Ontotheological Turnings?: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology

3. From the Subject to the ‘Adonné’

48 Ontotheological Turnings? a place in the Absolute itself” (ibid.) and that, in Christ’s abandonment on the Cross, “God undergoes the distance that constitutes the historical and mundane mode with which human beings live their distance to God” (NT, 193). Consider also the fact that, in both Note sur le temps and Experience and the Absolute, one finds the idea that “in resurrecting the Crucified, God also puts himself in a position of debt to whoever has reconciled himself through his Cross” (EA, 138–39; NT, 209). It is this position of debt that deserves our attention here, for wherever there is a debtor, there is correspondingly a creditor. But if the world can appear as a creditor over and against the Absolute, should one not at the same time admit that the world can interpret itself as a demand for a beyond of being? Is such a demand, as Lacoste suggests, only the demand of satisfaction of the promise of a resurrection, or is it likewise the demand of the one that, confronted with the radicality of evil or the brutality of one’s own nonexperience, can no longer be satisfied with a call to patience? To conceive of such a demand, one should perhaps recontextualize the relation between the eschatological blessings already granted and the eschatological blessings that still remain within the economy of the promise (cf. EA, 139). Lacoste envisions this relation between these blessings somewhat as an adequation, in that the already lived reconciliation in this world will be accompanied with the perennial joy of beatitude in the life to come, so as to make the liturgical experience instead of being solely “a veritable tragedy for consciousness” (EA, 143), an instance of joy and hope. However, one should perhaps question this adequation between the grace already received and the grace still to come on the christological basis Lacoste himself advances, for it is not at all sure whether the life to come or beatitude is to be conceived of as a verification of the knowledge of faith.35 It is in this thought of an adequation of the grace received and the grace to come that one might suspect not only a form of ontotheology at the heart of theology but also, from the perspective of theology itself, a form of hybris—in the sense of an appropriation of the divine. Therefore, one might want to cling onto a different liturgical experience than the one Lacoste has in mind by pointing, not to the verification of faith’s knowledge, but rather to the ever-present possibility of its falsification. It is in this sense that one might apply Lacoste’s description of “an ignorance proper to the Messiah” (NT, 174). Christ’s cry on the cross indeed constitutes the climax of the nonexperience. Its radical nonexperience should, however, not be interpreted in an antitheological fashion, for, as Lacoste argues, one does not speak to someone who does not exist (NT, 182; EA, 191). It is nevertheless important to note that, for 49 Phenomenology, Liturgy, and Metaphysics a liturgical experience that wants to be an imitatio Christi, this ignorance could be instructive, for it is, as Lacoste suggests, precisely an ignorance of the exact nature of God’s coming (parousia): “he expected the apocalypse, but the history of the world continued; he expected the Kingdom, and it is the Church that has come” (NT, 174). Such a falsification, of course, is not without consequences for the question of salvation, for if one avoids the (ontotheological) adequation of the grace received and the grace to come, one could understand the demand that arises from out of the world, not as something still standing out towards its fulfilment, but rather as an unredeemedness sui generis—as if something in man resists redemption. Chapter Three From the Subject to the ‘Adonné’ Jean-Luc Marion In this chapter, I will present Marion’s concept of ‘subjectivity’—summed up in his term adonné. It may be clear that Marion’s thinking of givenness requires something other than a transcendental subject, since this subject, prior to all reality as it is, constitutes this reality and determines which sense to be given to it (cf. Husserl’s ‘Sinngebung’). The adonné is no spectator as is the transcendental subject, quietly constituting its phenomena. If phenomena give themselves from their selves as their selves—a conception of the ‘given phenomenon’ that I will...