Revealing the Invisible: Henry and Marion on Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetics is a central topic in the works of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry. While Henry focuses on abstract art (especially Kandinsky), Marion’s writings range over the history of art, including analyses of Courbet, Rothko, and Klee. This article examines their strikingly similar aesthetic theories and shows how they are grounded in a phenomenological claim about the relation between invisible and visible, hence about phenomenality itself. The artist becomes a paradigm for phenomenological receptivity in both thinkers, and art is assigned a quasi-salvific function. This raises several important questions about their theories of art.