god — love — revelationphenomenon (God in the body of Christ too), without the possibility
of looking properly at it. Impossible to be looked at, and therefore
invisible, God becomes visible.
This visibility does not realize itself in the way of an object. The
human gaze does not perceive God as something that is in front of
him like any object. Here, in my opinion, lies one of the most power-
ful results of Marion’s thinking. The removal of God from the ambit
of objectivity depends on the same basis that determines Marion’s
phe no menological turn: 1) every given no longer appears as an
object (Gegen stand — which is still a measure of subjectivity) according
to the new way of understanding phenomenality within the paradigm
of saturation;^35 2) by the force of phenomenality as saturation and be-
cause of Marion’s refusal of onto-theological thinking (with its ontol-
ogical categories, which are always measures of the predominance of
the subject) the visibility of God does not appear in the idolatrous
figures of the tradition, which are always ways of making God an
object.
The metaphysical formula cogito ergo sum, which declares the primacy
of Being and of subjectivity, is replaced by Marion with amo ergo sum
through the choice of the erotic phenomenon, the experience of Love
as the exemplary condition of the saturated phenomenon. In the erotic
phenomenon, in fact, a new kind of reduction takes place, which
Marion calls “erotic.” The erotic reduction gives the certitude of
existence not as“epistemic reduction” (in which the thing is ascertained
as an object, or in the case of the ego as a subject — this is the form of
Husserl’s reduction of the transcendental ego) and not in the way of
an “ontological reduction” (in which the thing is grasped as a being in
- One of the final conclusions by Marion is the removal of the condition of the
Gegenständlichkeit. This condition is for Husserl the guarantee for the phenomeno-
logical method of reduction to reach a kind of knowledge which is universal and
objective, because the given is grasped as an “object in the flesh.” But already with
Heidegger — and Marion follows him — it becomes evident that the Gegenständli-
chkeit is the condition according to which the phenomenon is seen as vorhanden,
as an object in front of which there is a subject. This is only a representation
[Vorstellung] and not the thing in itself. The presence of the given is thus never the
Vorhandenheit, but the Anwesenheit.