This contribution to contemporary French philosophical phenomenology is a decisive response to the texture of love – both human and divine. Marion invites the reader to join him in this (necessarily) first-person meditation on the logic, coherence and ultimacy of love (pp. 4, 9). As an apology for love's logic, this Phenomenon presents itself as an amorous performance. As a demonstration of love's coherence, Marion shows that the erotic phenomenon is consistent ‘all the way up’ – neither eros and agape, nor any other, can divide where love unites in difference. This insight deconstructs the platitudinous division between agape and eros; these designate only coinherent moments in love's cohesive singularity (pp. 220–1). Ultimately, the logic and coherence of love serve Marion's primary purpose: showing how love is excessively original. Love surpasses even the Being of beings. Loving-thinking, thinking-loving – finally the phenomenon of love itself – embraces and gives what is. Love shows philosophy the way beyond itself.

The Erotic Phenomenon unfolds in six movements. The first traces the power of vanity to disrupt the presumptuous hegemony of what is, and thinking about what is, insofar as it is. ‘Assurance’ is of more primal concern than is ‘certainty’ because the apparent finality and ultimacy of what is can always be destabilised by asking ‘What's the use?’ (pp. 22–3). Marion does not attempt the substitution of a ‘values’ discourse for a ‘facts’ discourse: both how something is and whether something is are irrelevant concerns if it is impossible to say why. Only love can answer the ‘Why?’ of vanity (p. 23). In the second movement, primal self-love is shown to be impossible. Attempting to foundationally love oneself actually leads to self-hatred and hatred of all others. The third movement is an attempted redirection: the lover gives selfassuredlessly – irrespective of another to love the lover's self; the lover guarantees the giving (pp. 70–5). Just thereby, the lover accomplishes a ‘love without being’ (p. 72) while inviting the beloved's response. The fourth movement is the introduction of flesh, the self as feeling-self (pp. 112–13), into the dynamic that is love's gift: this Marion calls the ‘crossed phenomenon’ (pp. 105, 126–7). Eventually, however, the distance between the flesh's finitude and the infinity of the erotic claim generates lying and the search for erotic truth, the subject of the fifth movement. Such a search only ‘terminates’ in an eternal repetition beyond repetition of loving fidelity – the assurance of the lover's accomplishment by and through the beloved (pp. 185, 189–90). This erotic assurance treats the lover to the ‘conclusion’ that, after all, the lover is ‘loved because lovable, lovable because lover’ (p. 213). In the end, vanity is conquered by discovering that vanity has been dissipated by prevenient love (pp. 214–15). Such love points towards God, who is distinct from creatures in erotic perfection, but not erotic character (pp. 221–2).

Marion himself considers this book the consummation of decades of reflection (p. 10). Indeed, The Erotic Phenomenon reassesses in a fresh context concerns which characterise Marion's prior writings: the question of the gift, the problem of presence, the transparency of the face, the construction of idols and the advent of icons. In these figures, Marion entertains issues which have preoccupied traditional theology – the character of grace, the meaning of creaturely contingence, the mode of divine otherness in self-revelation, the aim of theological language – and passes with them through a philosophical horizon dominantly reconfigured by the thought of Martin Heidegger. Ultimately, for Marion, it is the ever-amorous God who gives theology for the sake of the loving of the beloved lover who worships by loving God. Love reminds theology of the way beyond itself.