rosa maria lupophenomenon from the condition of the subject is a preservation of the
way in which the phenomenon manifests itself, so that the subject is
not able to affect it anymore. It means respecting the phenomenon in
its own right of showing itself. It means, furthermore, freeing the
transcendence of the Gegebenheit from the immanence of the subject.
If the fact that the phenomenon specifically shows itself as “saturated”
means that the intuition of it remains poor, devoid of a concept, of an
adequate conceptual representation, it is also true that every pheno-
menon comes as a matter of fact from a radical otherness. And only if
the subject maintains a distance from this otherness, can it guarantee
to the phenomenon the capability of showing itself by itself.
It is essentially for this reason — i.e. because of Marion’s strong will
to preserve phenomenality — that Janicaud’s criticism against Marion
seems to me to be not entirely pertinent. When he says that abandoning
the horizon of immanence in favor of Transcendence becomes a
“virage théologique” which impugns the phenomenological neutrality
which Husserl wanted to guarantee,^20 Janicaud does not recognize the
phenomenological inversion which Marion effects in the structure of
intentionality in regard to saturated phenomena, or rather in the
elimination of the risks implied in Husserl’s position. Janicaud would
prefer a fidelity to Husserl’s idea of the transcendental reduction — for
him, the “inspiration fondamentale de Husserl,” — which consists in
the fact that “l’essence de l’intentionnalité est, � rechercher, par la
réduction phénoménologique, dans l’immanence phénoménale.”^21
But the so-called “third reduction”^22 of Marion demonstrates that
er the cipher of a given which has its existence from out of the subject.
- Cf. Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, 53.
- Ibid., 25.
- In this way Marion himself conceives at the end of Réduction et donation. Re-
cherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie, Paris: PUF, 1989, 303–305, the
operation with which he describes the process which will later open, in Étant
donné, his determination of the given (das Gegebene) as gift (die Gabe). In the sec-
ondary literature it has become, by now, customary to talk of three reductions,
beyond the specific significance that Husserl gives to the the word “reduction”.
The “first” reduction would be that of Husserl (or of Descartes and Kant too), i.e.
the reduction of the phenomenon to the given to the consciousness. The “second”
would be that of Heidegger — a so-called ontological reduction — in which the