Over the last few weeks, I have been working on Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon in my dwindling spare time, and I have found it thoroughly enjoyable. In this book, Marion wishes to recover what philosophy has lost: a concept of love. At first, this may seem odd because one typically does not associate love and the conceptual realm—love is supposed to be irrational. Indeed, as Marion goes on to affirm later, love is irrational, at least according to one form of reason, but it is by no means senseless or opposed to the conceptual, which must not be identified with the rational.
Philosophy needs a concept of love because, as Marion says,
Without a concept, we can of course feel violently such or such erotic disposition, but we can neither describe it, nor distinguish it from other erotic dispositions, nor even from nonerotic dispositions, much less articulate them in a right and sensible act. Without a concept, we can even make for ourselves a very clear idea of a love we have experienced, but never an idea the least bit distinct—one that would allow recognition of when it is and is not the case, which behaviors arise from it and which in no way concern it, what logic necessarily binds them or not, what possibilities are opened or closed to action, etc.
This reason (or even speaking of a reason at all, for I do not know which order of reason Marion refers to) is intriguing to me because he identifies the starting point of his inquiry at the point where philosophy has denied love it’s unity—that is, philosophy has divided love into various kinds of love (e.g. agape, eros). On the contrary, Marion argues, a serious concept of love “distinguishes itself by its unity, or rather by its power to keep together significations that nonerotic thought cuts apart.” Developing the concept of love, says Marion, should not begin by immediately dividing but by holding the unity of the concept of love for as long as possible. I have not finished the book yet, but with only two chapters left to go, I have found no division of the kinds of love yet, and I am waiting to see where a division may emerge. In my mind, his discussion is purely of what I would call the erotic side of love, which seeks the flesh. Of course, as Marion warns against, I am assuming a division in the kinds of love from the start. Thus, I must wait to deliver a reasoned opinion on this point, at least according to erotic wisdom.
Second, Marion’s project is to give the concept of love “a rationality to all that nonerotic thought disqualifies as irrational and degrades to madness.” Love, as Marion wishes to describe it and conceive it, then, is in no way nonrational or opposed to the conceptual, lying instead in the emotional. Breaking out of the rational/emotional paradigm is guaranteed to be a difficult endeavour, for the reader as well as the author, but I think it a noble one, and it is a line of argument that Marion constructs solidly as the book goes on.
Third, the foundations for a concept of love must start with the experience or phenomena of love, giving the question of erotics primacy over questions of ontology. Parallel to Marion’s critique of ontotheology, he here wants to subvert the notion that one must first be or exist in order to be loved. On the contrary, one must not even first love in order to be, but love without being even becoming a question. This is the primary argument that is developed through the rest of the book.
The ego cogitans (the thinking I), or the modern subject, the transcendental I of Descartes’ famous dictum, is always seeking legitimacy and certainty of itself. According to Descartes, man is primarily a thinking being, and he affirms his own existence in his thought. Supposing that we are insofar as we come to know ourselves, man discovers himself (that is, he certifies his own existence) by certifying whatever else he encounters. That is, man, in determining so-called objective knowledge of the objects around him, through math, logic, and historical facts, makes certain their certainness and, since man is himself the one declaring these things certain, must be certain himself. In a sense, then (not in Marion’s words), the concern with objective knowledge is just a matter of self-affirmation, though it be, as Marion wishes to demonstrate, an illusionary certainty.
The ego cogitans is always concerned with certainty and affirming his own existence, lest he doubt and fall into despair. However, Marion asks, “What’s the use?” I think that a better translation, at least coming from my own scholarly ignorance, would be, “What’s the point?” but I digress. In asking this question, Marion undermines the modern metaphysical project by pointing out that simply affirming existence has no meaning and must fall into vanity. “Logical calculation, mathematical operations, models of the object and its technologies of production offer a perfect certainty, a ‘total quality’–but so what? How exactly does that concern me, if not for as much as I am engaged in their wold and I inscribe myself within their space?” In other words, as the I is transcendent, above the world of mere objects and hence is able to objectify them, it is ultimately irrelevant to reach any certainty of knowledge about these objects because they can give the I no knowledge of himself. Thus, Marion concludes,
Certainty attests its failure in the very instant of its success: I indeed acquire a certainty, but, like that of beings of the world certified by my efforts, it sends me back to my initiative, and thus to me, the arbitrary operative of every certainty, even my own. To produce my certainty myself does not reassure me at all, but rather maddens me in front of vanity in person. What is the good of my certainty, if it still depends on me, if I only am through myself?
From this point, Marion moves to the erotic reduction, which I plan to take up in my next post.