god — love — revelationthe other in its ambit has its origin not in the fact that God represents
a frontier-field, but in the claim of both disciplines to be the sole
guardians of the truth. Even today it remains difficult for philosophy
and for religion to have a rich and fecund dialogue ,because both have
a bent for destroying the presuppositions of the other, the value of the
insight that the other brings.
What Marion offers, instead, is a different paradigm. His speech
moves within the frontier-line between philosophy and faith, and he
recognizes this with the consciousness that a frontier is something that
separates but at the same time unites. Marion’s phenomenology follows
this line, in dialogue with theology, without claiming to place itself
back into the space of theology and maintaining the right of autonomy
over its own speculative operations. However, from this point of view
it seems as if Marion has shifted the limit, the frontier between philo-
sophy and theology/religion, opening a new space of reflection which
demands that theology listen to the lessons of phenomenology by
abandoning the traditional ways of conceiving God, and that phenom-
enology become respectful of the emergence of the theological question
in human life and give attention to tran scendence. This attention in
Marion defines his work as a further step in the reflection that begins
with Levinas, Derrida, and Henry, authors to whom Marion recognizes
himself as owing a debt. But Marion understands that, in order to
receive the phenomenality of tran scendence, it is necessary to attempt
a reformulation of the phenomenological establishment, of its tasks
and aims, even if it means realizing a sort of “parricide” of Husserl.
What we see, then, is a singular situation. Phenomenology can
maintain its distance from theology only if it realizes itself completely
by analyzing the phenomenality of the given as otherness. In this way
it can, in fact, define its own field of research, declaring itself as an
investigation of the conditions of possibility and not of the content of
faith. But during this investigation it finds itself in front of theology
and cannot come back, otherwise it would lose what it has conquered.
Here, phenomenology and theology stand before one another as at a
frontier block.^41 It happens that Marion’s thought supports Catholic
- A frontier block belongs to both limit states, which are so near to each other
that they touch, but in this co-presence they are, equally, in opposition.