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Title: God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism) by Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A. Carlson ISBN: 0-226-50541-3 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "If 'God is love,' then God loves before being."
Comment: Let me admit first off that Marion's "God Without Being" is a difficult read; I admit this despite the fact that, when I first read it, my brain was well steeped in the work of Derrida, Heidegger, Levinas, and many others into and out of whose discourses Marion constructs his own argument. There are large chunks of the essay that still puzzle me, but the clarity of the ultimate movements will not be lost on the attentive reader. Theology is wasting its time, Marion claims, when it appears primarily as apologist for an existing God, for the most important thing about God is not first that God lives, but that God gives.
Beginning with an interrogation of what he will later term "the ontological impediment" (this very pre-occupation with systematizing or explaining God's being or God-as-Being), Marion contests that this very focus on ex-planation (with its aggressively outbound prefix) prevents one from being capable of acting as receiver (with all its quietly centripetal connotations) and thus betrays one of the most basic theological aims: speaking of "the gift that Christ makes of his body," Marion reminds us that "a gift, and this one above all, does not require first that one explain it, but indeed that one receive it" (162).
The book's back cover refers to this move as one that resituates God in the realm of agape, or Christian charity, rather than in the realm of Being. Marion does indeed speak of agape, but I think that the tidy and perhaps overly theoretical ring of the word would give way, if he had his preference, to the plain, everyday notion of "giving" to which he turns at the most powerful moments of "God Without Being." Because for Marion the gift of Christ is already a very physical fact ("in a word," he says, "the Resurrection remains historically verifiable" [193]), the messy physicality of giving seems to me truer to his reinscription of God than does the theological purity of agape.
The deeply Catholic background of Marion's work, while not in the least a detractor, may make the book slightly less accessible for those not familiar with many tenets of or ongoing debates within the Catholic theological tradition; this was certainly a difficulty for me, but not an insoluble one. And the framing of the essay as a working out of one's own faith, from the "Envoi" to "The Last Rigor," allows the impact of Marion's address to operate perfectly coherently on a logical level, but even more so on an individually emotional level.
Readers interested in theology and postmodern recontextuatlizations of it--and even, perhaps, in the reconciliation of these two terms--will find in Marion's "God Without Being" a very satisfying if not moving experience.
Rating: 5
Summary: Postmodern Theology
Comment: Marion rides the cutting edge of both theology and philosophy. He is a postmodern in the most brilliant sense of the word and already seems to be leaving such philosophers as Derrida and Foucault behind. Much like Kant and Heidegger, Marion is creating his own system and lingo- philosophers and theologians alike need to become familiar with his thought. This is a fantastic book and will undoubtedly take its place in the western cannon of philosophical thought.
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Title: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Giveness (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Jean-Luc Marion, Jeffrey L. Kosky ISBN: 0804734119 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Idol and Distance: Five Studies by Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A. Carlson ISBN: 0823220788 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Prolegomena to Charity by Jean-Luc Marion, Stephen E. Lewis, Jeffrey L. Kosky ISBN: 0823221725 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate by Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jen-Louis Chretien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Louis Chretien ISBN: 0823220532 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The God Who May Be: The Hermeneutics of Religion by Richard Kearney ISBN: 0253214890 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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