La filosofia dell'uomo di Jean-Luc Marion tra Cartesio e la fenomenologia

Today Jean-Luc Marion is mainly famous for his philosophical proposal known as phenomenology of givenness. And critics are involved today in studying more and more this proposal. However the phenomenology of givenness can’t be suitably understood if not as transgression and radicalization of the Cartesian philosophy, in the light of the up-to-date phenomenological perspective, which has found in Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas the most powerful exponents. Descartes, according to Marion, is the person who, by bringing to light the limits and the possibilities, leads metaphysics to claim and to make room for phenomenology, almost as its most rigorous development but also its overcoming. And if metaphysics has to be transgressed by phenomenology, that can’t be achieved unless through the transgression of the Cartesian ego and therefore through the revision of the concept of phenomenon, which in the classical phenomenology is still too marked by the Cartesian connotations. The category which allows this process of transgression is, for the contemporary French philosopher, that of distance, as the last event of givenness. Looking over the different moments of Marion’s reflection developed in more than 40 years, the work tries in this way to show that the distance category allows the transgression of the Cartesian ego in a thoroughly phenomenological perspective, up to the thematization of a subjectivity specifically characterized by the erotic phenomenon, that is the phenomenon which, by establishing the human being in his intrinsic filial condition, allows him to understand himself, radically appointed to the boundless liberty of the gift of himself, as he is given to himself and to others through himself, in the inner contingency of history.