-
In Place of a Response
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In Place of a Response R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y Interviewed by Mark Manolopoulos MANOLOPOULOS: In your debate with Derrida and Marion, ‘‘On the Gift’’ (Villanova, 1997), you ask the question ‘‘Is there a Christian philosophy of the gift?’’1 Do you think either Derrida or Marion provides handy directions? Could you summarize or interpret their insights ? And whose argument do you personally find more persuasive? KEARNEY: They did avoid the question. In Derrida’s case that is logical because he will always—reasonably, for a deconstructionist— try to avoid tying the messianicity of the gift to any specific messianism as such, be it Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other kind. So it makes sense for him not to engage in that debate per se because he would say something like ‘‘That’s beyond my competence. I’m not a Christian. ‘I rightly pass for an atheist.’2 I respect Christianity. I’m fascinated by their theological and philosophical expressions of the notion of the gift—I learn from it—but it’s not my thing.’’ Marion I find a little bit more perplexing in this regard because he is a Christian philosopher. He has talked about ‘‘Eucharistic hermeneutics’’ in God Without Being.3 Christ is a ‘‘saturated phenomenon’’ for Marion.4 But Marion is going through a phase—and this was evident at both Villanova conferences (1997 and 2003)—where he doesn’t want to be labeled as a ‘‘Christian philosopher’’—and certainly not as a Christian theologian. He wants to be a phenomenologist. So, being true—at least to some extent—to Husserl’s phenomenology as a uni365 versal science, he wants to be independent of presuppositions regarding this or that particular theological revelation: Christian, Jewish, or otherwise. I think that’s why in his essays on ‘‘the saturated phenomenon ,’’ Marion goes back to Kant. The Kantian sublime offers a way into the saturated phenomenon, as does the notion of the gift or donation, which—like Husserlian phenomenology—ostensibly precedes the question of theological confession and denomination. And I think Marion wants to retreat to that position so that he won’t be labeled a Christian apologist—which I think he is. I think he’s a Christian thinker who’s trying not to be one. Personally, my own response here would be to say that there are two ways of doing philosophy —and both are equally valid. One is to begin with certain theological and religious presuppositions, with the life of faith and conviction. The other is to operate a phenomenological reduction, where you say, ‘‘We’re not going to raise theological issues here.’’ The latter follows the basic Husserlian and Heideggerian line. In his Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger says something like ‘‘The answer to the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing ?’—if you fail to bracket out theology—is ‘because God created the world.’’’5 But if you bracket it out, you don’t begin with theological presuppositions—and that bracketing is what Husserl does, what Heidegger does, and what Derrida does. I think Marion mixes the two, although in Being Given and the Villanova exchange with Derrida I suspect he is trying to get back to a kind of pure phenomenology . He keeps saying: ‘‘I’m a phenomenologist! I’m doing phenomenology, not theology!’’ But the lady doth protest too much. Then there is the other way of doing phenomenology in dialogue with theology, which doesn’t bracket it out but half-suspends it. We might call this a quasi-theological phenomenology or a quasi-phenomenological theology. In other words, one acknowledges that there’s a certain hybridity, but one doesn’t want to presuppose straight off which comes first: the giving of the gift as a phenomenological event or the divine creation of the world as source of all gifts. This allows for a certain ambiguous intermeshing, intermixing, crossweaving . What Merleau-Ponty described as a chiasmic interlacing. And it seems to me that that’s perfectly legitimate. Even though it is methodologically more complex and more ambivalent than the Husserlian move of saying ‘‘Bracket out all political, theological, ideological , cultural presuppositions,’’ it is actually truer to life because life is the natural attitude. And the natural attitude is infused with presuppositions . And it includes both (a) experiences of the gift as pure gift 366 Richard Kearney [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:15 GMT) and (b) experiences of...