Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) is among the best-known living philosophers in France and a former student of Jacques Derrida. Although much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, it is rather his explicitly religious works that have garnered much recent attention. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida. To a certain extent, Marion also takes up the mantle of Emmanuel Levinas in directing our thought beyond being. There is a widespread but possibly dubious designation of Jean-Luc Marion as a leading contributor to postmodern theology.

Life

Marion was born in Meudon, France, in 1946. He married in 1970 and has two sons. Marion studied at the University of Nanterre (now the University Paris X – Nanterre) and the Sorbonne and then did graduate work in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. After receiving his doctorate in 1980, he began teaching at the University of Poitiers. From there he moved to become the Director of Philosophy at the University Paris X – Nanterre. In 1996 he became Director of Philosophy at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne). He is currently the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School; also in the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought at the same university.

Notable ideas

According to John D. Caputo, Marion "is famous for the idea of what he calls the “saturated phenomenon,” which is inspired by his study of Christian Neoplatonic mystical theologians....[The idea that] there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded—or saturated."^[1]

Works in English

• God Without Being, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1998.
• Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
• On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
• The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, Fordham University Press, 2001.
• Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Stanford University Press, 2002.
• In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, Fordham University Press, 2002.
• Prolegomena to Charity, Fordham University Press, 2002.
• The Crossing of the Visible, Stanford University Press, 2004.
• Descartes' Grey Ontology: Cartesian Science and Aristotelian Thought in the Regulae, St. Augustine's Press, 2006.
• The Erotic Phenomenon: Six Meditations, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• On the Ego and on God, Fordham University Press, 2007.
• Descartes' White Theology, Saint Augustine's Press, Translation in process.

Books in English on Marion

• Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, Ian Leask and Eoin G. Cassidy, eds., Fordham University Press, 2005
• Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction, Robyn Horner, Ashgate, 2005.
• Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, edited by Kevin Hart, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
• Reading Jean-Luc Marion:Exceeding Metaphysics, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Indiana University Press, 2007.

References

See also

• Continental philosophy
• Postmodern Christianity
• Radical orthodoxy
• Rational mysticism