He who pretends to go beyond all metaphysics most often risks taking up again, without being conscious of it, its basic characteristics.Footnote 1
Although there have been plenty of assessments and critiques of Jean‐Luc Marion's work in the last few years, this paper will attempt to approach what is positive and problematic from a rather different perspective. We will claim that there is an inherent oversight in Marion's oeuvre which is reflected in his failure to properly set out what the relationship between phenomenology and theology actually is. This is demonstrated most clearly, we think, in the way in which he construes the phenomenological reduction. This paper will show how this latter issue in Marion's work, when re‐assessed according to an understanding of phenomenological reduction as a practice, helps to provide some better starting points for thinking about the former problem, that of the relationship of philosophy to theology, not just in Marion's work but in philosophical theology and theology of religion more broadly.
Although our assessment of the work of Jean‐Luc Marion will be overwhelmingly critical, it is important to note at the start that our engagement with this material stems from a sense of something positive in Marion's work. This positive aspect is to be found in his notion of a ‘Eucharistic site’ of theology, first presented in Chapter Five of God Without Being. Unlike most of Marion's subsequent writings, this chapter has elements of a quite concrete character which Marion himself does not fully develop. The ‘Eucharistic site’ of theology means that theology's impetus is located within the sacramental practice of the Church: theology begins in the mediation of the Word through the material and concrete.Footnote 2 For Marion, at this stage, it is the (Sacramental) Word that gives language and gives interpretation to Himself.
Because such a ‘Eucharistic site’ is rooted in the Church's concrete practice, it means that following through on this concrete character in tandem with the strongly phenomenological trajectory which Marion's work takes might provide some corrective measures to the over‐idealized direction of his later writings, opening up some rich material for further theological work. That Marion's work has been very influential in some theological circles means that such a critical appropriation is necessary. Graham Ward is particularly astute in point out that:
The horizon of the post‐modern project … provides Marion with his Eucharistic site … used to draw attention to an a‐priori gift … but then Marion proceeds to a naming of the giver (as God) and the world as icon (the incarnated gift).Footnote 3
Accordingly, one wonders whether this shift of concerns, which coheres around the point at which Marion posits a ‘Eucharistic site’, is where his work goes astray. Granted that we think there to be some strong themes in this ‘sited’ aspect of Marion's work, and that it is, unfortunately, the later less successful work that seems to have garnered most critical acclaim, the rest of this paper will outline the contours of Marion's writings in order to open up useful space for critical reflection and positive appropriation. It is hoped that the focus on critical work does not disguise the original positive impetus to be found in our reading of Marion.
The appearance of Dominique Janicaud's polemical The Theological Turn of Phenomenology in the early 1990s signalled a new wave of critical interest in the reawakening of the question of ‘religion’ in a postmodern context.Footnote 4 After the heady days of the late 1960s, the various currents of French philosophy had begun to question seriously the French philosophical legacy: the question of ‘religion’ was again posed anew, albeit within a discourse structured by a vocabulary and methodology vastly removed from the terminological conservatism of most dogmaticians. At the heart of this controversy, a debate between different branches of phenomenologically‐influenced work, is the relation between philosophy and theology. For Janicaud, the problem in the relation of phenomenology and theology is not “directed at the theological as such, but at certain of its translations or intrusions into the phenomenological field.”Footnote 5
Jean‐Luc Marion's work claims fundamentally to be post‐metaphysical.Footnote 6 For Janicaud this is an issue. Critiquing the way in which Marion presents the adoption of the post‐metaphysical as if it is “quasi‐evident”Footnote 7 Janicaud sets about showing not only that this notion of a post‐metaphysical phenomenology is problematic, even within the terms with which Marion seeks to situate it, but that the basis on which Marion's phenomenology opens out onto the theological is very dubious. Janicaud's critique is mainly directed at Marion's “schema” of three distinct phenomenological reductions.Footnote 8 This will be the basis for our own critical approach in what follows. Before we engage in that task, we will briefly set out what Marion's position actually is. This is not at all an easy proposition, since one of the problems with Marion's work is that one cannot take at face value what he says he is actually doing.
In the English translation of Marion's influential book God Without Being, David Tracy contributes a foreword which introduces Marion's work as a philosophical theology that “needs new … concepts … to understand with conceptual rigour the reality of God's self‐disclosure as Love.”Footnote 9 Tracy's introduction portrays Marion's project as principally one which makes the “need to question whether any transcendental or metaphysical reflection is the correct route forward for theology” a priority. Although Tracy may be right in suggesting that Marion's philosophical work is about finding new concepts for adequately dealing with revelation, a major element that is lacking in Marion's work is a reflection on what it means to formulate such new concepts and categories, and indicates a serious issue at the heart of Marion's project as a whole: his failure to account for his own philosophical and theological practice. Though, according to Tracy, Marion forges a “new and brilliant postmodern version of the other great alternative for theology: a revelation‐centred, non‐correlational, post‐metaphysical theology”, Marion fails to think out what this forging itself consists in. We think that this failure could well be attributed to Marion's firm espousal of the need to “abandon all the metaphysics of the subject which have defined modernity.”Footnote 10
This denial of the subject without any alternative framework being properly worked out means that Marion's project floats free of the situational: it has no proper historical or located dimension. The concepts and categories end up as epistemological factors which subsist within a field of disembodied consciousness, neither fully human nor fully divine. It is, then, not post‐metaphysical, but an approach that has rejected ‘Being’‐talk as onto‐theological, in favour of something else that is never quite made clear, though we are sure that what this something else is does not evade being described as some kind of metaphysics.
This ‘something else’ takes the form of Marion's most critically acclaimed work: the development of a phenomenology of givenness. The issue is how Marion gets to this notion of givenness, how it functions in his phenomenology, and what the relation is to his theological interests. Rather than taking on the whole of his work for exposition and for critical points, which has been done in a variety of forms by others,Footnote 11 we will focus on three fundamental problems which help to open up other paths of inquiry. These issues will mark out slightly different openings than others have chosen to follow. These issues in Marion are: the way in which he sets‐up and works within a particular understanding of the relationship between philosophy, always conceived unambiguously as a type of phenomenology, and theology; the whole question which emerges, in this context, of a First Philosophy; and the role that the phenomenological ‘reduction’ plays in his work and the problems that accrue from his understanding of this reduction. It is the way in which Marion misunderstands reduction that points to what is most distorting in his work. We will suggest that his misunderstanding is caused by a strange and twisted kind of idealism which lurks in the background of Marion's work.Footnote 12
The relation of theology to phenomenology in Marion's work is one of its most problematic elements. Marion emerges from a French philosophical tradition informed by highly detailed Cartesian scholarship.Footnote 13 In his earliest books Marion develops, on the one hand, a series of careful analyses of Descartes; and on the other, a series of theological studies. The two strands come together in two important texts, On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism and God Without Being, both published in Paris in the 1980s.Footnote 14
In the former book, Marion attempts to overcome Descartes' ontology, which Marion describes as being a kind of intensification of onto‐theology to the point where onto‐theology is overcome or exceeded.Footnote 15 Marion closes the book by claiming that Pascal had realized the problematic ontological aspects of Descartes' rationalism and instead offers an alternative philosophical approach that can be described as having to do with the order of charity. This is the main theme of all of Marion's subsequent books, though under a variety of different guises. His oeuvre from this point on can be seen as an attempt to work out the character of the order of charity. The notions of givenness, gift, and the whole set of cognates which he works with in his later phenomenology, are phenomenological versions or modes of this ‘charity’. In other later books he sets out this notion of charity more substantially, but it is clear that givenness as a first philosophical term is dependent upon the Pascalian critique in which Marion first realizes the possibility of a philosophical order of charity which is reached by philosophical inquiry but which has strong connections with a theology.Footnote 16 From the start it is evident that, through a philosophical inquiry, Marion finds a theological datum, or tacitly takes up a theological datum into a philosophical inquiry. A serious problematic issue, however, is that although Marion has critically engaged with Descartes' ontology, he never seems to question what the epistemological ramifications of such a critique might be. Marion's work thus takes up the task of overcoming or exceeding Descartes' ontology but remains within an epistemological framework.
What skews his work as a whole is that he seems overly concerned to assert that his phenomenology and theology are two separate endeavours, when it is obvious from reading his writings that the two mutually inform one another. This is something that has been noticed by most secondary source critics, even those who are sympathetic to Marion's project as a whole.Footnote 17 What is odd is that most supporters of Marion's work do not find this basic methodological blindness to be a problem. Why does Marion refuse to acknowledge that his phenomenology is informed by theological insight and vice versa?
The other major text of this earlier period is the very influential and provocative God Without Being. Although there are many problems in its overall shape, the central core of the book presents a remarkably clear theological thesis: that theology must emphasize the theo‐ over the ‐logy, and that the principal way that this emphasis should occur is through finding ways to talk of God beyond the category of ‘Being’. It is this work which helps to orient Marion's project as a whole, since we find both the most positive aspect of his work and its own problematic turning point within the same book. The positive articulation of the ‘Eucharistic site’ for theology, a ‘site’ arising out of the concrete sacramental practice of the Church, is quickly passed over in favour of rather abstract formulations about the ecstatic nature of time and of ‘the gift’. This shift is discernible in the break between the fifth and sixth chapters of the book, towards that section entitled ‘Hors‐Texte’.
In the early chapters Marion's credentials as a ‘post‐modern’ theologian are displayed to full effect. Within this context, these chapters are an attempt to articulate a post‐metaphysical critique of onto‐theology, roughly in the footsteps of Heidegger, through the dialectical figure of the relationship between ‘idol’ and ‘icon’.Footnote 18 But from the start of this inquiry Marion is concerned with another distinctly theological theme, that of the unconditioned. This allows Marion to develop a “transcendental trajectory” which becomes “an a‐historical deconstruction of the history of metaphysics at once abandoned to and removed from historical destiny.”Footnote 19 The concern with unconditionality leads away from history in a dialectic of un‐concealment and withdrawal, situated here in terms of abandonment to and removal from history tending towards the eschaton.Footnote 20 It is notable that if Marion had extended and developed his notion of a ‘eucharistic site’, which has a quite concrete character, some of the miscues of the later work might have been avoided. It is precisely this aspect that we are picking up on with the intention of exploring further.
Translator Thomas Carlson offers us an insight into Marion's overall concerns in God Without Being, in his introduction to the relatively recently published English translation of Marion's first theological work, The Idol and Distance.Footnote 21 Carlson maintains that Marion's stated aim of working post‐metaphysically is really all about the question of conditions and the unconditioned:
Marion insists that the phenomenon constitutes its own, unconditional and irreducible self‐showing, against a constitution by a metaphysical God or transcendental ‘I’ … Marion's theology passes beyond metaphysics by freeing God's self‐revelation in distance (withdrawal‐absence) from limiting conceptuality, conditions of thought … His phenomenology passes beyond metaphysics by freeing phenomena's self‐showing from a‐priori conditions, the thinking subject or a metaphysical God.Footnote 22
There is more than a hint of Descartes here, something which results in the later Marion's concern to set‐out some kind of First Philosophy. In an attempt to push onto‐theology to its destitution Marion manages to succumb to the temptation to set his philosophical project on a great height removed from the world as a sort of articulation of possibility. Philosophy thus conceived remains the adjudicator of a theology, whilst simultaneously wishing to grant theology an autonomy from philosophy, and depending on the very possibility that his phenomenology has set out to describe.
In the opening chapter of In Excess, a late book published originally in 2001 and a mature working out of his project, Marion attempts to cast his phenomenology as the problem of a primacy. Much of his work, seen retrospectively through this essay, can be viewed as predominantly a grappling with what is a‐priori and a‐posteriori. This should alert us to the fact that Marion's work is still fundamentally located within an epistemological framework. Rather than ‘first principles’, Marion calls his phenomenology a ‘last principle’ submitted to givenness. It seems that Marion's work, as a whole, might well be best understood within the light of this essay which casts a retrospective shadow over the whole trajectory of his thought:
… it becomes vital for philosophy to maintain, even today, a claim of primacy … it is only in claiming, essentially, the rank of ‘first philosophy’ that philosophy remains in conformity with its proper essence … I will no longer ask if ‘first philosophy’ remains thinkable, but rather which determination of primacy can legitimately be exercised there.Footnote 23
The problem with Marion's definition of ‘givenness’ is that it seems to operate as a way of singularizing the manifold to a unified principle which underlies or determines it, or which supplies an intelligibility to an otherwise profuse manifold of phenomenality, (even if this intelligibility is always dissolved in an ‘excess’ which saturates what is usually understood conceptually.) Whatever he may call them, these moves appear to us as metaphysical, and metaphysical in a quite ‘traditional’ sense. The whole question of ‘primacy’ and ‘legitimacy’ seem to us to indicate that Marion's polemic against ‘metaphysics’ is misconceived, simply because he needs some sort of framework for even making the moves he does in his phenomenology. For instance, ‘givenness’ has the role of legitimizing particular strands within manifold phenomenality over others, yet the manifold is ‘given’ by one and the same givenness. If givenness, in Marion's thought, gives all phenomenality, then Marion's understanding of givenness must be able to account for the manifold nature of phenomenality without stripping away its diversity and complexity. Since Marion no longer sees it as necessary to ask whether ‘primacy’ is a ‘legitimate’ place to situate the philosophical and theological issues, we need to question whether the search for first principles is as immune to the critique of metaphysics as Marion appears to believe it is.Footnote 24 Marion's fondness for Descartes and Kant as dialogue partners also suggests that he remains squarely within an epistemological problematic, one that raises certain kinds of metaphysical questions.Footnote 25 Givenness operates as a principle within the primacy to which phenomenology's ‘last principle’ is correlated. So Marion's work is split between epistemological apriori‐aposteriori problematics and the search for metaphysical primacy:
… if one expects of a ‘first philosophy’ that it determines what it brings to light in fixing to it a priori a principle or group of principles, in particular, in imposing the transcendental anteriority of the I (or the equivalent), then phenomenology no longer reaches … the status of a ‘first philosophy’ … For … the determining originality of its enterprise consists in rendering to the phenomenon an incontestable priority: to let it appear no longer as it must (according to the supposed a priori conditions of experience and its objects), but as it gives itself (from itself and as such) … instead it offers a last principle … The last principle takes the initiative to give priority back to the phenomenon. It comments on the act by which what shows itself gives itself, and what gives itself shows itself, always starting from the irreducible and prime self of the appearing.Footnote 26
One sees here that despite his quest for a non‐metaphysical philosophy, Marion's work still shows major features of post‐Cartesian philosophies, particularly the attempt to shape issues connected with the problem of ‘metaphysics’ around supposedly ‘epistemological’ inquiries. Marion's ‘First Philosophy’ is of this rather odd hybrid kind. This hybridity also extends to Marion's conception of the relationship of philosophy to theology. On the one hand, he separates off theology from philosophy; on the other, he wants to set out a first philosophy and yet clearly works within theological parameters to do so. What is noticeable is that Marion clearly conceives God Without Being as a piece of theological work. We think this is the work where Marion's concerns become quite clear theologically. Yet it is also in this book that Marion turns to the analysis of the ‘gift’ and to a phenomenology of givenness in order to give a theological theme –charity– a philosophical possibility of articulation: in ‘givenness’. Ironically, in focussing on the how of charity, on givenness, on a sort of phenomenological possibility of Revelation, Marion fails to question the way of charity and the life that issues from such a way. This way is not a principle–like ‘givenness’– but a practice. Likewise, if we are not to remain hopelessly abstract and idealistic, is not the more fundamental issue not the gift as such, but what it does and how it fits into concrete lived situations?
II The Correlation of ‘First‐Last’, ‘Givenness‐Reduction’
I have but one theme: if the phenomenon is defined as what shows itself in and from itself (Heidegger), instead of what admits constitution (Husserl), this self can be attested only inasmuch as the phenomenon first gives itself … What shows itself first gives itself–this is my one and only theme.Footnote 27
Since Marion's phenomenology of givenness is so heavily dependent on the correlation that he establishes between givenness and reduction, it is essential to understand the problematics that surround the way in which Marion conceives the phenomenological reduction. What will be apparent is that the point we have just made about the confusion of a principle with a way, is also operative in the manner in which Marion formulates his central methodological correlation.
How does Marion get from the latter half of God Without Being to the ‘First Philosophy’ of In Excess? What is apparent is that during this period, Marion became interested in Edmund Husserl. Whereas the earlier texts refer often to Heidegger, an influence still apparent in the first half of God Without Being, the figure of Husserl is prominent by his absence. By the time of ‐ Reduction and Givenness Husserl has moved to centre stage.Footnote 28 In the first chapter of this book, Marion thoroughly explores early Husserlian texts. In Being Given, Marion explicitly links reduction and givenness by appealing to Husserl's text The Idea of Phenomenology.Footnote 29 It is in this text that Husserl first talks about the notion of a phenomenological reduction.Footnote 30 We are compelled to ask, why did Marion not work with later texts where Husserl had more carefully worked out what reduction might mean? It is clear that it is because in The Idea of Phenomenology Husserl links reduction specifically to givenness, something which he does not do in later formulations. It is precisely this issue which has been picked up by Janicaud. In an important section of his essay, entitled ‘The Schematism of the Three Reductions’, Janicaud critiques Marion for not being sensitive to Husserl's development of the notion of reduction:
… this unified presentation of the transcendental reduction fails to recognize the difference, introduced by Husserl … between regional reductions and the epoché as such. The epoché is no longer simply directed at objects related to psychological events, but at pure lived experiences in their intentional correlations … Marion systematizes the Heideggerean critique of the Husserlian reduction … to such a point that it becomes impossible to discern either the interest or the originality of Husserl.Footnote 31
Janicaud then presents a detailed analysis of each of Marion's points with regards to his appropriation of Husserl and Heidegger that lead to Marion's own formulation of a new phenomenological principle, “so much reduction, so much givenness.”Footnote 32 Janicaud's main critical point is that whereas Marion presents this formulation as “inevitable”, it is anything but: “the path that was supposed to lead to it proves to have been too artificially flattened.”Footnote 33
Janicaud's criticisms focus primarily on the way in which Marion's conception of phenomenology itself is really rather odd, whilst presenting his work as being strictly within the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger:
In Marion's work, there is no respect for the phenomenological order; it is manipulated as an ever‐elastic apparatus, even when it is claimed to be “strict” … his response concerning “givenness” makes use of the term's very ambiguity to avoid truly responding to the question posed … the question is one of a totally phenomenal givenness, which is precisely not the case with … “Marionesque” givenness.Footnote 34
Janicaud's critical work is incisive. However, we would like to suggest another problem which opens out Marion's work in another direction. It may be that it is not ‘givenness’ which is the most problematic issue in Marion's work, but the way in which he understands and uses the notion of a reduction.
Just what is reduction and how is it employed in the phenomenological tradition as formulated by Husserl and Heidegger? Briefly, the reduction emerges as a methodological practice or discipline out of the original formulations of phenomenological method. It is always a part of the intentional structure which is the binding together of intuition with phenomenon, that structure which undercuts any need to emphasize subject or object, subjectivity or objectivity. On this basis, Heidegger does not depart from Husserl. Where Heidegger moves away from Husserl, is in the specifics of the reduction itself and what is involved in its operation. Fundamentally, the reduction is a methodological technique for phenomenology as a philosophical method and as such lies at the heart of phenomenological practice.Footnote 35
The reduction can not be operated or emphasized outside of phenomenological practice. To focus on reduction means to take this intentional relation seriously from the outset and not to collapse it into a monolithic givenness. Marion's problem is that he does not reflect on his own practice of the reduction and he has no coherent account of the philosophical practice in which he is engaged. This results in a failure to give any account of how his philosophical polemic to strip away human‐centred questions from his philosophical vocabulary can even be articulated without consideration of the human who practices philosophy. Given that Marion's engagement with Heidegger is long and detailed, one struggles to see why he fails to recognize that these are some of the fundamental issues with which Husserl and Heidegger grappled, particularly those discussions which evolve out of Heidegger's notion of Dasein:
Phenomenological reduction as the leading of our vision from beings back to being nevertheless is not the only basic component of phenomenological method … For this guidance of vision back from beings to being requires at the same time that we should bring ourselves forward positively toward being itself …Footnote 36
Now Marion certainly is able to take account of certain elements of Heidegger's concerns, but he often seems burdened by the desire to strip away any possible mediation by that which is human.Footnote 37 Yet simultaneously he is also highly critical of Husserl's focus on objects, on objectivity in general, or of any philosophy which seems to be directed at a dimension which could be described in terms of its conceptuality. Yet we see this also firmly placed within the frame of a phenomenological method by Heidegger:
… here necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures … to the reductive construction of being, a destruction –a critical process in which the traditional concepts … are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn … These three basic components of phenomenological method ‐reduction, construction, destruction‐ belong together in their content and must receive grounding in their mutual pertinence …Footnote 38
Marion's attempts to recast the subject and downplay the object, whilst privileging a ‘pure’ transcendental unconditioned givenness which gives both objectivity and subjectivity, must be critiqued from this perspective. If there is any sense in which we can speak of this pure givenness, it emerges not as a monolithic transcendental, but from the intentional structure itself, which is relational. The correlation which pervades all aspects of phenomenology is this relationality in clear view, emerging out of intentional structure.
The best way to show the problems with the way in which Marion uses the notion of reduction is through one of his own phenomenological analyses. In Excess provides us with a fine example of such an analysis. The third essay in this book, a reflection on the ‘saturated phenomenon’ of the Idol entitled ‘The Radiance of the Painting’, is an attempt by Marion to bring his phenomenology of givenness into the realm of aesthetics, and simultaneously the setting out of Marion's ‘inversion’ of the Kantian category of ‘quality’.Footnote 39
This essay is very problematic. The ‘closing off’ operation that we observed earlier is properly at work in this essay. He treats the painting as “not an object”, but casts it as an instance of radiance, an excess of givenness which the painting merely instances, or provides a site for. The painting itself is simply a vehicle for a more originary givenness which is just ‘there’ regardless of the individual painting under consideration, like some sort of Platonic form. This means that his aesthetics operates with an a priori notion of what makes paintings ‘work’, something which he never spells out explicitly. In Marion's analysis, the painting, in order that it might serve as an instance of givenness, is made to perform some kind of reduction of the phenomenal field. How paintings accomplish this reduction is never unpacked or examined, but simply claimed. We need to ask, how can a painting do that? A reduction is the application of a philosophical technique performed by the phenomenologist! According to Marion, givenness is ‘known’ (or ‘perceived’, in this case) through the type of saturation proper to paintings (conceived as radiance, or as “idol”) and this means that the painting must be some kind of ‘object’ for perception. To claim otherwise means to call into question the proper status within the phenomenal field that the art work holds. Clearly to function as an instance, as Marion seems to suggest, means that the painting is situated as a particular element within the broader field or region of phenomena. Consider the following:
Here is the painting: the non‐physical space where the visible alone reigns abolishes l'invu (the invisible by default) and reduces the phenomenon to pure visibility … the painting, such that in its frame it operates a reduction of the given to pure visibility, produces … a visible that has never previously been seen by anyone.Footnote 40
There are several problems with this, but we will focus on the two that are most apparent with the aim of showing what is fundamentally misguided about Marion's approach. Firstly, as Graham Ward points out, Marion often has recourse to making the material, the physical, merely a metaphor, “… the movement from the concrete, the reele (sic), into the metaphoric, where objects continually lose their specificity … ”Footnote 41 We can see this in the example above. Marion de‐materializes the painting, it is for him a “non‐physical space”. Marion seems to be operating with a crudely Platonic semiotics, or something quite like it: worldly visibility is merely a sign pointing to a higher visibility which makes itself known through the radiance of paintings, in excess of our capacities.
Secondly, the painting “operates a reduction of the given to a pure visibility”. How one interprets the way in which Marion's notion of reduction operates, pretty much decides whether his project as a whole is viable, since in his work the correlation between reduction and givenness is absolutely crucial. In this passage, Marion seems to suggest that he conceives of the phenomenological reduction in a very strange way. It is not a philosophical method but something else entirely. What this ‘something else’ is remains a complete mystery. Just how does a painting operate a reduction? One major place where Marion's analysis becomes difficult to comprehend is, therefore, in the status of the reduction which the painting supposedly performs.
What Marion appears to be attempting is to downplay simultaneously the status of objects whilst also attempting to sidestep subjectivity by placing the operation of a reduction with a now somehow ‘de‐objectified’ object. Subjectivity is constituted by the excess of intuition required to assent to any kind of perception or cognition of the saturated phenomenon which “gives itself”: saturatedness or givenness ‘calls forth’ an excess of intuition which constitutes a being‐given in place of subjectivity. The problem remains that Marion never elucidates just how the painting, for instance, operates a reduction. Marion's failure to unpack this claim means that his project remains suspiciously unclear.
What does Marion's phenomenological reduction look like considered under the rubric of a practice. Marion hints at this in Being Given:
[the painting] … . comes from the studio of a minor master … the work of a well‐endowed student skilled in copying … . what phenomenon is thus given to me … .Footnote 42
In other words, a student produces the work. What then are these “skills” of copying? What might they tell us about the activity of painting, whether by a student or by a minor master. In either case, the painter produces the painting as an instance of a set of painting practices, both technical and expressive. The viewer sees the painting as part of a set of viewing and interpretative practices, from the individual appreciation (in Marion's language ‘admiration’) to the cultural economic (many ‘art lovers’ view paintings as more than simply “viewable” objects, since they enter into culturally defined and defining relations, such as ‘taste’, ‘value’ and ‘high‐low’ culture/class issues.) But it is clear that for Marion, the properly human involvement which art in general is a particular, and important, manifestation, is “banal”:
The abrupt metamorphosis from the unseen into the idol, which the painting accomplishes in its own right, reproduces nothing already seen and resembles nothing visible in the world. It adds to the visible of the world a visible that no longer belongs to it, transcending and annuling it. The painter does not reproduce it, he or she produces, copying nothing, making seen –these are banalities … The history of art must be understood as the emergence of a flux that is sometimes interrupted but always renascent until this point, of visibles so intense and dense that they irremediably submerge what the world gives to see.Footnote 43
If instance of anything, the painting is an instance of a whole set of artistic practices (painting techniques, cultural transmissions both artistic and economic, tradition history) which are brought to a focal point in each individual painting, but in each case the practices involved shape the painting in a way which is distinctive for each individual instance. The painting is thus a locus of social and cultural practices without those practices ‘explaining’ the individual painting as such. The practices do not act as a causal or explanatory scheme, since they are always various, complex and embedded in diverse historical and social situations. They escape simple categorization by their complex diversity. In each case the painting provides a site, or locus, in which these practices come together (or gather), but they do not define the painting in any singular sense. This can be seen in its complexity by considering that the painting is a locus in its own terms. This means preserving a sense of the painting as ‘artifact’ or ‘work’, as long as this remains neutral and not extended into a pinnacle achievement which somehow rises above its cultural situation, but is situated within a tradition of other such artifacts and works. This means to preserve the common sense interpretation of a painting or other artwork as that which is produced as real ‘object’ or entity, on canvas in the instance of a painting, without reducing this artifact to the result of a guiding principle or ‘idea’ which the artifact embodies, or denying the work any real status as entity in its own right. This locus is then extended and made more complex by the painting being situated in a museum, auctioned, placed in a home, stolen, etc, with each situation introducing different emphases in terms of the social and cultural field. Against Marion, then, it must be clearly emphasized that these situations are each a part of the region of phenomenality in which the painting is situated, with the painting itself a specific phenomenon within it.
For Marion, the category of ‘idol’ is about visibility as such. The painting, since it is a part of the field of visibility is chosen to demonstrate the category. However, this procedure on Marion's part is problematic because, as we have done, it is possible to produce a very different reading of the same phenomenon from another perspective.Footnote 44 So far from being determinative, Marion's category of ‘idol’ itself offers a multiplicity of different readings and interpretations. Rather than determining anything, it offers itself up for interpretation; far from being a property of the phenomena under interpretation, the hermeneutic enterprise, though determined by the phenomenon as the focus of attention, is still a hermeneutic practice. It does not matter how much determination is given to the phenomenon or to the interpretation, since any interpretation is situated within a practical set of skills of interpretation which are embedded in some sort of practice.
In the end Marion's work remains difficult because although he has acknowledged Pascal's critique of Cartesian metaphysics, and although he seems to be critical of the traditional problematics of subjectivity and objectivity, he remains firmly within the sway of certain epistemological problematics. This makes Marion's thinking a highly dense, confusing and complex affair, which offers on the surface the rhetorical flourish of French philosophy in the post‐Heideggerean climate, but requires great leaps of acceptance of Marion's pre‐suppositions and refusals in order to string together a coherent trajectory in his work. His work is highly problematic once one starts to dig deeper below its rhetorical surface: whilst the surface glitters with promise, the depths prove murky and misleading.
Marion's work seems to move too easily in blurring the boundary between proving something and showing something. Considering his rhetoric is so heavily oriented to the notion of letting things show themselves from themselves, there is considerable irony that he must be‐labour the point as he does. Is he attempting to prove that things show themselves from themselves?Footnote 45 Failure to think carefully enough about some of the intricacies of his own philosophical practice, combined with his suspicion of any kind of mediation or activity by a human ‘subject’, seem to find a strange parallel in Marion's failure to question how human persons might be involved in the way that things “show themselves from themselves.” We think that this question is one that is answered by a focus on the practices of doing philosophy and on the practices of doing theology, and in this way also illuminate their relationship to one another and to the object of their inquiry and articulation. Doing phenomenology is fundamentally about including those practices as a part of what is elucidated: the ‘space’ disclosed by such phenomenological practice inevitably involves the activity of philosophy as a situated practice. This is the whole point of Husserl's emphasis on phenomenological reduction. The reduction is exactly that procedure which is not merely jettisoned once one has made the reduction, but is continually re‐done because it is itself a part of what phenomenology elucidates. The reduction helps to bring phenomena into presence through a kind of ‘marking‐out’ of a realm or domain for thought, but more: this ‘marking‐out’ of a realm for thinking is the very matter of philosophy, this marking‐out is an activity that is engaged in, occurring in a particular situation, as part of a life. ‘Concepts’ and ‘categories’ are not the objects of philosophy, nor even of thought, they are the way in which we mark out a region to work with, work in, to work‐out‐of. The more flexible and fluid these markings‐out become, the richer the region thus marked out. Philosophical activity is richest when it seeks to dissolve the rigidity of precise definition in favour of the opening up of regions of investigation whilst remaining rooted in the life in which such activity always occurs and in which it has its sense. In order to unpack some of the implications of such a thesis, we must return to re‐assess basic issues within the phenomenological tradition with the view to opening out new critical angles and opportunities. Although Marion has seen the necessity of such a return, it is clear that his desire to get ‘beyond’ being is a move in the wrong direction, since he thus cannot account for his own situatedness as a philosopher.
