god — love — revelationenon appear by and in itself. Only in this way is it possible to under-
stand that the Gegebenheit is originally a donation; it is a process that
does not depend primarily on the laws of the ego, even if it is always
the pure ego that has to operate the phenomenological epoché. Thus:
every phenomenon, being a gift, is also saturated, because the subject
can neither dispose of the original act of the donation, nor decide
about the phenomenality and the self-showing of the phenomenon.
In other words — or rather using Husserl’s words — the content of the
cogitationes gives itself by itself to the cogito and it appears, before all
else, not as cogitatum, but as gift for the cogito, as possibility for the
cogito to be as such, as cogito in the act of its cogitationes.
This structural operation of Marion is very interesting, referring to
the revealing opening of God to humans. Christ’s Revelation to the
human being always escapes from the forms of the egological cogitatio.
The “more,” the “surplus” of phenomenality and donation which
allocates God beyond the human sphere of understanding, which
creates a sort of deep shade in the human being’s conception of God,
is exactly this excess (saturation) of His phenomenality. Revelation is
completely independent of the intentional gaze of the human being.
The human being searches for God, but he can find Him only because
God, even in the silence, in the absence, in the absolute distance,
always is: He is already “there” for the human being, comes to him,
makes Himself visible to the human being. A strange visibility,
however: the human gaze is not able to arrest itself before Revelation;
the human eyes cannot remain steadily looking at God, because the
light of His manifestation is too strong.^26 From this point of view only
centre comme une origine, un ego en première personne, en ‘mienneté’ transcend-
antale; on lui opposera qu’il ne tien pas ce centre, mais qu’il s’y tient seulement
comme un allocataire placé l� où se montre ce qui se donne; et qu’il s’y découvre
lui-même donné � et comme un pôle de donation, où ne cessent d’advenir tous les
donnés. Au centre, ne se tient nul ‘sujet,’ mais un adonné; celui dont la fonction
consiste � recevoir ce qui se donne sans mesure � lui et dont le privilège se borne
� ce qu’il se reçoive lui-même de ce qu’il reçoit,” 441–442. The new determination
of the subject as the “adonné” which receives itself from the gift is another opera-
tion of Marion that shows the constitution a posteriori of the spectator of the
phenomena.
- For example, in Christianity, only through the body of another human being,