), in conformity with Luke 1:37, which quotes it 
.1. “Analytic Kantianism” encompasses a fairly large group of philosophers; here I will only be considering aspects of the thought of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, leaving out any discussion of such figures as P. F. Strawson or Robert Brandom. For a more comprehensive view of “analytic Kantianism,” see the articles collected and edited by James Conant in the special issue of Philosophical Topics devoted to “analytic Kantianism”: Philosophical Topics 34, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 2006). McDowell’s contribution to this volume, “Sensory Consciousness in Kant and Sellars,” is included in his Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 108–26. For a good brief summary of some of the important issues involved in both McDowell’s and Brandom’s respective engagements with Sellars, Kantianism, and Hegelian thought, see Paul Redding, “The Possibility of German Idealism after Analytic Philosophy: McDowell, Brandom and Beyond,” in Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, ed. Jack Reynolds et al. (New York: Continuum, 2010), 191–202, especially the section entitled “Paths from Pittsburgh to Berlin.”
2. Jean-Luc Marion, Réduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989); Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Subsequent citations will be indicated by the abbreviations RD/RG, followed by the page numbers. Likewise for Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, 2nd ed. 1998); Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Citations will be given in the text, with page numbers following the abbreviations ED/BG.
3. Kevin Hart, introduction to Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 13.
4. Ibid.
5. Antonio López, review of Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, in Review of Metaphysics 57, no. 4 (June 2004): 855, referring to ED §26, 360–73/BG 261–71.
6. Jean-Luc Marion, Certitudes négatives (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 299. Subsequent citations of this book will be given parenthetically, following the abbreviation CN. Translations are my own.
7. On birth, see Jean-Luc Marion, De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 49–52; In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 41–44. See also CN 291–99. Marion’s account of birth is heavily indebted, as Marion himself acknowledges, to the analyses of Claude Romano in L’événement et le monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 95–101; Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 69–73. However, Shane Mackinlay draws distinctions between Marion’s approach to birth, which Mackinlay characterizes as “narrow[ly]” focused upon the ego, and Romano’s, which Mackinlay finds focused upon the “interrelatedness” of the I who is born and the world into which he or she is born in the event of being born. See Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 50. Subsequent citations from Mackinlay’s book will be given parenthetically.
8. For a striking description of the experience of givenness as, fundamentally, an experience of dependence best illustrated by the phenomenon of birth, see Luigi Giussani, Il senso religioso (Milano: Rizzoli, 1997), 139, 141; The Religious Sense, trans. John Zucchi (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 100, 101: “Supponete di nascere, di uscire dal ventre di vostra madre all’età che avete in questo momento, nel senso di sviluppo e di coscienza così come vi è possibile averli adesso. Quale sarebbe il primo, l’assolutamente primo sentimento, cioè il primo fattore della reazione di fronte al reale? [. . .] Io apro gli occhi a questa realtà che mi si impone, che non dipende da me, ma da cui io dipendo: il grande condizionamento della mia esistenza, se volete, il dato.” (Picture yourself being born, coming out of your mother’s womb at the age you are now at this very moment in terms of your development and consciousness. What would be the first, absolutely your initial reaction? [. . .] I open my eyes to this reality which imposes itself upon me, which does not depend upon me, but upon which I depend; it is the great conditioning of my existence—if you like, the given.)
9. Jean-Luc Marion, “The Banality of Saturation,” trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 383–418, on 408; “La banalité de la saturation,” in Le visible et le révélé (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 180.
10. Marion, “The Banality of Saturation,” 408, trans. modified; “La banalité de la saturation,” 180.
11. “Counter-experience” was first discussed by Marion in Étant donné, §22, 300–302; Being Given, 215–16. He then describes it in more detail in “The Banality of Saturation,” 401–4, and, most recently, at various places in Certitudes négatives—see, e.g., 317.
12. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 127–96. Originally published in The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). The 1963 edition will hereafter be cited parenthetically, using the abbreviation EPM. McDowell’s Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 1996) will be cited parenthetically using the abbreviation MW.
13. Calls for a confrontation between respective approaches to the given in Sellars and in Marion have been made by Jean Grondin, “La tension de la donation ultime et de la pensée herméneutique de l’application chez Jean-Luc Marion,” Dialogue 38 (1999): 547–59, on 552; and Denis Fisette, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique: Remarques à propos d’un débat récent,” in La métaphysque: Son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux, ed. Jean-Marc Narbonne and Luc Langlois (Paris: Vrin/Laval: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999), 91–116, in 111n1. In his recent study of Gegebenheit in relation to the motifs of reduction, construction, and destruction in Heidegger, Husserl, and Natorp, Jean-François Courtine similarly suggests—but does not pursue—the usefulness of “confronting [this dossier] with other, later debates relative to the given or the ‘myth of the given.’ ” See Jean-François Courtine, “Réduction, construction, destruction. D’un dialogue à trois: Natorp, Husserl, Heidegger,” Philosophiques 36, no. 2 (Automne 2009): 559–77, on 560. Hent de Vries, in his ninety-eight-page introductory essay to the volume Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), discusses Sellars, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom, including the role of the “myth of the given” in this line of thought, suggesting along the way (alas, with nothing in the way of supporting arguments) that aspects of Marion’s thought are compatible with the pragmatic perspectivalism of these three American philosophers (see 53, 64).
14. Claude Romano, Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard/Folio Essais, 2010). Citations will be provided parenthetically. Translations from this book are my own.
15. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), Anhang A, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander, in GA 58 (Frankfurt a./M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 131; quoted by Marion, 36.
16. Marion points out that Heidegger distinguishes “two primary meanings of givenness” in the neo-Kantian field: “on one side that of Natorp, who only allows ‘a givenness [Gegebenheit] that derives in a precise sense from the accomplishment of science,’ and thus remains within it without exempting itself from it; on the other that of Rickert, who allows ‘a givenness [Gegebenheit] that is anteriorly-given [vorgegeben], by necessity of meaning, to this accomplishment [of science] and its possible use.’ Thus we understand [. . .] in what way givenness was marking out a crossroads in philosophy [. . .], where two accepted meanings of Erkenntnistheorie diverge, according to whether the given is inscribed within the knowledge of the object [Rickert] or precedes and determines it irreducibly [Natorp]” 40–41.
17. Romano writes, “The confrontation of phenomenology with the thought of Sellars and of McDowell, respectively, is in no way a mere stylistic exercise. The problem of what, across the Atlantic, has come to be called ‘the non-conceptual content’ of experience has seen a lively growth in interest during the last two decades, under the impulse of Evans, McDowell, Peacocke and others. This problem is the very same one that occupied Husserl when he enlarged experiential sense beyond conceptual sense. But the confrontation of these two traditions cannot have real philosophical significance unless we are capable of showing first that they possess a common background: that of neo-Kantianism” (734).
18. Michael Friedman, in his historically based critique of McDowell’s Mind and World entitled “Exorcising the Philosophical Tradition” (in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith [London: Routledge, 2002], 25–57), makes some points similar to those made by Romano (738–39) about the structuring role of language in the “logical idealism” of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer), and the similarity between that way of arguing for the thoroughly conceptual nature of experience and McDowell’s Gadamer-influenced view that “languages and traditions can figure [. . .] as constitutive of our unproblematic openness to the world” (MW 155) (see Friedman, 39, on the Marburg school, and 46–48 on language as harmonizing mind and world in Mind and World). McDowell himself responds to all the essays in this volume; unfortunately he does not engage with this critical observation of a continuity between his thought and that of the Marburg school, other than to “express an affinity [. . .] with Kant’s successors” (see Smith, Reading McDowell, 274).
19. An exploration of the persuasiveness of Romano’s arguments for these conclusions is beyond the scope of this introduction; see Romano, 756–60, for his conclusions about several of Sellars’s arguments in EPM, and 760–78 for those having to do with the central aspects of McDowell’s argument in Mind and World. For a nonhistorical comparison of the given in Sellars and Husserl that agrees at several points with Romano’s conclusions, but also explores divergences between Husserl and Sellars surrounding the issues of intentionality and intersubjectivity, see Gail Soffer, “Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given,” Review of Metaphysics 57, no. 2 (December 2003): 301–37.
20. “To McDowell’s eyes, the content of experience is conceptual to be sure, in the sense of propositional—we perceive that things are thus and so—but, even when experience possesses the same ‘content’ as the judgment made upon it, it is not intrinsically a judgment. We are thus watching the third act in the debate between empiricism and neo-Kantianism—a neo-Kantianism whose weaker and weaker claims nonetheless remain inside the magic circle of formulations and of problems out of which it is unable to extract itself. After the original neo-Kantianism’s debate with classical empiricism, after that of Sellars with logical empiricism, McDowell attacks a residue of givenness that might still tempt the philosopher, in spite of Sellars’s critiques, and which would make felt the heavy threat of a new cleavage between sensibility and understanding, or, as he likes to say in appealing to Kant, between receptivity and spontaneity” (Romano, 760–61).
21. Marlène Zarader, “Phenomenality and Transcendence,” in Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion, ed. James E. Faulconer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 106–19, quotations from 114 and 116; for Marion’s response to Zarader, see “La banalité de la saturation,” especially 148–49; trans. Kosky, 386–88.
22. MW 23. What is “intolerable” is the anxiety-filled oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of the Given (MW 15).
23. Zarader characterizes her elimination of pure transcendence as an act of “subversion”: “Subversion [differs from destruction in that it] acknowledges its own impurity and interminability: it knows it can never extract itself from the place that it contests; nevertheless, it strives continuously to upset and to divert that place” (117). Zarader credits Roland Barthes as the source of this concept of subversion; it is also characteristic of the guilty complicity that characterizes Georges Bataille’s practice of contestation.
24. Romano, 755–56, points out that among the many possible senses of “looks,” Sellars privileges the comparative.
25. Anthony J. Steinbock, “The Poor Phenomenon: Marion and the Problem of Givenness,” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 120–31, quotation from 129.
26. Steinbock, “The Poor Phenomenon,” 129.
27. In Le phénomène érotique: Six méditations (Paris: Grasset, 2003), 140; The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87, Marion writes that “the properly infinite excess of the lover, as he loves without condition of reciprocity,” is characterized by “unknowing” and “poverty.” It seems, then, that the erotic phenomenon revises significantly even the “essential finitude” of the gifted that Steinbock, following what is written in Being Given, references in his discussion of the decision for or against the saturated phenomenon (see previous note). For more on the infinity of the lover’s advance, see my essay “The Lover’s Capacity in Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon,” Quaestiones Disputatae 1, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 226–44, especially 239–42.
1. I first introduced this quasi principle as a conclusion to Jean-Luc Marion, Réduction et donation: Études sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, 2004), 303; Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 203. After Michel Henry had validated it in its essential thesis in “Les quatres principes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (1991), reprinted in Henry, Phénoménologie de la vie, t. 1: De la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), I developed it in Marion, Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, 2005), §§1–6; Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), §§1–6.
2. To render Gegebenheit as given-ness (donnéité), rather than as given (donné) or givenness (donation), has been suggested by several translators of Husserl (for the different possible translations, see Étant donné, 98), especially Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 175.
3. This was Dominique Janicaud’s crucial point in his Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Eclat, 1991); Dominique Janicaud, et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
4. Jean-Luc Marion, “L’autre philosophie première et la question de la donation,” Philosophie 49 (Paris, 1996), included in Marion, De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), chap. 1; and then in Étant donné, book 1.
5. I attempted to show this in Étant donné, §3, 53 ff.; Being Given, 34 ff.
6. Published by Bernd Heimbüchel, under the title Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 56/57 (Frankfurt a./M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987). I have attempted a brief commentary in “Ce que donne ‘Cela donne,’ ” in Le souci du passage: Mélanges offerts à Jean Greisch, ed. Philippe Capelle, Geneviève Hébert, and Marie-Dominique Popelard (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 293–306.
7. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 10th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996), principally the Gegebenheit des Ich (§25, 115 and 116); of the totality of Dasein (§41, 191; §62, 309); and of Erlebnisse (§53, 265). I adopt as my own Jean-François Courtine’s remark: “[. . .] the Heideggerian ‘es gibt,’ as it appears well before the last variations of Zeit und Sein in Sein und Zeit, [. . .] indicate[s], moreover within quotation marks, that interpretation is necessary, that Being is not, but that it gives Being [il y a Être]” (Courtine, introduction to Alexius Meinong, Théorie de l’objet et Présentation personnelle, trans. into French by Courtine and M. de Launay [Paris: J. Vrin, 1999], 34). In a sense, my essay here is merely an attempt to interpret these quotation marks.
8. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §2, 6–7; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 5 (trans. modified). In his personal copy, Heidegger notes that Dasein here remains “neither the usual concept nor any other.”
9. I adopt as my own Courtine’s apt remark on the “. . . ‘es gibt,’ which both the French ‘il y a’ and the English ‘there is’ translate badly. Indeed, with ‘es gibt’ we are in front of a figure that is clearly elementary, extenuated as much as one might wish, and reduced to an almost nothing (but nevertheless not nothing) of givenness or of given being” (introduction to Meinong, Théorie de l’objet, 34; see my Étant donné, 51; Being Given, 33). But why speak from the outset of an extenuation? On the contrary, it may be that es gibt supports no analogy or gradation at all, but instead either produces itself perfectly, or does not produce itself at all, precisely because it indicates a fact, or indeed an event. What is more, can one legitimately make an equivalence between givenness and given being, if the whole point is precisely to think that “. . . Being is not”? This isn’t simply about a detail; or rather, everything here is at stake in such details.
10. For example, Sein und Zeit, §7, 36; §12, 55; §18, 87; §33, 158; §49, 247; §52, 258; §72, 30.
11. Sein und Zeit, §16, 72; trans. Stambaugh, 67–68 (trans. modified). Couldn’t one bring together the distinction between two modes of innerworldy beings: “Aber Zuhandenes ‘gibt es’ doch nur auf dem Grunde von Vorhandenem” (§15, 71)?
12. Sein und Zeit, §44, 230; trans. Stambaugh, 211 (trans. modified).
13. Sein und Zeit, §41, 196; trans. Stambaugh, 183 (see also §43, 207 and 208).
14. Sein und Zeit, §4: “Es ist vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, daß es diesem Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht” (12); “Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being” (trans. Stambaugh, 10).
15. Sein und Zeit, §43, 212; trans. Stambaugh, 196 (trans. modified).
16. Sein und Zeit, §44, 226; trans. Stambaugh, 208 (trans. modified). Similarly, “Warum müssen wir voraussetzen, daß es Wahrheit gibt? Was heißt ‘voraussetzen’? Was meint das ‘müssen’ und ‘wir’? Was besagt: ‘Es gibt Wahrheit’?” (227; trans. Stambaugh, 209, modified: “Why must we presuppose that it gives truth? What does ‘presuppose’ mean? What do ‘must’ and ‘we’ mean? What does it mean ‘it gives truth’?”).
17. Sein und Zeit, §80, 411; trans. Stambaugh, 378 (trans. modified).
18. Sein und Zeit, §79, 411; trans. Stambaugh, 377 (trans. modified).
19. Sein und Zeit, §16, 72; trans. Stambaugh, 67–68 (modified) (cited in n. 11 above).
20. Emil Lask, Zum System der Philosophie, chap. 1, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Eugen Herrigel (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1924), vol. 3, 179–80. The text takes up and refounds Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, which Heidegger read from its publication in 1911. The major thesis there was already givenness: “Durch die Identität ist das bloße Etwas ein Gegenstand, ein Etwas, das ‘es gibt.’ Die Kategorie des ‘Es-Gebens’ ist die reflexive Gegenständlichkeit” (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 142). On this point, see the classic article by Theodore Kisiel, “Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask,” Man and World 28 (1995), included in Kisiel, Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts (New York: Continuum, 2002), 101–36.
21. Sein und Zeit, §2, 6–7 (cited in n. 8, above).
22. Heinrich Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis: Einführung in die Transzendental-Philosophie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1892, 5th ed. 1921), 326. (Heidegger cites the third edition, 1915, in GA 56/57, p. 34, and in GA 58, pp. 71, 226, in order to critique the confusion between two meanings of Gegebenheit: that which precedes the accomplishment of scientific knowledge, and that which proceeds from it).
23. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 327, 328.
24. Paul Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode. Erstes Buch: Objekt und Methode der Psychologie (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1912), chap. 3, §1, 40.
25. See Christoph von Wolzogen, “ ‘Es gibt’: Heidegger und Natorps ‘Praktische Philosophie,’ ” in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Otto Pöggeler (Frankfurt a./M.: Suhrkamp, 1988).
26. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, in Gesammelte Werke, Hua. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 74; The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 59 (trans. modified).
27. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, 61; trans. Alston and Nakhnikian, 49 (trans. modified).
28. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, 44; trans. Alston and Nahknikian, 34 (trans. modified). On this strict link between Gegebenheit and reduction, see Étant donné, §3, 42 ff.; Being Given, §3, 27 ff.
29. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, 74; trans. Alston and Nahknikian, 59 (trans. modified).
30. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, 74; trans. Alston and Nahknikian, 59 (trans. modified). After 1907 Husserl will discover other “modes of authentic givenness,” in particular, the flesh, passive syntheses, intersubjectivity, and teleology. Subsequent phenomenology will not stop adding more (being/beings, time, world and truth, the face, auto-affection, hermeneutics and differance, etc.). I hold that all come under givenness, whether one admits it or not.
31. Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre, §67, in Gesamtausgabe, ed. Edmund Winter and J. Berg, Reihe 1: Schriften, Bd. 2, T. 2 (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1987), 112; Theory of Science, ed. Jan Berg, trans. Burnham Terrell (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1973), 106 (trans. modified).
32. Jocelyn Benoist, Représentations sans objets: Aux origines de la phénoménologie et de la philosophie analytique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 19, an imprecise formulation in a work that is otherwise indispensable.
33. Who was nevertheless an essential relay for the question for Husserl. The dossier of their exchanges has been remarkably collected by Jacques English: Husserl-Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 1893–1901 (Paris: Vrin, 1993).
34. Alexius Meinong, Über Gegenstandstheorie (originally published as Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie [Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1904]), §3, in Gesamtausgabe, ed. Rudolf Haller, Bd. 2: Abhandlungen zur Erkenntnistheorie und Gegenstandstheorie (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1971), 490. In a desire to remain elegant, the French translation (“Il y a des objets à propos desquels on peut affirmer qu’il n’y en a pas”) misses the essential, Gegebenheit. Moreover, it hides or mars by elsewhere rendering it “être-donné” (§6), precisely there where givenness dispenses with being. See Alexius Meinong, Théorie de l’objet et Présentation personelle, with an instructive introduction by Jean-François Courtine (here, 73 and 83).
35. Über Gegenstandstheorie, §6, 500: “Unter Voraussetzung einer unbegrenzt leistungsfähigen Intelligenz also gibt es nichts Unerkennbares, und was erkennbar ist, das gibt es auch, oder, weil ‘es gibt doch vorzugsweise von Seiendem, ja speziell von Existierendem gesagt zu werden pflegt, wäre es vielleicht deutlicher, zu sagen: Alles Erkennbare ist gegeben—dem Erkennen nämlich. Und sofern alle Gegenstände erkennbar sind, kann ihnen ohne Ausnahme, mögen sie sein oder nicht sein, Gegebenheit als eine Art allgemeinster Eigenschaft nachgesagt werden” (where clearly one must not translate Gegebenheit by being-given; see the French translation by Courtine and de Launay, 83). See “die Gegenstandstheorie beschäftige sich mit dem Gegebenen ganz ohne Rücksicht auf dessen Sein” (§11, 519).
36. Über Gegenstandstheorie, §4, 494. See: “Der Gegenstand ist von Natur außerseiend, obwohl von seinen beiden Seinsobjektiven, seinem Sein und seinem Nichtsein, jedenfalls eines besteht.” Which thus becomes the “principle of the beyond of being of the pure object, Satz vom Außersein des reinen Gegenstandes,” and certainly supposes the Kantian assumption that “being and non-being are equally exterior to the object,” because they do not constitute real predicates (ibid.).
37. Über Gegenstandstheorie, §11, 521.
38. How can Benoist put into question the central role of givenness as such for Meinong (“It is nevertheless doubtful that this reference to modes of thought and to what seems to be the imperative of givenness are really so central in Meinongian analysis” (Représentations sans objets, 123, my emphasis)? And how can Courtine be so astonished by the drawing of a relationship between the es gibt of Meinong and that of Heidegger in 1927 (“a preposterous idea,” he writes, in Meinong, Théorie de l’objet, 34)?
39. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A290; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1961), 294.
40. Edmund Husserl, Ideen I, §42, Hua. 3, 96; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982), 90 (trans. modified). See §46, 109 (where the difference between Erlebnis and transcendence leads back to the difference between two leibhaft Gegebene), and the commentary of Didier Franck, Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981), 24 ff.
41. Husserl did not fail to recognize the possibility, or indeed the obligation, of such an exit out, beyond being (see the light shed on this issue in Marion, Réduction et donation; Reduction and Givenness, §§1–7), but he essentially leaves it undecided.
This text corrects and modifies a study that appeared in tribute to a friend and eminent colleague, under the title “Ce que donne ‘Cela donne,’ ” in Le souci du passage: Mélanges offerts à Jean Greisch, ed. Philippe Capelle, Geneviève Hébert, and Marie-Dominique Popelard (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 293–306.
1. Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56/57 (Frankfurt a/M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987); Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum Books, 2008). Subsequent citations to the German edition will be given by the abbreviation GA, followed by volume, section, and page number; this will be followed by a reference to the English translation, abbreviated TDP.
2. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), Anhang A, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander, in GA 58 (Frankfurt a./M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 131.
3. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, §26, 127 (see p. 27).
4. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, §1, 5. See: “The sphere of the problem of phenomenology is not simply immediately pre-given [. . .]. And what does it mean to say: something must be, mediately, first ‘brought’ to givenness?” (§6, 27).
5. Jean Greisch (in L’arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir: Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique heidegerrienne [1991–1923] [Paris: Cerf, 2000], 38) recalls judiciously that Theodore Kisiel mentions a student note that glosses this already enigmatic formula with another that is even more surprising: “Gibt es ein ‘es gibt,’ wenn nur ‘es gibt’ gibt?—Does it give an ‘it gives,’ if it only gives an ‘it gives’?” (quoted in Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 42).
6. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, §7, 29. The same formula is found in Anhang B, Ergänzung 1, p. 203 (see also pp. 218 and 219).
7. “Es ‘muß der Gegebenheit ein aktives Geben entsprechen.’ ” Heidegger is here quoting Natorp’s “Bruno Brauchs Immanuel Kant und die Fortbildung des System des kritischen Idealismus,” Kantstudien 22 (1918): 440 (Heidegger, GA 56/57, §19, 106; TDP 81–82). The same argument appears in the book review “Husserls Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie,” Die Geisteswissenschaften (1913), and later in Logos 7 (1917–18); French translation, accompanied by a very useful introduction, published by J. Servois, in Philosophie 74 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002).
8. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Anhang B, 2, GA 58, 132.
9. Ibid., 224 and 225.
10. Paul Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode. I. Band: Objekt und Methode der Psychologie, chap. 3, §1 (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1912), 40: “Auch ein ‘Datum’ der Psychologie kann das Ich der reinen Bewußtheit nicht eigentlich genannt werden. Datum hieße Problem; Problem aber ist das reine Ich eben nicht. Es ist Prinzip; ein Prinzip aber ist niemals ‘gegeben,’ sondern, je radikaler, um so ferner allem Gegebenen. ‘Gegeben’ würde überdies heißen ‘Einem gegeben,’ das aber hieße wiederum: Einem bewußt. Das Bewußt-sein ist im Begriff des Gegebenen also schon vorausgesetzt. Eben als Voraussetzung aller Gegebenheit kann aber die reine Bewußtheit selbst nicht ‘gegeben’ heißen; so wie das Erscheinen selbst nicht eine Erscheinung.” See also chap. 5, §16, 122.
11. Allgemeine Psychologie,, chap. 2, §5, 32: “[. . .] die paradoxe Konsequenz, daß das ursprüngliche, reine Ich, das Ich der Bewußtheit, [. . .] weder Tatsache noch Existierendes noch Phänomen ist. Aber die Paradoxie hebt sich auf, sobald man sich klar macht: es ist Grund aller Tatsache, Grund aller Existenz, alles Gegebenseins, alles Erscheinens; nur darum kann es selbst nicht eine Tatsache, eine Existenz, ein Gegebenes, ein Erscheinendes sein.” See also chap. 4, §3, 66.
12. We can refer to the illuminating and detailed analysis of Theodore Kisiel, “Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask,” Man and World 28 (1995): 197–240, included in Kisiel, Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts (New York: Continuum, 2002), 101–36.
13. The Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie assimilates them clearly (“Transzendentale Wertphilosophie [Rickert, Lask],” GA 58, 133), even at times putting Rickert “unter de[n] Einfluß von Lask” and not the inverse (226). And yet, is it not the case that Rickert in fact dedicated Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis to Lask?
14. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, 133, which cites, or summarizes rather loosely, Rickert’s Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis: Einführung in die Transzendentalphilosophie, according to the third edition (Tübingen, 1915), 376 ff., or according to the fourth edition, which I will refer to here (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1921), 325 ff.
15. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, 226, which doubtless refers to: “Dies Blau und dies Rot bleibt in jeder Hinsicht unableitbar oder, wie wir auch sagen können, irrational, denn an den bestimmten Inhalten findet alles ‘Denken’ seine Grenze” (Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 326).
16. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, 226.
17. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 327: “Farbe ist, heißt so viel wie: Farbe ist Tatsache, ist gegeben, ist wahrgenommen.”
18. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 328: “die Form des individuellen real Gegebenen oder die Bejahungsform des Urteils, das ein rein tatsächliches, individuell bestimmtes einmaliges real Gegebenes konstatiert.”
19. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 330: “es gibt zwar keine individuellen Formen und Normen, aber es gibt Formen und Normen des Individuellen.”
20. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 331: “die Kategorie des realen Diesseins.”
21. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 327 (cited by Heidegger, GA 58, 134); in fact Rickert writes: “auch die Tatsächlichkeit als Kategorie zu verstehen.” Even here, Heidegger assimilates Gegebenheit to Tatsächlichkeit, beginning from the current formula of Rickert’s, cited in the following note.
22. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, chap. 5, s. III: “Die Kategorie der Gegebenheit,” e.g., pp. 327 and 328: “Kategorie der Gegebenheit oder Tatsächlichkeit.”
23. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 58, §15, 71.
24. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Anhang B, GA 58, 131.
25. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Anhang B, GA 58, 226 and 227.
26. Well before Sellars and Reichenbach, Natorp had already spoken of the “prejudice of the given [Das Vorurteil des Gegebenen]” (Allgemeine Psychologie, 278).
27. Confirmation is found in Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Anhang B, GA 58, 220, 223, 231. For life is structured like a language, its own: “Das Leben spricht zu sich selbst in seiner eigenen Sprache” (231, see also 31).
28. Martin Heidegger, Zeit und Sein, in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 23; On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 22 (trans. modified). See my study of this point in Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, 1998), §3, 54–60; Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 34–39.
1. Paul Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Lévinas, penseur du témoignage” (1989), in Ricoeur, Lectures 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 99, 100.
2. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Un Dieu Homme?,” in Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), 76 (my emphasis); Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 60.
3. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 152; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981, 1997), 119.
4. Autrement qu’être, 127; trans. Lingis, 100.
5. Autrement qu’être, 141; trans. Lingis, 111.
6. And it seems that such is indeed the case, at least according to Entre nous, 262; trans. Smith and Harshav, 231.
7. Autrement qu’être, 141; trans. Lingis, 111.
8. Autrement qu’être, v; trans. Lingis, v.
9. Autrement qu’être, 152 and 232, respectively; trans. Lingis 119 and 184 (trans. modified).
10. Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard/Radio France, 1982), 95–96; Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 90. See “It is in a responsibility that is justified by no prior commitment, in the responsibility for another—in an ethical situation—that the me-ontological and metalogical structure of this anarchy takes form” (Autrement qu’être, 129; trans. Lingis, 102). Or, we must understand ethics itself in an extra-moral sense: “The ethical is not a region or an ornament of the real, it is of itself disinterestedness itself, which is only possible under the traumatism in which presence, in its impenitent equanimity of presence, is upset by the Other” (Nouvelles lectures talmudiques [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1996], 34; New Talmudic Readings, trans. Richard A. Cohen [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999], 70). This is confirmed by a declaration of Levinas’s, reported by Jacques Derrida: “You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy” (Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas [Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997], 15; Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999], 4).
11. Emmanuel Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 228; Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 149. I follow here Jacques Rolland’s excellent commentary: “ ‘ethics’ (which thus must not be taken as a feminine substantive but, instead, if the word were not itself problematic, ought to be understood as the ethical (order) [l’(ordre) éthique], with a masculine that is perhaps capable of recalling the neutral of the German substantivized adjective [das Ethische]) is not a discipline—and [ . . . so], already for this reason, its term-for-term opposition with ‘ontology’ obviously proceeds not without raising problems” (Parcours de l’Autrement: Lecture d’Emmanuel Lévinas [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000], 17).
12. That is, insofar as ethics forms a group with logic and physics in the Stoic classification, or, in modern scholasticism, makes up a system with metaphysics, logic, and physics under the name of ethics or moral philosophy [l’éthique ou philosophie morale] (chosen as a title by S. Dupleix [Paris, 1610]; see also the Summa quadripartita, de rebus dialecticis, Moralibus, Physicis et Metaphysicis, by E. de Saint-Paul [Paris, 1609]). Jacques Rolland, once again, insists: “Thus is the meaning of ethics articulated. Once again, one must not understand it beginning from some moral or, even worse, moralizing prejudice. What comes into question here is nothing other than what we might call the ‘constitution of the ego [moi],’ the genesis of its ipseity and of its un-ity” (preface to Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethique comme philosophie première [Paris: Payot, 1998], 46).
13. Autrement qu’être, 163; trans. Lingis, 127.
14. “This is why Heidegger seems to me to dominate from above the philosophy of existence, despite the deepening or modification that one might bring to the content of his analyses. One can be to him what Malebranche or Spinoza had been to Descartes. It’s not too shabby, but it’s not Descartes’ destiny” (Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Paris: Vrin, 1949, 1974], 101). Or: “Despite all the horror that eventually came to be associated with Heidegger’s name—and which will never be dissipated—nothing has been able to destroy in my mind the conviction that the Sein und Zeit of 1927 cannot be annulled, no more than can the few other eternal books in the history of philosophy” (Entre-nous, 220, see also 134 and 255; trans. Smith and Harshav, 208, see also 116 and 225).
15. In “Mourir pour . . . ,” a lecture given at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, March 1987, collected in Entre nous, 219–30; trans. Smith and Harshav, “Dying for . . . ,” 207–17. I would like here to deepen an hypothesis suggested by Robert Bernasconi, “What Is the Question to Which Substitution Is the Answer?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 234–51.
16. “Auf dem Grunde dieses mithaften In-der-Welt-seins ist die Welt je schon immer die, die ich mit den Anderen teile. Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen. Das innerweltliche Ansichsein dieser ist Mitdasein” (Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §26 [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996], 118; Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit,” trans. Joan Stambaugh [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], 111–12).
17. “Das eigene Dasein ist nur, sofern es die Wesensstruktur des Mitseins hat, als für Andere begegnend Mitdasein” (Sein und Zeit, 121; trans. Stambaugh, 113).
18. I must admit that I do not understand why Stambaugh in her recent American translation of Sein und Zeit chose to render Fürsorge by “welfare work” (114 ff.), thus losing any link to Sorge/cura/ care.
19. Of course, Levinas calls attention to and contests this treatment of solicitude in “Dying for . . . ,” Entre nous, trans. Smith and Harshav, 212 ff.
20. Emmanuel Lévinas, Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 16; Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 1994), 97. Put another way, according to “the saying of the Lithuanian rabbi Israel Salanter: the material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs” (20; trans. Aronowicz, 99).
21. On the blurring of the identity and the own-ness of the other, or indeed his anonymity, in the gift, see my analysis in §9 of Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996, 2005), 124 ff.; Being Given, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 85–94.
22. Sein und Zeit, §26, 122, line 3; trans. Stambaugh, 114. The same analysis is found in Heidegger’s Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21, §9, 224.
23. Sein und Zeit, §26, 122, lines 5 ff. (the exact same terms are found in Logik, §8, 225). The French translation (by E. Martineau) does not hesitate to translate einspringen by “se substituer à lui” (105). This choice forces the feature a bit (it is a question of “leaping in place of someone”) and would fit better with “sich an seine Stelle setzen,” but it does signal well that the issue is indeed one of substitution.
24. Sein und Zeit, §26, 122, line 10; see Logik, §9, 2 (Herrschaft, Beherrschte, beherrschende Fürsorge). This is a transparent allusion to G. W. F. Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, IV, A, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), 141 ff.; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111 ff.
25. “. . . die für den Anderen nicht so sehr einspringt, als daß sie ihm in seinem existenziellen Seinskönnen vorausspringt, nicht um ihm die ‘Sorge’ abzunehmen, sondern erst eigentlich als solche zurückzugeben” (Sein und Zeit, §26, 122, lines 16–20; trans. Stambaugh, 115). The parallel passage in Logik speaks of “zwei extreme Modi der Fürsorge, die eigentliche und die uneigentliche” (224).
26. Sein und Zeit, §29, 134, line 23; trans. Stambaugh, 127. In opposition to the They (On), which discharges the burden (Entlastung, §27, 127, line 39, and §54, 268, line 6).
27. Sein und Zeit, §26, 122, line 5.
28. “daß es je sein Sein als seiniges zu sein hat” (Sein und Zeit, §4, 12, line 23; trans. Stambaugh, 10).
29. “Zum existierenden Dasein gehört die Jemeinigkeit als Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit” (Sein und Zeit, §12, 53, lines 3–5; trans. Stambaugh, 49). As for giving a moral interpretation to Jemeinigkeit and understanding it as an exclusive possession of its being—supposing that Levinas indeed thus understands it—one could doubt that it would draw much in the way of consequences, precisely because, for Heidegger, it is never anything other than a strict ontological determination: “Am Sterben zeigt sich, daß der Tod ontologisch durch Jemeinigkeit und Existenz konstituiert wird.” (In dying, it becomes evident that death is ontologically constituted by mineness and existence.) (Sein und Zeit, §47, 240, lines 13–14; trans. Stambaugh, 223).
30. Not for but toward death, following an explicit remark of Heidegger’s: “serious errors can become doubly rooted, like the one that has been spread because of the first French translations—and which it is currently almost no longer possible to eradicate—namely, the translation of the locution, “Sein zum Tode” by being-for-death, rather than being-toward-death” (Lettres à Hannah Arendt, April 21, 1954, in Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Lettres et autres documents, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, French trans. Pascal David [Paris: Gallimard, 2001], 139). Jacques Derrida comments, “Decease [Anleben] is not dying but, as we saw, only a being-for-death [Dasein], a being-pledged-to-death, a being-to-death or tensed-toward-(or as far as)-death [zum Tode] is able also to decease” (Apories [Paris: Galilée, 1996], 76; see also 102).
31. “Der Tod ist eine Seinsmöglichkeit, die je das Dasein selbst zu übernehmen hat”; and “Keiner kann dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehemen” (Sein und Zeit, §50, 250, lines 29–30, and §47, 240, lines 4–5, respectively; trans. Stambaugh 232 and 223).
32. Sein und Zeit, §51, 253, lines 19–20; trans. Stambaugh 234.
33. “So enthüllt sich der Tod als die eigenste, unbezügliche, unüberholbare Möglichkeit” (Sein und Zeit, §50, 250; see §52, 258, lines 38 ff., which completes the description with “gewisse und als solche unbestimmte,” “the ownmost nonrelational, certain, and, as such, indefinite and not to be bypassed possibility” (trans. Stambaugh, 239).
34. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1925), GA 20, 437 ff.
35. Sein und Zeit, §51, 253, line 37; trans. Stambaugh, 235. It is no coincidence that “Fürsorge” reappears here (line 34). When we “are [. . .] just ‘there’ ” (§47, 239, line 6; trans. Stambaugh, 222) at the moment of another’s death, rather than accomplishing the least substitution, we experience in this very proximity that it remains unthinkable. All that remains, in this powerlessness, is to “console” (§51, 254, line 1; trans. Stambaugh, 235: “tranquilization”), at best in the sense of a “dominating” solicitude.
36. “Zu den Seinsmöglichkeiten des Miteinanderseins in der Welt gehört unstreitig die Vertretbarkeit des einen Daseins durch ein anderes” (Sein und Zeit, §47, 239, line 24; trans. Stambaugh, 223).
37. “Das Sterben, das wesenhaft unvertretbar das meine ist, wird in ein öffentlich vorkommendes Ereignis verkehrt, das dem Man begegnet” (Sein und Zeit, §51, 253, lines 19–21; trans. Stambaugh, 234, modified).
38. “Sorge ist immer, wenn auch nur privativ, Besorgen und Fürsorge” (Sein und Zeit, §41, 194, line 23; trans. Stambaugh, 181).
39. “[. . .] die besorgende Fürsorge” (Sein und Zeit, §53, 266, line 15; trans. Stambaugh, 245: “concern taking care of things”).
40. Husserl hesitated to decide whether the other would offer only “einfach ein Duplikat meiner selbst” (Cartesianische Meditationen, §43, Hua. 1, 146), or instead another center, irrevocably decentered from my own. Heidegger, for his part, shows no hesitation: he concedes to the other’s alterity only the repetition of the originary unsubstitutability of ipseity: “Der Andere ist eine Dublette des Selbst” (Sein und Zeit, §26, 124, line 36; trans. Stambaugh, 117: “The other is a double of the self”).
41. Autrement qu’être, 185; trans. Lingis, 145.
42. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963, 1994), 120; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 89. The “burden imposed by the suffering of others” here replaces the “burden of being” (see n. 26 above).
43. Autrement qu’être, 130; trans. Lingis, 102.
44. Autrement qu’être, 151; trans. Lingis, 118 (with a correction: Lingis translates “voluntary” for the French “involontaire”).
45. Autrement qu’être, 61 and 142; trans. Lingis, 47 and 111; see too 180 (trans. Lingis, 141), or De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 167; trans. Bergo, 106.
46. Autrement qu’être, 128; trans. Lingis, 101.
47. For a nonstandard interpretation of the cogito, see Jean-Luc Marion, “L’altérité originaire de l’ego—Meditation II, AT VII, 24–25,” Questions Cartésiennes II (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 3–47; On the Ego and God: Further Cartesian Questions, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 3–29.
48. Autrement qu’être, 159; trans. Lingis, 124.
49. Autrement qu’être, 180; trans. Lingis, 142.
50. Autrement qu’être, 69; trans. Lingis, 53.
51. According to Rodolphe Calin’s very accurate analysis, Lévinas et l’exception du soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 138. Indeed, I never appear for myself, and thus by myself: everyone can see my face, except me, who only sees it reversed in a mirror. Strictly speaking, each person remains invisible (non-intendable, invisable) to himself and must, in order to see himself, make himself seen, in order to appear and to appear before [others], submitting the care of his appearing to the gaze of the other.
52. Autrement qu’être, 107; trans. Lingis, 85 (emphasis added).
53. Sein und Zeit, §57, 277, line 31 and 275, line 13, respectively; trans. Stambaugh, 256 and 254.
54. Autrement qu’être, 150; trans. Lingis, 117 (emphasis added) (see Entre nous, 76; trans. Smith and Harshav, 60, cited above in n. 2).
55. Nouvelles lectures talmudiques, 20; trans. Cohen, 58.
56. Autrement qu’être, 151; trans. Lingis, 118.
57. Autrement qu’être, 146 and 150, respectively; trans. Lingis, 114 and 117.
58. Autrement qu’être, 148; trans. Lingis 116: “without any choice”; 151, trans. Lingis, 118 (corrected): “involuntary, [. . .] prior to the will’s initiative”; 186, trans. Lingis 146: “before all freedom.”
59. “The subject is in the accusative, without recourse in being” (Autrement qu’être, 140; trans. Lingis, 110). See “Responsibility for the other is extraordinary, and is not prevented from floating over the waters of ontology” (180; trans. Lingis, 141).
60. Autrement qu’être, 142; trans. Lingis, 112 (emphasis added).
61. Autrement qu’être, 163; trans. Lingis 127 (trans. modified) (see “This book interprets the subject as a hostage,” 232, trans. Lingis, 184, cited above in n. 9).
62. Autrement qu’être, 146; trans. Lingis, 115 (trans. modified). See: “one absolved from every relationship, every game, literally without a situation, without a dwelling place, expelled from everywhere and from itself” (189; trans. Lingis, 146).
63. Autrement qu’être, 150; trans. Lingis, 117 (trans. modified).
64. Autrement qu’être, 145; trans. Lingis, 114.
65. Autrement qu’être, 173; trans. Lingis, 135. We must not misunderstand by seeing here the definition of racism (to accuse the other of being what he is, so that he is not allowed any escape), because here (a) the point is not the accusing of the other, but my responsibility; and above all because here (b) I discover myself accused not of my being but even before being—before being (l’être), and from elsewhere.
66. Autrement qu’être, 143; trans. Lingis, 112.
67. Autrement qu’être, 196; trans. Lingis, 153 (emphasis added, trans. modified). Rodolphe Calin says it well: “What isolates me is my responsibility for the death of the other, and not for my own death” (Lévinas et l’exception du soi, 290). “Isolates” here naturally translates both the entelekheia of the act in Aristotle, Metaphysics Z, 13.1039a7, and the vereinzeln of Sein und Zeit, §40, 188, line 18.
68. Autrement qu’être, 149; trans. Lingis, 117 (emphasis added).
69. Autrement qu’être, 177; trans. Lingis, 139 (emphasis added, trans. modified).
70. “Die Selbst-ständigkeit bedeutet existenzial nichts anderes als die vorlaufende Entschlossenheit” (Sein und Zeit, §64, 322, line 37; trans. Stambaugh, 297).
71. Autrement qu’être, 151; trans. Lingis, 118.
72. Autrement qu’être, 143; trans. Lingis, 112.
73. Difficile liberté, 247; trans. Hand, 190. See: “Israel would teach that the greatest intimacy of me to myself consists in being at every moment responsible for the others, the hostage of others. I can be responsible for that which I did not do and take upon myself a distress which is not mine” (Du sacré au saint, 181; trans. Aronowicz, 85).
74. “Dying for . . . ,” in Entre nous, 229; trans. Smith and Harshav, 217.
75. Autrement qu’être, 163; trans. Lingis, 127 (trans. modified).
This essay responds in certain ways to my earlier “Esquisse d’un concept phénoménologique du don,” which appeared in Filosofia della rivelazione, ed. M. M. Olivetti (Rome: Biblioteca dell’ Archivio di Filosofia, 1994); “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift,” trans. John Conley, SJ, and Danielle Poe, in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 122–43; also published in English in Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 80–100.
1. The same goes for anyone who puts his life in danger, ultimately for nothing, or almost nothing (the “adventurer” or the so-called extreme athlete). The question arises, at what point does such a figure, mundane as it appears, correspond—as its modern heir—to the figure of the master in the dialectic of recognition (the slave remaining within the domain of the profane, where he does not destroy himself)?
2. This was moreover the classical argument (forged by the Reformation, then taken up by the Enlightenment) against a peaceful but also radical figure of sacrifice—monastic vows: to renounce power, riches, and reproduction amounts to destroying goods, which allow the world to live and to increase, and this renunciation even makes one enter into the field of the sacred, in this case into a life that, if it is not outside the world, is at least oriented eschatalogically toward the alteration of this world.
3. The attempts to define sacrifice made by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss in the famous Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (published first in the Année sociologique in 1898, then in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, ed. Victor Karady, vol. 1: Les fonctions sociales du sacré [Paris: Minuit, 1968]; Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964]) are characterized by their poverty and their silence on the central (in fact the only) problem of the function and the intrinsic logic of sacrifice (its signification, its intention, its mechanism of compensation, etc.), contrasting all the more with the wealth of details on the actual practice of sacrifice. So if we suppose that “[s]acrifice [. . .] was originally a gift made by the primitive [sic] to supernatural forces to which he must bind himself” (193; trans. Halls, 2, modified), it remains to be understood whether and how these “forces” tolerate being thus “bound.” The same abstraction and the same insufficiency obtain in the definition that is ultimately adopted: “Thus we finally arrive at the following definition: Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned” (205; trans. Halls, 13): what does “consecration” here signify? How is the person in question “modified”? When is it a matter of “objects” more than of him, and which objects? And, indeed, in what sense can or must this act be called “religious”? Who or what allows the “modification” in question? No response is given, because the questions are not even raised. These extraordinary approximations lead back inevitably to the features, themselves already highly imprecise, of the Maussian concept of the gift. (a) Sacrifice becomes a reciprocal gift that won’t acknowledge itself as such: “If on the other hand, one seeks to bind the divinity by a contract, the sacrifice has rather the form of an attribution: do ut des is the principle” (272; trans. Halls, 65–66, modified); but what does it mean to bind “contractually” a “divinity” that has precisely the characteristic of being able to recuse itself from any contract and any reciprocity? (b) The destruction is assumed to be effective by itself and, without further consideration, it is assimilated to the accomplished sacrifice without recognizing that at best it fulfils only one of its conditions, but not the principle one (acceptance of the gift by the divinity): “This procedure [the sacrifice!] consists in establishing a line of communication between the sacred and the profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed” (302; trans. Halls, 97); but who cannot see that the difficulty of such a “line of communication” consists precisely in the fact that the “sacred world” has no reason to accept it unless one can explain how the contrary could be the case? (c) Thus one ends by granting that the sacrifice, in the end, isn’t one: “The sacrifier gives up something of himself but he does not give himself. Prudently, he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive” (304; trans. Halls, 100). One can hardly avoid reading this conclusion as an admission of failure to supply a rigorous definition of sacrifice.
4. Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps. 1: la fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée 1991), 42; Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27.
5. See Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation, §§9–11 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, 1998), 124–61; Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 85–113; and, to begin, Marion, “Esquisse d’un concept phénoménologique du don” (cited above, unnumbered note).
6. “Quemadmodum, fratres, si sponsus faceret sponsae suae annulum, et illa acceptum annulum plus diligeret quam sponsum qui illi fecit annulum, none in ipso dono sponsi adultera anima deprehenderetur, quamvis hoc amaret quod dedit sponsus? Certe hoc amaret quod dedit sponsus; tamen si diceret: Sufficit mihi annulus iste, iam illius faciem nolo videre, qualis esset? Quis non detestaretur hanc amentiam? Quis non adulterinum animum convinceret? Amas aurum pro viro, amas annulum pro sponso; si hoc est in te, ut ames annulum pro sponso tuo, et nolis videre sponsum tuum, ad hoc tibi arrham dedit, ut non te oppigneraret, sed averteret” (St. Augustine, In Epistulam Primam Iohannis Tractatus, 2.11; English translation available in The Fathers of the Church: St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24, Tractates on the First Epistle of John, trans. John W. Rettig [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995], 154).
7. Martin Heidegger, Zeit und Sein, in Zur Sache des Denkens, in GA 14 (Frankfurt a./M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 12; On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 8.
8. Martin Heidegger, Die onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik, in Identität und Differenz, in GA 11 (Frankfurt a./M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), 71; The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics, in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 64–65 (trans. modified).
9. Let us recall that we are dealing here with the three marks of the phenomenon as given (see Étant donné, §13, 170–71; Being Given, 119–20).
10. See the analysis of Roland de Vaux, Les sacrifices de l’Ancien Testament (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1964). In another sense, if one grants Ishmael the status of true firstborn, though born of a slave, he too is found rendered unto God by the sending into the desert (Genesis 21:9 ff.).
11. I translate Genesis 18:14 following the version of the Septuagint (), in conformity with Luke 1:37, which quotes it .
12. The death of the Christ accomplishes a sacrifice in this sense (more than in the common sense): by returning his spirit to the Father, who gives it to him, Jesus prompts the veil of the Temple (which separates God from men and makes him invisible to them) to be torn, and at once appears himself as “truly the son of God” (Matt. 27:51, 54), thus making appear not himself, but the invisible Father. The gift given thus allows both the giver and the process (here Trinitarian) of givenness to be seen. See my sketch in Jean-Luc Marion, “La reconnaissance du don,” Revue Catholique International Communio, 33/1, no. 195 (January–February 2008).
13. Georges Bataille, Théorie de la religion, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 310; Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 48–49 (trans. modified). More explicitly, Josef Ratzinger writes: “Christian sacrifice does not consist in a giving of what God would not have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him. Letting God act on us—that is Christian sacrifice. [. . .] In this form of worship human achievements are not placed before God; on the contrary, it consists in man’s letting himself be endowed with gifts” (Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990, 2004], 283).
14. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Enigme et phénomène,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1949, 1974), 215; “Enigma and Phenomenon,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 77.
15. Jan Pat čka, “The Dangers of Technicization in Science According to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger According to M. Heidegger” (1973), in Erazim V. Kohák, Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 332 (trans. modified in light of the French translation: Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice: Écrits politiques, trans. Erika Abrams [Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990], 266). On this question, see the work of Emilie Tardivel, “Transcendance et liberté: Lévinas, Patočka et la question du mal,” Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes, no. 7 (March 2008): 155–75.
16. Saint Augustine, De civitate dei, 10.6, Bibliothèque Augustinienne, vol. 34, 446; The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 400. See St. Thomas Aquinas: “omne opus virtutis dicitur esse sacrificium, inquantum ordinatur ad Dei reverentiam” (Summa theologiae Iia–IIae, q.81, a.4, ad 1).