Abstract
In 2013, the first reader of Jean-Luc Marion’s works appeared, Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, meticulously edited by his friend and colleague Kevin Hart. Yet, if the appearance of volume marked Marion’s status as France’s most influential living philosopher, Hart’s Kingdoms of God marks the beginning of a systematic theology long in the making. In addition to serving as the prologemenon to his planned systematics, the work also serves to differentiate Hart’s phenomenological theology from Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and doctrine of revelation through the rendering of what Hart calls the basilaic reduction, on the basis of which Hart builds a twofold theological criticism of Marion. He first criticizes Marion’s claim that revelation can gain phenomenological status like ordinary phenomena, and second contests the notion that revelation is always characterized by a saturation that bedazzles its receiver. I explore each thinker’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology, using their engagements with the works of Jacques Derrida and Karl Barth as points of comparison in order to contextualize Hart’s theological criticisms of Marion. I conclude by arguing that Hart’s, rather than Marion’s, approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of the second generation of the “theological turn” of French phenomenology.
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Notes
Kevin Hart, ed., Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). Hereafter cited in text.
Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 2nd Ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxiv.
Hart, Trespass, xxxiv.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxv.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, p. 27.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxv.
Bradley B. Onishi, “The Beginning, Not the End: On Continental Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (April 28, 2016), doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw032.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 77.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 77.
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 282.
John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 203 (translation slightly altered).
See, Emmanuel Falque, Passer le rubicon : Philosophie et théologie : essai sur les frontières (Bruxelles: Editions Lessius, 2013).
Hart, Trespass, x.
Hart, Trespass, xv.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Volume 2, Part 1: The Doctrine of God (London: Bloomsbury T and T Clark, 2004), p. 64.
Kevin Hart, “Introduction,” to Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, p. 29.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Volume 1, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God (London: Bloomsbury T and T Clark, 2004), 28–29.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, David Wills, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 72.
Jacques Derrida, “On the Gift,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 60.
Derrida, “On the Gift,” p. 60.
Thomas A. Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Naming of the Human (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 206.
Jean-Luc Marion, “On the Gift,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 63.
Jean-Luc Marion, “On the Gift,” p. 62.
Marion, “On the Gift,” p. 66.
Marion, Reduction and Givenness, p. 203.
Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 199.
Marion, Being Given, p. 268.
Marion, Being Given, p. 269.
Marion, Being Given, p. 243.
Marion, Being Given, p. 236.
Marion, Being Given, p. 235.
Marion, “On the Gift,” p. 70.
See, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014); and Matthew I. Burch, “Blurred Vision: Marion on the Possibility of Revelation,” in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67, no.3 (June 2010), pp. 157–171.
Jean-Luc Marion, Revelation and Givenness, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
David Jasper and Ramona Fotiade, “Jean-Luc Marion: A Reflection,” foreword to Marion, Revelation and Givenness, v.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 32.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 41.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001).
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 45.
Barth, Dogmatics II.1, p. 85.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 57.
Barth, Dogmatics I.1, p. 193.
Jean-Luc Marion, “The Possible and the Revealed” in The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 10. Marion’s criticism of Bultmann in this passage makes Emmanuel Falque’s association of Marion with Bultmann seem somewhat strange: “Far, then, from all the Balthasarian or Rahnerian tradition, which does not renounce a certain objectivity of revelation (probably due to the Hegelian and Thomist tradition in theological matters), a unique theologian—Rudolph Bultmann—is linked here with the thesis put forward by the author, for he too is a phenomenologist by way of being a disciple of Martin Heidegger.” Emmanuel Falque, “Larvatus Pro Deo: Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology and Theology” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), p. 193. Here, Falque associates Marion with Bultmann due to their respective treatments of Heidegger. He later explains this association with Marion’s disinterest in the historical event of the resurrection in favor of a Bultmannian existential resurrection of spirit: ‘Marion, like Bultmann, having become a phenomenological disciple of Heidegger, and beyond Husserl, can nevertheless no longer accord his faith to an objectivity of revelation that, if it is not destroyed by ‘doubt’ (Descartes), is at least suspended in the epoché (Husserl)’ (p. 194). The passage quoted above contradicts Falque’s argument. Marion cannot accept Bultmann’s appropriation of Heidegger due to the way in which Bultmann’s Heideggerian theological method employs the horizon of Being as its fulcrum. In contrast to Falque’s statement, the task of Being Given is to explain the possibility of an event such as the Resurrection taking place. Marion’s project resembles Barth’s rejection of historicism as a means of guaranteeing faith, rather than Bultmann’s attempt to translate the theological understanding of the Resurrection of the Christian tradition into an authentic, existential re-birth via Heidegger.
Marion, “Possible,” p. 10.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 59.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 57.
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 58.
“The phenomenon shows itself, then, from itself and in itself, because and in as much as it gives itself in person from itself. From a synthesized or constituted object, it transforms itself into an event. Such a transformation, such a passage from one form to another, can happen within the strict field of philosophy, and phenomenology aims at nothing other than describing such phenomena in general that veer from object to event” (Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 48).
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 58.
See, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?: Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy, (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 105–124.
For a helpful discussion of the infamous claim by Jocelyn Benoist, an atheist, that where Marion sees revelation he sees nothing, see Introduction to Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness.
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
Barth, Dogmatics II.1, pp. 90–91.
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
Hart, Essential Writings, pp. 28–29.
Anthony J. Steinbock, “The Poor Phenomenon: Marion and the Problem of Givenness,” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 126.
Emmanuel Falque, Le combat amoreux (Paris : Broché, 2014), pp. 19–25.
See Onishi, “The Beginning, Not the End.”
J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister, eds., Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion With Religion (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012).
J. Aaron Simmons, “Continuing to Look for God in France: On the Relationship Between Phenomenology and Theology,” in Words of Life, p. 27.
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Onishi, B.B. Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist: Hart’s Theological Criticism of Marion. SOPHIA 56, 15–31 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0576-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0576-y