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Introducing Jean–Luc Marion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Graham Ward
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Extract

The rue d’Ulm in the centre of Paris, a small almost insignificant street close to the Parthenon and the Jardin de Luxembourg, houses one of the most important and prestigious academic institutions in France: the École Normale Supérieure. Founded in the first decade of the 19th century with entrance by a nationwide competitive examination, it has educated many of the leading 20th century French intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are just a few of those selected in a nation-wide competitive examination to be schooled here. In 1969, when considerable student unrest still remained in Paris following the May riots a year earlier, Jean-Luc Marion, then 21, took up his place there. At an institution which had played an enormous role in disseminating the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger in post-War France, Marion began to work for his agrégation de philosophic. It was a time of les enfants terribles in French philosophy: when structuralism was gaining ground through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes; when Althusser was attempting to rewrite Marxism; when Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things) could enter the French best-sellers list; and Derrida launched, in the three books published in the same year, his deconstructive assault. Lacan and Derrida both gave seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (as Marion does now). The influence of German Idealism and its critics, Nietzsche and Heidegger, have remained throughout Marion’s philosophical work.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 76 , Issue 895 , July 1995, pp. 317 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

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2 It is by no means accidental that these scholars both wrote books on Descartes and the question of “the creation of eternal truths”.

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5 This shift seems to me to be part of a greater interest in Merleau–Ponty's late work and the phenomenology of perception. See Denida's Memoirs of the Blind: the Self–Portrait and Other Ruins (tr. Brault, Pascale–Anne and Naas, Michael, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, which also wishes to examine “This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible [which] can haunt the visible as its very possibility” (p.45).

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8 ibid., p.21.

9 Sur l'ontologie grise, p. 113.

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15 See her essay ‘Belief Itself’ in Sexes and Genealogies, tr. Gill, Gillian C. (New York: Columbia University, 1993), pp.23–54Google Scholar.

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25 There is a play here on the French homophone sans lettre. It means that God is both beyond Being, but also beyond representation (which is related to Being, particularly as analogy). See here my essays ‘Theology and the Crisis of Representation’ in Theology Towards 2000, eds. Detweiler, Robert and Salyer, Greg (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994)Google Scholar and ‘Beyond Postmodernism: the Project of Jean–Luc Marion’ in Postmodernism and Theology, ed. Blond, Philip (London: Routledge, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

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