intuitiona phenomenon in which intuition would give more, indeed unmeasurably more,
than intention ever would have intended or foreseen?
end p.482
but it is no longer a matter of the non-adequation of the (lacking) intuition that leaves a
(given) concept empty; it is a matter, conversely, of a failure of the (lacking) concept that
leaves the (overabundantly given) intuition blind” (2000, 195–96). In ordinary perception
and the rational idea, adequation fails because intuition can never catch up with the
concept; with the saturated phenomenon, it fails because the concept can never catch up
with intuition. (n.b. Marion speaks the Husserlian language of intuition rather than the
hermeneutical language of interpretation.) One might say that the saturated phenomenon
is one that gives itself as an icon.
Perhaps it would be better to say “in the iconic mode,” since the saturated phenomenon is
not necessarily of religious import. Marion draws heavily on Kant's Critique of
Judgement in developing this notion, and in a certain sense it is Kant's aesthetic idea, the
representation of the beautiful or sublime, in contrast to the rational idea of the Critique
of Pure Reason, that is the paradigmatic saturated phenomenon. But other examples
include historical events, the face of the beloved, and theophany. This last, of course, is
what makes the saturated phenomenon important for the phenomenology of religion.
The icon and saturated phenomenon are not Husserlian noemata, intentional objects
constituted by the intentional acts of the I or ego, whether transcendental or not. We have,
rather, a reversed intentionality in which the I is constituted by that at which it looks. For
it discovers itself to be more seen than seer. Thus, “the icon opens in a face that gazes at
our gazeshere our gaze becomes the optical mirror of that at which it looks only by
finding itself more radically looked at” (Marion 1991, 19–22). Similarly, the theophanic
saturated phenomenon involves “the paradox that an invisible gaze visibly envisages me
and loves me” (2000, 215; compare 208–11).
This reversal of intentionality is more fully developed in the third dimension of Marion's
phenomenology of religion. In his analysis of the pure form of the call, he reinterprets the
“subject” of religious experience so as to accord with the revised understanding of the
“object.” Developing the notion that phenomenology ought to be open to the whole range
of human experience (“It is forbidden to forbid”), Marion asks what gets excluded in
Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. For Husserl, the phenomenological
reduction reduces experience to the transcendental ego as constituting intentionality and
the objects constituted within its horizon. “It thus excludes from givenness everything
that does not let itself be led back to objectity [sic]” (1998, 204). Heidegger reduces
experience to Dasein as concretely engaged being-in-the-world and its encounter with the
phenomenon of being through its involvement with beings as a whole within the horizon
of time. This means, as Heidegger explicitly makes clear, that the question of being has
priority over the question of God. But this excludes the possibility that our understanding
of being should be derived from our understanding of
end p.483