The Erotic Phenomenon,
Jean-Luc Marion (2007)
Le phénomène érotique (2003): a book that
“obsessed” Marion since 1977 and one he considers
to be his major work: “All of my books…have been
just so many steps toward the question of the erotic
phenomenon.” (10)
•The Erotic Phenomenon,
Jean-Luc Marion (2007)
•“The ardent desire of many highly desired”
–Maurice Scève (16th century French poet)
•“No one is who doesn’t love.”
–Saint Augustine
The Silence of Love
•Philosophy has—philosophers have—
betrayed love… “One would almost doubt
whether philosophers experience love….”
•We lack words, concepts, and strength.
•Other disciplines—poetry, literature, theology,
and psychoanalysis—all fail to help me truly
understand the meaning of love.
•Thus we are “condemned to feed on
scraps” of the media, entertainment
industry, and pop psychologists.
The Silence of Love
•That philosophy has deserted “the question
of love” is shocking and scandalous, for love
belongs to its very name φιλοσοφία.
•What does this name mean?
–Loving comes before knowing, the desire of
truth precedes the attainment of truth
•But instead of being “the love of wisdom”
philosophy has become metaphysics,
opening the way to science.
The Silence of Love
•Marion’s hypothesis: “Out of philosophy’s
amorous disaster we can reconstruct an
inquiry on love.” (3)
•The current situation: the powerlessness of
philosophy
–We lack a concept of love
–We lack the words
•“make love,” “I love you,” “charity”
•Our point of departure: A trace of a path:
See where philosophy went wrong
The Silence of Love
•Our point of departure: The three
inversions
•Philosophy refused love’s unity…
–“A serious concept of love distinguishes itsef
by its unity…” (5)
•…Love’s rationality…
–There is a greater, erotic rationality
•…and Love’s primacy
–Focus on the erotic phenomenon itself—
without being
The Silence of Love
•Our point of departure: The three
prohibitions are all rooted in a single
decision:
–that love is a derivative modality
•Contra the Cartesian paradigm of the ego
cogito and Descartes’ shocking error
–We are lovers (ego amans) before we are
thinkers (ego cogitans)
•So we now need erotic meditations rather
than metaphysical ones
•Marion’s Method
•Destroying the tradition
•Avoiding citations
•No presupposed lexicon or theories
•“To the things themselves”
(phenomenology)
•Readers can test this all themselves
•“One must speak of love…in first person”
and yet he will “say I in your name.” (9-10)
•Humility
•Marion’s Method: Phenomenology
• Etymological definition: phainomenon + logos: “the study
of that which appears” (to consciousness as it appears),
the study of experience as such.
• A method of doing philosophy:
– a descriptive clarification of “the things themselves.”
– not a set of doctrines; “There is no the one phenomenology”
(Heidegger).
• For Husserl consciousness has an inherent a prior
structure that can be systematically analyzed and
described, thus phenomenology can be understood as “a
methodological description of the structures of
experience.”
• Phenomenology also denotes the complex philosophical
movement developed in the 20th century in Continental
Europe following Husserl (Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas,
Derrida).
•Marion’s Method: Phenomenology
• The natural attitude, epoché , and phenomenological
reduction
• The natural attitude is our ordinary, everyday outlook on
life, which includes an awareness of a world of objects
spread out in time and space and a practical world of
values.
• For Husserl this involves a certain dogmatic
(metaphysical) attitude towards reality, so he came up
with the epoché to suspend this attitude and its theoretical
presuppositions in order to be lead back (re-ducere) to the
specific way that experience manifests itself to us.
• The purpose of this is “to liberate us from a
natural(istic) dogmatism and to make us aware of our
own constitutive (i.e. cognitive, meaning-disclosing)
contribution to what we experience.” (PM, 24-25)
Concerning a Radical Reduction
•§1. Doubting Certainty
•Knowing: “Every man desires to know....”
Why?
•For pleasure, self-enjoyment, which points
to the primacy of desire over knowing
•Certainty concern objects; objects certified
by the ego… “but we must doubt that the
certainty can flow back upon the ego.” (13)
•Let us grant Descartes’ argument that there
is a certainty, but what follows from this?
Concerning a Radical Reduction
•What is Descartes’ certainty?
•That I exist as long as I think myself as the
object of thought.
•“I am only certain of myself in the same
way that I am certain of an object.” (13)
•But in no way has this certainty stopped me
from doubting myself—my future, my
possibilities, my talents, the strengths of my
desires. (15)
§2. “What’s the Use?”
•The certainty of objects is derivative and
doesn’t address what matters to me most:
the certainty of me.
•This simple question undermines the
significance of certainty of objects.
•“what is the good of my certainty, if it still
depends on me, if I am only through
myself?” (19)
§3. The Erotic Reduction
•Beyond the paradigm of certainty: “Vanity
disqualifies every certainty…”
•My assurance demands more than certainty.
•It demands a response to the question:
–“Does anybody love me?” (20)
•In order for it to be possible for me to be,
it is “necessary for me that someone love
me.” (20)
§3. The Erotic Reduction
•So beyond the epistemic reduction (to
knowing objects), and the ontological
reduction (to being being), we have the
erotic reduction (Does anybody love me?”).
•“I must discover myself as a given (and
gifted) phenomenon, assured as a given that
is free from vanity.” (22)
•This assurance comes from an other; it
comes from elsewhere.
§3. The Erotic Reduction
•Thus it is the elsewhere that “determines
originarily that which I am by that for whom I
am…I am insofar as someone wills me good
or ill…” (24-25).
•“Who can hold seriously that the possibility
of finding oneself loved or hated does not
concern him at all?” (26)
§4. The World according to Vanity
•A weighty objection: replacing the thinking
ego with the loved or hated ego could
weaken it for two reasons:
–1. I must give up perfect autonomy.
–2. I could lose myself in a definitive
uncertainty.
•Response: With the erotic reduction “I
enter into an absolutely new terrain” (27) …
“the reign of love” (28).
§5. Space
• “The erotic reduction renders destitute
the homogeneity of space (that every here
can become an over there).” (29)
• Where am I in the erotic reduction?
• Consider an exemplary situation: travelling
to a foreign country
• I am over there in relation to the elsewhere,
which radically defines where I am.
• Under the erotic reduction space is
essentially heterogeneous.
§6. Time
• “The erotic reduction renders destitute
the succession of time.” (32)
• The natural attitude: constant succession
in which nothing stays put, no center
• The erotic reduction: the event from
elsewhere provides the center
• Before the unforeseeable event arrives,
there is an expectation and a waiting, in
which no time passes, in which nothing
happens.
§6. Time
• It is our expectations that define who we
are.
• Through the arrival from elsewhere the
present is given (the advent), which
defines the temporal modes of past,
present, and future.
§7. Ipseity (The self’s identity)
• “The erotic reduction renders destitute all
identity of self to self.” (37)
• “The question ‘Does anyone love me?”
designates the point at which I discover
myself affected as such, as
unsubstitutable.” (38)
• Although I don’t know who I am, in the
erotic reduction I know where I am: i.e.,
where the question finds me.
• In the flesh… (not the body)