The article aims to present the distinction made by Jean-Luc Marion between common law and saturated phenomena, to introduce his paradigmatic view of art by presenting the idol as a saturated ...modality of phenomena, and to introduce the difference between constructed objects and constituted phenomena by a subject, which are determined as principle and basis. From this perspective, painting is considered as a phenomenic experience of anamorphosis in which the gaze of the spectator is submitted to the phenomenon, making possible the reception of what they want to see. The article also intends to reveal how within art, the process of visibility is presented as a construction of the phenomenon that takes place in what is invisible. Thus, it is shown how Jean-Luc Marion's thought concerning art enables to reach the core of his work, examining the ways in which the concepts of givenness and subject might be modified.
This paper argues that an enclosed hermeneutical circle is evident at the centre of modern religious education as a result of its rootedness in the romantic hermeneutical tradition. It argues that ...modern religious education carries an implicit text-based hermeneutical orientation. It contends that such a hermeneutical approach is limited in terms of its ability to engage with persons' encounter with truth in life itself as it unfolds historically. This paper attempts to move beyond an enclosed hermeneutical circle at the centre of modern religious education, as well as the restrictive hermeneutics that it implicitly promotes, by recognising the givenness of the other in encounters with truth. This is achieved by considering the phenomenological and theological project of Jean-Luc Marion. It argues that Marion has much to offer hermeneutical discourse in religious education by way of his embrace of the possibility of a God-beyond-being, his notion of givenness, and his discernment of four hermeneutical moments of givenness. By engaging with, and introducing, these aspects of Marion's work to hermeneutical discourse in religious education, this paper points to the need for a more dynamic hermeneutic that is open to the givenness of the other in encounters with truth or truth-events.
This essay examines the relationship between Jean-Luc Marion's argument of ‘conceptual idolatry’ and John Duns Scotus’ doctrine of the univocity of being. I argue that Scotus does fall under Marion's ...criticisms, which radically undermine the use of ‘being’ in theology, but that univocity, in its barest Scotist form, also seems impossible to avoid. After arguing that attempts to move past this ontological conundrum fail, I conclude the relationship stands at an impasse. While this conclusion is critical, I make it for the sake of a constructive argument: post-metaphysical theology should reckon with the inevitability of being, appreciating this impasse between the apparent hegemony of being and the priority of God's self-revelation. Making the impasse clear at least points the way towards a renewed theological consideration of being.
For more than two decades, the phenomenologies of revelation emerging from twentieth century French philosophy have met a North American reception framed largely within the context of a hermeneutic ...critique. This essay seeks to intervene in this situation by developing Jean-Luc Marion’s own sketch of a phenomenological hermeneutics and putting it in dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of language in Truth and Method. Thus, in an attempt to further develop Marion’s phenomenological hermeneutics of ‘giving’ and ‘showing’, a space is opened for Gadamer’s notion of ‘saying’. As a result, in the midst of the horizon opened by language itself, the ‘impossible’ phenomenality of revelation shines forth.
Without denying legitimate criticisms of metaphysics that have been made since the time of the Reformation, the purpose of this essay is to challenge prevailing assumptions in continental philosophy ...and theology since Heidegger that the age of metaphysics is now over and should be replaced as “first philosophy” either by some version of phenomenology, such as that offered by Jean‐Luc Marion, or by a pragmatic linguistic approach in the spirit of Wittgenstein, such as that offered by Kevin Hector. Notwithstanding the genuine merits of their proposals and concerns, it is argued here that metaphysics is not so easily dismissed, and that there is, in fact, a way to do metaphysics otherwise – a way that was taken by Erich Przywara, whose analogical metaphysics is characterized not only by an analogy between God and creation, the analogia entis, but also by an analogy between philosophical and theological metaphysics. In this, form, it is argued, not only is metaphysics impervious to the standard criticisms of “onto‐theology,” it also turns out to be, at its core, nothing other than a Christological metaphysics.
Jean-Luc Marion's early work on Descartes and his more recent writings in phenomenology have not only elicited huge interest in France and the US, but also created huge potential in the field of ...theology. This book is organised around central questions about the divine raised by Marion's work: how to speak of God, how to approach God, how to experience God, how to receive God, how to believe in God, how to worship God. Within that context it deals with the important aspects of his philosophical work: the inspiration of his writings in what he calls Descartes' "white theology" and its late medieval context as well as the apophatic theology associated with Dionysius the Areopagite; his important claims about idolatrous and iconic ways of speaking of the divine; his notion of the saturated phenomenon or a phenomenology of revelation and givenness, and his extensive writings on love. Christina M. Gschwandtner also considers Marion's explicitly theological writings and establishes their relationship to his larger phenomenological oeuvre. Overall, it approaches Marion's work not only as a philosophy of religion, but with specifically theological questions in mind. It hence shows how Marion's extensive historical and phenomenological work can be profitable and inspiring for theology today, for both systematic questions and for concerns of spirituality, in a way that holds the theoretical and the practical together.
This essay examines Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenal model of the Trinity expounded in his recent book D’Ailleurs, la révélation (2020) and attempts to give an initial assessment from a theological ...perspective. Since Marion’s programme is largely indebted to the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s own project, first I give an overview of the Balthasarian phenomenal approach to revelation famously termed “aesthetic theology”. Next, I present Marion’s ideas concerning the convergence between the phenomenological and the theological enterprise. The third part examines the theological rationale behind Marion’s phenomenal model of the Trinity that again can be seen as relying significantly on Balthasarian trinitarian theology. In this section, I give an overview of the idea of the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and I inspect notions, such as trinitarian distance, kenosis and Marion’s own concept elsewhere. The fourth section gives an outline of Marion’s phenomenal model of the trinity where he develops a new trinitarian triad based on a phenomenal approach. The closing section reflects on the advantages and difficulties of Marion’s project.
According to Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of Descartes, there is a strong ambivalence of Cartesian thought regarding metaphysics. On the one hand, Descartes has achieved metaphysics in the sense ...that he has completed it, by fixing all its major concepts and stakes for the modernity to come. As Marion shows, there is two onto-theo-logies in Descartes: one ruled by the concept of causa sui, and a second one built, from the subject, around the concept of cogitatio sui. We could then see Descartes as the most paradigmatic agent of classical metaphysics. But on the other hand, Marion states that Descartes has opened the possibility of the end of metaphysics by showing its limits through the non-metaphysical use of the infinite and the flesh, as well as the secondarity of the subject. Each onto-theo-logy is then always already broken and opened, pointing at an outside of metaphysics. Thus, Descartes is used, by Marion, as the philosopher who draws the borders and the limits, not only between philosophy and metaphysics, but also those that pass at the very heart of phenomenology, between constituted phenomena and given phenomena. Yet, on many occasions, Marion shows that those borders are not as clear as they seem, given that there is an original blurring of the inside and the outside of metaphysics, blurring on which Marion built his entire phenomenology of givenness. Then, for Marion and his phenomenology of givenness, Descartes is a kind of ghost, that should have been eliminated by the phenomenological overcome of metaphysics, but that lingers in all the major concepts of Marion’s phenomenology.
Asumiendo que existe una fecunda relación histórica entre teología y fenomenología, este trabajo se propone señalar la especificidad y novedad de la fenomenología francesa actual, destacando la ...diferencia entre el modelo teológico del que esta última se nutre respecto del tipo de teología con el que dialoga la fenomenología histórica. En primer lugar, abordaremos la relación entre fenomenología y teología ofrecida por Edmund Husserl, sosteniendo allí la presencia de una teología positiva, pues Dios es nombrado bajo términos tales como phrase omitted, "idea" (Idee) y "substancia absoluta" (absolute Substanz). En segundo lugar, mostraremos el vínculo entre fenomenología y teología propuesto por Jean-Luc Marion a partir de su interpretación del pensamiento de Dionisio Areopagita como "teología pragmática de la ausencia" (pragmatique théologie de l'absence), tal como aparece en De surcroít (2001). Finalmente, estableceremos un diálogo entre ambas propuestas. Sostendremos que puede hallarse una diferencia fundamental entre ellas. Por un lado, Husserl apela a una teología positiva, pues Dios irrumpe aquí en el horizonte de los Grenzprobleme de la fenomenología. Por el otro lado, afirmaremos que en Marion puede hallarse una apelación a la teología mística como búsqueda de un lenguaje que permita expresar el exceso.
Yet the fact or the pretense of not seeing does not prove that there is nothing to see. It can simply suggest that there is indeed something to see, but that in order to see it, it is necessary to ...learn to see otherwise... (1)
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