God. The God who must conform to Dasein's prior understanding of being is an idol
(1991, 37–43). Dasein is the measure and God is the mirror image of Dasein's
understanding.
Marion's goal is simple enough, at least to state: “To think God without any conditions,
not even that of Being” (1991, 45). To that end he seeks a third reduction that allows for a
subject more open than the transcendental ego or Dasein and thus not restricted to the
horizons of objectivity or being. The subject is now the interloqué, the one addressed, “an
auditor preceded and instituted by the call which is still absolute because indeterminate”
(1998, 204). Because he develops this notion in dialogue with the later Heidegger's
notion of the call of Being (Anspruch des Seins), Marion also speaks of the interloqué as
der Angesprochene (the one claimed, appealed to). But for this subject, the “object” is a
another subject, the as yet unspecified caller. What is no longer excluded is the possibility
of being claimed, or, in Levinasian terms, of responsibility.
But this is not theology. While describing a possible experience excluded by other
phenomenologies, this analysis does not make the theological move of naming the caller.
That which lays claim to me might be God, but it also might be Being, or the Other, or
the Tribe (ethnic nationalism), or the Family, or the Party, or the Environment, or
Whatever. Marion rejects “the illusory presupposition that it is necessary to name the
instance that claims in order to suffer its convocation. Now, following the order of a strict
phenomenological description, the reverse happens: I recognize myself as interloqué well
before having consciousness or knowledgeespecially of what leaves me interloqué”
(1998, 202).
Marion's phenomenology of the icon and the saturated phenomenon are about the gaze,
and his “third reduction” is about the call. As in Augustine's Confessions and in Levinas'
Totality and Infinity, vision is trumped by the voice. This means that transcendence,
including the transcendence of God, is not so much to be understood in terms of an
“object” that I can locate within my field of “vision,” but in terms of a “subject” within
the sound of whose “voice” I find myself.
The Critique of Ontotheology: Overcoming Metaphysics
Marion regularly contrasts phenomenology with metaphysics. It is phenomenology that
can both keep the philosophy of religion from lapsing into metaphysica specialis under
the domination of the principle of sufficient reason and keep the
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ology from playing the same game with the help of revelation. We hear here an echo of a
central theme in the later work of Heidegger: overcoming metaphysics or, more
specifically, overcoming metaphysics in its ontotheological constitution.
In the 1949 introduction to What Is Metaphysics? entitled “The Way Back into the
Ground of Metaphysics” (1998), Heidegger argues that metaphysics needs to be
overcome because in its interpretation of beings it forgets being. Aristotle sets out to
think being as such, but to do so finds it necessary to think the Highest Being, God. In
this way, ontology becomes theology, or rather, ontotheology. Reminding us that many
different beings can play the role of Highest Being, Heidegger sees ontotheologically
constituted metaphysics as a tradition stretching from Anaxagoras to Nietzsche, with
Aristotle, Leibniz, and Hegel as high points. As the Highest Being becomes the key to the