Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)

by Jean-Luc Marion (Author), Jeffrey Kosky (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Jean-Luc Marion has established himself as the leading phenomenologist of the day. The appearance of Being Given, the English translation of what is in my view the most important philosophical work of this important thinker, marks a milestone in the reception of Marion's work in English. A brilliant, complex and meticulous analysis of the whole range of phenomena surrounding giving, givenness, and the gift, culminating in the saturated phenomenon as the ‘given par excellence,’ Being Given, which was ten years in the making, will be the standard work in this field for an entire generation. Kosky's translation is superb. Altogether, a major publishing event.”—John D. Caputo, Villanova University

“Audacious and rigorous, Being Given is a signal contribution to modern thought. For Marion, phenomenology is concerned not with objects or even being but with givenness. Having clarified what phenomenology does, Marion brilliantly shows how it exceeds metaphysics and how it requires us to rethink the human subject in the most radical manner. At no time are we asked to call on revelation, yet every page of this luminous book has rich and inescapable implications for theology as well as philosophy.”—Kevin Hart, Monash University

“Being Given is . . . simply dazzling: it is a work of tremendous depth and highly original thought. . . . It’s amazing how much Marion . . . has changed the landscape of phenomenology—or what we on this side of the Atlantic call ‘continental philosophy of religion.’”—The Christian Century

Product Description

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative.

Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines.

Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (August 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804734119
• ISBN-13: 978-0804734110
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #248,813 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 49 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

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.

7 of 12 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

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?