Abstract

Jean-Luc Marion is one of several contemporary French philosophers who focus upon the issue of givenness and gift; other notable French thinkers who have addressed this theme are Jacques Derrida and the late Claude Bruaire. Although they come to different conclusions, all of them agree that the theme of gift, donation, or givenness is not merely one interesting topic among many, but that it is rather indispensable to any serious reflection on the nature of the whole. For Marion in particular, the question of givenness guides, to some extent, all of his work. In God Without Being, for example, he argues that when the Biblical God announces his name in Exodus—“I am who am” —what matters is not so much that he gives his name to Moses, but that he gives it. Hence, in Marion’s reading, God’s most proper name is not being or the scholastic Ipsum esse subsistens but “love”—which, for Marion, is the “icon,” as he calls it, that allows the incomprehensible to be seen while impeding any conceptualistic reduction of it. Being Given is the second volume of a trilogy whose first part, Reduction and Givenness, proposes what Marion considers the phenomenological principle: “so much reduction, so much givenness.” The first volume argues that every phenomenology is a phenomenology of givenness—in the sense both of an objective and a subjective genitive. BG clarifies the meaning of givenness by addressing three distinct questions over the course of its five books: whence does givenness proceed? ; what does givenness give? ; and who receives what is given?. The principal insight of the work concerns what Marion calls “the saturated phenomenon,” a theme that will be treated more fully in the third volume of his trilogy, In Excess.