NOTES ON THE EROTIC PHENOMANON of Jean Luc Marion

^ Notes from !e Unity of Eros and Agape: On Jean-Luc Marion’s Erotic PhenomenonKyle Hubbard

*Highlights :• If I have never been loved by anyone, then I consider life to be meaningless. • Being loved gives me the assurance that my life matters.• any attempt to love ourselves directly ends in self-hatred and not self-love.• self-hatred is our primary affection• “[T]he finitude of the self only feels itself adequately assured if an infinite love

assures it; in short, the finite receives assurance from nothing less than the infinite. • assurance as a lover -not the assurance of being , nor of being itself , but the

assurance of loving. .• “Seduction wants to make itself loved without, in the end, loving—I only go about

the advance with the firm resolution of losing it as soon as possible

If I have never been loved by anyone, then I consider life to be meaningless. Consequently, Marion defines love (whether agape, eros, or philia) as that which provides my life with meaning. When I ask the most fundamental human question, ‘Does anyone love me?,’ I am looking for someone to act and feel towards me in a way that gives me the assurance that my life matters.

For Marion, the central question of human existence is whether anyone loves me. If this question is not answered affirmatively, then I have no natural self-love, no natural desire to persevere in my being: “For I can just as easily not esteem my being as lovable, I can always hate being, out of disgust or impotence; I can even deny myself the right and above all the duty to encumber the world of my fellows with my pathetic claim to persist in my pitiable being. Being—should a lover necessarily love it, and love it for itself, as fitting to him in the rank of lover? Nothing is less assured” (2007: 50). Therefore, self-love rooted in the perseverance of one’s existence is an illusion according to Marion. It cannot assure me in any sense because I need a reason to persevere in my being other than the brute fact that I exist.

Marion believes that any attempt to love ourselves directly ends in self-hatred and not self-love. He argues that our desire for assurance, the demand that someone else loves me, reveals not that self-love is at the core of our existence, but that self-hatred is our primary affection:

“Nothing is more evident than love of self and perseverance in one’s being, at least in the natural attitude; but as soon as we enter the erotic reduction, each appears as a logical contradiction, or more exactly, an erotic contradiction. To have done with these illusions, we will establish once and for all the exact opposite thesis—no one can love himself, and surely not with an unconditional self-love, because every man for himself finds, more original than the alleged self-love, self-hatred in himself” (2007: 53).

Marion claims that the result of our search for assurance is that we do not love ourselves, but we actually hate ourselves.

“[T]he finitude of the self only feels itself adequately assured if an infinite love assures it; in short, the finite receives assurance from nothing less than the infinite. The finite, in order to resist vanity and its ‘What’s the use?’ requires an assurance, and thus an infinite love” (2007: 55). Because I know I am finite, I realize I cannot possibly assure myself. So, even if I could love myself in an immediate sense prior to receiving assurance from the outside, this self-love could not assure me because I require an infinite love, a love that I cannot see the beginning or end of. This must be a love that comes from outside me and appears as something unexpected.

my demand to be loved shows that I have not yet understood love. When I demand that another assure me, I am looking to get something out of her; I am considering love to be an economic exchange (2007: 69).

I have not yet understood that love suspends reciprocity. Love must be given without reason and without the expectation of exchange.In order to find assurance I cannot just ask the question, ‘Does anyone love me?,’ but I must proceed to the question, ‘Can I love another first?’ Marion believes that the former question requires moving to the latter. I need to move to this question because it is only by seeking to love first that love occurs: “When, then, does the lover appear? Precisely when, during the encounter, I suspend reciprocity, and no longer economize, engagingmyself without any guarantee of assurance. The lover appears when one of the actors in the exchange no longer poses prior conditions, and loves without requiring to be loved, and thus, in the figure of the gift, abolishes economy” (2007: 78). I can only love when I suspend my demand for assurance and instead seek to love another.

[W]hen I pass on to the question ‘Can I love first?’ what assurance can I legitimately hope for, as a lover? Evidently not the assurance to be able to continue or to persevere in my being despite the suspicion of vanity, but the sole assurance appropriate to the radicalized erotic reduction— not the assurance of being , nor of being itself , but the

assurance of loving. . . understood as the pure and simple assurance of the precise fact that [I love] (2007: 73).

Marion insists that when I decide to love I do not give up my desire for assurance. Instead I replace my demand for assurance with the hope that another will love me and thus assure me

“Seduction wants to make itself loved without, in the end, loving—I only go about the advance with the firm resolution of losing it as soon as possible; I only lose myself in the advance so that someone comes to me and I thus find myself again; or rather so that I find her without her ever finding me again. The advance disappears, like a lure I dangle, assuring me a free gain. In seduction I take pleasure, but the pleasure is solitary” (2007: 83). Seduction is not love because the seducer only tricks the other into loving him without actually loving the other.

The case of seduction is not an instance of love because it does not presuppose eternity; the lover has not promised to love at this moment for all time. While no one can presume to guarantee that one’s love will last forever, in declaring love for someone, I must do so under the promise of eternity. To begin to love, I must desire to be faithful forever. If I say “I love you” at the same time knowing that I am only going to love for a limited amount of time, then the love is not simply deficient, but it is not love at all. My choice to be faithful does not guarantee eternity, but I do not love if I know that I will love only for a limited amount of time. Marion concludes that eros, and not just agape, requires the promise that I love for all time. An attempt to love without the promise of eternity is not love because I will not assure the beloved that she matters.

^ Notes from In (the) Place of the Self Joeri Schrijvers

*Highlights :

• the question whether I will be able to live truthfully boils down to the question whether I decide for love and decide not to shy away from it—if and only if I may finally know what, who and even how to love—the world, myself, or God.

• The desire for happiness is ineradicable: “we prefer the sadness of not reaching beatitude [. . .] rather than giving up on desiring it”

• the human being in somewhat of a dreadful position: at some point, all of us have to face the truth, and the truth of love is, in Marion—and in good theological fash ion—placed in God: the joy of happiness and of beatitude will only endure “in” God

• This “distance” between what I love and long for and the tiny bit that can be attained of it in this vain, all-too-vain world defines, for Marion at least, the very place of the self.

• I can only escape the vanity of this world when someone answers my question “does someone love me?”

• My place is defined by the place where my love is• substitute being and the world -towards a divine place.• These growing pains, the burden that is being, and the “irresolution of the resolution,

the indecision of the decision”—the fact of not being able to liberate oneself entirely from being

• this state of flux, the reluctance and resistance to decide upon the “great reason” of things: temptation

• It can learn to love the truth if and only if it “can make good use of the pain”• “the liar attempts to make that which he or she prefers to the truth (the beloved

idol) occupy precisely the place of truth” • “one accepts letting oneself be accused by the truth, only to be able to confess” • for not [having to] hate [its] light, one needs to love it more than one loves oneself,

of which it accuses the traits • “sin consists ultimately in the negation of (or ignorance about) the fault rather

than in the fault itself” • the almost permanent state of sin is thus “to desire and to will [beatitude and

God’s gifts] in such a way that I dispense with God at the moment when I appropriate what God dispenses”

• The deviation lies not in “the beautiful and the truth, which remain the apex of desire, but in the mode of access to this goal: either through direct possession [. . .] or by participation” either seeing “the beautiful as a gift” or “as a good to be appropriated”

• It is the latter that can lead one astray, and puts one on the way even to perversion: “I pretend to imitate God without God” (ALS, p. 176).

• “if I produce the truth, the truth thus does not produce me”• “love is nothing like an option it only remains for us to decide how and what to

love”• The will, in this example, has power over everything but itself, since here “the

metaphysical rule of the will is [. . .] bracketed [and] submitted to the erotic reduction

• “beauty makes that step towards me that I cannot take towards beauty. Beauty makes me go towards itself by attracting me with a strong enough seduction so as to make me, as if despite myself, confess my sins”

• it is “God [who] gives the most intimate in us—our will to will” the love of God

• the hermeneutics of creation consists in precisely not recognizing things as beings [. . .] but in recognizing them as gifts received under the rubric of creation and whose presence [as gifts] only persists in this exchange

• ** The question posed to things becomes the answer: to have access to the creation it is necessary that one be transported to another place, elevated and lifted to an “elsewhere” that is silently already crossing the totality of beings. Through praise the believer is attracted to this “elsewhere” than world, to this place other than (the) self from which the praise, worthy of the Lord, finally becomes possible. For this to occur, however, it is necessary that one see the nothingness of the world—as if the things of the world already tell us to look elsewhere, for there is no God here—and that one flees from everything that attaches to this world and its place: my place and my life, my praise and my love are elsewhere. This “transposition” is again reminiscent of the reduction as portrayed in The Erotic Phenomenon: my reaching out for the phone to get back to my lover’s reach not only indicates that, in a certain sense, I am nothing without the one I love but also that my home is, so to say, nowhere without her: the entirety of my being is directed and oriented towards our love. It is this sense that Marion will say that only love can tell me who I am, where I am, and what I am: I am your love, I am with you, I am a lover.

• It is this attraction to and seduction by God’s advance towards the believer that “saves”. It is this liberative “movement” that places the believer in some sense outside the world and outside itself. It is this liberation from and this exodus out of the time of sin, “this time converted in advance that gives me the time of conversion. It does not pass, but comes upon us as a possibility, the ultimate one”

• What liberates and saves from sin is that time reserved for those who, through faith, know to reach out—although never fully—to that which will never pass; that is, the “perfectly eschatological future” . It is here that the soul wishes to dwell, attracted by the one thing that seems to last, namely, the divine permanence and the constant divine blessing

• Marion envisages a “reprise, rehearsal and a revision” of the question of being . It is this return to being that allows for a renewed stance over and against the world, and even oneself

• such a love for the world is only possible for the self that has already substituted its absolute and spontaneous concern for all things of the world for the love of God, the one who is occupied by charity rather than the world. It is this one who is allowed to love truly “even oneself”

We know we want to be happy. We know, too, that it is love that makes us happy. On top of that, and over and against the temporary satisfaction that the pursuit and the purchase of this or that object may bring, we also know that love manages to induce a more or less permanent state of attunement to and well-being over our lives. Truth therefore becomes

depen- dent upon a certain practice and, perhaps, a decision: the question whether I will be able to live truthfully boils down to the question whether I decide for love and decide not to shy away from it—if and only if I may finally know what, who and even how to love—the world, myself, or God.

The desire for happiness is ineradicable: “we prefer the sadness of not reaching beatitude [. . .] rather than giving up on desiring it” (ALS, p. 133).

Marion mentions, for instance, that the longing for beatitude is “intrinsic to desire” (ALS, p. 130). In any case, the mysteriousness of such a desire in each and every one of us puts the human being in somewhat of a dreadful position: at some point, all of us have to face the truth, and the truth of love is, in Marion—and in good theological fash ion—placed in God: the joy of happiness and of beatitude will only endure “in” God (ALS, p. 140).15

if that which one longs for, ultimate and lasting happiness, proves itself to be untenable, unreachable and unattainable from out of this world and constantly being deferred and different from that which I can attain in being and in the world, then the very fact of this inadequacy needs to be considered as “gaping and unsurmountable: it [even] becomes my most evident and most clear characteristic” (ALS, p. 141). This “distance” between what I love and long for and the tiny bit that can be attained of it in this vain, all-too-vain world defines, for Marion at least, the very place of the self. It is a distance over which we cannot cease to cross.

The Erotic Phenomenon. In this book, the erotic reduction seems to resemble a well-known fact of our every-day lives. Indeed, when we are abroad very often the first thing that we do is to get in touch with the lover we left behind. We start to look for telephones, the internet, looking for an answer to the question that sets the erotic reduction in motion: “does someone love me?” And, as long as I haven’t found a telephone this question will keep unsettling me. Everything else that is offered to me is of no importance, its vanity, the vanity of all there is seems to surround me and I can only escape the vanity of this world when someone answers my question “does someone love me?” The world, and everything in it, is in a certain sense bracketed. My place is defined by the place where my love is and the assurance of this love can only come from another and from elsewhere (EP, pp. 11–40).

Saint Augustine, Marion says, does not only ask to substitute being and the world—exteriority—for love or the interiority of the loving self; Augustine likewise demands to substitute the intimacy of our very interiority for that which is superior to it and, thus, that

one “transcends one’s interiority” towards a divine place. Marion is quick to point to the liberation that this turn towards the superior—that is, toward the good, the beautiful and the truth—entails: commenting on Augustine’s idea of “mens” (in its difference from the ego), Marion argues that:in not thinking itself, the mens thus no longer queries for its essence [. . .] in short: liberates itself from itself [. . .] The mens becomes what it knows because it loves it and thus wants to identify itself with it [. . .] In sum: as soon as the mens is liberated enough to think an other than itself and can surpass its own (non-)essence, it can become, through thinking an other than itself, an other than the self (ALS, p. 124).The growing pains accompanying such a liberation are obvious and Marion is perhaps more explicit than ever on the resistance with which we meet this transformation, on the pain and the sadness that seems to accompany it. this practice of love, the desire for truth, and the judgment that this truth exercises, “imposes its demands” and that the one receiving them can “sometimes or even most often” (ALS, p. 157) not be properly equipped to endure its excess.These growing pains, the burden that is being, and the “irresolution of the resolution, the indecision of the decision” (ALS, p. 230)—the fact of not being able to liberate oneself entirely from being

With Augustine, Marion names this state of flux, the reluctance and resistance to decide upon the “great reason” of things: temptation (ALS, p. 161).

It is here as well that the self, according to Marion, is assigned two basic tonalities: love and hate (ALS, p. 159). It can learn to love the truth if and only if it “can make good use of the pain” (ALS, p. 169n.1) the truth provokes, or it can be tempted to turn its back on the truth and live, so to say, a lie, for the truth’s adversary is not falseness but the lie: “the liar attempts to make that which he or she prefers to the truth (the beloved idol) occupy precisely the place of truth” (ALS, p. 179).20 Thus either one denies the truth and one loses oneself in the temporary “relief” (ALS, p. 169) which the “pleasure of fleeing” brings about (ALS, p. 170) or one confronts the truth, submits to its judgment, and bears its pain—if only to finally “see” the truth (ALS, p. 170)21, to become “other” and so find one’s “true self” (cf. ALS, p. 171). In the latter case, “one accepts letting oneself be accused by the truth, only to be able to confess” (ALS, p. 171).

Marion, points to the recognition of the deformity of the sinner. To support this deformity, however, does neither mean to make it my own [mienne] nor to let me be reduced to it, but means precisely not to deny this deformity and, by admitting it, finding oneself liberated. By recognizing it, I break free of it, and, by seeing myself in [its] light, I also appear to myself as enlightened. In short, for not [having to] hate [its] light, one needs to love it more than one loves oneself, of which it accuses the traits (ALS, p. 163)

Marion regularly comments on our status as sinners: “sin consists ultimately in the negation of (or ignorance about) the fault rather than in the fault itself” (ALS, pp. 61n.1; 205). The “originary lie” and the almost permanent state of sin is thus “to desire and to will [beatitude and God’s gifts] in such a way that I dispense with God at the moment when I appropriate what God dispenses” (ALS, p. 174). The deviation lies not in “the beautiful and the truth, which remain the apex of desire, but in the mode of access to this goal: either through direct possession [. . .] or by participation” (ALS, p. 175): either seeing “the beautiful as a gift” or “as a good to be appropriated” (ALS, pp. 177–178).22 It is the latter that can lead one astray, and puts one on the way even to perversion: “I pretend to imitate God without God” (ALS, p. 176).

“if I produce the truth, the truth thus does not produce me” (ALS, p. 186).

“love is nothing like an option, or something facultative but predestines us with an [. . .] inexcusable and irremediable possibility [. . .] it only remains for us to decide how and what to love” (ALS, p. 367).

Marion takes great pains to describe the failure of the self to reach out for the divine, its suffering because of not being able to, once for all, settle on its stance with regard to God. Although there exist only two possibilities, namely to decide for the love of God (or not) considered from the fact that the truth becomes loveable because it is beautiful

It is this impossibility to decide about oneself this experience where, even if the self knows better and therefore ought to want the good, it nonetheless chooses not to act accordingly and even encounters the limits of doing so.

One might, for instance, think of the smoker, who, fully aware of all the reasons that should make him or her quit smoking, nevertheless lights another cigarette. Such an experience could thus not be explained on the basis of reason alone.The will, in this example, has power over everything but itself, since here “the metaphysical rule of the will is [. . .] bracketed [and] submitted to the erotic reduction [:] I do not want the truth precisely because I know [the truth]. In other words: I hate the truth” (ALS, p. 231). The infamous weakness of the will shows itself, paradoxically, very strong: it will go out of his way not to choose what it ought to choose; it will come up with lies, even deceive itself, and live in denial so as to avoid what is best for it (Cf. ALS, p. 233).

It is this permanent state of resistance which makes Augustine (and Marion) again differ from Heidegger: “Saint Augustine sees that the proclaimed ‘authenticity’ (which one needs to understand more exactly as the appropriation of the self through itself) is not accomplished through the will and through resolution [. . .] The access to the self does not depend on the self” (ALS, p. 234). In the encounter with God, the self discovers precisely that which it cannot give itself.32 Though the self has access to all beings and allobjects it desires, it does not have access to its most intimate desire, namely, its lust for beatitude. For at the very moment the self tries to appropriate beatitude and possess it, it loses its divine infinity and takes on the finite contours of its possessor (ALS, p. 178).33

This impossibility to decide about oneself is in need of some “outside help”, as it were. Here lies another difference between Dasein and a facticity coram Deo: the one who “ ‘belongs to Christ’ (pertinens ad Christum) decides without knowing if and how he or she can decide [. . .], since this decision does not depend on him or her. [This decision] has to be received [. . .] as a gift” (ALS, p. 217).34 It is this gift which decides for me over myself that shows and reveals for me something, which I, because of its superiority, can love more than anything else, even, and especially, more than myself. In this sense, grace comes to the aid of the imperfect will, and it is here that the incarnational nature of Marion’s account shows itself. For the decision about oneself would remain impossible were it not the case that “beauty makes that step towards me that I cannot take towards beauty. Beauty makes me go towards itself by attracting me with a strong enough seduction so as to make me, as if despite myself, confess my sins” (ALS, p. 198).35 God’s grace is always and already ahead of me, and outruns my run towards it.36 If the self advances inwards and finds God in that place of intimacy, it is only because God already has advanced and descended to that place and dwells there. In this sense, the Incarnation is, as it were, an “inside job”.

God gives the power for me to decide for love. It is in this sense that, in a certain way, God operates an erotic reduction on me: God gives me what I cannot give to myself. “That which my will can absolutely not will, God can grant it to will it if only God gives [the power] to will it” (ALS, p. 255). This is God’s condescension towards the believer: instead of me advancing towards the object I try to love, but love poorly, the beloved descends, has descended already in advance, to show me the place where “it” dwells and where the self, albeit always and already too late, advances towards (ALS, p. 254). Although the human will can advance towards God’s love, God, in turn, advances towards the human will to turn it into an instance worthy of (God’s) love. It is thus through God’s grace that one finds love within, and by means of which the human will is transformed and turned, in advance, in “a response” (ALS, p. 257), for it is “God [who] gives the most intimate in us—our will to will” the love of God (ALS, p. 260).

Creation - the crossing of my struggle with God with God’s struggle for me—which responds to the question “how I can make myself heard, in the time of God, in eternity?” -then, is nothing other than the very crossing of time and eternity.Praise of God as creator is only possible because we have been radically preceded by the believing community—this is creation’s “place”. The opening of the world to its creator—the movement through which the world can point and refer “to” its creator—derives from the “hermeneutics of belief”:

To qualify the heavens [or] the earth [as] creatures, boils down to praise in them the gift of God, to praise God by recognizing him as Creator. It follows that the hermeneutics of creation consists in precisely not recognizing things as beings [. . .] but in recognizing them as gifts received under the rubric of creation and whose presence [as gifts] only persists in this exchange (ALS, p. 324).

it is “only the community of the believers [. . .] which is permitted to see and to say all things as created” (ALS, p. 322). No one can give the faith to him- or herself: it is only from the believing community that my own response arises in the first place.

By means of praise the believer is granted the ability to see creation cross the world and all its beings. ** The question posed to things becomes the answer: to have access to the creation it is necessary that one be transported to another place, elevated and lifted to an “elsewhere” that is silently already crossing the totality of beings. Through praise the believer is attracted to this “elsewhere” than world, to this place other than (the) self from which the praise, worthy of the Lord, finally becomes possible. For this to occur, however, it is necessary that one see the nothingness of the world—as if the things of the world already tell us to look elsewhere, for there is no God here—and that one flees from everything that attaches to this world and its place: my place and my life, my praise and my love are elsewhere. This “transposition” is again reminiscent of the reduction as portrayed in The Erotic Phenomenon: my reaching out for the phone to get back to my lover’s reach not only indicates that, in a certain sense, I am nothing without the one I love but also that my home is, so to say, nowhere without her: the entirety of my being is directed and oriented towards our love. It is this sense that Marion will say that only love can tell me who I am, where I am, and what I am: I am your love, I am with you, I am a lover.

The nothingness of the world opens onto, or is opened by, God’s descent towards God’s dwelling place—what Augustine calls “caelum caeli”, the heavens higher still than the terrestrial heaven and earth (ALS, p. 338)—and which pulls the gaze away from that

which perishes only to attract it to that which lasts (ALS, p. 311): the “love for the divine permanence” (ALS, p. 340). It is this attraction to and seduction by God’s advance towards the believer that “saves” (ALS, p. 331). It is this liberative “movement” that places the believer in some sense outside the world and outside itself. It is this liberation from and this exodus out of the time of sin, “this time converted in advance that gives me the time of conversion. It does not pass, but comes upon us as a possibility, the ultimate one” (ALS, p. 313).

The “alterity within” does not point to “the presence of God or to a divine spark within me, but indicates that I only accede to myself when I have a place elsewhere—as it happens: in God” (ALS, p. 331).

What liberates and saves from sin is that time reserved for those who, through faith, know to reach out—although never fully—to that which will never pass; that is, the “perfectly eschatological future” (ALS, p. 311). It is here that the soul wishes to dwell, attracted by the one thing that seems to last, namely, the divine permanence and the constant divine blessing (ALS, p. 344). It wants to move there—and remain there—a place which is neither tempted nor distracted by time.45 Indeed, it is in this place—the caelum caeli—that the unrest of the heart is finally put to rest and where one finds repose, a stable place in the Spirit (ALS, pp. 354, 353). It is from this site where creation crosses being, intimating and announcing thereby a place exempt from mutations and alterations, that Marion envisages a “reprise, rehearsal and a revision” of the question of being (ALS, p. 197). It is this return to being that allows for a renewed stance over and against the world, and even oneself. As for the return to the world, the loving gaze will recognize that seeing the beauty of the things of the world provides the way to see these things, no longer as mere beings or objects, but “as the Creator [. . .] sees them” (ALS, p. 202), no longer “enjoying them absolutely” but seeing them as things to be “used” relatively and with moderation (ALS 218), that is, insofar as they admit a reference to the Creator. The love of God and the love for the world are therefore not mutually exclusive, for the joy of the attraction and advance towards God allows for “the enjoyment of all the rest, because this residue constitutes precisely a gift of God” (ALS, p. 372).47 To be sure, such a love for the world is only possible for the self that has already substituted its absolute and spontaneous concern for all things of the world for the love of God, the one who is occupied by charity rather than the world (ALS, p. 380). It is this one who is allowed to love truly “even oneself” (EP, p. 212).48

^ Notes from The Lover’s Capacity in Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon Stephen E. Lewis

Highlights :•• “Love raises from the dead—we must understand this as an analytic proposition.”• “the will only receives a preeminence because it can love, and because God,

revealing himself as love (1 Jn. 4:8), may only be known by an act of love. That the similitudo Dei rests upon the will signifies [for this tradition] that the will can and should love God”

• For Descartes, writes Marion, “Not only does love no longer lead into participation in God, but God himself, as simply one among many ‘objects,’ participates in love,

• For Descartes, writes Marion, “Not only does love no longer lead into participation in God, but God himself, as simply one among many ‘objects,’ participates in love, in short, God submits himself to the constitutive structure of the ego”

• Descartes.. altered the primary orientation and purpose of that will from love of God to imitation of God’s aseity or self-sufficiency.

• how can the ego move beyond the dead-end of independence (the autarchic hatred of every man for himself and for every other) to which reciprocity has brought it, and instead love truly?

• the “capacity” for love needs to act as if it were in the image and likeness of a God who loves first.

• But no one is wrong to want immortality if human nature is capable of receiving it as God’s gift; if it is not capable of it, then it is not capable of happiness either].

• Capax connotes not only the possibility of a gift in general, but indicates that, for man, his very nature issues from a gift, and testifies to that gift by its very constitution.

• if one holds to the strict point of view of the lover, the fact of losing (or the risk of being lost) in no way entails one’s disappearance for lack of assurance, but instead the accomplishment of love in its very definition—the more it loses and is lost, the more it attests to itself as love and nothing other than love”

• An abandonment to love is thus required in order for the lover to recognize his human nature as a gift structured as receptive capacity.

• the “assurance” comes to the advancing lover in the very gesture in which I give up what I have (my gift) and what I am, in order to assure myself only of what I truly make in this instant—love. I receive the assurance that I am making love and I receive it only from lovemaking itself and in view of itself alone. [...] I receive the assurance of my dignity as lover”

• the given free will, the restless heart, that alone can decide to love “the only subsistence to which [man] could ever lay claim”

• the ego when it decides to love loving discovers the truth of its nature—as Marion states, the ego that makes this decision becomes a lover, that is, discovers itself as a self that is “decenter[ed ...] in view of a center that is always to come”

• ie - the ego is recognizing its very ‘I’ as “inamissible” gift, as structural capacity advancing toward fulfillment,when it makes the free decision to love. Authentic love emerges, and what appeared to be love is refused as a lie.

• “the [erotic] reduction starts off in an advance that is definitive and without return, an advance that will never cancel itself out, and never catch up with itself; I start off out of balance and I only avoid the fall by lengthening my stride, by going faster, in other words by adding to my lack of balance.

• I remain in the race and alive only by repeating my imbalance; each accomplishment asks for and becomes a new beginning.

• The infinity of the lover’s advance is met by a likewise infinite opening out of the other.

• Luigi Giussani : :The poor in spirit is one who has nothing, except one thing through which and by which he is made: an endless aspiration. This is the opening and the availability: a boundless expectant awaiting. It’s not a boundless expectant awaiting because the accumulation of things expected is endless; no, he doesn’t expect anything, but lives a boundless openess— and doesn’t expect anything! This is the originality of man; in fact, the originality of man is the awaiting of the infinite.”

“Love raises from the dead—we must understand this as an analytic proposition.”

The specter of vanity, which pointed its finger at such a poor certainty—namely, the ego’s disappointing discovery that it is certain of itself only as an object of thought, nothing more—asked “What’s the use?”, and thus unsettled the ego and nudged it into the erotic reduction. The ego therefore looked outside itself—“elsewhere”—for assurance, attempting to make itself be loved, and thereby answer the charge of vanity, first by trying to love itself, and then by trying to make an other outside of itself love it. The result of this attempt to make love happen, to “be loved,” was a disaster: the ego discovered that this use of the will to make itself be loved led only to self-hatred and the hatred of all for all. Marion sums up the position of the ego at this dead-end as follows:I cannot require that the other love me, any more than I can promise myself to love myself—as if I could offer an authentic elsewhere for myself, or as if I, in my incontestable finitude, could assure myself infinitely. But above all, who can seriously believe himself unscathed by all self-hatred, transparent, equal, benevo- lent toward himself, free of ressentiment and of the insolvent debt of a past that is out of reach? [...] If someone can show me how the other must love me, let him show it. If someone can show how I am able to love myself (from elsewhere, and in- finitely), let him show it. And if, as I believe, no one could ever do these things, then all that remains is seriously to consider the aporiae at which we’ve ended. (EP 65; PE 107-8)

Marion, “the will only receives a preeminence because it can love, and because God, revealing himself as love (1 Jn. 4:8), may only be known by an act of love. That the similitudo Dei rests upon the will signifies [for this tradition] that the will can and should love God” (TB 409). For Descartes, by contrast, the will’s primary office is not to love God; instead, it is to mimic God’s sover- eignty by “rang[ing] over” objects, as we saw in the passage from the fourth meditation quoted above. Insofar as the Cartesian free will does love, as we noted earlier, it does so merely as part of its primary function of exercising its sovereignty over objects.For Descartes, writes Marion, “Not only does love no longer lead into participation in God, but God himself, as simply one among many ‘objects,’ participates in love, which is to say, in one of the will’s employments (and one that is secondary, to boot); in short, God submits himself to the constitutive structure of the ego” (TB 424).10

Descartes in Marion’s account retained the understanding of the human will as similitudo Dei, but altered the primary orientation and purpose of that will from love of God to imitation of God’s aseity or self-sufficiency. In the con- text of The Erotic Phenomenon, how can the ego move beyond the dead-end of independence (the autarchic hatred of every man for himself and for every other) to which reciprocity has brought it, and instead love truly?11 Based on the consequences Marion noted that follow from Descartes’ decision to de- tach the will from the primacy of love—namely, that love becomes reduced to the rule and administration of objects over which the ego ranges—it would seem that the will that wants to recover the “capacity” for love needs to act as if it were in the image and likeness of a God who loves first.

The Christian paradox of losing one’s life in order to gain it is central here. Marion states,

“[...] We must understand capacitas as a resolutely passive reception; not due to powerlessness, but because only abandonment to God allows for the availability of a welcome, through which men discover themselves as those [spirits to whom He gave intelligence, making them capable of contemplating and apprehending Him].The capacity of a recipient, applied to the human soul, certainly indicates a receptivity; but this receptivity itself, become constitutive of the soul, realizes and ratifies a divine gift—that by which God gives to the soul the receiving of Him as such—which is to say, as gift: [But no one is wrong to want immortality if human nature is capable of receiving it as God’s gift; if it is not capable of it, then it is not capable of happiness either]. Capax connotes not only the possibility of a gift in general, but indicates that, for man, his very nature issues from a gift, and testifies to that gift by its very constitution. (QCI 136)”

Abandonment, losing oneself in order to “realize and ratify a divine gift” and thus become available to or receptive of love, is clearly part of the lover’s advance as described in The Erotic Phenomenon. Of the advance that loves without counting the cost, Marion writes: “if one holds to the strict point of view of the lover, the fact of losing (or the risk of being lost) in no way entails one’s disappearance for lack of assurance, but instead the accomplishment of love in its very definition—the more it loses and is lost, the more it attests to itself as love and nothing other than love” (EP 73; PE 120).

An abandonment to love is thus required in order for the lover to recognize his human nature as a gift structured as receptive capacity.

Marion writes, “Receiving himself as a gift, [man] discovers himself as suspended by the donation that thoroughly assures him of the only subsistence to which he could ever lay claim—in- quietum est cor nostrum. If nature constitutes the first grace that man receives from God, this very nature finds itself ordered to every grace. Nature, defined by graced receptivity, thus opens itself, by virtue of the gift that estab- lishes it, to the perpetual establishment of gifts to come: capax completes itself in participatio” (QCI 136-137).

the “assurance” comes to the advancing lover “from an elsewhere that is more inward to me than myself: the elsewhere that comes upon me in the very gesture in which I give up what I have (my gift) and what I am, in order to assure myself only of what I truly make in this instant—love. I receive the assurance that I am making love and I receive it only from lovemaking itself and in view of itself alone. [...] I receive the assurance of my dignity as lover” (EP 75; PE 122-123). The lover’s assurance now comes not from “the assurance [...] that someone love him in return, or even the assurance of loving first, perfectly” (EP 91; PE 147) 18, butrather from an “elsewhere [...] more inward to me than myself” This paradoxically innermost elsewhere is the given free will, the restless heart, that alone can decide to love, what Marion in the 1975 essay on capax Dei calls (as we just saw) “the only subsistence to which [man] could ever lay claim” (QCI 136).

the ego when it decides to love loving discovers the truth of its nature—as Marion states, the ego that makes this decision becomes a lover, that is, discovers itself as a self that is “decenter[ed ...] in view of a center that is always to come” (EP 84; PE 136). ie - the ego is recognizing its very ‘I’ as “inamissible” gift, as structural capacity advancing toward fulfillment,when it makes the free decision to love. Authentic love emerges, and what appeared to be love is refused as a lie.

describes an infinite movement from fulfillment to renewal of desire, in which the gift of capacity for God is constantly enlarged or dilated according to the measureless measure of “He who comes” (QCI 138). This is perhaps the characteristic of man as capax Dei that is most evident in the forward movement Marion terms the “advance,” as well as in the description, later in The Erotic Phenomenon, of the desire-driven giving of flesh between lovers. In prose that is at once highly evocative and phenomenologically precise, Marion describes the lover’s advance toward the beloved other:

“the [erotic] reduction starts off in an advance that is definitive and without return, an advance that will never cancel itself out, and never catch up with itself; I start off out of balance and I only avoid the fall by lengthening my stride, by going faster, in other words by adding to my lack of balance. The more I do to avoid falling, the more I advance without any hope of return. For even if I reach the other, this does not give me possession, precisely because I only touch her and open an access to her by the impact that I provoke, and therefore according to the measure of the impetus that I take and that I must maintain; the other does not stop me like a wall or an inert and delimited lump, but offers herself to me like a path that opens, always continuing in proportion to my entry forward; the advance thus requires a permanent fresh start, wherein I remain in the race and alive only by repeating my imbalance; each accomplishment asks for and becomes a new beginning. In conformity to the definition of the phenomenological reduction in general, the erotic reduction (radicalized under the form ‘Can I be the first to love?’) is only definitively accomplished in never ceasing to repeat itself. (EP 83-84)”The infinity of the lover’s advance is met by a likewise infinite opening out of the other.

“the other only becomes unique for me on the condition that she is confirmed to be infinite—that she is able, by herself, not only to support, but to provoke an ever repeatable start of the initial advance, of my initiative to love first” (EP 84; PE 136). And of course, when two lovers meet in love, each engages in both the active advance and the passive or receptive opening, constantly, for as long as they can keep it goingEpektic progress “consists in extending capacity to the measures of participation, which is to say, receiving as much as God gives—not augmenting a power, in view of the attainment of dominion” (QCI 138-139).

the lover’s hope aims to fulfill a need that is entirely given to him from elsewhere, rather than defined by his self-assessing measurement. The lover’s truly mysterious poverty—mysterious because the lover’s need is unmeasurable by the lover, and properly called poverty because the lover advances in love impelled by this unmeasurable constitutive need—is sustained in its infinity by the assurance he gains from the beloved.

“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est,

Luigi Giussani : :The poor in spirit is one who has nothing, except one thing through which and by which he is made: an endless aspiration. This is the opening and the availability: a boundless expectant awaiting. It’s not a boundless expectant awaiting because the accumulation of things expected is endless; no, he doesn’t expect anything, but lives a boundless openess— and doesn’t expect anything! This is the originality of man; in fact, the originality of man is the awaiting of the infinite.”

Marion on how God loves : “God loves in the same way we do. Except for an infinite difference. [...] God surpasses us as the best lover” With such a substitution, the three characteristics of the lover’s advance discussed above would become: abandonment to God; the resulting discovery of the free will as gift of God; and the transformation of life into expansive, infinite ascendance toward God.