Frontmatter

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Givenness and God

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Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

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p. ix

This collection emerged from a symposium held at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, in January 2003. The editors wish to record their profound thanks to the staff and students of the Institute, especially its director, the Rev. Dr. Michael Drumm, and its president, the Rev. Dr. Dermot Lane, for their unstinting support ...

Abbreviations

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pp. xi-xiii

Foreword

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pp. xv-xvi

It is a pleasure for me as President of Mater Dei Institute to welcome the publication of this collection of essays celebrating the work of Jean-Luc Marion. Most of the papers were first delivered in the Mater Dei Institute, a college of Dublin City University, in January 2003, at a conference attended by Marion. It was Marion’s first visit ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-8

Jean-Luc Marion’s body of work has already secured his place among the top rank of twentieth-century philosophers; it seems inconceivable that his reputation will not grow even further in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though equally renowned for his scholarly work on early modern philosophy and on Husserl and ...

Part I: Marion on Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger

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pp. 9-10

Chapter 1: The Conceptual Idolatry of Descartes’s Gray Ontology: An Epistemology ‘‘Without Being’’

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pp. 11-36

As even a cursory glance at the current literature will confirm, the task of investigating the many philosophical and theological questions raised by Jean-Luc Marion’s explorations into the phenomenology of the gift and of givenness (donation) has only begun. Not least of these questions, of course, is the purely formal one of ...

Chapter 2: I Am, I Exist

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pp. 37-46

The aim to lay knowledge on a foundation that is free of doubt is historically associated with the philosophy of Descartes. Moreover, with his observation that only one proposition escapes doubt— namely, the famous cogito, ergo sum: ‘‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’’—it is claimed that Descartes inaugurated a philosophy of ...

Chapter 3: Hubris and Humility: Husserl’s Reduction and Givenness

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pp. 47-68

For more than a decade, Jean-Luc Marion has led us back to Husserl’s writings. The shadow cast by his interpretation serves as a shade that delivers us from an earlier blindness, letting us discriminate much that lay in obscurity. He has helped us to understand Husserlian phenomenology anew, foregrounding as he does the ...

Chapter 4: Glory, Idolatry, Kairos: Revelation and the Ontological Difference in Marion

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pp. 69-86

The terms of the title—glory, idolatry, kairos—are Christian, not Greek, if we understand Greek as the Greek of classical philosophy. Kairos is a Greek word meaning the opportune moment, but prior to Christianity it had little philosophical significance¹; idolatry comes from eidolon, which in Plato means a deceiving image but in ...

Chapter 5: Reduced Phenomena and Unreserved Debts in Marion’s Reading of Heidegger

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pp. 87-98

In the question concerning the necessity of grace from Aquinas’s Summa theologiae we find the following remark: ‘‘The free-will of man is moved by an external principle that stands above the human mind, that is, by God’’ (quod liberum arbitrium hominis moveatur ab aliquo exteriori principio quod est supra mentem humanum, scilicet a Deo; q. 109, art. ...

Part II: Marion: Gift and Reception

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pp. 99-100

Chapter 6: The Reason of the Gift

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pp. 101-134

We give without account.We give without accounting, in every sense of the word. First, because we give without ceasing. We give in the same way we breathe, every moment, in every circumstance, from morning until evening. Not a single day passes without our having given, in one form or another, something to someone, even if we ...

Chapter 7: The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?

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pp. 135-166

Theologians ruminate among inherited concepts and images, seeking to clarify their history and judge it critically. To establish a perspective in which even a single such concept can be brought into question or deconstructed is no easy matter. To bring the entire tradition into perspective and retrieve it in a well-founded way, as Heidegger ...

Chapter 8: Phenomenality in the Middle: Marion, Romana, and the Hermeneutics of the Event

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pp. 167-181

‘‘The Reason of the Gift’’¹ is part of Jean-Luc Marion’s broader phenomenological project, which begins from his critique of the traces of a constituting subject retained by Husserl and Heidegger. While Marion’s phenomenology of givenness (donation) eliminates these traces, it does so only by reducing the subject to a passive recipient ...

Chapter 9: The Dative Subject (and the ‘‘Principle of Principles’’)

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pp. 182-189

Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophical project is largely about being true to phenomenology’s supreme principle—the principle that every originary intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered in intuition be accepted as it presents itself.¹ It is by interrogating this ‘‘principle of principles,’’ by unfolding its full ...

Chapter 10: Marion’s Ambition of Transcendence

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pp. 190-198

The essay that best encapsulates the recent thought of Jean-Luc Marion is, in my opinion, ‘‘The Saturated Phenomenon’’ (SP). Here the author gives an account of what he calls the paradox of an ‘‘impossible’’ phenomenon, one that bedazzles the ego through an excess of intuition over intention. Although this idea has generated a good ...

Part III: Marion and Beyond

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pp. 199-200

Chapter 11: Le phénoméne érotique: Augustinian Resonances in Marion’s Phenomenology of Love

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pp. 201-219

Jean-Luc Marion’s Le phénomène érotique (PE)¹ is not only the culmination of an ongoing and long-standing concern² but, as such, is also the most explicit statement in his oeuvre to date about the sheer primacy of love. Specifically, PE suggests that only in the phénomène croisé, only in erotic love, can one receive the gift of significance that ...

Chapter 12: Hermeneutics of the Possible God

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pp. 220-242

God, if God exists, exists not just for God but also for us. And the manner in which God comes to us, comes to mind, comes to be, and comes to dwell as flesh among us, is deeply informed by the manner in which we think about God—in short, how we interpret, narrate, symbolize, and imagine God. This, I suggest, calls for a philosophical ...

Chapter 13: Giving More

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pp. 243-257

This chapter is an edited transcript of a seminar held at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin, January 2003. ...

Chapter 14: The Absent Threshold: An Eckhartian Afterword

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pp. 258-284

Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophy of God has the excitement, clarity, and danger of something that has issued from the source. On the one hand, it has the imaginative warmth of a poetic sensibility that mines the silence in order to overhear the inner echoes of the transcendent and pierces the visual for tracings on the invisible. On the other, his ...

Notes

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pp. 285-340

Contributors

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pp. 341-344

Index

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pp. 345-346

Other Books in Fordham's Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series

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