ABSTRACT
In an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas that appears elsewhere in this collection (“From the Other to the Individual”), Jean-Luc Marion argues for an experience of transcendence that is at once resistant to rational calculation and yet able to be thought. He articulates three stages on the way to naming this experience. The first of these involves the recognition that transcendence cannot be thought according to the terms of an economy. So, with Levinas, Marion rejects the ultimacy of being, proposing that the order of being can be transgressed. In this instance it is transgressed by the other person, the Other who “is” otherwise than being. Transcendence resists economic recuperation. That is not to suggest, however, that with this formula transcendence can simply be opposed to the economy, for that would economize it all the more. This is why Plato’s “good beyond being,” which is often put to work in Levinas’s writing, is better expressed as being’s “otherwise.” The metaphysical danger to which we are exposed in attempting to think transcendence is the duplication of one economy with another, higher one to which it corresponds. To adopt more of a Derridean inflection, transcendence inhabits the economy instead in the mode of interruption; transcendence is always transcendencein-immanence. This is clarified in the least theological way by a thinking of textual excess. Différance is a good example of where the withdrawal to transcendence does not mean an escape by an infinite term to a place outside the text, but the constant undoing of the text by its own infinitude. Let us be clear that to attempt to speak of transcendence, therefore, is not necessarily to propose the existence of a hidden order beyond the borders of the text, but to allow for a kind of immanent excess. Economic terms restrict that excess even as they are simultaneously made possible by it. But having recognized the resistance of transcendence to economy, we arrive at the real dilemma signaled by Marion: how to experience transcendence as such, when it cannot be reduced to the economic categories that define “experience” as theoretical, represented to a self-conscious consciousness.
