The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib

205 Pages·2017·0.947 MB·English

by  Jean-Luc Marion

The Rigor of Things
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The Rigor of Things
Conversations with Dan Arbib
Jean-Luc Marion
Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner
fordham university press
New York 2017
Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief
quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission
of the publisher.
This book was fi rst published in French under the title
La rigueur des choses: Entretiens avec Dan Arbib,
© Flammarion, Paris, 2012.
This work, published as part of a program providing
publication assistance, received fi nancial support from the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services
of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE
(French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices Logo
designed by Serge Bloch.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
in memory of Maxime Charles
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contents
Foreword by David Tracy ix
Preface xi
Translator’s Note xiii
1. My Path 1
2. Descartes 40
3. Phenomenology 71
4. Theology 106
5. A Matter of Method 134
6. The World as It Runs—and as It Doesn’t 162
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foreword
David Tracy
It is hardly necessary to introduce Professor Jean-Luc Marion to this audi-
ence, since he has become a very important interlocutor in North America
for over twenty years. However, the occasion of the English translation of
these fascinating interviews is a good time to remind ourselves of some
of his accomplishments in philosophy, intellectual history, and, more re-
cently, theology.
First philosophy. There is no doubt that Jean-Luc Marion is the fore-
most living phenomenologist. Not only has he continued the great tra-
dition of Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Ricoeur, and others, but
Marion has advanced that tradition in major ways, especially through his
groundbreaking phenomenological work on related phenomena of given-
ness and gift as well as his analysis of the saturated phenomenon. Along
with these original phenomenological contributions, Professor Marion has
also written major interpretive essays on such phenomenological prede-
cessors as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and
Michel Henry.
Second, the scholarship of intellectual history. In the fi eld of intellectual
history, Professor Marion early became a major interpreter of seventeenth-
century philosophy, especially in several volumes on the very founder of
modern philosophy, René Descartes. It is no small thing to provide a new
and persuasive interpretation of Descartes. Most intellectual historians to-
day no longer follow the interpretation of Descartes given by the standard
histories of philosophy, nor even the once-infl uential readings of Martin
Heidegger or Étienne Gilson—today they follow Marion’s. His Descartes
work alone would have assured him a major place in his second discipline,
intellectual history.
Third, theology. In more recent years, Marion has turned explicitly,
no longer merely implicitly, to theology. Here he has both followed and
advanced the theological program of his teachers, the great (indeed now
classic) resourcement thinkers of early and mid-twentieth-century French
theology: Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Louis Bouyer,
ix