rosa maria lupoHusserl’s position is unable to surpass Kant’s thesis of the human
impossibility of knowing the essence of the thing as noumena, but
only its phenomenon. Thus, if Husserl’s Gegebenheit remains con-
ditioned by the subjectivity — depends on it — and it is not free from
the egological way of reduction,^24 what Husserl loses, by comparison
with Kant, is the autonomy of the given before the ego. At this point
the ideal answer of Husserl to Kant — that our knowledge of the
phenomenon corresponds to the knowledge of the essence of the
thing — closes up the possibility of the thing itself as something given
to the ego, i.e. as something that the ego receives from outside itself,
that exists independently from the forms with which the subject grasps
the thing.
But Marion’s lesson is, in my opinion, unexceptionable from a phe-
nomenological point of view. This lesson says that we need to turn
away from subjectivity, to break with its predominance, if we want to
be able to think givenness as such, the phenomenon as such, as what
gives itself to the subject without the subject realizing any apriori
limitation of the given, any prior operation on it. This means that it
is necessary to break with the predominance of vision, of the subjective
and the unidirectional looking-at.^25 Only in this way can the phenom-
- Husserl himself always defines as “transcendental” the work of phenomenol-
ogy: phenomenology has to investigate the conditions of the possibility of knowl-
edge. It means the elaboration of an eidetic science of the ego, which exhibits the
forms with which the object/given is originally given to consciousness, i.e. sensi-
bility and intuition. - With regard to the problem of the subject, I do not think that Marion wants
either to deny the importance of the subject for the intentional relation or operate
a destruction of subjectivity. It is the existence of the saturated phenomena that
imposes a rethinking of the intentional structure and of the mode of givenness.
Marion’s aim is not the negation of subjectivity, but its replacement before the
gift. What he writes at the end of the complex path of Étant donné is emblematic:
“La phénoménologie de la donation en finit radicalement — � nos yeux pour la
première fois — avec le ‘sujet’ et tous ses récents avatars. Elle y parvient pourtant,
justement parce qu’elle ne tente ni de le détruire, ni de le supprimer [... ]. Pour
en finir avec le ‘sujet,’ il ne faut donc pas le détruire, mais le renverser — le re-
tourner. Il se pose comme un centre: on ne le lui contestera pas; mais on lui
contestera le mode d’occupation et d’exercice du centre qu’il revendique — � titre
d’un ‘je’ (pensant, constituant, se résolvant); on lui contestera qu’il occupe ce