La voix de l’appel du sujet chez Jean-Luc Marion

Abstract

The voice of the subject’s call according to Jean-Luc Marion

The topic of present paper relates to Jean-Luc Marion’s conception of subject-less-ness of subjectivity which might, at first glance, seem somewhat impossible. In phenomenological triptych Reduction and Donation (1989), Being Given (1997), In Excess (2001), Marion listens to the voices of the Cartesian ego, Husserlian transcendental self, Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein, and subjects their constituted self-less-nesses by the excess of saturated phenomena. Marion urges us to believe that «the phenomenon appears (shows itself) insofar as it gives itself» and, therefore, is not conditioned by the subject, because showing and givenness of phenomena determine both donation and phenomena. The French philosopher centers the subject on what he calls the « witness », « ego in the dative », « interloqué », « gifted » (adonné), « recipient » (attributaire) in which the self emanates from the principle of givenness (donation). This subject-less ‘grammar-ego-logy’ in what Lévinas refers back to the «relation without a relation» of subject and declines ego in accusative form of Latin me, conducts Marion to jeopardize the status of the Lévinassian grammatical case of « Me voici » by exposing conception of subject in the first singular person of dative declension (mihi): « I receive myself from the call gifted to me ». Marion’s intuition within the interlocutory and ‘dislocatory’ varieté of subject (interloqué) reveals an auto-giveness (Selbstgebung) of the Heideggerian Dasein’s abyssal call which « is at the same time the caller and the one summoned (called) ». The pure form of the call incorporates the internal capacity of the interloqué (Angesprochene) to respond to the interpellation of audibly-disappearing response which offers a subject’s surplus of inappropriative paradoxes, notably the dichotomy of love and being. J.-L. Marion takes up four characteristics of the claiming interloqué - convocation, surprise, identification, and facticity - to navigate the hermeneutic anonymous space covering the gap between the call and the responsal voice, in order to maintain the possibility of its own being delayed by the donation of the call already encountered before verbum vocis .

Keywords: subject, myself, interloqué, call, giveness, phenomenon