-
5. The Apparent in the Darkness: Evaluating Marion’s Apophatic Phenomenology
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
five The Apparent in the Darkness: Evaluating Marion’s Apophatic Phenomenology Marion’s prose can be obscure. At times such obscurity is unavoidable. Marion plumbs the depths of dark matters: the resistance of given phenomena to objectification, the incomprehensibility of God, the long and deep apophatic traditions of Christianity. Such questions and such retrievals elude the clarity of a bright morning. Yet we must ask: What is hidden in the dark? What lies in the shadows? One can distinguish three different kinds of “darkness” in Marion’s thought: blindness, hiddenness, and invisibility. In this chapter I aim to distinguish between these various strands. First of all, Marion evidences a certain kind of blindness: a blindness to the tensions in his thought as well as a blindness to the different ontologies imported in his retrieval of the Fathers. These two blind spots need to be uncovered and, if possible , illuminated. Second, there is the hiddenness of Gregory of Nyssa in Marion’s writing. As I will argue, were Gregory to become more of an explicit source, Marion might discover a way forward from two crucial problems in his thought: the troubled relation between “pure givenness” and “infinite hermeneutics,” and the lack of clear distinction between “worldly” saturated phenomena and God as the saturated phenomenon par excellence. Gregory might also provide a model for considering bodily and contemplative practices that expand the receptive capacity of l’adonné, a topic thus far underdeveloped by Marion. Third, there is the invisibility of saturation. This invisibility characterizes the “luminous darkness” that nonetheless makes an appearance , one that calls us to respond, to love, and to be transformed. Marion’s attention to such exceptional and excessive experience, his insistence on its philosophical analysis and discussion, guarantees the The Apparent in the Darkness . 131 importance of reading and studying Marion today, despite my critical comments. Blind Spots Unraveling Tensions Part of what is attractive in Marion’s philosophical enterprise is a thought complex and broad enough to elicit criticisms from opposing intellectual camps simultaneously: Marion is both too theological and not theological enough; his phenomenology is too exclusively Christian and also too purely negative, with no real content possible. Marion is both not hermeneutical enough (i.e., he does not give an account of subjective interpretation) and not phenomenological enough (i.e., he does not hold to the strict neutrality of the transcendental view). No one of these criticisms, taken alone, does justice to Marion’s complex thought. However, taken together they highlight the tensions that emerge when his corpus is read as a whole. Is Marion simply inconsistent , or can these tensions be held together in a tight and generative balance ? To answer this question, the different oppositional pressures must be isolated. That Marion’s primary project is phenomenological in that it attempts to return to the “things themselves,” in themselves and from themselves, is indisputable. In other words, the return to the things must include their liberation.1 Marion seeks to free phenomena from all constraints, whether metaphysical or epistemological. This necessitates a radical broadening of the horizon within which phenomena appear, radical to the point of transgressing all horizons (subjective, temporal , spatial) so that all that remains is the “horizon” of the givenness of the phenomenon. Only by removing all horizons does Marion think one might return actually to the things themselves, from and in themselves , as they give themselves. At the same time, the return to the things themselves is a return to all things. A key element of Marion’s revisioning of phenomenology is its refusal to bar the entrance to any phenomena. Thus, he seeks to secure a place for excessive phenomena at a philosophical table dominated by French secularism. This twofold motivation, not in itself self-contradictory, determines his articulation of both a phenomenological method and his central concept—a “reduction to pure givenness” and the “saturated [3.238.79.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:56 GMT) 132 . A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion phenomenon,” respectively—in such a way, however, that tensions arise. On the one hand, in order to secure convincingly that place at the philosophical table, his method must demonstrate a certain level of rigor. It must yield certain and universal results and still claim the valence of “first philosophy” (even if, Marion argues, it is “first” only by virtue of being “last”). But on the other hand, his desire to free phenomena from all constraints directly opposes the former requisite, for here...