ABSTRACT
With Le phénomène érotique: Six Méditations, Marion aims to complete a project begun with The Idol and Distance and explicitly continued with Prolegomena to Charity, but which, he maintains, has essentially marked all his work between and since: the working out of the question of love.1 But where his earlier material frequently invokes love as a kind of theological imperative that simply overrides metaphysics by claiming to render it destitute, here he attempts a phenomenological thinking of love that addresses the deficiencies of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy on their own terms. While he ultimately calls upon God to guarantee (as a witness) the meaningfulness of love, his adieu/à Dieu is a supplication rather than a cognition, more resonant with the tones of Lévinas and Derrida than with Pascal. Le phénomène érotique is framed by two basic phenomenological questions: ipseity and alterity. Marion argues that we are assured of ipseity only through being loved, and not through being as such. And we reach the other not through constitution, but by willing-to-love, on the basis of finding ourselves always and already loved. He reaches these claims by way of a series of meditations that tend to function in a spiral rather than a linear fashion; read otherwise they can appear quite confusingly like a sequence of false starts. As we proceed through the book the focus of the questioning shifts around a centre, until we reach a point, as it were, of anamorphosis. In this chapter, we will attempt to follow that movement.
