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102 Ontotheological Turnings? as ontotheology flees from contingency and finitude, Levinas has in mind a positive evaluation of both the finite—the finite, living, and embodied subject—and the infinite: the creature’s finitude or its ‘separation’—both capable of atheism and marked by the transcendent—belongs to the glory of the infinite. Levinas is quite clear on this: “Life is not comprehensible simply as a diminution, a fall [. . .]. The individual and the personal are necessary for Infinity to be able to be produced as infinite” (TI, 218). If this is the case, one cannot but be surprised by the recurrence of the thought of finitude and materiality as being, in one way or another, inferior to or a diminution of the transcendent. For Lacoste, we recall, the painful nonexperience of the believer is summoned to patience. Of course, in this way the nonexperience always points to an absolute future in which it will be liberated from its incompleteness. Levinas’ view also helps to explain Marion’s negative appraisal of (worldly) visibility, for it might be precisely this unavowed negation of immanence that might lie at the root of the problems of the concept of a reversal of intentionality. In this respect, it is noteworthy that our analysis of Lacoste’s work came up with a similar kind of dialectics, just as much as Marion sets off the saturated phenomenon over and against the ordinary object, so too we have yet to understand how Lacoste plays out the liturgical experience over and against (Heideggerian) being-in-the-world. Verhack, for instance, has argued that underlying Lacoste’s distinction between the liturgy and the world is a misunderstanding of Heidegger’s account of factical being-in-the-world: whereas for Heidegger our factical relation to the world is always and already an ecstatic opening of and towards the world, Lacoste tends, to interpret “human beings’ confrontation [. . .] with the world [as] the consciousness of a limit which encloses one’s own ‘inherence.’ ”44 Therefore, one must note that, just as Marion could place the saturated phenomenon next to the ‘visual prison’ of objectivity, so too must Lacoste distinguish in all too rigid a manner between the ecstatic relation coram Deo and the disenchanted, since closed, factical being-in-the-world, for it might be that the reversal of intentionality simply points to the fact that such a downplaying of immanence must be presupposed in order to delineate a region (of saturated phenomena, of the liturgical relation) which perpetually escapes the imprisonment and the closedness of worldly immanence. On this account, it would thus seem that Levinas’ account of transcendence is better armed towards the criticism of a reversal I am raising here against Lacoste and Marion. Nevertheless, one should not forget that it is Marion who, already in his earlier work, raised a similar question towards 103 On Miracles and Metaphysics the thought of Levinas, towards the Levinas of Totality and Infinity that is.45 It is, according to Marion, Levinas’ conception of the Saying—at the time of Otherwise than Being— that “cannot be confused any longer with a reversal of the terms inside the ontological difference to the benefit of beings.”46 Such a confusion was indeed addressed by Marion’s The Idol and Distance in which he argued, roughly, that the Other in Levinas came to occupy the position of a privileged being and that such a move would reinforce metaphysical reasoning rather than constituting a break-through as regards its overcoming.47 Marion thus seems to point to the problem that I already perceived in Marion’s own work and in that of Lacoste: just as givenness and God would come to occupy the position of an autonomous instance, so too the Other in Levinas would play the role of a privileged being, which accounts for all other beings and grounds their manner of being in advance. The fact that I ‘am’ in face of the other stems from the very existence of the highest being which is the Other. But this Other would also determine the ‘what’ of my being in its entirety, my ‘way of being’ as it were: my being is in its entirety directed toward the attending to the Other. One should note, however, that Marion has largely abandoned this criticism of Levinas later in his work. For this, it is important to note just what is at issue here. In The Idol and Distance, Marion is seeking a way to surpass the ontological...

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