While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself.
Marion begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love.
A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love.
Jean-Luc Marion is professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV, and the John Nuveen Distinguished Professor in the Divinity School and professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Stephen E. Lewis is assistant professor of English at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is the translator of Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity and Jean-Louis Chrétien’s Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art.
Table of Contents
Translator's Acknowledgments The Silence of Love
Concerning a Radical Reduction 1. Doubting Certainty 2. "What's the Use?" 3. The Erotic Reduction 4. The World According to Vanity 5. Space 6. Time 7. Ipseity
Concerning Every Man for Himself, and His Self-Hatred 8. Separation and Contradiction 9. The Impossibility of a Love of Self 10. The Illusion of Persevering in One's Being 11. Whether I Will It or Not 12. Self-Hatred 13. The Passage to Vengeance 14. The Aporia of Assurance
Concerning the Lover, and His Advance 15. Reducing Reciprocity 16. Pure Assurance 17. The Principle of Insufficient Reason 18. The Advance 19. Freedom as Intuition 20. Signification as Face 21. Signification as Oath
Concerning the Flesh, and Its Arousal 22. Individuality 23. My Flesh, and the Other's 24. Eroticization as Far as the Face 25. To Enjoy 26. Suspension 27. The Automaton and Finitude 28. Words for Saying Nothing
Concerning Lying and Truthfulness 29. The Naturalized Person 30. The Gap and Deception 31. Abduction and Perversion 32. The Street of Darkened Faces 33. Jealousy's Honor 34. Hatred's Way 35. Free Eroticization
Concerning the Third Party, and Its Arrival 36. Faithfulness as Erotic Temporality 37. The Ultimate Anticipatory Resolution 38. The Advent of the Third Party 39. The Child, or the Third Party on the Point of Leaving 40. The Adieu, or the Eschatological Third Party 41. Even Oneself 42. The One Way Index
