The Erotic Phenomenon - Softcover

Marion, Jean-Luc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226505375 ISBN 13: 9780226505374

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

"Marion's avowed topic is the erotic phenomenon, and his method is phenomenology. He is a master of that method, and the result is an analysis of erotic love of unparalleled precision and depth. The depiction he gives of the erotic phenomenon is fundamentally convincing, and readers will find their own loves illuminated and questioned."--Commonweal

"In attempting to place love at the center of things, Jean-Luc Marion wishes to escape the reign of heartless reason."--Roger Pol-Droit, "Le Monde"
""The Erotic Phenomenon" is a philosophical act of love. Not a discourse of love, nor one on love, but an act of love, an act that "makes" love, that makes it happen, that 'conceives' it."--"Liberation"
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"A superb philosophical reflection on love. . . . Here, finally, is a book that explores the intimate landscape of each one of us . . . . [Marion] deserves our complete attention. Let's give it to him."--"L'Express"
"Marion is doing the most interesting work in phenomenology today. . . . This work carries on the true spirit of phenomenology: this is not a book about other books about love. It is patiently and carefully attentive to 'the things themselves, ' and reads as an analysis that is at once rigorous and lyrical--attuned to both the concept and the caress."--"Choice"
"Marion''s avowed topic is the erotic phenomenon, and his method is phenomenology. He is a master of that method, and the result is an analysis of erotic love of unparalleled precision and depth. The depiction he gives of the erotic phenomenon is fundamentally convincing, and readers will find their own loves illuminated and questioned."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0226505375
• ISBN 13: 9780226505374
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230