how this phenomenology might give access to an excess of happiness comes from an initial observation, in the form of a question: What would be the sense of a phenomenon like happiness if it appeared to me without my desiring it? Even more, what would be the sense of the desire aroused by the phenomenon of happiness’ excess if not that I desire to become it rather than have it become me? I do not want so much to constitute it as object of my intending but to have it constitute me as subject of its presence. On this point, Marion would, I think, agree with the melancholy Dane— Søren Kierkegaard, not Hamlet—who listed it among those phenomena that necessarily entail that one “become subjective,”9 an alteration in perspective that is perhaps what the phenomenological reductions accomplish. I do not become subjective so long as I remain ego, subject of objectifying intentionality and appropriation of the phenomenon. As Kierkegaard saw, to objectively constitute a happiness such as beatitude, for example, would be to constitute it as it would be constituted by anyone who takes the time to think about it methodically—but a happiness in general is not what concerns me in my most intimate intimacy. This is why Kierkegaard says that beatitude is a phenomenon in which we have an “infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, and it is precisely this that one relinquishes in order to become objective, precisely this that one lets oneself be tricked out of by objectivity.”10 The blessed life disappears when it appears objectively, for a beatitude that does not implicate me in it in what concerns me most intimately is no beatitude at all. More importantly, as Kierkegaard also points out, a beatitude that is object of my own experience, one that is appropriated into the unity of



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consciousness, is hardly the one I desire when my own experience is constituted precisely by sorrow. Neither the curious I, maintaining itself unaltered in detached, aesthetic engagement, nor the scientific I who sees from the unmoved, untouched perspective from which certainties can be secured, can constitute its appearance. Rather, the appearance of the phenomenon calls for a subject that becomes what it thinks, and gives itself over to the idea so as to become the testimony in which the phenomenon appears. This is precisely the case for what Marion calls the gifted or the lover, both of whom are figures of the subject that not only receives itself as a response to the phenomenon but in fact shows the phenomenon in this response—a response that constitutes itself as the phenomenon’s appearance. This suggests that an excessive happiness finds its possibility established in the erotic truth to which such a reduction leads. This third form of truth is distinguished from the truth of adequation as well as from the truth of disclosure.11 In the truth of adequation (espoused by Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and a certain Husserl), I make the truth by stating something about something in such a way that the concept I utter corresponds adequately with the being to which it refers. In the truth of disclosure (Heidegger), Dasein opens the possibility of truth by disclosing the clearing where being is manifest so it can be referenced by concepts. The differences between the two, however, make little difference when compared to the difference made by the erotic truth. For, in both truth as adequation and truth as disclosure, the subject (ego or Dasein) precedes or makes an exception to what appears in truth so as to decide the measure and dimension of the opening of truth itself; in the erotic truth, however, I myself, also appear with the given. In the erotic truth, Marion insists, I receive myself from the phenomenon that appears; that is to say, I receive myself by receiving it such that it is fair to say the phenomenon makes me more than I make it. This means I become a lover in receiving love, and I receive love only so long as I do not hide from it in becoming hatred but remain a lover who gives love, receiving by not keeping it in my possession. Because it exceeds an ego’s happiness, the phenomenon at issue in this chapter is what Marion calls a saturated phenomenon—that is to say, one unconditioned by horizon and contrary to objective experience. It will appear according to the logic of givenness in which what is given shows itself in the response of the receiver who receives himself in, and as, what is received. This is an important, sometimes overlooked point: according to the logic of givenness, the phenomenon shows itself in the receiver’s response; the response is responsible for phenomenalizing the given as saturated phenomenon. This is one reason why the receiver can be called the “gifted”: he has a gift or talent for phenomenalizing the given, and this gift or talent is itself one that was given to him as a gift constitutive of himself.12 But the gifted, no matter how gifted at phenomenalization, always responds in a necessarily

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limited and inadequate way since his response is made belatedly, after the fact of the advent of the excessive given. As such the response that shows the phenomenon is always a failure even in its success. “Put into operation in the essential finitude of the gifted,”13 such that the gifted fails to show the full measure of the excessive given. The response, therefore, in phenomenalizing the phenomenon, testifies also to the limits of the gifted whose gifts for phenomenalization are put on trial by the givenness received. At the limits of his resistance to the givenness he continues to receive, the gifted decides to desert the excessive burden of givenness, to no longer respond to its call, and to abandon the excess. This means that what Marion calls “marginal givens” or the “given as abandoned,” a “remainder” of givenness, surrounds the phenomenon that shows itself in saturating the receiver’s response.14 Now, it turns out that an excessive happiness is among the examples of saturated phenomena Marion describes in Being Given. It shows up briefly with the example of the exceptionally gifted poet Rimbaud who, daring to say, “I have held the dawn of summer,” suffered an excess of happiness. This example, Marion suggests, depicts the excess that the gifted can or no longer wants to bear, and abandons. Trying to contain the dawning beauty of summer bursting into flower all around him, the young poet finds himself in the ever-mounting joy of a glorious world unveiling its full mystery to the little of his senses, but the weight of this dawning joy proves to exceed what he will bear, despite his extraordinary gifts for taking it on in the magnificent poem that lets it be seen. At the point where he “felt something of the immensity of her body,” he cannot contain it or himself any longer, and, Marion says, “He faints fast away before the happiness.”15 Rimbaud’s swoon testifies to a phenomenon that is a far cry from the poor phenomenon of happiness that the ego can be equal to and have in reciprocity. It tells of an excess that the ego cannot possess but that overwhelms it, an excessive happiness that is not so much the realization of plans for myself as the point at which I no longer make any plans. The givenness of this happiness exceeds what even the most gifted of us (Rimbaud certainly being one of them) is able to bear or contain, and at the limits of our capacity to suffer this joy, we desert it, take refuge in absence, and perhaps leave it to oblivion. Even Rimbaud swoons so as to escape the condition of being gifted, to no longer be there in the truth where he is called to bear the burden of this joy’s givenness. His desertion of it allows him to escape its accusation of his finitude. But the fainting only indicates these limits the more. I come to know myself, as shortcoming, in the measure that such a joy presents to me. Deserting the excess of happiness is not the only option for its phenomenalization that Marion explores, however. An interesting, if unexpected, contrast can be found in his reading of Saint Augustine’s experience of confessio as the ongoing movement of conversion toward beatitude, an exemplary



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phenomenon of excessive happiness. Where Rimbaud swoons or faints so as to abandon the excess of happiness that accuses him of being unable to bear it, Augustine confesses his weakness and insufficiency to respond adequately to the beatitude that appears to him. The confession remains vigilant, wakeful, as it were, and not faint in the face of its insufficiencies and incapacity to respond adequately to all that is given. This “all” exceeds everything he is since it goes back to his very creation, an event that happened to him at a time when he was not and for which his thankful response of praise for his creator therefore always remains guilty of being too late. Rather than flee the accusation of this truth or hide from the guilt with which it charges him by fainting, swooning, or even hating it, Augustine takes on the charge in confessing it, loving it so much as to bear it, even its accusation of himself. Confession, in which Augustine admits his inadequacy to receive the beatitude that appears in divine revelation, is the way Augustine maintains himself in this truth, the way he takes up the insufficient self given to him with the appearance of the excessive phenomenon. Admitting weakness to receive as my own thus takes up what is received, but in confessing it, takes it up by giving it back to God in praise. In confession, then, Augustine suffers the accusation of truth without fleeing it or fainting because he loves it more than himself and his own shortcomings. Indeed, as Marion emphasizes, the confession that speaks endless praises of the God from whom it receives itself also admits its own insufficiency to respond adequately to and for this gift of love. The well-known practice of the double confession—in malus and in pius—speaks to this. Inhabiting the place of confession in pius, Augustine does not appropriate to himself the good of the good life given but gives it to God in the form of praise that gives back or returns to God the good received so as to sustain the joy of truth in confessing. Confession thereby dis-possesses or ex-propriates him of the good of the good life so as to receive the excess of happiness that cannot be enjoyed if kept. Inversely, when Augustine keeps it as his own, what he takes to be his own as a possession, is deemed the bad, the evil, in malus. What he has from himself, or what he gives himself without receiving, that is to say, what he takes into possession, in confession, is taken up as sin. Referred to God in this way, confession is always and already part of the life of conversion—referring or addressing oneself toward the place of beatitude that conversion approaches by confessing one’s inadequacy to receive the given in its entirety. Just as it is important to consider the type of phenomenon that happiness might be (saturated or poor), so too is it important to ask, correlatively, who is the subject of happiness? This is the second lesson a phenomenology of happiness might learn from Marion: To whom does the phenomenon appear, or to what does the reduction reduce? In fact, we have already encountered

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the need for asking the question when it became apparent that the subject of happiness is not, indeed cannot be, the ego. Reasons for this can be seen if we follow Marion briefly and ask about the position and function that the ego occupies in modernity. The primacy and the determination of the ego emerge as a consequence of two decisions: the first determines the meaning of beings as objects of thought; the second bases this thought in the existing ego or I. Together the decisions achieve the being-certain of thought. The first decision entails eliminating the categorical senses of being so as to maintain only the barest minimum of objectivity offered to the mind in a maximum of clear and distinct evidence. This is in effect the discovery of cogitatio. But the certainty of this evidence seems to have been reached at the price of its being since its objects appear “not in so far as they can be referred to some ontological genus (such as the categories into which philosophers divide things), but in so far as some things can be known on the basis of others.”16 For these objects appearing in the certainty of thought to be, these certainties must be founded on another: the certainty of the existence of thought. This certainty is operated by the ego, the thinking I who thinks thought. As Marion puts it: “Without the ego to put the cogitatio into operation the latter could never attain its own existence.”17 All that is needed for such thought to be is the will to think. While the object of my thought might not always offer itself, while I might be alone absolutely, I will always be able to think myself and can always rely on this certainty—always available since produced by my own thinking will, my own willing thinking. Cogitatio thereby becomes Cogito. Cogito names what I, the ego, can give myself such that all that appears in thought is equivalent to me. It is the sphere of self-possession or presence of myself to myself. The ego unites this cogitatio into a whole (cogito) by its common submission to the I who thinks or sees it. All that appears to an ego in the cogito is available to it in the form of that over which it has power and can command to its order; all the phenomena it sees belong to the measure and limit of the experience it constitutes for itself. Indeed doubts are put to rest by sticking to the security of a self-possession that my thinking can put into operation in every moment, at will, without owing it to anyone or anything. The ego then can be as happy as it finds it in itself to constitute a phenomenon. But how happy is that? Born out of the quest for objectivity and certainty, the ego is not so much their master as it is their servant—and they are harsh and brutal masters, allowing the ego no rest or time to drop its attentive guard over the objects it keeps in present possession. One need only bear in mind the constant effort, the constant willing, even and especially for the strongest of wills, that is required of the ego to produce again and again the certainty of thought’s



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existence. The ego must think constantly, attend tirelessly, and concentrate rigorously in order to maintain the thought that thinks its existence into beingcertain. If I am, as Descartes says, only “for as long as I am thinking,”18 then it takes repeated or sustained effort on the part of the thinking will to produce the certainty of itself. Only with this constant effort of will to command its attention does the ego make its reduction to the appearing of phenomena as objects for it. The egological reduction thus seems hardly suited to constitute the appearance of a phenomenon of happiness. The effort of attention is demanding, and existential fatigue proves very real—the eventual languor insurmountable, at least at times. It is in any case an always open possibility for the ego if “everything depends on what I cogitate—on my thinking will,” as Marion suggests it does for the ego in search of certainties.19 With everything dependent on so much willing, it is always possible that the ego will find itself too tired, too sunk in lassitude and languor, to summon the will to think it all and itself into being-certain. Even Descartes, from time to time, admits that his nature is such that he cannot command his attention to stay fixed continually and therefore lapses from his being-certain in clear and distinct knowledge, falling into the unclear, indistinct haze of unthinking, unwilled, undecided life.20 But it is Augustine who was particularly sensitive to the experience of this lassitude and fatigue as he speaks of the taedium vivendi that tempts him, as it did Rimbaud, when he stops confessing and his love falls short.21 Augustine remarks explicitly on this languor in the case when he finds himself unable to fix his mind attentively on the things presented in hymns sung in Church and is lost in the sensible music, “floating adrift between peril of pleasure and profitable custom.”22 At the very moment of loving the truth in the life of conversion, Augustine finds his will unavailable to him and unable to command itself to operate attentively. “This is my languishing [ipse est languor meus],”23 he concludes. In Marion’s work, the event in which lassitude or languor overcomes the ego is spoken most directly in the opening pages of The Erotic Phenomenon, where he reminds us that all the certainties generated by the thinking will, that is, ego, only expose it to the question “What good is it? [A quoi bon?].”24 All the being-certain it can generate for itself does not shelter the ego from the blow of vanity that can reduce it to boredom and melancholy. Marion had already noted in God without Being that a similar blow struck Ecclesiastes. Whereas Job is thrown into anxiety by the complete and total loss of all the things making up his world and its comforts, Ecclesiastes by contrast does not lose the happiness of his possessions; rather, he declares the vanity of all goods happily possessed, the vanity of presence held securely in the present and enjoyed in the plenitude of possession. As Marion puts it: “That which

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he strikes with vanity consists in the very thing that he has, hence in goods that he has enjoyed and that he will continue to enjoy.”25 Unlike Job, he experiences the being-certain of possessing his happiness. But the security of this possession is not indemnified against the question “what good is it?” and Ecclesiastes finds that even happiness possessed can appear useless, empty, and vain—not that being-certain of it disappears but that the certainty of possessing it is reduced to being no good at all, no matter how happy I might be. The question of the good (“What good is it?”) thereby reduces the selfpossession of the ego secure in its existence to an anterior instance, in which what is at stake is not being-certain but the good of living. By a paradoxical inversion, then, the reduction of the ego’s being-certain by the question “What good is it?” marks the threshold through which I enter into the field where the good of life can be lived—or not. This perhaps tells us of the promise held by Ecclesiastes’ boredom, by Rimbaud’s world-weary fatigue, and by Augustine’s languor: they occupy the place where a happiness in excess of the happiness of possession might be received. The subject of an excessive happiness, then, is not the ego, but the same I who is capable of boredom. Avoiding or denying further reduction by the question “What good is it?” so as to cling to being-certain in self-possession in the present is a self-defeating security for a phenomenology of happiness’ excess. I must yield, ceding the ego, therefore, to further reduction by the question “what good is it?” in order to reach the subject of happiness’ excess. Inversely, the ego loses the good life it tries to win for itself by constituting its being-certain of happiness at will. A clear account of the ego’s incapacity to receive it is found in Marion’s reading of the story of the prodigal son. His interpretation of the parable emphasizes that it targets the logic of possession that delivers the goods over to the son: “the parable concerns only this point—the entrance of ousia into the logic of possession, or more exactly of possession as the mode par excellence of the placement of goods at one’s disposal.”26 The problem is not that the son requests that he be given the goods or that he enjoys using them for personal pleasures once they have been given to him. The problem is that he asks no longer to receive them; he wants the goods as possessions, beings about which he can be certain as to their availability. This request proves impossible to fulfill, or rather its satisfaction is at once its disappointment, its appearance at once its disappearance. When he takes the goods he receives as his own, appropriating them to the sphere of his possessions, they become his to dispose of at will, according to his preferences, but they are no longer goods when reduced to possessions (or to securities) and therefore are no longer received in a way that constitutes a good life. A possessed good dissipates as a good, becoming a being over which the son has power and dominion; it is at his disposal—and is disposed of. The goods dissipate, Marion claims, and



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“ousia finds itself possessed in the mode of dissipation.”27 What is held onto no longer holds together. Again, this is so less because of some immorality of the son than owing to a phenomenological fact having to do with the nature of the reduction he practices. The good, it appears, cannot be had, and so the excess of happiness slips away never to find presence when reduced to the present possessed in having. The present cannot keep the presence of happiness’ excess. The parable tells, on Marion’s reading, that in asking to have possession, in asking not to have to owe it to another, the son in fact asks to be deprived of what he already enjoys, the goods of a good life. The son had the goods at his disposition already; he threw that away for possession and saw his disposition dissipate, his enjoyment of the goods vanish. It is as if possession of the goods does not permit him to enjoy their use only to use them by using them up. This is seen by Ecclesiastes, too, when he sees that keeping the goods in the present keeps them where they dissipate and do not appear. When Ecclesiastes looks on his present possessions as vain and empty, he does not experience them having disappeared, fallen into past, or become nothing. He looks on what he has in the present before it disappears but sees in it disappearance or passage itself. His boredom or melancholy is “not that all disappears or falls, but . . . not falling, in fact, reveals itself in order to manifest . . . passing away: the thing resists its disappearance only in order better to indicate that the very possibility of disappearing defines it.”28 What is held or possessed in the present is in fact the disappearing or passing itself; what remains present is disappearing, like a cloud of smoke—hence the vanity of presence possessed in the present. As Marion puts it: “‘Vanity’ can define whatsoever may be only inasmuch as all that is can dissipate, like a mist.”29 The dissipation of happiness’ excess in a present where time is always running out is also the experience of Augustine. He undergoes it in his seminal meditation on time where the present is discovered precisely as the production of the self, giving itself time or making its time, what Augustine calls distentio animi.30 His experience suggests that the excess of happiness cannot become a phenomenon, because I make time temporalized according to the present for and as myself. The distentio that seems a great achievement of the human self is finally disclosed in truth in the melancholy state of mind that finds itself torn apart in the indecision of distractions, unable to make up its mind in order to make the movement of conversion in which the excess of happiness called beatitude appears. Distentio, for Augustine, characterizes not objects or beings in the world but the soul. Observing that when we measure time we measure an interval, not a point, and that this interval of time must be a passage or transition, otherwise it would be eternity, Augustine concludes that time is an interval or stretch, extended in some way, in which the passage is held so that it can

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be sensed. He famously locates this stretch in the soul—a privilege it earns because in the present of its presence to itself the soul tends by definition toward the past and the future in memory and expectation where both past and future are present, as well as toward the present in attention. Importantly, the present of distention is not just located in the mind’s stretching but is also made by the mind’s own operation in what Marion calls an “intentional present,”31 an intending that puts into operation all three faculties of the present. The present is produced by the intention that removes from expectation, where the future is present, what it consigns to recollection, where the past is present. Intending the present thus produces the passage or transition of future into past that we attend to in the present, by operating its own distention. It is equally important to note that “the intentional present” made by the self-possessed mind is not simply the site of transition or passage of future into past: it is where that passage is held for our sensing of time. Strangely, then, the act of making the present where things appear also makes the span of passage in which we sense their passing away. The example Augustine gives is a psalm he sings. Singing the psalm, making it appear present, entails removing expectation, which before beginning engages the whole of the psalm: portions that are relegated to memory, which grow as the expectations past are consigned to it by an activity of attention that is all the while focused on the present. As Augustine observes: “The scope of the action I am performing is distended into memory (of what was said) and expectation (of what is to be said), all this while my attention is present, through which what was future is conveyed so that it becomes past.”32 By staying attentive the mind conveys expectations into memory, all the while attentively holding this passage in a present that lasts long enough to be measured and to admit the appearing of phenomena. Intentio and distentio are thus two sides of the same coin, each making the other operate in the constitution of the present. The more the mind acts to give itself the present, the more it stretches itself out into past and future, the more it suffers distention. In other words, the distentio arises out of an intention that shatters in its very operation. We are compelled to live in time we never have, time that is always running out. It appears as if the mind that gives itself time makes its present as something it undergoes in losing it, finding it always just past in the retention that holds its just pastness in the present, inevitably a melancholy state of mind. Likewise, expectation, too, is shadowed by a melancholy as it enters the present in the form of foreseeing the future’s past: when the expectation of the future passes into the present of the distended mind, the future is seen to hold only what will have been. The time the soul gives itself turns out to be incapable of putting phenomena such



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as happiness at its disposition, for it finds, as did Ecclesiastes, that possession makes everything available in the present only as having been. Marion describes this time as tending toward “distraction,” a term he suggests be used to translate Augustine’s distentio. Distraction obviously conveys the sense in which the mind wanting to possess itself finds it can never make up its own mind but remains adrift in indecision as it chases after passages present in the time it makes for itself. The distracted mind (distentio animi), made by the mind’s own effort to be collected, never finds a moment for decision but remains in indecision: since the present of a self-possessed mind is always found paradoxically in memory (retention), the mind always misses a decisive moment in which it might decide to turn around and make the movement of conversion. That moment, like every other, is always a bygone time just past, to which I come too late. But distraction also conveys the etymological sense of being pulled apart—devastated—by time that scatters one into times and dissipation. Having one’s mind made up becomes difficult when the mind is made up of expectations and memories that inevitably bring worry and regret, planning and rumination. Augustine himself realizes both senses of the distentio in the famous lament of Confessiones, Book XI, 29: “I see that my life has been wasted away in distractions [Ecce distentio est vita mea] . . . I have been scattered in times. . . . My thoughts are torn to pieces in tumultuous vicissitudes [ego in tempora dissilui, quorum ordinem nescio, et tumultuosis varietatibus dilaniantur cogitationes meae].” But the lessons of Marion’s phenomenology do not end with the melancholy or distraction of dissipation. For, teaching us not to abandon the excess of givenness, it invites us to practice a reduction beyond the ego so as to find another temporality than the one the self-possessed ego gives itself and thereby find the time for the excess of happiness. This time is found most notably in the Augustinian notion of the extensio— a notion invoked when Augustine comments on Philippians 3, 13–14 in Confessiones XI, 29, the same chapter where his lament of the distentio reaches its highest pitch. If distentio defines the time that the self disposes of in making it, then the time that is given to the self is extensio.33 In extensio, the self’s intentio is redirected, turned around, and converted as it turns from the passages it distractedly holds in its melancholy present (distentio) to an absolute future (“the things of God” in eternity) that exceeds expectation and therefore does not show itself in the present as what will have been. As Augustine puts it: “I follow the one, ‘forgetting the things which are past,’ not distended but extended [not distentus sed extentus, not distracted but extracted, according to Marion], not toward the things that are to come and will pass in the transit of the present, but ‘toward those that are before me,’ ‘I chase,’ not distractedly but with intentionality, the prize.”34 Stretching out toward, that is to say,

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intending, an absolute future “ever before me” because never entering into the present transition to the past, the extensio is a temporality in which time is given, such that the self extended toward the absolute future always has time for this excess of happiness, rather than see its time dissipate in its very appearance. Such a future that never passes because it never presents itself is precisely what is meant by eternity, what Marion calls a “perfectly eschatological future”:35 always before me or up ahead, eternally to come. Since eternity is extracted from the present of passage, it gives time as it draws near since no approach or intentional directedness toward it ever reaches it. The extensio is what Marion calls an “extraction” from the distraction of the times in which the self is devastated and adrift, its every happiness shattered and caduke. Just as the extensio to “what is before me” anticipates an eternity beyond the future held in expectation, so too does it exceed the past I can reach by remembering. The extensio, Augustine says, implies a memory that “forgets the past” in order to go beyond it in the approach of the immemorial. As always already before me, the immemorial past beyond my memory is ever futural: it never enters the present because it can never be represented in memory. What came before I remember will remain ever up ahead of my effort to remember it. Memory of the always forgotten immemorial (in fact, the event of Creation) thereby becomes desire. It enjoins me to leave myself and the present I make for myself and to enter the time of extensio. The desire that anticipates eternity in a memory that goes beyond itself to the immemorial extracts me from the melancholy times of a mind that possesses itself in memory and expectation. This desire and its time is how the excessive happiness of beatitude appears. For what is the immemorial of Creation and the eternity of eschatology if not the place of Augustine’s beatitude? Beatitude is given as an event that overcomes the subject since it is beyond expectation, something whose arrival is awaited patiently but not sorrowfully. And its arrival will be an overwhelming surprise, unrecognized because not corresponding to what is already found in memory and yet welcomed since better than what the melancholy times would have led one to predict would come. Finally, it comes suddenly out of a waiting that does not mobilize the event by methodic techniques and procedures so much as receive the event when it will. If the happiness that I make for myself in the present dissipates, extraction from the time the mind gives itself is required for this excess of happiness. What then is it that can enjoy what it does not possess? How can happiness’ excess be enjoyed without it becoming a present possession? Here again, I believe Marion’s phenomenology suggests the value of an erotic reduction, for in reducing the ego to the lover and desire it extracts me from the time I make for myself that is always running out. How does the erotic



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reduction lead back to desire and the temporality of the excessive happiness of beatitude? Love, Marion suggests, is a response to eternity in which the excess of time shows itself, for love waits devotedly. In this way, he suggests, it exceeds hope, extends farther than hope, and extracts me longer and farther from the present, as it were. For, hope, as he understands it, is hope for something; it expects a present to arrive. Love, by contrast, admits the possibility that it might go on in its questionable state forever, unto eternity, as it were. But whereas hope might grow disappointed in the waiting, indeed will eventually be disappointed with the hoped-for’s arrival in the transition to the past, love, so long as it lasts, sticks to what does not pass without growing weary of the waiting. When, by contrast, I grow tired or impatient of waiting and cannot bear it any longer, I make something happen in the present, but this is to bring about the appearance of something in the distentio where it comes to be in the melancholy I make for myself out of memory and expectation of what will have been. If the excessive happiness of beatitude is temporalized in the extensio, then it is had only so long as love for it lasts, since it remains in an eternal future. This love, Marion insists, like the ego cogito, can be put into operation without depending on any object: it waits as pure desire and therefore without condition. So long as I do not yield on my love for this excessive happiness I will never lose it—but even a poet as gifted as Rimbaud could bear it only so long. To conclude, I want to suggest, in a necessarily brief sketch, another phenomenon of happiness that might appear to a phenomenology of givenness such as it is practiced by Marion. That is, a reduction beyond the ego might disclose a subjectivity in which another excessive happiness could appear. This would suggest that further exploration might construct something like the topics of excessive happiness and draw up a table of the phenomena of “happiness” that appear to a subject at the end of a reduction beyond the ego. Such a topics or table would admit the necessary plurality of phenomena appearing to a subject of happiness. My example comes from Marion’s account in Sur la pensée passive de Descartes, in which he explores the final mode in which Descartes deploys the res cogitans: the passivity of sensation, developed most completely in the sixth meditation on the meum corpus and in the final texts written in correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, both the letters they exchanged and the Passions of the Soul. Thought becomes fully thoughtful, Marion claims, when deployed in the passivity by which it receives the thoughts it thinks. Suggesting that Descartes anticipates the phenomenology of flesh developed by Michel Henry and to a lesser extent Edmund Husserl, Marion argues that the Cartesian account of meum corpus, in distinction from other bodies and the passions, practices something like a reduction beyond

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the ego and the constitution of objects to the passivity of a subject affected by what appears to it. “Just as the intentional object is known by a constitution that does not affect me, so is [the subject as meum corpus] exposed to the world as affected passivity.”36 Reaching this subject opposes the project Descartes set for himself at the inception of his career in the Regulae where he proposed that we turn our attention only to objects appearing in certain and indubitable evidence achieved by methodic practice and disciplining of our attention. Descartes’ Passions and correspondence with Elisabeth tell us, however, that “to think like a human, not just a mind,”37 we should renounce clarity and distinctness of evidence as well as possession held with certainty in order to think passionately. Here is where something like a phenomenon of happiness can appear. First, because for happiness to appear, it must affect me: a happiness that did not touch me in what concerns me most intimately would not, we said, be the phenomenon in question. Second, because what appears in sensation or meum corpus appears despite myself, against my will, as it were, and this paradoxically is what is required for an excessive happiness to appear, as a happiness I could give myself as a possession would dissipate as happiness. If happiness appears to me only by being given to me in excess of what I give myself, then it calls for a passivity such as the sensation Marion explores here. Importantly, however, this pursuit of an excessive happiness through a reduction to sensation entails passing beyond the clarity and distinctness of objective evidence made through sustained and focused effort of attention. We need to think passionately in order to follow after a hazy vision or dream of happiness’ excess. We need to value such indistinct thoughts, not be so disenchanted as to dismiss them, if we are to follow happiness’ excess. Marion’s phenomenology of sensation goes far in such a valuation. In the passive mode of cogitatio, then, Marion suggests, something like a happiness appeared to Descartes, a happiness that we might call “reverie.” Like the Augustinian extensio in desire for beatitude, reverie offers an extraction from the distentio of the intentional mind and the objects whose dissipation it makes present—and so reverie, along with beatitude, might warrant a place in the table of desire for happiness’ excess. Late in his life, Marion shows, Descartes professed it “necessary to learn to relax one’s attention” so as to find “rest for the mind . . . in life,” for life is immersed in the sensation of its own affectedness by what arises in it without the strain of egological meditations and the incessant constitution of objects. This “suspension [is not just of beings or objects, but] of the theoretical attitude itself”38 gives the possibility of a paradoxically excessive happiness by a reduction that reduces the thinking will and its time so as to reach sensation and the flesh of life. Descartes experiences this, Marion suggests, in reveries, in which objectifying attention relaxes so as to follow thoughts less attentively and therefore



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without the effort of will initiating and directing their constitution into objects. Such thinking without object thinks nothing, Marion points out, and is therefore like Heidegger’s event of anxiety and Husserl’s practiced epoché in that it isolates the subject by suspending objects and the world, reducing them to nothing so as to isolate the “subject” that opens them or constitutes their appearing. The reverie that thinks nothing, but still thinks, resembles those whom Descartes says, “dream while waking” and let their mind “stray nonchalantly.” Nonchalantly, that is to say, without getting hot about whatever it is outside me, by “putting oneself in parentheses,” bracketing oneself and one’s self-regarding cares, as it were, so as not to get all worked up about it. Nonchalance is thus a form of reduction that suspends not just the objects of attention but more basically the ego that puts theoretical objectification into operation. Such a reduction leads to a subject who passively follows received impressions where they will, willingly following them here and there as they go. “In its assumed nonchalance,” Marion writes, “the soul makes up its mind not to make up its own mind, decides not to decide”39 but to wander. In renouncing its effort to will a decision that would make up its own mind, the soul lets its mind go in the direction of thoughts that arrive and impress themselves on it “fortuitously” in its willingness to follow them. Such thoughts are not thought at the initiative of the will that I am, but against my will, a counter-will, as if to make me think thoughts I would never have thought of on my own—opening a space of thought where an excessive happiness might appear. But since they are not thought without appearing in me, my will is nevertheless still involved in their appearance—only passively and received. As Marion concludes: “Even the will becomes passive, the will which nevertheless defines what is most proper to me.” The will to attend to these thoughts—and thereby let the phenomenon appear—comes to me in my willingness to go along with them. The conversion of my will to willingness lets the phenomenon appear as the reverie follows thoughts willingly rather than attending to them carefully in a concentrated, willed effort. Thinking about nothing in the nonchalance of living life that requires less willed attention, Marion suggests, gives a form of happiness. He suggests this by again citing Rimbaud, this time the early poem “Sensation,” which I redact a bit here: “Through evenings blued by summer, I will roam the paths. . . . Dreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet . . . I will not speak, I will have no thoughts. . . . But infinite love will mount in my soul. . . And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy. . . happy.”40 But for the attentive mind, committed to the constitution of objects and its own being-certain, the joy of this reverie, of thinking without anything thought, is impossible. The relief of coolness will not mount in the soul, and there will be no paths to follow willingly in an infinite love that leads into the distance of far, far away—eternally

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elsewhere. Echoing themes from throughout Marion’s work, the infinite love Rimbaud experiences mounting in his soul sustains a movement that carries him further across the distance in which the excess of happiness appears than does the will that might secure the objects that constitute a poor phenomenon of happiness possessed. It is as if Rimbaud confirms Marion’s point that love can stretch the limits of the gifted to show the phenomenon received: in this case, he can follow the excess of happiness down a longer and longer path, farther and farther into the distance, in love that mounts more and more the less and less he attends to thinking objects of thought—and instead is lost in a reverie where he finds himself. NOTES 1 EP, 2. 2 Bruckner uses the phrase “duty to be happy” in: Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3 EP, 86. 4 Ibid., 69. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 59–60. 7 Ibid. 8 See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Plume, 2003), 56–76. 9 Søren Kierkegaard, “Becoming Subjective,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, 128–88 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 10 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 27. 11 Marion discusses truth as adequation and truth as disclosure, in contrast to the erotic truth, in: LS, 184–86. 12 “The gifted” is the translation I adopted for rendering Marion’s l’adonné, following the translation of Étant donné into English under the title Being Given. Though some prefer to leave the term untranslated or to render it as “the devoted” or even “the one given over,” I have chosen this translation for the reasons given in the chapter. Most of those who do not adopt use of “the gifted” do not use the term in a sense that conveys the subject’s responsibility for transforming the given into the seen, a transformation that is owing to the subject’s talents for phenomenalization, which is, as it were, his giftedness. 13 BG, 309. 14 Ibid., 308, 310, 319. 15 Ibid., 315.



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16 René Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21; Descartes’ sixth rule proves central to Marion’s account of the Cartesian constitution of metaphysics, as summarized in DMP, 74. 17 DMP, 69. 18 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 18. 19 EP, 18. 20 Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” 25; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2: 32, 48. See, for instance, “my nature is also such that I cannot fix my mental vision continually on the same thing, so as to keep perceiving it clearly; and often the memory of a previously made judgment may come back, when I am no longer attending to the arguments” (48). And, “if one concentrates carefully, all this is quite evident by the natural light. But when I relax my concentration, and my mental vision is blinded by the images of things perceived by the senses, it is not so easy for me to remember why the idea of a being more perfect than myself must necessarily proceed” (32). These passages could be contrasted with those in “Rules for the Direction of the Mind” in which Descartes calls for “a continuous and wholly uninterrupted sweep of thought” in order to complete knowledge (25). This is necessary, he says, to counter “the weakness of memory” and make it such that the deductions that pass through thoughts successively happen “so swiftly that memory [of previous thoughts in the series] is left with practically no role to play,” as if the thinking now saw deductions as clearly as if they were intuitions (25). The ability to be “uninterrupted,” to move so “swiftly,” and to possess a strength that would counter the “weakness” that slows down and needs to rest or take a break—the demand for all this would be belied by the experiences recorded in the passages cited previously from the Meditations. This is something to which I would like to return in a future chapter. 21 Augustine, Confessiones, trans. William Watts, 2 vols, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912). [I have modified all English translations]. On taedium in Confessiones, see Conf. IV, 6: “An affection I could not understand was in me . . . the tedium of living [taedium vivendi] was in me most gravely and so too fear of death”; Conf. VI, 6: “If by chance prosperity smiled [adrisset] upon me, I was too disheartened to seize it [taedebat adprehendere], since it flew away almost before I could grab hold of it”; Conf. IX, 7: “At this time it was first instituted after the manner of the Eastern Churches, that hymns and songs should be sung, lest the people wither away through the tediousness of sorrow”; and finally Conf. XII, 26: “It used to be tedious for you [Paul says to the Philippians]. These Philippians had grown languid and limp on account of the long spell of tedium and were withered and dry, as though they no longer bore the fruit of good works.” To my mind, the moment when Augustine seems most overcome by this languor, most stuck in the taedium vivendi, is when he suffers the death of his dear friend in Book IV. In IV. 4, he describes how all the world became hateful to him [oderam omnia], appearing a great annoying bother, as it were; even the most familiar of places and their comforts were too much to take up. The French ennui, which in English is often translated boredom, goes back to the

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Latin mihi in odio [“it is hateful to me”]. Augustine’s hatred of all is thereby perhaps anticipating the boredom Marion sketches in GWB. This point, too, is something to which I hope to return in a later chapter. 22 Augustine, Confessiones, X, 33. 23 Ibid. 24 Stephen E. Lewis’ translation renders the French à quoi bon? with the English “What’s the use?” This is a perfectly good translation; it conveys the sense in which what is at issue is an indifference to the advantage/disadvantage of what appears. I am using the more literal “What good is it?” as this translation allows for us to see a connection with earlier discussions of the good in GWB. The significance of this connection will become apparent as this chapter progresses. 25 GWB, 124. 26 Ibid., 97. 27 Ibid., 98. 28 Ibid., 127. 29 Ibid., 125. Marion suggests that the Hebrew word Hebhel, which is typically rendered as “vanity,” more properly “suggests the image of steam, a condensation, a breath of air. A mist, as long as it remains immobile in the atmosphere, remains under the gaze like a genuine spectacle. . . . But this reality, without destruction or annihilation, can eventually disappear in a light breeze.” And yet perhaps this disappearance is better expressed as a loss of cohesion or consistency, such that it no longer holds together, as the vaporous form’s reality is undone more than annihilated. 30 Augustine, Confessiones, XI 26. 31 LS, 289. 32 Augustine, Confessiones, XI 28. 33 LS, 310. Commenting on the transformation of distentio into extensio, Marion writes: “The intentio can be liberated from the distraction of the distentio, which dissipates in the passing stream, all the while remaining in temporality (even after this life), not by the illusion of being established in eternity (which belongs to God alone), but by stretching itself out by extensio toward the things that are ahead, the things of God, to the point of being extracted from the variations of the world. The ordinary intentio can turn from distentio toward extensio—and temporality converted from one mode to the other without betraying it.” For Marion, it is important the extensio remain a mode of temporality. The conversion of time is not an exit of time, he wants to insist, but a different way of temporalizing it. Whether or not this is faithful to Augustine’s text is a point that some will dispute. 34 Quoted in LS, 307. 35 Ibid., 311. 36 PP, 75. 37 Ibid., 215. 38 Ibid., 165–66. 39 Ibid., 236. 40 Quoted in PP, 167 (emphasis added).



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. Confessiones. Translated by William Watts. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. Bruckner, Pascal. Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vols. 1–2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Translated by Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Plume, 2003. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Marion, Jean-Luc. Au Lieu de Soi. L’approche de saint Augustin. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur la pensée passive de Descartes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013.

Chapter 15

Flight from the Flesh: Freud’s Id and Ego as Saturated Phenomena Brian Becker

Rarely has Jean-Luc Marion’s work ventured into the social sciences, although when he speaks of those “illegitimate theoretical acts of violence”1 that restrict the field of possible phenomena or reduce persons to a “medical object,”2 it is hard not to infer that the field of psychology is among the foremost instigators of such views. We appear to garner some of his own thoughts more clearly in a passage discussing our unsuccessful attempts to overcome our self-hatred “by a frenetic or imaginary excess of love for myself, as recommended by the weighty, authoritative opinions of psychology and psychoanalysis—had I only known, for example, that I have a psyche, or what is signified by this word, or even that the point is in fact to take care of it and to work on it!”3 To the degree that psychology is associated with that “boastful asphyxiation known as ‘self-actualization’”4 or reduces persons to common and poor phenomena, it is difficult to imagine points of contact between Marion’s proposal for saturated phenomena and what the regional science of psychology offers under its lens of operational definitions and medicalized models. Yet, we can glean some possibilities to go further than this. For instance, Marion acknowledges that “psychoanalysis . . . knows to remain among my lived experiences of consciousness and, especially, unconsciousness.”5 In a talk at Georgetown University and again in the second of his recent Gifford Lectures, Marion briefly suggests that psychoanalysis, as with other social sciences and humanities, responds to the excess of events (the aftermath of trauma, birth, etc.). It is for this reason that psychoanalysis takes so long to reach its completion, as the excess of personal events requires an ongoing, perhaps infinite, hermeneutics for developing concepts remotely capable of making sense of and integrating them. 252



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These claims notwithstanding, the case has yet to be demonstrated that psychoanalysis, in fact, deals in saturated phenomena, and also what a theoretical stance within the field would look like if it conceived of itself as doing so. Rather, what is most clear is that “psychoanalysis itself lacks concepts for thinking them.”6 The following will attempt to develop such concepts by drawing upon Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena to rethink the classic Freudian tripartite model, giving rise to a new understanding of our psyche that eludes metaphysics or at least hovers around its outskirts. The particular focus in this chapter will be on the id, its associated life and death drives, and the id’s relation with the ego, which will be read through the saturated phenomena of the flesh, event, and idol.7 In making these comparisons, I may be guilty of certain intellectual misappropriations. First, from the perspective of the psychoanalyst, I do not remain true to some authentic Freudian project, though I will attempt to show certain slips of the metaphysical tongue in Freud’s writings that offer untraversed paths for viewing the unconscious as excess. Second, from the perspective of the philosopher, I will be using phenomenological concepts in a manner that risks dislodging them from their proper use, potentially producing a muddled mixing of disparate language games. Although my intention is to free certain psychological concepts from their metaphysical imprisonment, Marion’s categories of saturated phenomena are being appropriated in a manner that divorces them from Kant’s categories of understanding and uniquely uses them as resources for reinventing a psychological model, risking a clandestine slip into the natural attitude. However, my wager, if readers permit these moves, is that such a conversation will yield a more robust and coherent vision of the psyche as a dynamic interplay of varying saturated phenomena. Concentrating all the paradigms and offering a manner of viewing the psyche as a phenomenon that gives itself with maximum intensity will go well beyond what psychology’s standard concepts can bear. This correction is important not only for more faithfully describing how the psyche gives itself in excess but also the manner in which the givenness of this excess expresses itself both in healthy and pathological modes, thereby changing the meaning of healing and transformation within a therapeutic context. To paraphrase one of Marion’s concluding remarks at the Breached Horizons conference, if we treat the environment as an object and use objective means to understand environmental pollution, we will never be able to solve the pressing ecological crisis before us. Similarly, if we understand our interiority in the light of common or poor phenomena, then the best psychological interventions in the world will not help and will only leave a smoke screen of bandages over the veneer of still gaping wounds. Reformulating our interiority as saturated phenomena will not only allow us

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to reimagine ourselves in terms more abundant than what psychology currently allows but will also help us to reformulate the pervasive personal and collective wounds of our time: the ongoing dissociation and alienation from the flesh and the continued identification and reification of ourselves in the idol of a body-ego.8 FREUD’S KANTIAN PROJECT Marion initially established the different paradigms of saturated phenomena by inverting Kant’s categories of the understanding.9 However, it is questionable as to whether these different modes of saturation are necessarily dependent upon Kant’s categories. Certainly the examples he uses (flesh, event, idol, icon) were all previously developed in different contexts and by different authors (e.g., Henry, Levinas) without linking them to Kant. One convincing argument is that the Kantian categories act merely as a convenient foil, used to mark a stark contrast between a preeminent example of modern metaphysics and the deconstruction of that metaphysics through the shift to saturated phenomena as the paradigm for lived experience. In this sense, Kant’s categories offer a poignant “point of orientation,”10 but we need not be wedded to them to sustain the various modes of saturated phenomena. Rather, the crucial factor in applying these saturated phenomena to alternative models lies in whether those models collude more generally with the Kantian metaphysical project; that is, they must sustain the use of synthetic a priori knowledge, which appears to be the case in Freud’s metapsychology. We can see abundant evidence of Kant’s influence on Freud, as he would have made on most German-speaking thinkers at the time when Freud was writing. In fact, “it was Kant who brought tripartite modelling to prominence in German thought.”11 An analysis of Freud’s texts reveals that he referred to Kant far more often than any other philosopher, and his copy of the Critique of Pure Reason is reported to be one of the few instances he left notes along the margins of a book he owned.12 Despite clear knowledge of and abundant references to Kant, Freud never attributes any part of his model to Kant’s influence. However, a self-conscious link was noted at least once in a private conversation with his colleague, Ludwig Binswanger. Freud reportedly “mused on whether his own categories of understanding the mind . . . related to Kant’s transcendental philosophy.”13 However, how exactly Kant influenced Freud is difficult to ascertain as there are no clear parallels between Kant’s categories of the understanding and Freud’s model. A more apt comparison is found between Kant’s model of the mind consisting of reason, understanding, sensibility, along with the noumenal self, and Freud’s model, consisting of the superego, ego, the conscious perceptual system (Pcpt.-Cs), and the id, respectively.14 For our purposes, I will focus on Kant’s noumenal



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self and Freud’s notion of the id. Again according to Binswanger’s account, “Freud entertained that his version of the unconscious was close to Kant’s noumenon.”15 We can see this parallel most clearly where Freud writes, Behind the attributes (qualities) of the object under examination [the Unconscious] which are presented directly to our perception, we have to discover something else which is more independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves. But herein lies the very nature and limitation of our science. . . . Reality will always remain “unknowable.”16

Here Freud presents an unconscious rich in possibilities for thinking in terms of saturated phenomena. In the same manner that, according to Marion, “Kant himself . . . had a foretaste of what I call a saturated phenomenon,”17 so too did Freud. However, Freud retreats from this formulation to render the id under the lens of representational concepts drawn from biology and evolution. Michel Henry states: “The unconscious, originally representation’s other, now contains representations. The aberrant concept of an ‘unconscious representation’ is born.”18 It is an “aberrant concept” because what is unconscious cannot by definition be adequately represented. Thus, what is initially Freud’s remarkable contribution to thought, the unthinkable par excellence, is translated into the language of causality and made to obey the principle of sufficient reason. This is most clearly expressed with Freud’s dual-instinct theory of the life drive (eros) and death drive (thanatos), which serve as the a priori categories that organize psychic life and experience. This makes Freud a better “Kantian” than even Kant for whereas the noumena remains completely beyond the realm of conceptualization, the content of the instinctual unconscious can be rendered intelligible according to Freud, especially through the techniques of psychoanalysis. But is there a way past both the philosophical contradiction of an unconscious representation and its reinforcement of the metaphysical subject? FROM ID TO FLESH: THE AFFECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS Indeed there is when we reconsider the more radical element of Freud’s formulation of the id and make a move first established by Henry who “defines its essence [the unconscious] as identical to affectivity, understood as the auto-affirmation of life.”19 This concept of affectivity and life, a phenomenology of the flesh as Henry calls it elsewhere, is a self-affectivity beyond

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representation but still accessible in its radical and absolute immanence. Marion appropriates Henry’s concept as one of the paradigms of the saturated phenomena, which he claims is an inversion of the Kantian category of modality. The flesh is distinct from the body known by science and the natural attitude.20 This distinction has not only epistemological significance but also psychological implications. The flesh and body offer alternative perspectives from which to see oneself and others, and this distinction not only contains parallels but also makes some important advances upon Freud’s presentation of the psychodynamic relation between the id and ego. However, to make this move requires a few justifications. First, it must be established that Freud’s concept of the id and its associated drives can be rethought, phenomenologically, in terms of an intuition that exceeds any representational concept, thus meeting the formal criteria for saturated phenomena. Second, it needs to be established that the paradigm of the flesh is an appropriate phenomenological category for rethinking the id. To establish both claims, I draw upon what is one of Freud’s most famous expositions on the id: A chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic—above all, the law of contradiction—do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise formations under the overpowering economic pressure towards discharging their energy. There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers’ assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time.21

Based upon this passage and others like it and despite himself and his metapsychology, Freud opens the door to think of the psyche in terms of excess. We can see from this passage that, consistent with the manner of saturated giving, no concept can adequately represent the unconscious id, and as such it is expressed in terms suggestive of excess (“seething excitement,” “an impulsion,” “overpowering economic pressure”). The id is invisible because, compared to the littleness of the conscious ego, the id towers over it like an



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incomprehensible beast whose total proportions cannot be estimated due to its enormity and our proximity to it, as depicted in the famous iceberg metaphor. Further, it violates the classic metaphysical principles of logic, particularly the principle of non-contradiction, and it takes exception to the usual linear understanding of time. The manner in which these metaphysical principles are violated and the implications of this violation continue to be debated, but the fact of the violation offers a necessary space for an alternative formulation of the id as a saturated phenomenon, best exemplified in the paradigm of the flesh. In the aforementioned passage, Freud states that the id “is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes.”22 Elsewhere he states that the id “contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution—above all the instincts, which originate from the somatic (bodily) organization and which find a first psychical expression here [in the id] in forms unknown to us.”23 Thus, we have an element of the mind deeply connected with the body that lacks the usual designations that would render that body fully representable to itself, and which gives itself in excess. Further, the flesh is as strong of a determinative force for Marion as the id is for Freud. Marion states that “flesh has nothing optional about it.”24 Every thought, every perception is contingent upon my flesh and to properly understand anything it must first be thought from this perspective. My flesh defines me like nothing else. “I can neither take leave nor distance from my flesh, because I do not have it, but I am it.”25 Henry provides an explicit link between the determinate and absolute character of the unconscious id and what he calls self-affection: “Maintaining constant excitation (e.g. affection), the impossibility of escape or flight, of creating a split or difference, of retreat from affection (i.e. from self), caught and imprisoned in itself—such self-affection implies nothing less than absolute subjectivity.”26 Important to note, however, is that the flesh, though determining of psychic life, is itself not determined. The flesh remains an absolute, unconditioned phenomenon that gives rise to and determines subjectivity but itself remains outside the determinations of sufficient reason. This shows how it is both similar to and different from Freud’s conception of the id, maintaining its massive power within the psychic economy but itself not being subject to biological or evolutionary interpretations. TIME IN THE FLESH: LIFE AND DEATH EVENTS Marion’s conception of the flesh, as with Freud’s conception of the id, does not obey the rules of linear time, but that is not to say that time is irrelevant. The flesh and id are marked by the effects of temporality as the effect of

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events, whereby time is played out in a radically nonlinear manner. This importance of the event, as such, marks another paradigm of the saturated phenomena important for reinventing Freud’s structural model. In the conclusion of the second of his Gifford lectures, Marion addresses the elevated importance that two particular events (birth and death) have for our personal histories and explicitly links them with the work of psychoanalysis. He states, The event knows more about itself than I shall ever know about it and it is why the event can be my destiny. The event rules me more than I can rule it. And our life is based on several events, which will never be completely understood by us. And that’s why they are the keystones of our personal story. The two unquestionable events which we have or we shall experience for sure are two events which we never fully understand. Those two events are my birth and my death. Nothing is more crucial for me, unescapable. It is absolutely certain that I don’t understand what my birth was. It is why I can spend much time with a psychoanalyst. And I have no hint of what my death will be, to the point that I cannot even say that I’m certain that I shall die with my death.27

Although problematic in Freud’s original formulation of the dual-drive theory, a phenomenological reading of these drives moves us away from the causal language of natural instinct and to an interpretation far more consistent with his original non-metaphysical formulation of the unconscious. Taking seriously Marion’s claim that birth and death are the two events that most significantly determine our existence, we can begin to see how Freud’s life and death drives can be rethought phenomenologically and without recourse to a naturalistic reductionism in the light of these constituting events, such that they continue to exhibit a powerful influence on the dynamics of psychic life. Birth and death are saturated events living in and playing out through the flesh in a way that defines me radically. They are marked by their unpredictability (I do not know how my birth will unfold; I do not know the hour of my death), calling (I find myself always already responding to the demands that birth and death give to me), and facticity (I cannot, in all honesty, deny either my birth or impending death). In this way the flesh gives itself in the unfolding of these events with many of the determinations constitutive of givenness, as forces that render the nascent subject passive and late in responding, repeating with some notable differences the Freudian decentering of the subject. The flesh has a special relationship with these events, housing them as the id does its drives, being inhabited by them as their horizons gradually cross into each other. It begins with birth, which is the “original taking of flesh.”28 Freud also states: “The event which we look upon as having left behind it an affective trace of this sort is the process of birth.”29 Birth gives life, which unfolds in and through the flesh, calling out to be given again in the erotic impulse. This playing out of birth through the erotic gives new meaning to



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the pleasure principle, which is conceived as the affirmative “Yes!” to life spoken through our desires.30 But our flesh confronts the unfolding of another event, death. Different from birth, it gives itself before having arrived, through anxiety, aggression, hatred, and the intimations of fleshly failure, like a clearing of ground before the landing of an aircraft. Here time “accumulates” in the “members, muscles, and bones” of the body, which “ruins” the flesh.31 For Freud, the death drive was an attempt to recognize that at the heart of psychic life is another tacit force living inside of us that is bent on the destruction of others and ourselves, and desirous of a return to a primal state of nothingness where we no longer have to face the ongoing tensions, fluctuations, and frustrations resulting from our erotic impulses in their ongoing conflict with culture. Where does repetition compulsion fit in here? For Freud the death drive produces an urge to return to a prior inorganic state, and the repetition compulsion is the mechanism by which this drive is expressed. Repetition’s relation to saturated phenomena can be thought of in two ways. One way is the manner in which the repetition compulsion attempts to kill the flesh by turning it into a hardened by-product, the ego as commodified body, which results from the harbingering call of death in trauma and suffering.32 In this case, the repetition compulsion aims at the destruction of excess by turning the life of the flesh into a dead commodity. Here repetition is reproduction. However, repetition can also be thought in terms of the life event as well, something Freud never saw but Marion does address, where the gift of life is repeated through forgiveness.33 One of the possible implications for psychotherapy, if this proposal has merit, would consist of a gradual transition from one kind of repetition (economic reproduction) to another (forgiveness). FLIGHT FROM THE FLESH: THE BODY-EGO Suffering results as the unfolding of these events in my flesh, and it is my suffering that gives me to myself in my full ipseity. In fact, the flesh primarily experiences itself in “its suffering, its passivity, and its receptivity,”34 and is torn asunder through gradual and progressive injuries that erode the rocky terrain left behind by the birth event and its eventual collision with death. The events of birth and death individualize me in the ruins left in that space between the wake of one and the incoming rumblings of the other. The flesh is also the source of another kind of suffering, derived from its encounter with what Freud named “external reality” but phenomenologically we can refer to as the other, the one who enters into and takes up space within my flesh. The suffering by and of the other comes about by an introjection of them into the flesh. Flesh is the only site where others can dwell, but for that reason I suffer wounds and the ecstasy of pleasure (there is no necessary dichotomy here)

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through my accommodations. Beyond the pain and pleasure of welcoming the other into me, of being touched by the other, there is the absolute pain of the other’s “No!” to me. Marion states: By pain, we understand the resistance of the other’s flesh to my own (or even the resistance of mine to hers), such that it contents or refuses my own flesh; this pain augments as my flesh diminishes, until my flesh withdraws into a corporeity that is spatially defined or closed-up, and which no longer gives access to anything or anyone . . . my flesh when it is suffering not only retracts . . . it becomes hardened; contaminated by the resistance of the other body, what was once flesh makes itself into a body, a heart of stone, a touch body, adapted for bodily combat with the world.35

We see here a developmental transition from flesh to body through the encounter of the other’s resistance to the erotic advance. This “withdrawing” and “hardening” of the flesh is what we can call in Freudian terms the ego and represents a crucial moment in psychological development. The pain of the parent’s resistance to the child, as the first instance of this great “No!,” gives birth to a body, which has its closest parallel in Freud’s model to the ego. According to Freud: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”36 In the transition from the flesh to the body, the psyche does not stop giving itself excessively. Rather, the body-ego now reveals itself in a manner that bedazzles with excessive visibility, in contrast to the excessive, but invisible, givenness of the flesh. The bedazzling visibility of the body-ego “precedes” me, hangs over me, “expects me,” “lays siege” to me, and “surrounds” me.37 Thus, the withdrawing of the flesh, thought in terms of the body-ego, offers an opportunity to think about the psyche as yet another paradigm of saturation: the idol. The ego relates to the invisible of the flesh by framing it as a body and in this way sees not itself, but the frame imposed upon it. It reproduces the flesh through seeming to master it, and saturates sight and “hoards up all admiration in it.”38 Unlike the flesh, which blends visible with invisible (body as object with body as felt sense), the ego presents itself as mere visibility, that which I fully see and identify with, without any hidden side whatsoever (like a two-dimensional object)—but it is also limited because I cannot see anything outside of its frame. “But in the end, when the object appears, the flesh sinks into the darkness.”39 As a result, we come to see ourselves and, by extension, others, as bodies rather than flesh, conceived of as objects of ownership, inviting the language of rights and private property, in other words the logic of the economy, with its repetition compulsions of reproductive objectification. This is “the bodies of the world,”40 which are objects and, thus, do not feel anything. As Marion states: The simple fact of denuding it—of removing the last piece of clothing, like the last screen—changes nothing; on the contrary, the final surface (the skin) can



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immediately become once again the surface of an object, which annuls all phenomenality of the flesh. Thus medical nudity, far from manifesting me as flesh, re-transforms me into an object of examination, measurable under every angle, diagnosable like a physical machine, a chemical metabolism, an economic consumer, etc.; stripped before the draft board or for a clinical examination, not only do I not appear as flesh, but I appear more than ever as an object.41

This marks a fundamental departure from Freud, for we cannot affirm the aphorism “where id is, there shall ego be,”42 as the ego is what produces our self-distortion. In its suppression of the flesh and its corresponding desires, desire is perverted into a fetish whereby we long to possess ourselves and, by extension, others as objects. The flesh is reified into a body, which is detached from itself and turned into an object of use or, perhaps more often, an object to be displayed for others’ uses and enjoyment. And we do this to hide from ourselves, to hide from the suffering of the flesh behind the illusory control we feel over our bodies, and this wish to hide is experienced as one of the most fundamental affects of the self: anxiety. As Freud writes: “The anxiety which signifies the flight of the ego from its libido is after all supposed to be derived from that libido itself.”43 The ego erects illusory constructs known as defense mechanisms to help manage this anxiety. The ego distorts our perception of ourselves, to the point of denying the flesh altogether. This flight from the flesh helps to preserve an illusion of unity and autonomy with a corresponding sense of linear temporality, thus giving rise to a sense of ourselves as a self-subsisting repetition of the same. The repression of the flesh by the ego does not remove the flesh, however, as flesh is ultimately inescapable. The ego cannot distance itself from its flesh because the ego is flesh. Marion states that “the ego gives itself as flesh, even if one wants to hide it.”44 Although I could deny or hate it, I cannot definitively suppress the flesh and so it continues to give itself, ceaselessly, determining the psyche. Thus, fleeing from the flesh is like fleeing from the scene of a crime in which one will inevitably become caught; the facticity of the flesh cannot be undone, and will give itself all the more indubitably in the ego’s attempts to run away from it. The flesh puts the self “under house arrest”45 by delivering the ego to itself. However, the flesh does give itself differently under the conditions of the ego, whereby the flesh appears as neurosis, that is, unwanted, unbidden affects, bodily reactions, and cognitions that impose themselves upon me. As Freud states: “Symptoms are derived from the repressed, they are, as it were, its representatives before the ego.”46 One particularly notable manner in which the symptom, the repressed flesh, reveals itself is in the uncanny.47 The uncanny for Freud belongs to the realm of terror and fright. The German word (Unheimlich) refers to that which is hidden, dangerous, unhomely. According to Freud, the uncanny is the mark of the return of repressed infantile material and is encountered at great moments of ambivalence.48

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This encounter with the uncanny is characterized by a great fear of going blind because, according to Freud, it reminds the individual of the original castration fear encountered as a child. For Freud, the substitution of blindness for castration is part of the Oedipal drama in which Oedipus blinds himself as a mitigated penalty for his transgressions. Blindness and castration are linked by their respective losses of the power to penetrate. Read phenomenologically, the uncanny is a return of repressed flesh that threatens the body-ego, that artificial phallus, with “a quasi-moral intensity of intuition.”49 This confrontation with our own potential impotence haunts and terrifies us, reminding us of the passivity of our abundant but invisible flesh where the sufferings of birth, death, and the other initially confront us. The idol of the body-ego protects the psyche from the inevitable fragility of our artificial constructs and fetishized desires. As Marion states, “My idol defines what I can bear of phenomenality . . . without weakening into confusion or blindness.”50 The id as invisible flesh renders us unknowable to ourselves whereas the ego as idol bedazzles us with the visible frame of our bodies, rendering us unaware of our unknowability. But when, on occasion, the excess of the flesh breaks through, we can either intensify our flight from the truth, a path often taken, or enter into the truth, though a sort of idol-analysis, whereby we willingly become blind again as Oedipus “blinds himself on account of having seen his transgression.”51 What Oedipus does here by blinding himself is not a perpetuation of the problem, the anxious fleeing from the flesh through masochism, but the proper response when exposed to the truth of his flesh, which never stopped giving itself in the wounds of his feet for which Oedipus bears his name. His ability to see and to penetrate the riddle of the sphinx, all of which communicates the heights of his power, hides the truth that he wears on his feet. His willing acceptance of blindness at the end of the story, a castration of the ego itself, was the necessary action for his return to the flesh. Again, we find here an inversion of the classic Freudian conception of therapeutic change. The point is not to make the unconscious conscious but to become flesh and expand unconsciousness, and thus to willingly enter into another kind of blindness that reveals to me the question that I am unto myself. CONCLUSION Freud’s project of creating a science while maintaining a bulwark against speculative thought led him to distinguish sharply between psychoanalysis and philosophy. However, Freud’s metapsychology is consistent with and directly influenced by the Kantian project whereby knowledge of the psyche is reduced to a priori categories of thought. In place of Kant’s categories of



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the understanding we have the naturalistic categories of the life and death drives derived from biology and evolutionary theory. This problematic foundation of the psyche results in the loss of Freud’s initially profound insight—a loss that can be regained through phenomenology. The interior life of the mind is born out of a rich and excessive degree of intuition given through distinct, but dynamically interacting, modes of lived experience. In seeking this return to the original and unconditioned richness of the psyche, some of Freud’s fundamental categories including the id, life and death drives, and the ego were revised and rethought in the light of Marion’s paradigms of saturated phenomena. Some family resemblances exist between these concepts of Freud and Marion, but the differences are of greater importance as the variegated modes of saturated phenomena assist in moving Freud’s highly influential model outside the constrictions of metaphysical thought and change the foundational assumptions of psychoanalytic treatment, for we would now want to exclaim: Where idol gives, there shall flesh give! The ego, as idol, saturates our vision with the visible spectacle of our bodies that, in contrast to the flesh, becomes a fragmented object.52 The banality of our self-objectification (i.e., the psychopathology of everyday life) becomes quickly evident in the ways we display ourselves in our culture today, such as through online social media and the manner in which contemporary social issues are addressed within our political discourse. The dissociated view of ourselves evident in these practices and discourses represents the ongoing collective neurosis of our day and results not from a failure to rein in our desires but rather from falling short of them, denying them their full expression and, instead, cathecting them onto the provincial dimensions of objects where desire becomes fixated and engaged in the vicious economic circle of a repetition compulsion. The symptom, then, is the return of the repressed, a rebellion of the inescapable flesh that continues to give itself in a frightening and unwelcomed excess, the uncanny, which threatens a blindness to the ego, a kind of blindness, when followed rather than avoided, that would render the ego properly impotent and help make its return to the flesh. So much time and energy spent hiding, clothing ourselves with the fig leaves of our egos as our eyes are open and filled with the splendor of objects, of bodies rather than flesh, and the enmity within ourselves and between others that emerges as we seek to possess them! As we began this chapter, the points of intersection between Marion’s phenomenology and the field of psychology are not immediately apparent, and much hard work still remains to further establish the possibility of bringing psychological theory toward a proper phenomenological sensibility. Among the many possibilities still before us, one of the most intriguing is the connection between the interiority of the subject, defined in terms of saturated phenomena, and the understanding of intersubjectivity in terms of the gift.

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It is a limitation of this chapter that I have not adequately addressed more explicitly the fundamental role of the other in the formation of subjectivity. Thus, a fecund direction for future work should endeavor to consider the manner in which the other as yet another saturated phenomenon is constitutive of my subjectivity, looking to the concept of the icon as a reformulation of the superego, an introjection of the other who we do not see but whose gaze pierces us with eyes that gives the ability to see again but with a sight that is not our own. Thus the return to blindness is not the final stop on this journey of psychic development. NOTES 1 BG, 10. 2 MM, 11. 3 EP, 75 (italics added). 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Ibid., 1–2. 7 The fourth saturated phenomena of the icon and its relation to the superego will be left aside for now. I speak to this briefly at the end of the chapter. 8 This is certainly not the first attempt to use phenomenology to understand Freudian theory. For other approaches see for example: Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); Jean-Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 9 BG, 199. 10 Ruud Welten, Fenomenologie en beeldverbod bij Emmanuel Levinas en Jean-Luc Marion (Brudel: Damon, 2001), quoted and translated in Christina M. Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 266. 11 Andrew Brook, “Kant and Freud,” in Psychoanalytic Knowledge, ed. Man Cheung Chung and Colin Feltham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 24. 12 Ibid. 13 Alfred I. Tauber, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 118. 14 Brook, “Kant and Freud.” 15 Tauber, Reluctant Philosopher, 118. 16 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1960), 196. 17 BG, 197. 18 Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 298. 19 François Roustang, “A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis,” in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, ed. Michel Henry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), xx.



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20 Husserl was the first within the phenomenological tradition to make the distinction between flesh (Leib) and body (Körper). 21 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1965), 91. 22 Ibid., 98. 23 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 2. 24 IE, 89. 25 Ibid., 92. 26 Henry, Genealogy, 307 (italics added). 27 UR (italics added). 28 IE, 98. 29 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 102. 30 Manoussakis offers an insightful analysis regarding the body’s time as reflected by the experience of hunger. He writes, “Despite satisfying my hunger, in the course of time, I will become hungry again. Hunger and its satisfaction by eating demarcates the before and after of the body’s time.” John Manoussakis, “On St. Augustine’s Body: The Conversion of Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Theology,” in In the Wake of Trauma, ed. Eric Severson, David Goodman, and Brian Becker (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 24. 31 IE, 95. 32 See the following section. 33 Marion writes: “[Forgiveness] always repeats an initial gift, which might have disappeared; and by reviving it, it makes it appear all the more clearly.” NC, 143. Parenthood could serve as another example. 34 Ibid., 87. 35 EP, 119. 36 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1962), 26. 37 BG, 54. 38 Ibid., 61. 39 EP, 116. 40 BG, 84. 41 EP, 115–116. 42 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 80. This is the famous translation, which in the original German is, “Wo es war, soll Ich warden.” This translation is possibly problematic as Lacan has identified and suggested, instead, that Freud meant exactly the opposite of what the English translation indicates. Lacan offers the following translation: “Where it was, I must come into being,” which, for Lacan, highlights “the very truth Freud discovered,” that of the “self’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself.” Jacques Lacan, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), 435. 43 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1977), 503 (italics added). 44 IE, 87 (italics added). 45 Ibid., 100. 46 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 71.

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47 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 48 Lacan later takes up this idea and claims that the uncanny is the royal road to the origin of anxiety: the signal of the real, as irreducible to any signifier. 49 IE, 204. 50 Ibid., 61 (italics added). 51 Ibid., 204. 52 This diverges from Lacanian thought. For Lacan, the infant is born fragmented due to its uncoordinated and undeveloped body and it receives an illusion of wholeness by being mirrored. However, what is mirrored back during the mirror stage, an otherwise supportive notion for ego as idol, is not the image of the whole body, as Lacan states, but a partial image of the body that is identified as the whole. The illusion formed during the mirror stage results from the way we learn to identify the whole in a part of the body, an objectification that leads to an alienation from the flesh and thereby producing a fragmented body. As such, fragmentation comes later than Lacan indicates. This does not, however, mean that wholeness, a metaphysical concept, precedes fragmentation as the flesh cannot be a whole for it gives itself as an excess that no whole can contain. For Lacan’s view see: Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brook, Andrew. “Kant and Freud.” In Psychoanalytic Knowledge, edited by Man Cheung Chung and Colin Feltham. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1962. Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965. Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960. Gschwandtner, Christina M. Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Henry, Michel. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Douglas Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1957/2006. Manoussakis, John. “On St. Augustine’s Body: The Conversion of Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Theology.” In In the Wake of Trauma, edited by Eric



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Severson, David Goodman, and Brian Becker. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing.” In The Journal of Religion 85 (2005): 1–24. Marion, Jean-Luc. Negative Certitudes. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Understanding Revelation: A Phenomenological Re-Appropriation.” Second of the Gifford Lectures, Unpublished, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hKZdIP0GOxs. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Roustang, François. “A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis.” In The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, edited by Michel Henry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existential Psychoanalysis. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1996. Tauber, Alfred I. Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Welten, Ruud. Fenomenologie en beeldverbod bij Emmanuel Levinas en Jean-Luc Marion. Brudel: Damon, 2001.

Index

adoration, 188 – 210 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 66, 197, 218, 235 Aristotle, 13 – 22, 99, 156 – 57 Augustine, 16, 54 – 57, 60, 65 – 75, 160, 181 – 85, 194 – 95, 199, 207 – 9, 215, 221, 223, 236, 239 – 44 Blanchot, Maurice, 13, 21, 153 – 54, 156, 159, 161, 162, 164 boredom, 20, 33, 91, 157 – 59, 175, 177 – 79, 240 – 41 categorial intuition, 15, 79, 80 – 85 cogito. See ego Dasein, 15, 33, 35, 42, 91, 97, 125, 157, 159, 160, 188, 235 Denys the Areopagite, 17, 88, 96, 218 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 17, 21, 22, 73, 82, 88, 89, 96, 98, 101, 102, 158, 160, 162, 198 Descartes, René, 17, 18, 28 – 30, 41, 56, 57 – 62, 65 – 69, 87, 190 – 95, 197, 201, 208, 209, 219, 239, 245 – 47 Eckhart, Meister, 219 ego, 21, 28, 32, 35, 39 – 43, 56, 59, 65 – 71, 73, 75, 116, 125, 135, 137,

142, 158, 180, 181, 192 – 95, 208, 209, 220, 223, 232 – 36, 238, 245, 247, 252 – 64 epoché, 27, 43, 62, 247 event, 19, 36, 43, 89 – 92, 95, 98, 100 – 103, 143, 146, 151, 206, 221, 227, 237, 239, 244, 252, 253, 257 – 58 face, 42, 43, 52, 115, 117, 125, 145, 196, 208, 224 – 26, 237 fatherhood. See paternity Flaubert, Gustave, 151 – 52, 160 – 61, 164 Freud, Sigmund, 252 – 64 gift, 32, 38, 43, 65, 69, 73 – 75, 87 – 103, 115, 139, 152, 175, 176, 180 – 82, 184 – 85, 189, 194 – 96, 198 – 201, 203, 206 – 7, 220, 222 – 28, 235 – 37, 245, 248, 259, 263 givenness, 18 – 21, 28, 31 – 34, 38, 40 – 41, 44, 68 – 71, 75, 79 – 85, 87 – 91, 96, 115, 118, 125, 131, 139, 156, 158 – 60, 162, 182, 196, 200 – 202, 204, 221 – 24, 228, 236, 236, 243, 245, 253, 258, 260 glory, 113, 115, 196, 197, 225 God, 15, 17, 18, 35, 52, 54 – 57, 61, 62, 67, 68, 73 – 75, 91 – 95, 97, 98, 100, 269

270

Index

102, 110, 112, 114, 123, 124, 131, 132, 144 – 46, 158, 176, 179, 184, 185, 188 – 202, 205 – 9, 218, 219, 221 – 27, 237, 239, 243 grace, 56, 65 – 75, 164, 184, 193, 195, 206, 209 Gregory of Nyssa, 198 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 43, 57, 58, 93, 155, 218, 219 Heidegger, Martin, 13 – 23, 29, 32, 33, 37, 41, 42, 68, 82, 83, 88 – 91, 96 – 100, 102, 125, 129, 140, 152, 155 – 61, 164, 176, 177, 179, 188, 197, 219, 222, 235, 247 Hill, Geoffrey, 18, 162 – 65 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 88, 96, 98 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 16, 18 horizon, 1 – 4, 6 – 12 passim, 32, 33, 41, 51, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 74, 80, 85, 89, 97, 100, 117, 119, 125, 130, 131, 140, 145, 159, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 199, 213n75, 224, 228, 234, 235, 253, 258 Husserl, Edmund, 13 – 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 30 – 33, 37, 39 – 43, 54, 57, 58, 68, 79 – 85, 90, 125, 129, 130 – 32, 140, 141, 152, 154 – 61, 164, 179, 219 – 22, 227, 228, 235, 245, 247 icon, 88, 99, 101, 123 – 32, 135, 145, 176, 195 – 97, 200, 201, 205, 209, 224 – 28, 254, 264 idol, 7, 11, 94, 123 – 32, 135, 145, 196, 197, 224 – 28, 231, 253, 254, 260, 262, 263, 266n52; idolatrous, 9, 88, 176, 179, 188, 191, 192, 198, 203, 226; idolatry, 132n15, 176, 188, 192, 196, 197, 199, 200, 224, 225, 226, 227; non-idolatrous, 191, 197 infinite, 10, 21, 31, 61, 74, 112, 113, 115, 117, 124, 125, 132, 191, 192, 193, 195, 224, 225, 226, 227, 247

intuition, 6, 15, 19, 30, 31, 32, 72, 73, 74, 79 – 84, 85n5, 85nn13 – 14, 86n23, 151, 152, 156, 161, 163, 199, 227, 249n20, 256, 262, 263 invisibility, 9, 10, 11, 127, 215n103, 221, 224 – 28 Janicaud, Dominique, 46n36, 66, 91 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 29, 30, 41, 65, 66, 67, 69 – 75, 76nn34 – 35, 92, 93, 141, 155, 219, 235, 253, 254, 255, 262; Kantian, 11, 28, 37, 69, 70, 83, 167n55, 254, 255, 256, 262 Kierkegaard, Søren, 53, 58, 61, 65, 66, 73, 74, 192, 218, 219, 234 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 29, 191, 192 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 7, 21, 22, 37, 42, 58, 88, 91, 96, 98 – 103, 109 – 19, 119n1, 120n2, 120n5, 125, 133n29, 165 – 66n20, 229n31, 254; Levinasian, 6, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104n60, 116, 125, 136 literature, 2, 6, 8, 18, 111, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 161, 166n27 logos, 9, 10, 92, 93, 221, 223 love, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22, 51 – 62, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77n49, 92, 112, 114, 115 – 18, 120n1, 135 – 48, 148n22, 152 – 54, 160 – 64, 175, 176, 179, 180 – 85, 186n26, 189, 193 – 97, 200 – 204, 206, 209, 211n29, 213nn83 – 85, 214n99, 214 – 15n103, 215nn107 – 10, 231 – 35, 237, 239, 245, 247, 248, 252; beloved(s), 115, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 158, 161, 163, 164, 181, 182, 183, 185, 215n110; lover(s), 115, 116, 117, 118, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 152, 153, 154, 161, 163, 215n110, 235, 244; self-love, 43, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74



Index 271

memory, 5, 14, 19, 51 – 63, 140, 161, 163, 165, 203, 243 – 45, 249n20 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 13, 16, 21, 27, 44n1, 58 Milbank, John, 138 – 39, 144, 146 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 111, 120n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88, 94, 95, 98, 102, 197; Nietzschean, 6, 94, 97, 188 Nygren, Anders, 69 onto-theology, 17, 75, 88, 92, 94, 129, 176, 219, 228 ontotheology. See onto-theology onto-theo-logical. See onto-theology paternity, 6, 92, 96 – 102, 104n60, 109, 120n2 Pauline, 10, 96, 221, 222, 224, 225; Saint Paul, 9, 218, 221 – 29 Plato, 5, 14, 51 – 53, 56, 60, 62, 114, 153, 157; Neo-Platonic, 56, 218; Platonic, 53, 56, 163, 188; Platonist, 162, 163; post-Platonic, 56 Plotinus, 5, 51, 53, 56, 60, 61 reduction, 3, 4, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23n7, 24n16, 27 – 43, 63n7, 68, 70, 82, 90, 91, 130, 135, 141, 142, 152 – 63 passim, 179, 180, 241, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247, 258; egoic, 10,

234, 239; eidetic, 16, 27, 155; erotic, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 68, 70, 74, 116, 117, 118, 135 – 48 passim, 160, 179, 180 – 81, 182, 184, 186n26, 208, 232 – 33, 234, 234, 235, 244; ethical, 42, 43; infinite, 21, 159; third, 6, 20, 68, 79, 87, 91, 125, 158, 159; transcendental, 16, 27, 28, 29, 39, 42, 90 Ricoeur, Paul, 21, 22, 27, 57, 58 Rimbaud, Arthur, 10, 236, 237, 239, 240, 245, 247, 248 Romano, Claude, 21, 27, 82, 119 saturated phenomenon or phenomena, 3, 8, 10, 11, 19, 32, 58, 72, 73, 137, 139, 145, 152, 182, 192, 200 – 205, 215n105, 218, 221, 228, 235 – 36, 252 – 59, 263, 264; phenomenality, 141, 161 theology, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 17, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76nn32 – 34, 91, 92, 109, 125, 126, 161, 164, 176, 179, 189, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210nn12 – 18, 213n75, 214n103, 218 – 20, 228n4 vanity, 8, 9, 118, 135, 141, 142, 145, 175 – 85, 186n26, 197, 239 – 41, 250n29

About the Contributors

Rachel Bath is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Emory University, in Atlanta, GA. Her research focuses on phenomenology and critical phenomenology, with an emphasis on topics of embodiment, temporality, emotion, and lived worlds. She is author of publications on anticipatory grief, and grieving as an active process of becoming ourselves. Brian Becker is associate professor of neuropsychology and assistant chair in the division of Psychology & Applied Therapies at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He obtained his PhD in clinical psychology and MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. His research focuses on the “theological turn” in French phenomenology and its implications for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. He is coeditor of three book volumes: In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other (Duquesne, 2016), Critical and Theoretical Perspectives in Psychology: Dialogues at the Edge of American Psychological Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Unconscious Incarnations: The Body in Phenomenology & Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018). Antonio Calcagno is professor of philosophy and the co-director of the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy at King’s University College, London, Canada. He is the author of Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence (1998), Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (2007), The Philosophy of Edith Stein (2007), and Lived Experience from the Inside Out: Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein (2014). Ryan Coyne is associate professor of the philosophy of religions and theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of 273

274

About the Contributors

Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at the University of Tromsø and the coordinator for the English Literature section. She is the author of Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed. 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013), and The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), which explores the relevance of Jean-Luc Marion’s erotic phenomenon for literary theory. Her grants and awards have included a Fulbright professorship, two NEH awards, and a Distinguished Professor designation for teaching. Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches continental philosophy of religion at Fordham University. She is author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Indiana, 2007), Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in JeanLuc Marion (Indiana, 2014), Marion and Theology (T&T Clark, 2016), and articles on Marion’s work and that of other contemporary French thinkers. She has also translated several of Marion’s articles and books (On the Ego and on God, The Visible and the Revealed, Believing in Order to See, The Rigor of Things, On Descartes’ Passive Thought). Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds professorships in the Department of English and the Department of French. He is the editor of Jean-Luc Marion’s The Essential Writings (2013). His recent scholarly books include Kingdoms of God (2014) and Poetry and Revelation (2017). His poetry is gathered in Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (2015) and Barefoot (2018). Jeffrey L. Kosky is professor in the Department of Religion at Washington & Lee University. He is the author of Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity (University of Chicago Press) and Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (Indiana University Press). He is also the translator of works by Jean-Luc Marion, including In the Self’s Place: The Approach of St. Augustine (Stanford University Press), Being Given (University of Chicago Press), and On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism (University of Chicago Press). Kathryn Lawson is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Having attended the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University for a master’s degree, she has also attended summer schools, including The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University to study vitalism with Branka Arsic and Tilburg University’s Philosophy Summer School to study nihilism with Simon Critchley. Kathryn



About the Contributors 275

Lawson’s work focuses on continental philosophy and religion, with emphases on Eastern religious thought, temporality, and ethics. She has a forthcoming chapter in Richard Kearney’s The Art of Anatheism (also with Rowman and Littlefield). Stephen E. Lewis is Professor and chair of English at the Franciscan University of Steubenville (USA). He teaches a variety of periods and figures in British and American literature, and writes about modern and contemporary American, British, and French literature, and modern philosophy and Christianity. He has translated several books by Jean-Luc Marion, including The Erotic Phenomenon, Negative Certainties, and Givenness and Revelation. Steve G. Lofts is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University and co-director of the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy. Dr. Lofts holds a PhD from Louvainla-Neuve, Belgium, and was a Humboldt Fellow. He is the author of A “Repetition” of Modernity (2001), as well as articles on Cassirer. He has also translated several works of Cassirer, including The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology and The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Jean-Luc Marion is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University Paris IV (La Sorbonne), Professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and holds the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Chair of Catholic Studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In 2008, he was elected a member of the Académie Française. He is winner of the Prix Charles Lambert de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques (1977), the 1992 Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française, and the 2008 Karl-Jaspers Preis. He also won the Humboldt-Stiftung Prize in 2012. He was made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, in 2010. In 2014, Jean-Luc Marion gave the Gifford Lectures. Jean-Luc Marion’s work provides both a philosophical and theological treatment of questions about the nature of God and His relation to the created world and human beings. Engaging contemporary French and German philosophy, especially phenomenology, Marion thinks God in terms of a pragmatic theology of absence. He considers God as a saturated phenomenon that exceeds the structures of mind, consciousness, and intentionality. Understood as excess, God cannot be seen, known, or spoken: God is an absence that breaches the horizons of our own thinking and being. Marion’s later works focus on rethinking the impact of this notion of God on the nature of love, especially love for God and neighbor.

276

About the Contributors

Jodie McNeilly is an Australian-based researcher and teacher of philosophy. She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney in humanities and is currently completing a second PhD on Husserl and religious belief at the Australian Catholic University. She is a choreographer of contemporary dance who also reviews dance and film for the Australian, Asian, and European markets. Felix Ó Murchadha is Professor in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is author of The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (Bloomsbury, 2012), A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (Indiana University Press, 2013), and numerous articles and chapters on Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Marion, as well as on the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of violence. Ugo Perone is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy, and now holds the Romano Guardini Chair at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His books include: Modernità e memoria (1987), Le passioni del finito (1994) (German translation, Endlichkeit. Von Grenzen und Passionen), Nonostante il soggetto (1995) (German translation Trotzt/dem Subjekt), Il presente possibile (2005) (English translation, The Possible Present), La verità del sentimento (2008), Ripensare il sentimento (2014), L’essenza della religione (2015), Il racconto della filosofia (2016) (Portuguese translation in preparation). Ugo Perone is also the editor of J.L. Marion, Dialogo con l’amore (2007). Pierre-Jean Renaudie is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Lyon (France). He earned his PhD from Paris-Sorbonne University, where he taught philosophy for eight years. From 2013 to 2017, he was appointed as an FCT postdoctoral researcher and joined the Mind Language and Action Group (MLAG) at the University of Porto (Portugal). He is the author of Husserl et les catégories. Langage, pensée et perception (2015), and the coauthor of Phénoménologies de la matière (2017). He is an Honorary Fellow at Deakin University, Melbourne (Australia). Jennifer E. Rosato, PhD, has published articles on various figures in recent French philosophy, including Emmanuel Lévinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. She is especially interested in Marion’s philosophical anthropology. Jennifer Rosato completed her degree in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and currently teaches at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California.



About the Contributors 277

Claudio Tarditi is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Turin, Invited Professor at the Salesian Institute of Turin (IUSTO), and a member of the Husserl Circle. He conducted research at the Radboud University of Nijmegen and Université Catholique de Louvain. His publications include Con e oltre la fenomenologia (2008), and “Is Ontology the Last Form of Idolatry? A Dialogue between Heidegger and Marion” (in A. Cimino, G.-J. van der Heiden, eds., Rethinking Faith: Heidegger between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein 2017).