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59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"If 'God is love,' then God loves before being.", March 24, 2001
This review is from: God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
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.
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
God: Given (and) Outside, After and Beyond the Text, May 30, 2004
This review is from: God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
This review starts out with a bit of perplexity: there are two works in this book, 1) God Without Being, and 2) Hors-Texte. "Hors-Texte" translates, literally, as " 'outside the text,' the unpaginated plates added to the end of a book." My question here is, what is the relationship between these two works? My guess is that they are to be read together: Hors-Texte gives a place for the embodiment of (the) God Without Being. This embodiment takes place ("place" being here an intentionally spatial reference) in liturgy and the eucharist: God gives God's self outside of, after and beyond the text. This book functions as a work of theology (Marion is Roman Catholic) but can also function as a work in the philosophy of religion: religion is not something textual, so much as it is embodied in real time and real space. Marion, however, is not a theologian or philosopher of religion who seeks to arrive at a conception of God (or, for that matter, religion) that justifies a particular philosophy. Hence, he breaks fully with Enlightenment rationalists who seek a God that does little more than justify their own ideas of autonomy: for Marion, God is not the unmoved mover who must be before he loves. Rather, God loves before being: it is God's love which gives place to the Being of beings. This understanding of God as agape is a break, however, not only with so-called rationalists, but with scholasticism and late modern/post-modern thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Marion works off of both Nietzsche and Heidegger but also criticizes them for not giving a place to a God who loves before being. Nietzsche's twilight of the idols is nothing more than the twilight of particular idols: atheism is simply the refusal to believe in a particular *conception* of God, not God as such (although few, if any, atheists would ever admit to this). Similarly, Heidegger's subsuming God to the predicates of Being is equally misguided and blind; in the end, both Nietzsche and Heidegger commit a type of idolatry. For Marion, theology ought to be iconic: We only "see" God between the "halftimes of our idolatries", he writes. This God who exceeds our prior conceptions - that is, the predicates of Being - is not the God of metaphysics (onto-theology as Marion, following Heidegger, asserts). Rather, he is the God of unknowing: in short, revelation. Marion turns to the great mystics of the Church, particularly Dionysius the Aeropagite (aka Pseudo-Dionysius) and his mystical theology. There is something wonderfully raw about this; Marion's call to return to an understanding of God who loves outside of and beyond our ability to comprehend and inscribe in books finds its fullest expression in liturgy, lived and acted with/in/by bodies. Hence, God Without Being culminates in incarnation: Christ, in the Church, and in communion. There is a deeply ecclesial dimension to Marion's work. The Eucharist is celebrated within the life of the community collective whose local leader (the bishop!), as the central servant-celebrant, is the theologian extraordinaire. It is this embodiment that stands on the threshold of Hors-Texte (quite literally, as this discussion takes place immediately before the second part of the book, Hors-Texte). Marion writes with a rare combination of intellectual rigor, philosophical learning and appreciation, and a deep spirituality. The icon, ever opposed to the idol, directs our gaze beyond its own presence and to the God (Theos) that is beyond the text, but nonetheless gives Himself - loves - in the Word (Logos), which all theology (from the Greek words "Theos" and "Logos"!) writes towards and is, at its height, converted to. This is not an easy book to read (particularly if you have little or no background in late/post modern philosophy), but it is well worth the effort. Rarely does a book really give itself to the reader as a key to looking more deeply and seeing more clearly, but for those with eyes to read and ears to hear, they may are likely to find themselves moving beyond the text and into an embodied, liturgical practice, celebrating the Word that all words, at their best, look and are converted to: not on their own, but because of the Word's self-giving to words.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Controversial Thesis, May 24, 2005
This review is from: God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
In God without Being, French Theologian Jean-Luc Marion offers a controversial thesis about how to think God with categories, including the category of Being. Beginning with an important and enlightening distinction between the idol and the icon, Marion goes on to argue that most "conceptual" understandings of God (i.e., causa sui, prima causa, moral god, etc.) actually constitute idolatries, because they essentially limit the divine to the scope of the human gaze. This is, in Marion's view, the quintessential manufacture of God in the image of humans.
In following chapters, Marion attempts to develop an account of God's self-revelation that would allow us to avoid the traps of conceptual idolatry and think "God without being." For this project, Marion settles on the notion of "giveness" (French: "donation"). In Marion's view, we can think of a God free of all categories (including the category of being) only if we think of God as pure gift--a gift given without any horizon except the gift itself (phenomenologists take note). To flesh out this concept of giveness (i.e., the God who trangresses Being), Marion introduces the notion of love--an idea which, in his view, is still conceptually free enough to allow us to think God without inevitably falling into idolatry. Thus, with the God who "gives" himself as "agape," Marion believes he has found a way of thinking of God without recourse to the category of being--and more importantly, without the erection of a conceptual idol.
This text is profound in every sense of the word and merits numerous rereadings. In fact, anyone who wants to be conversant with "cutting-edge" Christian theology at the beginning of the 21st century will need to know this book well.
That said, Marion's language is often dense and, quite frankly, obscure. The sentences are long and jargon-filled, and the precise structure of his arguments is not always clear. In any case, however, God Without Being merits the attention it has received. A close, reflective reading will not go unrewarded.
Adam Glover
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