ABSTRACT
Marion discovers a universal structure of “selving” that includes every imaginable form of praxis to be recounted in this context: contemplation, social justice advocacy, or otherwise. Marion’s counternarrative sharply denies what has just been affirmed by Cartesian metaphysics of representation. The existential counternarrative of selving, precisely by laying an axe to the root of essence, shows that the self in its most intense evocation of representationalism becomes the substantiation of the most elusive species of development and modification, even convertibility. While theology and philosophy can doubtless benefit from conversation partners who offer a strong prophetic-ethical voice, or even who endorse a strong political theology, Marion has constructed a phenomenology adequate for the theologian to develop an ethics rooted in erotic, nonconceptual agency. The phenomenological interrelation of the call and the response in Marion’s work represents one way a phenomenology of the gift can offer resources for Christian selfhood.
