How to Interpret what is Given: Revelation and Hermeneutics in Jean‐Luc Marion

Abstract The most significant gift of Jean‐Luc Marion’s work to the worlds of phenomenology, theology, and religious studies is the provision of a thinking which begins with givenness: the thought of a given which, arriving from “elsewhere,” escapes the determining limits of the one who receives it and, thus, a gift which reveals itself starting from itself. Given this starting point, the question of this article is whether there is a genuine role for hermeneutics in Marion’s understanding of phenomenology, especially as seen in his most recent discussions of revelation. If so, can it be made to cohere with his more fundamental phenomenological methodology, specifically the reduction to “pure givenness” which is meant to deliver phenomena without the constituting influence of a subjective knower? Can he make room for the role of interpretation without jeopardizing that which he seeks to guarantee: the appearance (or arrival) of the given on its own terms?