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ABSTRACT
Since the “theological turn” in continental philosophy, theologians have regularly turned to phenomenology as an authentic opening to a new mode of theological discourse. Yet, when these theo-phenomenological discourses turn to the questions of sexuality, gender, and love they often fail to live up to the radical opening promised by this turn. Taken as a case study, the work of Jean-Luc Marion is emblematic of this failure. While many of his insights might offer new openings for theological thought, his phenomenological speculations nonetheless often merely serve to re-inscribe a traditional, even reactionary heteronormativity into the heart of postmodern theological thought. In fact, it is not uncommon to catch his work offering a denigration of the body, presupposing a determinately male subject, and foreclosing the very possibility of non-heterosexual love. This critical examination of Marion’s account of sexuality shows that even the most radical phenomenological theology needs the ideological interruption of queer theory.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
J. Leavitt Pearl is a PhD candidate at Duquesne University, and adjunct professor at St. Vincent College and Seton Hill College, currently completing a dissertation on the phenomenology and theology of the sexual body.
Notes
1 For Nietzsche's critique of Christian theology, see, in particular: Nietzsche, “The Antichrist”; or Kaufmann's own analysis of the relationship between Nietzsche and Christianity in Kaufmann, Nietzsche, chapter 12. For Heidegger's critique of ontotheology, see, in particular Heidegger, Identity and Difference.
2 To borrow a term from Paul Ricoeur, see Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy.
3 Helpful introductions and primers on the theological turn include Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”; Benson and Wirzba, Words of Life; Benson and Wirzba, The Phenomenology of Prayer; Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?; Simmons and Benson, The New Phenomenology.
4 This failure has already been insightfully noted by Clayton Crockett, who writes, “The postmodern theology of Milbank, Marion, and others that promotes orthodoxy betrays the radical promise and possibility of postmodern theology, at least in terms of American origins.” Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime, 6.
5 These speculations may be seen as emerging from conversations and debates with his phenomenological contemporaries. Particularly, these focuses each stem from certain key conversation partners: his concern for the radicality of the Other from his study of Levinas, his concern for the Gift from his dialogue with Derrida (as well, as we will see, from theological motives), his turn to passivity from the influence of Michel Henry, and his emphasis on the call from his dialogue with Jean-Luis Chrétien. Perhaps his most truly unique contribution to the French debate is his turn to “pure givenness” and his conception of the “saturated phenomenon” – as Caputo writes, “[Marion] is famous for the idea of what he calls the ‘saturated phenomenon,’ which is inspired by his study of Christian Neoplatonic mystical theologians.” Caputo, Review of The Erotic Phenomenon, 164–8.
6 See, for example, Colebrook, “Sexual Difference and Embodiment.” Butler's Bodies that Matter (particularly its first two chapters: “Bodies that Matter” and “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”) is also particularly instructive here, contending as it does with the question of the “materiality” of the body outside of its linguistic constitution. See Butler, Bodies that Matter. This discussion of matter/materiality also draws heavily from the existing debate regarding the precarious status of Plato's “chora” (Timaeus). See, for example, Kristeva, “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives”; Irigaray, “Plato's Hystera”; Derrida, “Khõra.”
7 An alternate, even opposite approach to this question can be found in the work of Marion's predecessor, Michel Henry, who argues that one must completely bracket gender and sexual characteristics from the flesh, exposing a pure, transcendental self. Yet, as can be clearly seen through the consistently patriarchal and heteronormative character of Henry's own texts (in particular Incarnation: A Philosophy of the Flesh) this opposite approach equally lends itself to a reaffirmation of a neo-conservative sexual ethic. This heteronormativity may be partially attributed to Henry's shared affinity with the Communio school (as illustrated by his multiple publications within the journal), though his work is not as directly tied to the tradition's language (gift, nuptiality, etc.) as is Marion's.
8 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 201.
9 Marion, as for Michel Henry, the sexual and the erotic are in most instances formally distinguished. Whereas the sexual corresponds to the body (le corps) and is generally denigrated for its merely visual (i.e. pornographic) character, the erotic corresponds to the flesh (la chair) and is valorized as an authentic modality of love. As Marion writes:
strictly speaking, there is never anything erotic to see – what is seen immediately becomes once again a ridiculous or obscene object. … Organs belong to the physical body not the flesh; next, these organs merely implement sexuality, which only very partially covers eroticization. … One may ask whether my entire body is sexed, but one cannot doubt that my entire flesh can, and thus must, be eroticized. (The Erotic Phenomenon, 121–3)
10 As Husserl will write, “Obviously, the Body is also to be seen just like any other thing, but it becomes a Body only by incorporating tactile sensations, pain sensations, etc. – in short, by the localization of the sensations as sensations.” Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 158–9.
11 Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body and Franck, Flesh and Body.
12 Husserl will mark this as the “double sensation” of touch. To borrow one of his favorite examples, when one uses their left hand to touch their right (or vice versa), their touched hand is not only felt (the body, le corps) but at the same moment feels itself being touched (the flesh, la chair). As Franck writes, explicating this example:
What is important here is the self-relation of touch, the endless exchange between the organ and the object in which they can no longer be distinguished from one another. If touch is privileged, it is due to this double “sensation.” What touches is also touched. (Franck, Flesh and Body, 82)
13 Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, 159.
14 For Henry, the essence of immanence, of life, and of the flesh, is self-affection. To be alive is to feel oneself as living: “life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produce there is life.” Henry, I am the Truth, 27. For Henry, the flesh is phenomenon of self-revelation par excellence. It is defined by its self-revelatory character; it is that which first feels itself, in order to subsequently feel the world. Marion takes up this account of the flesh whole-cloth, writing, for example, “I would feel nothing other (than myself) if I could not first feel myself, with an undertow more original than the wave that seems to result, but which, in fact, announces the undertow and, at once, allows itself to be sucked in by it: auto-affection alone makes possible hetero-affection. I only feel the things of the world because, first, I experience myself, within myself.” Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 114.
Commenting on the depth of Marion's reliance upon Henry's analysis of the flesh, Gschwandtner notes:
although Marion does interact with Romano on the saturated phenomenon of the event, with various painters and their writings in regard to the phenomenon of the idol, and with Levinas in regard to the phenomenon of the icon, his reliance on Michel Henry's phenomenology for the phenomenon of the flesh is much more extensive. Marion basically adopts Henry's account of the self-affection of the flesh and merely illustrates how it can be understood as a saturated phenomenon of relation. (Degrees of Givenness, 95)
15 Marion, Being Given, 231 (emphasis added).
16 Marion, In Excess, 98.
17
More radically than the idol, the flesh provokes and demands solipsism; for it remains by definition mine, unsubstitutable – nobody can enjoy or suffer for me … Mineness (Jemeinigkeit) does not concern first or only my possibility as the possibility of impossibility (dying), but my flesh itself. More, it belongs only to my flesh to individualize me by letting the immanent succession of my affections, or rather of the affections that make me irreducibly identical to myself alone, be inscribed in it. … The flesh therefore show itself only in giving itself – and, in this first “self,” it gives me to myself. (Marion, Being Given, 232)
18 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, chapter 5, “Concerning Lying and Truthfulness.”
19 “Thus the face, taking up again its autonomy and finding once again its privilege, could give me access to the other in person.” This is what abduction and perversion, by Marion's account, attempt, but inevitably fail, to do. This return to the priority of the face, is ultimately a return to Levinas, for whom the face of the Other (le visage de l'Autre) – most famously analyzed in the two volumes: Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being – is nothing less than the very emergence of the ethical value of the Other, which declares “do not kill me!”; it is the truly foundational human experience, “presupposed in all human relationships.” Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89.
20 Often, he will suggest, even perpetuating a “worse violence” against the very will of the other. Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 164.
21 Ibid., 165.
22 For academic engagements with this argument, see Cahill, “Same-Sex Marriage,” Corvino, “No Slippery Slope,” and Sternglantz, “Raining on the Parade of Horribles.”
23 As cited in Cahill, “Same-Sex Marriage,” 1544 (emphasis added).
24 Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZD.html (accessed 25 September 2014).
25 Cahill, “Same-Sex Marriage,” 1605 [emphasis added].
26 See, for example, Derrida's classic deconstruction of the nature/culture distinction (particularly as manifest in Rousseau) in “Nature, Culture, Writing.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, Part II.
27 Using a number of names – including epoché (εποχη), bracket, and reduction – Husserl attempts to describe a methodology in which any pre-phenomenological assumptions about the nature of the world, that is, metaphysical claims, are set aside, in order that the raw manifestation of the phenomenon can appear with greater clarity. As he writes in Ideas I:
our design is just to discover a new scientific domain, such as might be won precisely through the method of bracketing. … I do not then deny this “world,” as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as though I were a sceptic; but I use the “phenomenological” εποχη [bracket], which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence. Thus all sciences which relate to this natural world, though they stand never so firm to me, though they fill me with wondering admiration, though I am far from any thought of objecting to them in the least degree, I disconnect them all, I make absolutely no use of their standards, I do not appropriate a single one of the propositions that enter into their systems, even though their evidential value is perfect, I take none of them, no one of them serves me for a foundation. (Husserl, Ideas, 59)
28 Marion, Reduction and Givenness. Here Marion will not only defend the centrality of the Husserlian (and Heideggerian) reduction, but also propose his own work as undertaking a “third reduction” to pure givenness, more rigorous than either Husserl's reduction to consciousness or Heidegger's reduction to Being.
29
There remains, then, the attempt at a third reduction: in order for me to appear as a full-fledged phenomenon, it is not enough that I recognize myself as a certified object, nor as a certifying ego, nor even as a properly being being; I must discover myself as a given (and gifted) phenomenon, assured as a given that is free from vanity. … Now, asking to assure my own certainty of being against the dark assault of vanity comes down to asking nothing less than, “Does anybody love me?” So there we are: the assurance appropriate to the given (and gifted) ego puts into motion an erotic reduction. (Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 22)
30 As one might say, for example, “I captured the recital on film.”
31 As Lee Edelman notes, queerness is understood as the embodiment of “a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law.” Edelman, No Future, 24.
32 An analysis of the patriarchal nature of Marion's account of the child and the “name of the father,” particularly as it manifests in Being Given (300–2), can be found in Dickinson, “The Problem of Having Both a Body and a Name.” Though, there, Dickinson will also note the implicit heteronormativity that saturates Marion's account, writing, for example, that
“these excellent reasons [for naming the child after the father] nevertheless suffer from a well-known weakness,” as [Marion] puts it, though this is not apparently the fact that not all fathers have a “wife,” that not all children take the father's name or that not every birth has a discernible father figure (as in the case of lesbian households, for example). (Dickinson, “The Problem of Having Both a Body and a Name,” 24)
33 It is here that Marion again reveals his deep indebtedness to the phenomenological work of Emmanuel Levinas. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas’ own “Phenomenology of eros” gives way, immediately to a discussion of “fecundity,” that is, of the child. Just as in Marion's later analyses, this child is understood primarily in temporal terms. The child extends love forward, into the indeterminate future. “The relation with the child – that is, the relation with the other that is not a power, but fecundity – establishes relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 268.
34 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 197. Edelman examines this cultural correlation of the “figure of the Child” and futurity (the “to come”) in No Future, where he writes, “the Child … marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.” Edelman, No Future, 23. Because queerness stands apart from this imaginary investment in the Child, the figure of the Queer becomes marked as a violent rejection of futurity.
If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no culture, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. (Ibid., 12)
35 Ibid., 9.
36 “Essential,” here, should be taken in the Husserlian sense. The “essence of love” that Marion seeks is precisely the phenomenological essence that Husserl suggests can be attained by eidetic analysis. Yet, and it is here where Marion's analysis loses its phenomenological credentials, Husserl outlines strict methodological requirements for undertaking an eidetic analysis, the most central being the eidetic reduction [see above]. Husserl comments directly upon the need to eradicate preconceptions and the danger of failing to do so in Experience and Judgment, writing:
this treatment [pure eidetic seeing] is achieved only when every connection to pregiven actuality is most carefully excluded. If we practice variation freely but cling secretly to the fact that, e.g. these must be arbitrary sounds in the world, head or able to be heard by men on earth, then we certainly have an essential generality as an eidos but one related to our world of fact and bound to that universal fact. It is a secret bond in that, for understandable reasons, it is imperceptible to us. … Only if we become conscious of this bond, putting it consciously out of play, and so also free this broadest surrounding horizon of variants from all connection to experience and all experiential validity, do we achieve perfect purity.
37 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 196–8.
38 Ibid., 197 (emphasis added).
39 Ibid., 197–8.
40 Or even, for that matter, a phenomenological analysis of heterosexual erotic relations that employ contraception.
41 O'Brien, on the jacket of Wittig, The Lesbian Body.
42 Wittig, Lesbian Body, 38.
43 Horner, Jean-Luc Marion, 4.
44 As Tracey Rowland writes, “Whereas Concilium approached the Conciliar documents with a hermeneutic of rupture, the Communio authors offered a hermeneutic of continuity.” Rowland. Guides for the Perplexed, 5. That is to say, for the Concilium school, the reforms of Vatican II represented a radical break in the Catholic tradition, the emergence of something substantially new, while for the Communio school – the school wherein Marion was reared – the documents of Vatican II necessitated no significant break in Catholic teaching or dogma, only a shift in expression or presentation. Against the Concilium approach, Ratzinger will suggest in his “Communio: A Program,” that it is a central tenet of the Communio program that they resist those who “sold goods from the old liberal flea market as if they were new Catholic theology.” Ratzinger, “Communio.”
45 This language of nuptiality can be found explicitly in Marion, who writes, for example, “the icon properly manifests the nuptial distance that weds, without confusing, the visible and the invisible.” Marion, The Idol and Distance, 9.
46 To his credit, von Balthasar will, at least, resist the traditional language of femininity as passivity. Arguing that this thesis “is definitively and fundamentally contradicted by modern biology which has seen that the female organism is just as active in conception as the male, and indeed, through the long pregnancy, the birth, the early feeding, and motherly care of the child, significantly more active that the man.” Though, even here it is noteworthy that this “activity” is represented primarily in terms of the “fruitfulness” of birth; highlighting the questionable recourse to the child that reemerges in Marion. von Balthasar, The von Balthasar Reader, 233.
47 Ibid., 231–2. See also von Balthasar, The Glory of God, 470–84.
48 Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 175.
49
To the marriage of the first husband and wife, as a sign of the supernatural gracing of man in the sacrament of creation, there corresponds the marriage, or rather the analogy of the marriage, of Christ with the Church, as the fundamental great sign of the supernatural gracing of man in the sacrament of redemption. (Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 97:2)
50 Ibid., 95:5 (emphasis added).
51 Full Title: “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.”
52 A threat equally condemned by von Balthasar in his essay, “Women Priests?” There he will, for example, write of “the worldwide offensive of ‘feminism,’” and “the assault of ‘feminism,’” and suggest that “the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity's last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes.” von Balthasar, “Women Priests?” 164, 168–9.
53 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” §2 (emphasis added).
54 For example: emphasis upon the self-givenness of God (and the analogous self-gift characteristic of the nuptial relationship); return to patristic sources; interest in phenomenological sources and language together with traditional Thomistic themes; rejection of the “sexual revolution,” feminism, queer liberation, and related movements; etc.
55 Horner, Jean-Luc Marion, 4.
56 Explicit in The Erotic Phenomenon, for example, where he will write that “an initial precaution, as insufficient as it is obligatory, will consist in avoiding scrupulously the citation of any author at all.” Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 8.
57 For Marion, “The search will thus unfold, so far as we are capable, without the analysis at any moment forcing a choice of one pole rather than another (sexual difference rather than filial affection, the human rather than God, ερως rather than αγαπη). Univocal, love is only told one way.” Ibid., 5; for Communio, see, for example:
Fundamentally, “love” is a single reality, but with different dimensions; at different times, one or other dimension may emerge more clearly. Yet when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one another, the result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love. (Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 8. See also Tóth, “Love Between Embodiment and Spirituality)
58 For Wojtyła, see Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 165–6. For von Balthasar see Horner, Jean-Luc Marion, 58.
59 See Jones, A Genealogy of Marion's Phenomenology of Religion and Hankey, “Jean-Luc Marion's Dionysian Neoplatonism.”
60 Lewis, for example, writes “a guiding principle in my interpretive decisions surrounding the translation of autrui has been the belief that sexual difference is to be taken seriously in this text.” Lewis in Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, n24.
61 Paul VI and Caligari, Humanae Vitae.
62 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 197.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 197–8.
65 Marion, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology,” 590. In context the passage reads:
Of itself, phenomenology can identify the saturated phenomenon of the being-given par excellence only as a possibility – not only a possibility as opposed to actuality but above all a possibility of donation itself. The characteristics of the being-given imply that it gives itself without prevision, without measure, without analogy, without repetition; in short it remains unavailable. Its phenomenological analysis therefore bears only on its re-presentation, its “essence,” and not directly on its being-given. The intuitive realization of that being-given requires, more than phenomenological analysis, the real experience of its donation, which falls to revealed theology. Between phenomenology and theology, the border passes between revelation as possibility and revelation as historicity. There could be no danger of confusion between these domains.
66 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 197 (emphasis added).
67 Humanae Vitae, 11 (emphasis added), as cited in Paul II, Man and Women He Created Them, 118:2. This English translation is derived from John Paul II's preferred Italian translation of Humanae Vitae. The English translation derived from the Latin is here ostensibly stricter, reading “the church … teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.” Yet, even in this “stricter” translation, emphasis still remains upon the intrinsic (read: natural) ordering of human sexuality toward creation, an ordering that need not manifest in every instance (see Humanae Vitae's discussion of licit methods of birth control, 15–6). This emphasis on an “openness” to procreation is reaffirmed by John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio, 14, where he emphasizes that “even when procreation is not possible, conjugal life does not for this reason lose its value.”
68 Ibid.
69 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 198.
70 Henry S. Rubin, for example, marks the unique value of phenomenology in its ability to resituate the subjectivity of the embodied trans* individual:
Phenomenology recognizes the circumscribed agency of embodied subjects who mobilize around their body image to sustain their life projects. A phenomenological method works to return agency to us as subjects and to return authority to our narratives. It justifies a turn to the self-reports of transsexual subjects as a place to find counterdiscursive knowledge. … It does not judge any “project” or lifework to be more subversive or valuable than any other. The critiques of transsexuals may be countered by a phenomenology that views all lived experience as worthy of description and does not deny that knowledges gleaned from such experiences are also functional to transsexual subjects. (“Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies,” 263–81)
71 “By using two strategies simultaneously – queering phenomenology and moving queer theory toward phenomenology … ” Sara Ahmed, QueerPhenomenology, 5.
72 Ibid., 68.
73 Ibid., 23.
74 I would like to offer a special thanks to the editors Aimee Light, Colby Dickinson, and Kent Brintnall for their assistance and notes (particularly Dr Brintnall's suggestion to examine Lee Edelman's No Future), as well as Erica Schiller Freeman's assistance in the final section, thinking through the way in which “phenomenology needs queer theory.”