Marion on love and givenness

desiring to give what one lacks

pp. 97-121

in: Jason Alvis, Marion and Derrida on the gift and desire, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

This chapter extends the treatment of Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon and applies the findings on the "manifold of desire" from chapter three to an investigation into how that manifold might specifically relate with "the gift." The topic of privation is used as one way to exfoliate the points of interrelation between the gift and desire. Indeed, if nothing falls outside the bounds of "being given," then givenness must have some way of relating with "lack," which Marion refers to as the emptiness of actuality, and an obscurity that gives a "deficiency in appearing." Along similar lines, Marion not only holds that gifts are generally "invisible" phenomena, but also that they achieve the status of "the gift" all the more when they are not reified in an object or thing: The less the gift attains to being an object, the more the gift "appears." Yet there are a number of other ways in which desire and gift might relate in Marion's work. It may be that desire is given, that givenness relies fundamentally upon desire as a passion for performing the reduction, or that the adonné's "desire to give" or the "desire for the gift" play particular roles in intuition and the profusion of givenness.