Givenness as the Opening of All Phenomenological Possibility: Marion’s Overcoming of Henry Through Heidegger

Taking into account that Marion studied Sein und Zeit simultaneously with Henry’s opus magnum, L’essence de la manifestation, one may read his phenomenology of givenness as an overcoming of the aporias that Henry identifies in Heidegger; aporias that, as Marion argues, persist in Henry’s own solutions. In this way, following Heidegger’s principle that possibility stands higher than actuality, Marion overcomes Henry’s non-ecstatic phenomenology of life, which closes the phenomenological field in a pure immanence. Contrary to Henry, Marion argues that the structure of call and response fulfils, more radically than any phenomenology of immanence, Heidegger’s own definition of phenomenology as letting the phenomenon show itself in and from itself. Moreover, the study of Heidegger’s Beiträge, a text that only became publicly available in 1989, and which Marion never cites, reveals a remarkable convergence between Marion’s notion of revelation and Heidegger’s Ereignis, insofar as both think it is what gives itself unconditionally, exceeding every horizon of subjectivity, whether transcendental, intentional, or purely affective.