Abstract

What are we to make of the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion? It is perhaps most remarkable in the boldness with which it re-engages the classical phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger; this was already the case with Marion’s 1989 Réduction et donation, and remains the case with two texts that have appeared in English since Being Given, In Excess and Prolegomena to Charity. Being Given, which originally appeared in 1997 in French under the title Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation, is Marion’s most sustained attempt to carry forward the promise of the earlier Reduction and Givenness, namely to make the phenomenality of the phenomenon once again the central question of phenomenological philosophy. The attempt here is thus not to go beyond phenomenology, but to return to its original insights, its fundamental accomplishments, in order to discover again, in a new form, what had been the driving force at its inception.