god — love — revelationa living soul that aims at grasping the divine, which itself enters into
a relation of intentionality with the soul. By contrast, from Marion’s
point of view, the act of constitution of the ego is a process a posteriori,
in the sense that the phenomena (and the erotic phenomenon espe-
cially) are makers of the ego itself, which finds its constitution in the
act of donation to which it is destined.
Thus, the concept of “saturated phenomenon” introduces a paradox
into phenomenology. In its Husserlian origins , phenomenology could
guarantee the Selbstbewusstsein as a movement of the pure ego that
grasped itself as its own object. In this way, the foundation of sub-
jectivity was still an immanent operation of consciousness. With the
concept of saturated phenomenon, subjectivity is constituted by the
phenomenon because intuition is no longer a noetic operation of
which the subject disposes. The ego itself is delivered over to an
intuition that then becomes free of the conceptual forms with which
the subject fills its own intuition of the object given in intuition:
Nommons cette extrémité phénoménologique [scil. the saturated
phenomenon] un paradoxe. Le paradoxe ne suspend pas seulement la
relation de sujétion du phénomène au Je, il l’inverse. Loin de pouvoir
constituer ce phénomène, le Je s’éprouve comme constitué par lui. Le
Je perd son antériorité et se découcre pour ainsi dire destitué de la
charge de la constitution. [.. .] Lorsque le Je se découvre, de constituant
qu’il restait face aux phénomènes de droit commun, constitué par un
phénomène saturé, il ne peut s’identifier lui-même comme tel qu’en
admettant la préséance sur lui d’un tel phénomène. Ce renversement le
laisse interloqué, essentiellement surprise par l’événement plus original
qui le déprend de soi.^15The peculiar aspect of the saturated phenomena is thus their excess,
their form of phenomenality that cannot be enclosed in the subjective
ways with which the object — given to the ego — is measured and re-
duced. The saturated phenomenon exceeds intuition and therefore
cannot be closed off or conceived of in the conceptual or categorical
forms of the subject.^16 Because of this kind of exceeding of egological
- J.-L. Marion, Le visible et le révélé, 69–70.
- The power of the saturated phenomenon is the breaking of conditions of pos-
sibility which are imposed by the intuition of the subject. As Marion explains at