Pierre-Jean Renaudie « Ways of being given. Marion and Husserl on the bounds of givenness »
in S. Lofts, A. Calcagno (eds.) Breached Horizons: The Work of Jean-Luc Marion, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017
Abstract: Marion’s philosophical works extend the concept of givenness in order to provide new grounds to phenomenological description. Analyzing the breakthrough of phenomenology in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Marion claims that phenomenology does not deal with the given but only with the very fact that the given is given, and relies on an absolute notion of givenness understood as a mode of phenomenality. Consequently, Marion’s third phenomenological reduction aims at bracketing everything but the pure “giving itself” of the phenomena, in order to reconduct the given (le donné) to givenness (la donation). Pointing out the limits of Marion’s reading of Husserl, this paper demonstrates the bounds of givenness and elaborates a phenomenological analysis of phenomena that does not need to presuppose a generalization of the concept of givenness. Husserl’s broadening of intuition must be understood as a way to make phenomenological description possible even when things are not strictly given.