The Erotic Phenomenon

Philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little. And this silence is for the better, because when philosophy does venture to speak of love itmistreats it or betrays it. (p. 1)In case this wasn’t a sufficiently ambitious remit, this bold opening statement of The EroticPhenomenon is swiftly followed up by Jean-Luc Marion’s claim that not only will this book attempt to surpass everything which has been said about love by philosophy, literature,theology and psychoanalysis, it will also represent the culmination of his own intellectualendeavours, all his previous publications having been ‘‘just so many steps toward thequestion of the erotic phenomenon’’ (p. 10). With such high aims it is perhaps no surprise that Marion’s attempt falls short; but it is disappointing that such a bold project turns out tobe so deeply conservative and misogynistic. But let´s keep hearing Marion. While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it, he contends. No comment. He goes on: 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 rather 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. "Just as the kiss leads inevitably to penetration, eroticization leads inexorably to orgasmwhich must — if it is not to give way to objectification — be simultaneous. And yet this moment of climax is so fleeting as to disappear afterwards almost without trace, opening the way for doubt, untruthfulness, and jealousy. To lie is to enter into the erotic relationwithout being willing to make oneself wholly and unresistingly available to the other (andhere Marion argues that seduction is worse than rape because ‘‘it tears from the other even[…] consent’’ [p. 153]). Jealousy is problematic for Marion due to his insistence that lovecannot demand reciprocation and his refusal to consider the historical relationship of monogamy to property and power. It cannot be the demand for a love or a faithfulnesswhich is owed to me by the other, and so this murderous rage — literally, for Marion, the desire to kill the beloved — is glossed simply as the desire that she remain faithful to herself. Finally, the problem of the fleetingness of the erotic climax (orgasm) is addressed. Not exactly on evolutionary biology grounds, however. Love mustconstantly renew itself, Marion argues: love contains the demand for its own eternalendurance, and so love between two people (nowhere is the Catholicity and heterosexualityof Marion’s erotic phenomenology more evident than here) inevitably leads to the desire forchildren. The child is ‘‘an unconditional demand of the erotic reduction’’ (p. 197). And yetthe child who is desired as the external guarantee of the lovers’ pledge becomes, inevitably,her own person, escaping her determination by her parents’ relationship, and throwing them back upon themselves. Beginning from cogito amans, the lover discovers that he or she nevercould have loved without first being loved, because ‘‘in order to be alive, it was necessarythat others love one another’’ (p. 215 — by this point that casual elision of love and sexualintercourse is barely even surprising). Furthermore, the demand for an eternal guaranteewhich arises inevitably from love can only be met by the appeal to God, the pre-eminent,primordial and eschatological lover. The Erotic Phenomenon sets out three criteria for a successful phenomenology of love:first, such a phenomenology must offer a unified concept of love, which holds together loveand charity, reason and passion. Second, it must make reasonable those aspects of lovewhich appear to ‘‘non-erotic thought’’ as irrational — jealousy, passion and betrayal. Third,it must begin from the erotic phenomena themselves, rather than seeking to impose uponthem a philosophical framework. By its own criteria, then, it fails: neglecting all that isdifficult and interesting about the many and various ways in which people love one anotherin order to subsume all diversity into a single framework which unquestioninglyuniversalizes a very particular sort of white, western, male perspective — one which is alltoo clearly Marion’s own. Worse yet, this bland effacement of diversity is constantly stalkedby the threat of violence, as love begins in hatred, passes through the temptation to murderthe other, and ends with the turn to God who functions to ratify and absolutize itsdangerous demand." MARIKA ROSE Durham University, UKc.m.roseATdurham.ac.uk