Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (review)

We can all be very grateful to the work done by Jeffrey L. Kosky for this superb translation of Marion's Étant donné (1997). Marion is not an easy read in French. While not an experimental and avant-garde writer such as Derrida or Irigaray, his sentences are intricate, elusive, and difficult. The very titles of his books are often—like this one—multileveled word plays. He is a tantalizingly subtle reader of other texts, especially of Descartes, on whom he is an international authority, making everything turn on the finest nuances, and an equally crafty and sophisticated expositor of his own views. So it is a daunting charge to get all this into English. Kosky, who is an experienced translator of Marion and did graduate work with him at Chicago, has done a splendid job.

Marion is the central figure in the new phenomenology in France, a group of Catholic thinkers working in the phenomenology of religion. Their work, which is being steadily translated into English, is an important part of the turn toward religion in recent continental philosophy, a movement that can be traced back to Levinas. Marion's project is to extend phenomenology beyond the garden variety and quotidian phenomena upon which human reason can get a decent grip that preoccupied traditional (especially Husserlian) phenomenology. These "handicapped" phenomena (321) pale in comparison with the more overwhelming phenomena—like the work of art, the experience of love, or an historical event such as the Holocaust (or maybe "nine-eleven")—phenomena that we have trouble conceptualizing and objectifying, that land on us and take us by surprise. The latter he calls "saturated phenomenon," which he presents as a radicalization of Husserl's principle of "givenness"—to accept phenomena just as they give themselves from themselves. The expression arises from a clever critique of Husserl for compromising this principle. Confining himself to "meant intentions" that are never completely "fulfilled" (I know what "Budapest" means but I have never "seen" it), Husserl neglects richer phenomena whose fulfilling givenness overwhelms or "saturates" their intentions (or concepts).

The saturated phenomenon par excellence is the God of mystical theology, to which we were earlier introduced in God Without Being (1976), the first major work of Marion to appear in English. That book reached an unapologetically apologetic (theological) conclusion—the only way to overcome the God of metaphysics and find the truly divine God is Revealed theology. Since then, Marion has regained his confidence in philosophy, but of a specifically non-metaphysical sort—phenomenology—and has set about expounding his work as a rigorous phenomenology. If the only way to be true to God was to abandon philosophy for theology in God without Being, now the only way for philosophy to be true to God is to abandon metaphysics for phenomenology. Beyond that, the only way for phenomenology to be true to phenomenology itself is to take up saturated phenomena—such as God. This is not without its critics. In The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology, the late Dominique Janicaud complained that phenomenology here has become imperious, having been hijacked by theology and forced to serve theological purposes beyond its methodological limits.

The account of the saturated phenomenon is presented in a trilogy of which Being Given is the centerpiece. The stage is set for the analysis by Reduction and Givenness (1989), where Marion works out an innovative theory of the "three reductions" by means of a microreading of Husserl and Heidegger. "Givenness" is the translation of donation, which is the French translation of Husserl's Gegebenheit. In French and English, "donation" (like "creation") can mean either the act of giving (or creating) or the donation (or creation) that results from the act. So the obvious translation of donation into English is "donation." But Marion himself prefers "givenness," because this Anglo-Saxon word is true to Husserl's German term, but this cuts off the double movement of the word. Kosky's decision is made in...