Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics

3 The Theory of Saturated Phenomena

3 The Theory of Saturated Phenomena Marion’s claims about givenness and the self of the phenomenon culminate in his new category of ‘‘saturated’’ phenomena. According to Marion , some phenomena give more intuition than is needed to fill a subject’s intention. Such phenomena are ‘‘saturated’’ with intention, and exceed any concepts or limiting horizons that a constituting subject could impose upon them. Marion describes five possible types of saturated phenomenon (four corresponding to the divisions of Kant’s table of categories ; and one that encompasses all four, and is thus ‘‘saturated to the second degree’’), and then presents a ‘‘figure’’ as an example of each type (events, paintings, flesh, the face, and ‘‘revelation’’). Marion develops his concept of saturated phenomena across three main texts. He first proposed the theory of saturated phenomena in an essay entitled ‘‘The Saturated Phenomenon’’ (1992).1 A revised version of this essay forms part of Being Given (1997), in which he gives his most complete account of the theory of saturated phenomena. Finally, in a collection entitled In Excess (2001), Marion presents a series of studies, each of which is an extended account of one of the five figures of saturated phenomena that he proposes in Being Given. At first glance, Marion’s texts give the impression that saturated phenomena are an exceptional class of phenomena, and limited to a region at the margins of phenomenality. Indeed, in Marion’s early texts, saturated phenomena are introduced as a way of making space in philosophy for specifically religious phenomena.2 Even in his later texts where Marion 57 omits this religious context, the examples of saturated phenomena that he chooses are somewhat obscure, and might be regarded as no more than interesting curiosities. This impression of the exceptional status of saturated phenomena is further strengthened by Marion’s description of saturated phenomena as part of his project to extend phenomenality ‘‘as far as possible’’—an ambition that he justifies by an injunction: ‘‘In phenomenology , even the least possibility obliges’’ (BG 199/279–80).3 However, further consideration calls this initial impression into question . Although Marion does recognize that saturated phenomena are unusual , he sharply criticizes the ‘‘metaphysical’’ view that regards them as ‘‘an exceptional (indeed eccentric) case of phenomenality’’ (BG 226/ 316).4 Far from accepting that the unusual is perforce exceptional, Marion argues that in fact ordinary, everyday phenomena should be regarded as the exception because they are the ones in which phenomenality is distorted . In his view, phenomena mostly appear as objects, constituted by a transcendental ego, and therefore reduced to something other than themselves —‘‘put at one’s disposal for and by thought, that governs them exhaustively ’’ (IE 30*/35). When a phenomenon is manifested in this way, its ‘‘self’’ is hidden, and ‘‘the movement by which the phenomenon gives itself’’ remains inaccessible (IE 31/36). Thus, in most instances, the movement of self-giving that gives rise to phenomenality is obscured. In the case of a saturated phenomenon, its excess of intuition prevents it from being limited by a subject or a horizon.5 Such a phenomenon, which is ‘‘unconditioned (by its horizon) and irreducible (to an I),’’ is given simply as itself, and is therefore ‘‘a phenomenon par excellence’’ (BG 189/265)—a privileged instance of the givenness of phenomena. Marion concludes that saturated phenomena give a crucial insight into phenomenality in general because they disclose ‘‘the movement by which the phenomenon gives itself’’ (IE 31/36). This capacity to disclose givenness leads Marion to propose saturated phenomena as the paradigm for understanding all phenomena: My entire project, by contrast [to metaphysics], aims to think the common-law phenomenon, and through it the poor phenomenon, on the basis of the paradigm of the saturated phenomenon, of which the former two offer only weakened variants, and from which they derive by progressive diminishment. For the saturated phenomenon does not give itself apart from the norm, by way of exception to the definition of phenomenality. . . . What metaphysics rules out as an exception (the saturated paradox), phenomenology here takes for its norm—every phenomenon shows itself in the measure (or the lack 58 The Theory of Saturated Phenomena of measure) to which it gives itself. To be sure, not all phenomena involve saturated phenomena, but all saturated phenomena accomplish the one and only paradigm of phenomenality. Better, they alone allow it to be illustrated. . . . The saturated phenomenon in...