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57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't be Fooled By the Title, December 23, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)
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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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Back,Back, before things themselves, May 24, 2011
I have long been interested in the idea of increasing complexity, the paradigm in which energies interact in such ways as to be anentropic, or actually increase in organization rather than disperse into oblivion. Philosophy has been at a loss to fully engage this notion, being locked in ancient and scholastic notions of causality, and ultimately first causes, or dominating, all-encompassing concepts that metaphysically presage all under the sun that is or may be. Until now.
When one attempts to describe notions of singularizing out of the great cosmic onwarding, without presupposition, except for what arises in the form of "it just so happens that it is the case that..." words fail. Until now.
When one attempts to drive to the heart of occurrence, and that there is occurrence for us, for living beings, no less consciousness, it has seemed impossible to do so without implying the necessity of human cognizance. Until now.
Marion has initiated a significant movement in charting out the outer reaches of experiencing, where language and even awareness goes dim, so as to sense coming forth, givenness, on its terms, not on ours. We see the liveliness of anentropic potencies streaming forth (a call) so as to instigate singularizing. He does this in the terms that elide names -- intentionally and systematically. And instead, shows these great potencies, in their multiple modes of givenness (in the human phenomenological realm) that we actually, daily enact: as idol, flesh, event, icon, and as surprise, unbearable, unintelligible, such that we are only the respondants, and can only be so in "Love." This term finally taking its place as non-sentimental, but profoundly determining of what comes.
To be sure, Marion remains within a phenomenological, teleological and "epistemic" mode, and so we do not see, for instance, the artist at work, in the throes of encounter with these forces (Blanchot takes us there in his Thomas characterizations). But this is no limitation -- it is a giving in itself.
I am not a professional philosopher and so I don't know how the logicians and positivists will attack this work (or try to bury it by ignoring it). For me, it has the status of Schelling's "Ages of the World," or even Hegel's "Phenomenology," certainly it has the status for me of Neitzsche's "Gay Science" or "Geneology of Morals." Or maybe its work on my response has only begun and I have no parameters as yet available to hear anything but a provisional echo. I think that might change too.
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11 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I agree with the previous reader's review, except, January 1, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)
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?
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