Jean-Luc Marion and a Saturated Politics

For decades, Jean-Luc Marion has been a leading voice in the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. However, it was not until 2021’s Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment (Brève apologie pour un moment catholique, 2017), that he made a concerted effort to bring his phenomenology into conversation with political questions, namely, how Catholicism can revitalize French social, political, and public life. A Brief Apology offers a phenomenological model for politics that is paradoxically non-political: modeled not on human political ideas, but, instead, the intervening will of the divine. In my view, Marion’s emphasis on divine will leaves his politics susceptible to fascism, especially considering the resurgent far-right in France.

Marion’s phenomenology is difficult and multilayered. For the purposes of this post, what matters most is his understanding of the individual person’s relationship to phenomena. What happens to the human person when we encounter things in the world, things of all types, ranging from ordinary objects to that which cannot be considered things at all, like divine revelation? In his work Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Marion expands on his claim thatgivenness is what makes phenomena visible or showable: without givenness, we are unable to understand things as things at all. When a viewer intends to see something, for Marion, their intention is fulfilled by the intuitive reality of the object as it gives itself, the gift of the phenomenon. This is the case for every appearance, whether the givenness of an object as ordinary as wax or as extraordinary as the so-called saturated phenomenon, a phenomenon that exceeds itself and the horizon in which it is situated. In other words—the saturated phenomenon is not traditionally visible. We cannot hold it in our view as completely as an ordinary object like a cup sitting on a table. We cannot pick it up and turn it around and have its reality confirmed by our searching intention. No, the saturated phenomenon is something like an event for Marion, the experience of enfleshed human interaction, or a work of art. Before phenomena like this we are overwhelmed, bedazzled, unable to contain the entire vista of the phenomenon. Before all phenomena we become a prism where our subjectivity is reconstrued in terms of the object: we are no longer a detached Cartesian “I” but a receiver, who is personalized by the object and is made, forever, a “to whom.” Before the saturated phenomenon we graduate from receiver to gifted, to whom is made a call. This is how the face of another person can instill responsibility in us: the flesh of the other gifts us with its appearance—in turn we are bidden to care. (Being Given, 262-65, 282) A politics formed on this basis seems viable, even preferable—a responsibility to care borne of the irreducible givenness of the Other. 

However, before the advent of God, what Marion calls the saturated phenomena par excellence of divine revelation the self remains in tension between passive witness and responsible subject. The revealed God, Jesus Christ, can affix us in his loving gaze and transform us into loving actors, hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Marion uses the depiction of Jesus from Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew as an example of this transformation in action. (Being Given, 283-85) However, in Marion’s work Christ also can appear more coercive. A notable example comes near the end of 1991’s God Without Being, the text which introduced Marion to the English speaking world. Here, Marion describes the priest letting himself be spoken by the Logos. . Standing in person Christi during the consecration of the Eucharist means the total instrumentalization of the priest during the sacramental moment (God Without Being, 144-46). Across Marion’s writings, then, two human responses to the saturated phenomenon of revelation emerge: the first is a reaction conditioned by vocation, the second is a passive worshipfulness.

When we turn to Marion’ s politics, it is passivity that ultimately rules the day. Marion’s political system is limited by its reliance on the passive reception of divine revelation.

In A Brief Apology, Marion’s case for a Catholic moment revolves around a uniquely Catholic approach to separation (the Church as society) and the divine call to justice that should birth politics—a Catholic case for politics as justice’s tool, not politics first. If he were to stop here, we would be left with a thought-provoking reimagining of what Catholic Christian life can bring the state, especially because he makes the case at the end of the text that a catholic moment for him means being bound together in universal community. This vision matches the first response to revelation. According to Marion, the Catholics have preeminent experience in universal community, so they can teach the secularized French (Brief Apology, 84-85). If this were the extent of Marion’s political musings, we would be left with a case for a realignment of the state along the lines of democratic separation of church and state and justice-based reform, in this case brought about by modeling the state after Christian principles. As an aside, that Marion clearly sees the Catholic church as the best teacher for this task does smack of triumphalism (which is where Tamsin Jones critiques Marion). This triumphalism is also prominent when Marion talks about Islam in A Brief Apology, which in many ways mirrors the way Marion engages Islam in his 2015 article in Sightings, as a flawed socio-religious system in need of correction via the Catholic West.

Yet, Marion also puts his phenomenological project to work in this political text and ties both givenness and the saturated phenomena par excellence of revelation to questions of power, authority, and especially, the will. I think this leads in a dangerous direction.

My critique stems from how Marion discusses the will in A Brief Apology. I think he accurately diagnoses a real issue, which is that the only will operative in our decadent culture is the will to power. Marion does not see this as a way forward for society, as the will to power ultimately only wills its own power, is only able to will for more growth, a growth divorced from any value other than excess.

Marion’s answer to this problem is that we must will in a “different way,” which ultimately means letting ourselves will a will which comes from elsewhere, the will of the Father. (Brief Apology, 61-63). This is not a cooperation with an imposing divine will, but a true displacement of the human will with the divine. (Brief Apology, 64). The human will, which is always a will to power, is lashed to the mast of metaphysics, to a world of values abstracted from the real, and therefore is always willing toward nothingness. It is incapable of defeating nihilism without first being overwhelmed by God’s perfect will. This will is ultimately a triune will, at work communally between the persons of the Trinity.

Allowing the self to instead will the will from elsewhere follows all the hallmarks of Marion’s phenomenological project. This type of willing requires a radical reimagining of the self. This is no longer the sovereign Cartesian subject, the “I” which wills. Instead, it is a transcended self, one immersed in the landscape of the given. God gifts God’s Triune will, which is revealed to us as the saturated phenomenon par excellence in a world of things which show themselves insofar as they give themselves. We are prompted by this gift to respond to its call, which is love. The gift of the divine will, which replaces our wills caught up in nihilistic, metaphysical, recurrence, places a demand upon us to love others, which then leads to the foundation of a politics of the common good. This communion is a trinitarian model, a “universal that precedes us” (Brief Apology, 68-69).

Marion maintains that this trinitarian model of community is a non-political model because it accomplishes itself (indeed is actively accomplished) elsewhere, namely in God’s trinitarian self. The power and authority which flow from the gift of God’s will are what Marion terms unpower, a reimagining of power that depends upon the willful obedience of those on whom power is exerted, a power that gains its authority from elsewhere, the ultimate sovereignty of God. Marion, in an interview with Hugues Choplin, provides a further elucidation of unpower that predictably positions it beyond metaphysics—a traditional understanding of power does not work with the ultimate saturated phenomenon of God beyond being revealing Godself. This site is where the “rational pertinence of the concept of power comes to an end” (Appears in Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, 42).

While this program admirably articulates a counter-politics modeled after Marion’s own phenomenological system, it nevertheless opens itself up to one main problem: if, in order to bring about a better political moment, we are required to submit to the divine will which comes from elsewhere, does this not justify a parallel model of a human political subject which has its sovereignty overrun?  Marion seems to want to avoid this risk by emphasizing the objective nature of God’s revelation—God as ultimate good means God’s will must make us better, must add to our selves. Plus, the gift of God’s will must happen beyond an economy of exchange, operating instead in the logic of the gift, which, in doing away with the need for reciprocity, spoils an exchange rate logic (Brief Apology, 75)^. The human political response to the divine call creates a new type of citizen, one conditioned not by that person’s position in a system of exchange, but instead as a beneficiary of the absolute gift.

The fact remains, however, that a political system modeled on human reception of the saturated phenomenon of revelation is one that depends on absolute receptivity. This means that both the subject whose will is replaced by God’s will and the communion created from the effects of this perfect will, are colored by the absolute passivity required of the person in the face of the saturated phenomenon of revelation. How is one protected against the tendency toward authoritarianism, especially because human persons, by virtue of our sinful nature, fall away from God’s call? I agree with Marion that if we never slip away from God’s righteous authority, the result is blessed communion. However, as Marion makes clear in A Brief Apology, all it takes for authority to slip back into violent power is simple re-direction: authority “only becomes tyrannical precisely if it loses its authority and returns to being a mere power, tensely gripping its strength and the exercise of violence (Brief Apology, 81). Is the danger of this slippage not encoded within any political program which emerges from the saturated phenomenon of revelation, if radical passivity in the face of the gift becomes part of our very subjectivity? In short then, there remains, as Shane Mackinlay and Richard Kearney have pointed out, a hermeneutical disjunction between the saturated phenomenon of revelation and human receptivity. Without a way of interpreting revelation, the allure of domination is ever-present.

With A Brief Apology, Marion has offered a potential interpretative solution by way of Catholicism, yet never addresses how and when Catholicism falls victim to the very tyrannies he warns about. The landscape of far-right parties in France today is one prevalent example. The Catholic far-right movement Civitas was forcibly dissolved by Emmanuel Macron’s government in October 2023 for “promoting anti-Semitic comments.” The movement’s chair, Alain Escada, supported Éric Zemmour and his Reconquête party during the 2022 French elections. Reconquête seeks to unify France’s right wings under a program which argues for severe limits on immigration, decries the so-called Islamization of Europe, urges that France return to its European and Christian roots, decries LGBTQ and woke “propaganda”, and urges a renewed focus on European products and innovation, the French rural sector, and increasing the birthrate. This program dovetails with recognizably fascist emphases on racial and national purity, while updating them for the current moment.

Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece who publicly severed with her aunt’s Le Front National to join with Reconquête, was nominated by Zemmour to head the list of the party’s parliamentary seats in the June 2024 European elections. In her introduction to the party’s policy brief for the EU elections, Maréchal writes,

Ce ne sont pas ici que des mots ou un slogan de campagne: non seulement nous avons un projet ambitieux, non seulement nous avons la volonté de le mettre en œuvre, mais nous aurons aussi la capacité de le faire. (These are not just words or a campaign slogan: not only do we have an ambitious project, not only do we have the will to implement it, but we will also have the capacity to do so.)

Like the callbacks to blood and soil in Reconquête’s political program, power of a certain kind is also championed. The will looms large here, laying bare, basically in real time, the dangers of Marion’s project. The will of Maréchal seeks to implement policies that raise white Europeans above the rest of the world, and it is a will that right-wing Catholics in France are eager to have supplant them.