BEING JEAN-LUC MARION

CRITIQUE - Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) / Originally published as Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997)

PRÉCIS – The theological turn in French phenomenology … What is it ??? … What does it portend ??? … If not /S/ome-thing Else, then what else ??? … Marion seems to be the exemplar of this ‘new’ thing (not-thing) … Whatever it is, Marion insists it overflows all possible names and is unnameable … Yet this self-same thing (turn) has been appropriated by the Neo-Marxist triumvirate of Agamben, Zizek, and Badiou … Cacciari is still missing in inaction, spending ‘down-time up on Mount Athos’ reading Greek philosophy … Zizek and Badiou seem to want to re-load certain universals (certain abstractions), after the fact, and so to speak … Thus, herein, anyway, a blow-by-blow account of Marion’s seminal Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness -- citations taken primarily from within the fold of “The Given II”, Book IV… And yet, phenomenological ‘erotica’, if you wish (desire) … as compensation for that absent, critical-poetical nothing much at all (which is at risk every day, anyway)  …” … That is, then, embracing the shape, length, color, curve, swerve, tone, call of Things to Come …

I. READING MARION

"Saturated phenomenon" ... to play at the limits of the conditions of phenomenality ... to demolish "horizon[s] of apparition" and impoverished constructs of the "constituting I" (p. 189) ... Marion's Being Given, 2002 [Etant donné, 1997] ... The phenomenological price of minimalism (p. 192) is its reliance on poor phenomenon (weak in intuition) versus full phenomenon (saturated phenomenon) ... and adequation (here and gone), "intuited adumbrations" fail in the near-zero degree ... modalities of nothingness return (after Kant), such that it (minimalia) characterizes the deficiencies of intuition (source of so-called phenomenon) (p. 197) ... With Kant (and Husserl), then, a topology of near hopelessness (things mired in near-empty concepts) ... things forever exiled ("abandoned") by ideality (horizons of pure thought) ... "To the phenomenon supposedly poor in intuition, can't we oppose a phenomenon saturated with intuition?" (p. 197) ... The 'aesthetic idea', or representation according to intuition (without concept, or adequation) ... Here it is a case of "a deficiency of the (lacking) concept, which leaves the (superabundantly given) intuition blind." (p. 198) ... Kant's 'foretaste' of saturated phenomena resides in his negation of things purely given (things inadequate to concepts, or ideal, timeless forms) ...

Kant: "No language fully attains or makes intelligible the aesthetic idea ..." (p. 198) ... Kant: "Representation of the imagination" leads to sensible intuition ... Outside a priori categories, beyond metaphysical causes (and effects), the affective, superabundant 'thing' "plays perfectly 'in its free play.' And this play plays the sublime." (p. 198) ... "For intuition, supposedly 'blind' in the realm of poor or common phenomena, turns out, in a radical phenomenology, to be blinding." (p. 203) ... "Bedazzlement begins when perception crosses its tolerable maximum." (p. 206) ... That is, such things do mostly 'nothing', representing the antithesis of the "interactive commercium", the instrumentalization or relative coordinates substituting for anything authentic ... Cut loose, then, freely floating in time (and out), generating a 'difference that differs' ... generating 'historicity' by remaining mostly absent, provisionally inferred in time ... "Absolute, unique, coming-forward" by degrees (p. 207) ... /S/aturated, another /S/ word ... "In saturation, the I undergoes the disagreement between an at least potential phenomenon and the subjective condition for its experience; and, as a result, it does not constitute an object." (p. 213) ... "The saturated phenomenon refuses to let itself be regarded as an [abject] object [instead an event] precisely because it appears with a multiple and indescribable excess that annuls all effort at constitution [assimilation to an abstract concept] …" (p. 213) ... Therefore, avoiding (voiding) objectness versus objectivity (p. 214) ... Or, it escapes the gaze of the transcendental ego (I), as "irregardable" ... "[T]he gaze keeps [needs] objects [things] in an objected state for the I [eye]." (p. 214) ... Thereafter, Descartes' cogito 'rules' things, and they cannot 'return' (escape) ... The gaze 'guards', 'follows', placing all things in relation to a priori conceptual 'fields' (coordinates of pure thought), except when confronted with the 'exceptional' (saturated phenomenon) ... "In what figure does it appear?" ... The "poor or common phenomenality of objects" is lost, and some-thing else is found (appears, is given ...) (p. 215) ... Hence, there arrives "counter-experience of a non-object" (italics added, p. 215) ...

Apperception gives way to apperception (of motion, affects) … ‘Reification’ of the eye’s (I’s) powerlessness before things that overflow (overrun) time / space coordinates (instrumental reason and its modalities) … “The witness succeeds the I” (p. 217) by “renouncing the first person” … that is, as “simple, luminous witness [… it] lights up as on a control panel” (p. 217) … Analogues: Infinity (Descartes), the Sublime (Kant), internal time … Husserl, and Bergson (perhaps) (pp. 219-220) … No zero-point, no finite origin … pure temporality (time itself) … “Auto-manifestation (giving itself in and from itself)” (p. 222) … Auto-poiesis ??? … 

A path through dispossessed things, “common-law” and “poor” phenomenon … “What metaphysics rules out as an exception (the saturated phenomenon), phenomenology takes for its norm …” (p. 227) … “The saturated phenomenon in the end establishes the truth of all phenomenality because it marks, more than any other phenomenon, the givenness from which it comes. The paradox, understood in the strictest sense [counter to received opinion], no longer runs counter to appearance [is measured by concepts]; it runs with apparition.” (p. 227) … Paradoxes versus objects (paradoxes multiplying paradoxes) … (Skryje, Czech Republic, 05/22/04)

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II. SATURATED, IN TIME

Shall we talk, then, of ‘phenomenal things’ (non-things) that ‘undress’ themselves and ‘offer’ themselves (give themselves over, giving the /S/elf to the self) ??? … Or is this a distortion (denigration / denegation) of saturated phenomenon (even if Marion, in describing types of saturated phenomenon, such as history, also describes seduction … the call … and the response, or refusal …) … And, why not, the Coming-Coming (the Coming One, The Coming Philosophy, etcetera) ??? … What differs in such ‘difference’ (echoing within Marion’s call), from / departing endless deferral, such as with / contra Derrida ??? … Is it not that things (not-things) are always in the process (throes / arms) of coming (thrown toward time, by time) ??? … Coming-forth (and withholding) ??? … Simultaneously arriving and leaving (in con-temporality) ??? … Is the aporia (doubt) only a relic of the de-centered transcendental I (eye), the manufactured self (ego) now (and then) lost to this coming-coming ??? … The proverbial ‘sticky mess’, perhaps … And as such, a fertile (fecund) field (not ground, nor ontology) for Being, opening Being to iteration, extension, and, after Marion, anamorphosis (formal presentation and re-presentation … in time and space …) … Perspectival tricks or the real-real thing ??? … Active, protean, pro-creative, penetrating, saturated, ‘sexed-up’ … 

Thus, a splendid vision of the ‘gifted’ coming-to, coming-with, unfolding, embracing, con-joining, lost and found in / through the looking-glass (time) …

Derrida’s three doors (in Archive Fever) echo / mimic the so-called transcendental logic, the de-naturing reduction of abstractions, circling back (to zero) … A=B, B=C, and therefore D probably (maybe) = A (by way of C) … With Derrida, the universal mathesis collapses because the third door (the nominal fourth ‘form’, coming forth from the first three, interwoven, folded) is also the first, a doubling of beginning / end … Anyway, “Is there a historian of the first door?”, asks Derrida … “Is there a measure on earth?”, asks Holderlin, appropriated by Heidegger, spun more finely by Derrida … Is poiesis capable of showing / answering saturated phenomenon ??? … Is a critical-poetic, sublime analytic a possible Way Out ??? …Or, is every answer (Way Out) a question mark in itself (after all) ??? … Does difference simply rule (measure) the aporias (aporae) of logic and reason ??? … A hellish hermeneutic (rhetorical fire and ice), circling forever ??? … until …

Which is more phantasmatic ??? … Reason or Imagination ??? … What is, after all, an ‘aesthetic idea’ (after Kant) ??? … Things (not-things as objects, but things as phenomenon, complexes / constellations … or, with Lacan, complexes as neuroses) saturated with intuition (sensible, intelligible things then) arrive, in time, sometimes just in time, from outside time (from inside time itself, pure duration … yet also from the past, as echoing tableaux … generative historicities … ‘knotted’ histories …) … Hence to negate everything past (and/or present) is to undo time itself … Universalizing abstractions = the future (which never comes … but appears to call, nonetheless …) … Total flow = total nihilism (nothingness, which comes up short, always) … Total flow, then, is the non-mark of the absolute zero-degree (poverty) of denegation, delimiting nothing at all … thin air … Time deconstructed = nil … Nothing comes from nothing …

A coupling between the given and the gifted (the witness), and never a matter of who comes, but what … in simultaneity … Saturated phenomenon seduces the ‘I’ … lays waste to the eye … bedazzling … Its arrival, in time and space (including, or privileging even, the screen of dark imagination), inhabits (and gives to the self itself, its Self) the ‘moist’, fertile ‘plane’ (crescent) of the representational ‘field’ of imagination (and, yes, cognition)  … waning / waxing … It cognizes (re-cognizes) itself … It (itself, procreating the /S/elf lost-and-found, over time immemorial, of the gifted, the one whom responds / receives … and re-creates) … Into Being enters Becoming (and vice versa), deferring the explosion (outburst) of what comes, slowly penetrating and preparing Coming-forth … That is all, except /S/ does not = Sex … IT surpasses it (IT dwarfing ‘it’ …) … And yet, phenomenological ‘erotica’, if you wish (desire) … as compensation for that absent, critical-poetical nothing much at all (which is at risk every day, anyway)  … And too, the starry heavens AS moral law … Why not (to honor the aesthetic idea in its velvet vault) ??? …

All minimalisms, all advertisements and simulations, all dry (drying) winds, and all abstractions impoverish … They are, at best, temporal moments in-between the exhausted, spent comings-forth (squarely, clumsily) of intemperate professionalisms, disciplines, formalisms, and insurrections (so-called avant-gardes) … Irrespective of time and place, such horizons of conceptual hegemony (the commercium of forms and figures frozen in capitalist and ideological lockstep) are undone, undressed by new saturated phenomenon … “May it come, may it come / The time of which we’d be enamored …” --Rimbaud, “Alchimie du verbe” … (Tisnov, Czech Republic, 05/25/04)

GK (Here & There, 2004)

This essay, “Being Jean-Luc Marion”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/marion2.rtf
“The Given, The Taken, and The Given-Back”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/the_given.rtf
“Zizek / Badiou”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/zizek_badiou.html
“L + A About Almost Nothing”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/burlemarx.html

ENDNOTES

1 - Note 69: It is in the swirling, circling endnotes of Marion’s text that we find the traces and tracks of “le tournant théologique” (le tournant phénoménologique), perhaps underway since the late 1980s and early 1990s, folded into a type of second discourse, a secondary line of thought similar in spirit to the accessory-after-the-fact nature of Rousseau’s footnotes. It is here, in Marion’s dense and knotted notes that certain things suppressed or merely referred to in the body of the text come ‘home’, including the agonistic development of the trajectory of his third reduction, a process that reaches an apotheosis (perhaps) in a June 1994 conference (Marion says ‘debate’) at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. It is the name of Jean-Louis Chrétien that returns repeatedly in the notes (mentioned in passing in the text) regarding the nature of the call that Marion privileges in his evocation of saturated phenomenon. And it is Note 69 (see p. 373n69) referring back to Book V, “The Gifted”, that echoes mightily in the antechamber of the notes. Here, Marion quotes Chrétien: “Infinite excess, first of all, of the call over and above the response.” This signals Marion’s shift, along the path of developing the third reduction, toward embracing the ineluctable fact that the call overflows itself and cannot be fully assimilated in any nominal (or noetic) ‘thing’, in any singular work, concept, or individual. It would appear that Marion reached this conclusion late in the process of deconstructing the remains of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s own phenomenological projects. To underscore this point, Marion also states in Note 1 (p. 328n1), notes referring to Book I, “The Given”: “The phenomenological method is always practiced as a deconstruction or a destruction. Between these two terms, which are in fact both derived equally from the reduction, the difference stems solely from the nature of the obstacles cleared away: objectivity, Being as presence, the ‘history of Being’ [referring most likely to Hegel], etc.” Yet it is Note 66 (p. 373n66) that sounds the essentially sublime depths of this extraordinary inquiry / plunge into the nature of things (not-things), a plunge / thrust toward /S/. This note again references Chrétien but amends a reference to Rousseau’s Emile. I leave it to the reader to turn to this page and read what transpires there. Suffice to say, what is indicated is a summary judgment regarding all forms of simulated calls and diversions, situating Rousseau as a touchstone or prophet of / for the present-day call (and its problematical absence / return).

2 - The above-mentioned ‘history’ of the theological turn in late-modern phenomenology is indexed in Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Francois Courtine (eds.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debates (Fordham, 2000). In calling upon Chrétien for ‘support’, Marion refers primarily to the book L’appel et la réponse (Paris, 1992), English edition The Call and Response (Fordham, 2004). Chrétien’s work also falls within / beneath the covers of Jean-Francois Courtine (ed.), Phénoménologie et théologie (Paris, 1992) and his own L’inoubliable et l’inespéré (Paris, 1991), English edition The Unforgettable and the Unhoped for (Fordham, 2002), Le Regard de l'amour (Paris, 2000), and Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art (Fordham, 2003). For Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou’s synchronized appropriation of this ‘debate’, see the review “Zizek / Badiou” (as above).

3 - See Chrétien’s “Eloge d’humilité”, http://www.ndweb.org/ecrit/humilite/chretien.htm

4 - The Present-Past - “For the buttercups grew past numbering, in this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added luster, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them before I could even properly spell their charming name -- a name fit for the Prince in some fairy-tale -- immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village, satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water’s edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping nonetheless like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East.” --Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way”, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1, Pléiade edition, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 183

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"Jean-Luc Marion, qui a succédé à Emmanuel Levinas à la Sorbonne et à Paul Ricoeur à l'Université de Chicago, a profondément marqué la philosophie française de ses trente dernières années par une oeuvre située à la croisée de l'histoire de la philosophie, de la théologie et de la phénoménologie. Ses trois livres principaux sur Descartes, Sur l'ontologie grise de Descartes (1975), Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (1981), Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (1986) ont renouvelé les études cartésiennes en soustrayant la pensée de Descartes à une approche purement épistémique et en réinscrivant l'oeuvre du philosophe français dans le mouvement de l'histoire de l'être, tout en soulignant les limites du schème onto-théologique heideggérien pour en appréhender le statut et les contours. Son travail théologique, inauguré par L'idole et la distance (1977) et poursuivi dans Dieu sans l'être (1982) a consisté à interroger la possibilité d'arracher la pensée de Dieu à l'horizon de la question de l'être et à l'idolâtrie métaphysique qui la sous-tend: la "mort de Dieu", dans cette perspective, ne signifie plus la fin du christianisme, mais le retrait même par lequel Dieu se manifeste à nous à l'époque du nihilisme, et la source renouvelée à laquelle la théologie peut et doit puiser sa propre possibilité. Enfin, la phénoménologie de la donation inaugurée par Réduction et donation (1989) et poursuivie dans Etant donné (1997) et De Surcroît (2001) -- enfin, plus récemment, dans Le phénomène érotique (2003) -- s'efforce de soustraire la question de la phénoménalité au double horizon de l'objectivité (Husserl) et de l'être (Heidegger). C'est ce dernier aspect de l'oeuvre de Jean-Luc Marion, désormais salué et traduit dans de nombreux pays, qui fait plus particulièrement l'objet de ce numéro. Par un examen minutieux et critique de certaines de ses thèses, il voudrait contribuer à la connaissance de ce philosophe désormais incontournable." (Éditions de Minuit)

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KANT NIETZSCHE UNDO LACAN? - “Here (and in conformity with a long poetic tradition) the abyss of infinity is contained in the eye that gazes at us (Hegel called this ‘the night of the world’). But, of course, there is one instance when the two terms, Auge [Auge / n, eye / s] and Blick [gaze], are even more happily united: precisely the notion of Augenblick (moment). When, in Zarathustra, the theme of eternal recurrence appears for the first time (in the chapter ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’), Nietzsche talks about a ‘gateway’ called ‘Moment’ (Augenblick), a point at which two paths meet (as if ‘offending each other face to face’) -- two paths that seem to contradict each other, and to stretch for an eternity in opposite directions.” Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 22-23

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ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT

“Immodernity Itself”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/immodernity_itself.rtf
“The Dark Gaze”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/dark_gaze.rtf
“Sinister Perspectives”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/sinister_perspectives.rtf

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