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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: 0-8047-3411-9 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: I agree with the previous reader's review, except
Comment: he focuses only on Derrida's negative reduction - of phenomenology to its impossibility within a system of exchange (in this case, discursive). But Derrida also has a positive reduction, that of the gift to being outside and without givenness, the gift qua event that is not a gift, which he claims 'exists' only in differance. Thus being a discursive practice phenomenology is not only possible but necessary. Marion's argument is that the intentio is always already in the intendum, which he claims (as of no consequence) for phenomenology, for this intentio-intendum/intendum-intentio is exactly what phenomenon is (a kind of Hegelian move, claiming the part is formally the whole). In fact this is his thesis throughout his works, that the (theological) absolute (ie the presence of a pure given) is irrelevant to phenomenology, for phenomenology is absolute in and for itself. The true distinction between Derrida and Marion's theses is that the latter focuses only on the positive reduction (to immanence) of givenness whereas the former already demonstrated how one can't have one without the other, negative reduction (to transcendence), how one performs the other. Have we witnessed a 'metastasis' of differance?
Rating: 5
Summary: Don't be Fooled By the Title
Comment: Don't be fooled by the title. This book is far more than a simple phenomenological analysis of the structure of the gift giving. Anyone who has followed phenomenological debates is aware that much of the current discussion rises or falls with the status of givenness. Phenomenology, in one interpretation of its Husserlian formulation, is a thesis about the nature of intuition-- Put in very vulgar terms, it is a descriptive methodology that seeks to trace our intentions (our consciousnesses of) back to full intuitions given in lived experience. This project would function to ground knowledge, since the full intuitions of lived experience, like the Cartesian Cogito, are absolutely certain and cannot be doubted. However, from the very beginning, this project was plagued by aporia. Husserl quickly discovered time-consciousness and horizons of absence inhabiting all lived experience. As Derrida sought to demonstrate in his masterful _Speech and Phenomena_, the function of internal time consciousness and horizons in lived experience contaminates the project of tracing all intentionality back to *present* lived experience, thereby undermining the claims to foundationalism and certainty sought by phenomenology. Put otherwise, Derrida, in his "concept" of differance, discovered an "un-ground" preceding the ground or demonstrated that all lived experience is *mediated* by absence and difference or the trace. This demonstrates that the conditions for the possibility of phenomenology are also its conditions for its impossibility.
The premise upon which Derrida's argument is based is that Husserlian phenomenology is based on the possibility of full intuitions or rendering intentions present "in the flesh". If it can be shown that the condition under which it is possible to render any intention present also involves mediation or absence, then it also follows that phenomenology cannot achieve its avowed aim. If I have followed his argument properly, Marion, in highly startling move, contests precisely this *intuitionist* interpretation of phenomenological practice. What Marion attempts to do is to distinguish givenness from full intuition. From the very beginning a paradox animated Husserl's thought. The basic structure of intentionality consists in being consciousness of something. As such, every intention is composed of the act of intending (for instance, the act of perceiv*ing*) and that which is intended (the object perceived). After the reduction, but act (noesis) and object (noema) are immanent to consciousness. However, a paradox quickly became evident surrounding the noema or intentional object: in any intention the object is only given to me in profiles or aspects and never all at once. Yet nonetheless I intend these partial profiles of the object as being profiles *of* the object. In other words, I intend the whole without having that whole before me in intuition.
It is here where Marion seems to intervene. Under Marion's readings the *given* seems to become the object intended as such which gives itself and not the present profile given in intuition. But if this is truly the case, then Derrida's arguments lose much of their force, for phenomenology, while still indispensably making use of intuition, no longer premises its argument on full intuition. We thus see why Marion is engaged in an analysis of the gift. Derrida had already analyzed the impossibility of gift giving outside economy in _Given Time_, where he demonstrated this impossibility of a pure gift or a gift that did not demand exchange and profit. This conclusion already had implications for phenomenology, in that the syntax of the gift structure mirrors that of givenness (both have a similar structure of mediation according to Derrida). If Marion is led to approach the question of the gift, then it is to undermine the Derridean thesis about the gift and economy by showing how Derrida has failed to completely carry out the transcendental reduction, thus conceiving the gift in its transcendent formulation (which is bracketed in phenomenological analysis), rather than developing an immanent conception of the gift, for and through itself. Through this analysis, Marion is able to formulate an account of givenness that avoids the aporia developed by Derrida and which meets the criteria of givenness demanded by phenomenology's principle of all principles.
What we have here is thus far more than a simple phenomenological analysis of the gift. Marion has made a substantial contribution to phenomenological theory that intervenes in key twentieth and twenty first century debates about the status of the given or the ground of being. As such, this is a work of the greatest interest.
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Title: God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism) by Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A. Carlson ISBN: 0226505413 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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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: In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena by Jean-Luc Marion, Robyn Horner, Vincent Berraud ISBN: 0823222160 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) by Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A. Carlson ISBN: 0810112353 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
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