Jean-Luc Marion Quotes on Love
Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon (Le Phénomène érotique, 2003) gives contemporary phenomenology its most sustained treatment of love as a phenomenon of its own type, irreducible to the categories the modern epistemological and ontological traditions developed for objects and beings. The central argument is that the philosophical question “does anyone out there love me?” displaces the Cartesian ego’s self-certainty as the founding question of first philosophy: love rather than thought is the originary site at which the self comes into possession of itself, and the analysis of erotic phenomena (the lover’s gaze, the flesh, the oath, the child) discloses a logic the metaphysics of presence cannot accommodate. The framework integrates with Marion’s broader project on the saturated phenomenon (Being Given, In Excess) and his Catholic theological work on God Without Being.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“Does anyone love me?”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“God gives Himself to be thought outside of being.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“Love does not have to be in order to give itself.”
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“What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.”
p. 3