ABSTRACT
As heritage as trope was handed down this British lineage, it steadily accumulated resonances: legacy as evoking family and community; as intimating a web of past social relations confronting industrialization and market forces; as signifying the land and nation itself whether as nostalgia or lure for tourists. Marion finds inheritance the ideal figure for the given. He inherits givenness from Husserl and Heidegger but reads it in a theologically suggestive fashion, bearing out providential resonances within many versions of heritage. Marion finds legacy as ultimate gift is constituted not so much by its materiality or taking possession, but rather in awareness and perception of the benefaction as gift, of its status as bounty. Heritage, the given, reveals people's indebtedness to a larger whole, an exterior preceding and founding them. Though Marion's use of givenness clearly manifests the phenomenological legacy, his account is far more Husserlian than Heideggerian.
