Abstract
This article aims to explore the philosophical approach to faith after deconstruction as manifested in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. By taking the saturated phenomenon as its focus, the analysis seeks to demonstrate that whilst Marion’s thinking proves to be an innovative re-imagining of the possibilities of phenomenology, its problematic recourse to a supplementary hermeneutic means that saturation can never be adequately applied to faith without simultaneously compromising the excessive intuition upon which it relies. The article then explores whether Nancy’s suggestion that saturation be re-framed as faith can offer a viable alternative approach. Whilst the post-phenomenological modality within which Nancy operates means it may be problematic to retain the term ‘saturation’ in the exact sense Marion gives it, it is argued that Nancy’s version of saturated faith allows us to approach the binary divide between philosophy and theology from a different direction, resulting in a vision of faith that cuts across theism and atheism, destabilising them from within. Although Nancy’s thought in this area certainly does nothing to respond to persistent questions surrounding the place of institutionalized religion within secular modernity, it nevertheless serves as a powerful tool for thinking the possibilities of faith in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
Hart’s breakdown of five distinct areas of debate between deconstruction and theology perhaps most succinctly demonstrates the diversity of viewpoints in this regard. These diverse positions range from a conviction that deconstruction makes a devastating (and perhaps inevitably fatal) atheistic attack on theology, to the appropriation of Derrida by the so-called ‘death of God’ theologians (1989: 64–67).
By utilising the term ‘after deconstruction’ throughout this paper, I do not mean to refer to the existence of any clearly discernible epoch after post-structuralism in any linear intellectual sense, but rather, the demand that twenty-first century thought continually return to the same challenges taken up by Derrida and his contemporaries in new, but also in many respects very similar, ways.
Horner suggests that Nancy’s faith as saturation does no essential violence to Marion’s thought but does not undertake a comprehensive analysis (2009, endnote 41, p. 16).
It should be noted that whilst I will be utilising the saturated phenomenon as a focal point for the discussion, I do not intend to carry out a detailed analysis of saturation as such. Rather, my objective is to explore the way in which saturation brings to light Marion’s and Nancy’s respective visions of faith.
Although I shall be focusing on this article—understood in the context of Marion’s broader oeuvre—as representative of his thinking on belief, it should be noted that he also engages with the question of faith in certain other texts that have not been considered here (see, for example, Marion 2010).
For example, see Marion’s reading of the Emmaus encounter in God Without Being (2012: 146–152).
For example, see Ward’s (1998) discussion of what he terms Marion’s ‘uncritical dogmatism’ (p. 229) founded on the self-legitimisation of a Biblical revelation beyond interpretation (p. 235). Although it should be noted that Ward is here critiquing Marion’s earlier theology, I would contend that in many ways his criticisms still apply to Marion’s phenomenology. Despite Jones’ defence of Marion on the grounds that a view of faith as hermeneutically derivative is a common interpretation within Christianity (2011, note 33, p. 199), we are still left with the problem of how to make this vision of faith cohere with the groundlessness saturation is meant to maintain.
It is interesting to note that in the early 1990s Marion made a contribution to a volume co-edited by Nancy entitled Who Comes after the Subject? (Marion 1991).
This withdrawal from nominative categorisation is clearly evident in Marion’s notion of a ‘de-nomination’ [dé-nomination] via which he seeks to access ‘the unattainable yet inescapable interlocutor beyond every name and every denegation of names’ (2002b: 140). De-nomination is therefore at once the site of the sharpest divergence from Derrida’s position, but also, as Horner suggests, the site of a possible convergence within a common aporetic experience (2001: 246).
Such a problematic is also visible in other key texts. In Being Given, for example, we read that ‘Christ can receive a plurality of names [which] denominate he who saturates not only each horizon, but the incommensurable sum of the horizons’ (2002a: 239–240). However, the very act of de-nomination seems to preclude us ever being able to acknowledge Christ as being at the centre of this incommensurable sum of horizons in the first place, a fact Marion himself comes close to admitting when he says that the origin of the call must always remain anonymous in both revelation and Revelation (2002a: 297).
A case in point is Burch (2010: 167), who claims that Marion’s reading of faith in ‘They Recognized Him’ commits the error of granting access to phenomenological religious intuition when theological faith cannot ever make such a claim. But does not Burch’s alternative, a vision of faith as ‘a commitment to the certainty of [a vision of the divine] when such certainty cannot in fact be guaranteed,’ risk entirely divorcing faith from any relevance to the real? In contrast, Purcell suggests that the clear-cut separation between phenomenology and theology results in an immature faith that can no longer engage with the reality of a world fundamentally shaped by the incarnation of Christ (2010: 134–135). It should also be noted that in certain other texts, Marion himself in fact argues for a dialogue between phenomenology and theology that may leave room for a re-evaluation of their respective boundaries (e.g. see 2008: 13).
In his dialogue with Derrida, Marion in fact goes further and declares that ‘as to the question of whether what I am doing, or what Derrida is doing, is within phenomenology or beyond, it does not seem to me very important’ (Derrida and Marion 1999: 68)
For a more thorough account of Nancy’s complex relationship to the thought of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, see Watkin 2009.
An ever-present subtext within this thinking on faith is, of course, Nancy’s understanding of the monotheistic God itself. In the context of his deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy retains the term ‘donation’ but stresses that the non-position of God and the world must be read as a givenness ‘from nothing and for nothing’ (2013: 31). The ‘nothing’ Nancy is referring to here is in turn directly related to patency, since ‘the effacement of God is the sense of the world’ (2013: 30).
Interestingly, Nancy suggests that the address of the parable bears much in common with the entire history of modern art (2008c: 8), an assertion that is borne out by his decision to examine these post-resurrection scenes through a series of paintings. Equally of note is the fact that his discussion of phenomenology in The Muses is carried out within the context of an examination of the plurality of the arts, an emphasis on artistic representation that clearly resonates with Marion’s own usage of art, especially his treatment of the idol (2002b: 54–81) which is also applied to a study of the resurrection (2002a: 238). In addition, the readings in Noli me tangere foreground the importance of the body (e.g. see p. 79), which plays an important role in both Nancy’s ontology of sense (see, for example, his notion of a bodily ‘exscription’ (Nancy 2008a: 17)), and in Marion’s reading of flesh as saturated phenomenon (2002b ,: 82–103). Although we are unable to delve deeper into this connection here, given that Marion himself indicates that revelation subsumes all four categories of saturation at once (2002a: 235), it would seem that sense offers a possible lens through which to view this confluence within, and across, the two philosophers’ respective oeuvres.
Like Marion, for whom the name spoken in the act of praise never captures any essence (2002b: 142–145), Nancy is seeking to efface the name but in a different way: in Nancy’s act of adoration, the name of ‘God with us’ becomes ‘the pronoun of all beings’ (2013: 41). In other words, ‘“God” [is] a name for the relation among all beings—therefore, for the world in the strongest sense of the word’ (2013: 30).
Here, we can note some strong resonances with Watkin’s discussion on the ethics of the Nancean call. Although for Nancy, ethics must be thought within the ontological because singular plurality is both ‘an ethos and a praxis’ (2000: 65), it could be argued that the appeal of sense lacks the necessary weight required to maintain any normative value (Watkin 2011: 176–85). In a similar way, detached from the force generated by Marion’s Levinasian understanding of the call, saturated faith may risk remaining unable to facilitate any meaningful step beyond the undecidability of the tout autre.
On this point, see Schrijvers’ important observations on what he sees as the instability of Nancy’s faith/belief distinction (2009: 284–85).
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Collins, A. Towards a Saturated Faith: Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy on the Possibility of Belief after Deconstruction. SOPHIA 54, 321–341 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0473-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0473-1