Being Given by Marion Jean-Luc

Author:Marion, Jean-Luc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Lack and Nothingness

We should therefore expect that Kant would dedicate himself to thinking this unheard-of privilege of givenness—to securing nothing less than the bishopric of givenness. And yet in a stupefying reversal, he emphasizes this privilege of intuition only in order to better stigmatize its deficiency. For if only intuition gives objects, there falls to human finitude only a decidedly finite intuition, in this case a sensible intuition. Consequently, not only all the objects that demand an indefinite intuitive fulfillment, but also all those that probably necessitate a nonsensible (intellectual) intuition, are barred from appearing. Phenomenality remains limited by the lack of what makes it partially possible—intuition. What gives (intuition insofar as sensible) is but one with what is lacking (intuition insofar as intellectual or indefinite). What gives is lacking. The very thing that is lacking is precisely the only thing that could and should give. Intuition determines phenomenality as much by what it refuses it as by what it gives it. “Thought is the act which relates given intuition [gegebene Anschauung] to an object. If the mode of this intuition is not in any way given [auf keinerlei Weise gegeben], the object is merely transcendental, and the concept of understanding has only transcendental employment.”32 Thinking is more than knowing objects given by intuition, renouncing all those that no intuition will ever give, considering the immense cenotaph of phenomena that never appeared and never will appear, in short, taking the measure of intuition’s lack. Intuition, which alone gives, is essentially lacking. A paradox follows: from here on out, the more phenomena give themselves in sensibility, the larger grows the silent crowd of those that cannot and should not claim to give themselves. The more intuition gives in terms of the sensible, the more it attests its deficiency in bringing about the appearing of the phenomenal possible—held to be impossible. The finitude of intuition betrays its problematic character with the—“necessary,” Kant admits—permanence of the idea. The idea, although—or rather because—it is a “concept of reason to which no corresponding object can be given in sense experience,” nevertheless always remains visable, if not visible in the sensible apparitions from which it is excluded.33 “Absent from every bouquet,” the flower of thought calls sensible flowers to the “glory of long desire”34 and survives them. Likewise, the idea, in aiming outside the conditions fixed for phenomenality, marks its limits all the more. In the quasi-ghostlike mode of a nonobject, the idea accuses the limits of an intuition that can no longer give it. By not becoming sensible, therefore, the idea not only attests its own failing, but stigmatizes the failing of sensible intuition in general.

The phenomenon is therefore characterized, according to Husserl and Kant, by its lack of intuition, which gives it only by limiting it. Two observations confirm the radicality of this decision. (a) One would be the investigation of the privilege that theories of knowledge (from Plato to Descartes,35 from Kant to Husserl) have almost always accorded to logical and mathematical phenomena.

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