Hermeneutics of Plasticity in Marion's Approach to Givenness

And to continue with more preliminary remarks...



The primacy of givenness in Marion's phenomenology creates inversions not only in metaphysics but in phenomenology itself. The centrality of the horizon bends toward givenness itself, which decenters 'horizon,' the sine qua non of the phenomenological gesture. Givenness does not erase the horizon, but puts it in play, allows it to multiply into a play of horizons that have become more fluid than was possible in the traditional practice of phenomenology. This kind of plasticity of the horizon and the allowance for multiplicity cannot be limited to the horizon, as its thrust impacts on the recipient of phenomena in more tangible and practical ways.


When Marion speaks of the 'ontological status' of the gaze, he speaks of hermeneutics---he can only mean hermeneutics. The anteriority of givenness suggests that the modifications of the gaze, which modify the thing itself, are rooted in the given. The asymmetric laterality of the phenomenological moment locates plasticity on the side of the recipient. In Marion's concept of phenomenality, that which gives itself does so unconditionally and therefore even in the absence of the gaze of the recipient, though the modes of phenomenality---the modes of the appearance of objects and events---depend on the existential experience of the recipient.


If Marion's approach is to remain coherent, the approach must always stipulate the origin of the ontological status of the gaze: givenness---the given calls the gaze into being. The 'self' of the given 'inscribes' its hermeneutic upon the self of the recipient. This kind of inscription should be thought of less as writing than as a shaping or a forming of the receiving self, while all hermeneutical variations trace to Dasein.


Such inscriptions and formations locate the negative certainty within the phenomenological moment in the plasticity of the receiving self. Akin to Keat's 'negative capability,' this uncertainty marks an acceptance within the receiving self of such uncertainty, which enables it to remain open to givenness. This understanding problematizes the nature of the recipient and renders it vulnerable to the obvious critique of the romantic impulse, which conjures up the 'critic-as-artist' or 'critic-as-hero' (read hermeneut, recipient for critic here). Yet, the recipient engages in a poeisis, not necessarily of an 'overflow of powerful feelings' but of an experience of phenomenality whose gradations or degrees of saturation or objectness can be 'recollected in (the) tranquility' of a counter-experience (pace Wordsworth).


Marion always insists nearly everywhere that his phenomenology does not identify actuality but, instead, possibility; he famously insists on this distinction to distinguish theology from phenomenology as they regard the actuality and possibility, respectively, of revelation. Still, a theopoetics is what the recipient reports back from her experience. Depending on the hermeneutical variations inducted by Dasein and the modifications of the gaze as constituted by givenness and as modifying givenness, the recipient will report back about either an object or an event.


I must insist that the unconditionality of givenness requires all modifications of the given are a function of the modified and modifying gaze, which cannot alter the essence of the given, but the aperture of the gaze upon it. As the self, inscribed and formed by givenness, waxes in its plasticity, its modified gaze strengthens to lift a bit higher the veil on the given. Degrees of unveiling are enabled therefore by the given giving itself to the receiving self, in its hermeneutic of plasticity. This process of the gift giving itself---the event of the gift---is the hermeneutical event from the side of the recipient. These are, apparently, often the same event.

The Givenness of Death

Death comes.


Hospices across the universe manage death and dying, often without the slightest idea of death as it is in itself. As a specialist in hospice and palliative medicine, I am often part of a team dedicated to death, or more accurately, to the looks of death when it is happening. When death is happening, a human being is dying, which is the process through which a living being exits life,  a life lived in a world of living and non-living things. The living and the dead. The dead are things formerly living, having gone through the process of an exit from life. The hospice team specializes in the death of a human subject; there is no palliation for fishes and trees. Every living thing dies (despite the odd and remarkable life cycle of turritopsis dohrnii); but we only manage the death of humans---it is the human thing to do.


We pronounce death. We declare that a human has died and has exited life. We even speak of the 'remains,' a thing left behind,  such as after a departure. A presence is exchanged for an absence. The official declaration is a matter of ownership and the public health. We protect the living from the dead. We protect the dead from accidental life by embalming or cremation, lest life creep back in, a very rare occurrence. Such is the final act in the management of the dead. The dead really must stay dead. It is the human thing to do.


Dying is the human thing to do. We all do it. Death is manner of the human condition. It is also the least examined thing we do. Thanatology does not begin to touch death; not even in its most morbid observations (turritopsis, not thanatopsis). When does death make an appearance: how does the phenomenality of death enter experience as it is in itself? Neither Addie Bundren nor Agamemnon get to report back to base camp, and the tales they do tell are for the lips of the living, the logoi of the dead; which is not to say they do not speak---they are given their lines.


As our patients lay dying, we minister to lives woven into the death-in-coming. Death presents itself to the life it entangles, and to those eyes that dare to manage it. Just what or who is managing what or whom? This death at a distance is the very hermeneutics of death, if we dare to experience its givenness. This hermeneutics of death is the space between the living and the dead, the call of death in its givenness to the one who would read its hieroglyphics. Even when we paint over dying with morphine and other opacities, death shines through in its phenomenality and givenness. We can know of the givenness of death by the response to its call. As the ones who want to know, we know death in its insistence to be heard, its command to interrogate it, through the hermeneutic that cuts a gap between we who would know and a death who would speak.


The symptom is death in its lowest degree of givenness. To understand it as a metaphor is to already read it, and misread it at that. The symptom is not a mode of similarity. Death's symptoms are extensions of itself; their reach is metonymy, and they foreclose on death's wholeness. We tend to know death by its parts. The 'death rattle,' the coalescence of secretions in a throat betraying the personhood of the dying, chills its hearer. For some, the sound is the very voice of death, gripping a loved one by the throat. By the time this symptom makes its appearance, the dying are oblivious, so it is a gift only for the hearer. It is a symptom more often treated to 'treat' a family member, than to alleviate suffering in the dying. The secret is to dry the secretions and quiet the sound of death, denying it embodiment. Another symptom, 'air hunger' or dyspnea, is horrific for the dying and their witnesses. Morphine blankets air hunger, subdues it, gives it rest; the body relaxes as this finger of death loosens it grip on everyone in the room.  We add to the massive presence of death in every intervention; we give death a shape and a rhythm, and make its invisibility visible, if only in outline.


Our own presence to death invests it with meaning, the meaning it calls to us as it beckons us to display its self. This the moment of two selves: reading and being read, interpreting and being interpreted. We so want to abbreviate death, we would close it off with a signature on a death certificate. But if we want to know death, we must allow it to appear, to makes its presence known to our own presence. What is in the room when the last breath, the last beat of a broken heart, has had its say? I am in the presence of death, now without a symptom, without a metonym to make it all a bit more palatable. I am present to death as death. What is becoming visible? Death is an idol created by my gaze upon the invisible. Death is in life's place, a complete transubstantiation symbolized in the lifeless body before me: the accidents of the flesh, which give death its metaphor.


Death does not mean the absence of life. Death, in its pure givenness, means the change in substance. That is the difference to which I bring my own presence. Death wants to present itself in its whole givenness, which we are wont to foreshorten through its metonymy, our very desire to keep it at arms length. But we do not let death appear through the perspective of foreshortening, which distorts it to fit it into a frame, our picture of death. To be with death is to stand in death, the space in the room that wants to mean as it wraps its cellophane self around my presence and the lifelessness before me. Death embraces the living and the dead with its difference that builds its cathedral to house a sacred space.




Death sacralizes all things and erases every profanation in the event that is death. Death is the difference that cuts a gap in the space of my hermeneutic attitude  that give it a voice in which to whisper its call. This eventive gap cuts into the lack that reshapes my reader's self, now something also different, and new.  This death is the event of my own death as a movement from the profane to the sacred. It is the same death that I will die. The wholeness of death is in the difference it makes for everyone. It is the same difference. I know death because I am as human as the dying and dead before me. Death appears before me as I appear before death. I do not sign so fast: I sign for myself when I sign for the dead. I tarry, for I do not certify death; I ratify it with the signature that I use to sign off on what we all do.

Hermeneutics and Dogma: Some Odds and Ends

The recent discussion on Mary in Church dogmatics has opened upon the stages of theodicy, the reality of the Incarnation, the Will of God, and the biblical representation of sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (IC) has underscored the difficulty of its own language and its reception in the sensus fidelium. In order to move toward a reasonable synthesis, it would seem that the dogma should be contextualized within Christological, ecclesiological and soteriological themes and grace-theology as well.

1. Sanctifying grace (SG): The grace of holiness, SG maintains the integrity of a properly ordered relationship to God, and it is freely given by God, absolutely gratuitous, and beyond the reach of human merit. It is imparted by God through sacramentals, sacraments (the 7 properly so called and all others) and by direct will of the triune God. It is both cause and effect of the relationship between a human and God. SG is the grace operative in the dogmatic expression of the IC, for in this grace all abuse---sin--- of the relationship with God is impossible.

2. Ultimately, Original Sin (OS), from which Mary is preserved, is unintelligible apart from the representation of evil in the bible, which expresses the lived experience of evil and sin of the inspired authors of the biblical books, and the culture which produced the authors and books. Hence, only a hermeneutic that addresses the biblical representation of the reality of evil and sin can decipher the dogmatic representation of the IC. Any logic that seeks to separate the IC from OS and its representation cannot but fail to go astray in any effort to consider the meaning of the dogma. The Christian self-understanding of sin, Adam, Christ and (by obvious extension) Mary is already established in the Pauline corpus (cf. Rom 5:12ff; 1 Cor. 15:22) during the formation of the Church. For Paul, Adam was a historical figure, not merely a historical 'reality.'

3. The historical and biological uniqueness of the motherhood of Mary provides the facticity of her uniqueness as an individual. In this manner, Mary is forever embedded in Christology, and the uniqueness and facticity of the Christ-event itself.

4. Soteriologically, The Word made flesh, in order to effect salvation, must be of the flesh of Adam, real human flesh. The flesh of Adam was given to the Logos through the biological motherhood of Mary.

5. The sanctity of the vessel of the historical Incarnation of the Logos is a very ancient idea in the Church. How could God enter the world as a human being from a flesh always poised (effect of OS) to breach the relationship with God?

6. Which Adam would provide the flesh for the Word, a prelapsarian Adam, or a postlapsarian Adam? If we are to move to an interpretation of the IC and OS, a hermeneutic ordered to the mythological representation of the human being in proper relation to God is required, and that hermeneutic must be attuned to an Adam on either side of the breach, hence the validity, if not the essentiality of the question.

7. The dogma of the IC would be incoherent if it positioned Mary in a superior relation to sin from the incarnate Word. The Synoptic temptation scenes (Mk. 1; Matt. 3; Lk. 3 etc.) present Jesus being invited to sin by Satan. Though Jesus did not sin, narratologically there was an 'occasion' of sin. This simple concupiscence denied by Jesus cannot therefore be absent from Mary. The sanctifying grace imparted to the human nature of Jesus forecloses any real 'drama' in the moment. It must be something like this for Mary as well, without prejudice to the unique grace of the hypostatic union.

8. The simple concupiscence---the drive to seek the good--- of Adam is not the rejection of sanctifying grace. Such concupiscence is simply the reality of being human in a created environment. The IC implies that Mary did not answer to concupiscence, and this is held by the Tradition, though without de fide status. Mary's concupiscence is bracketed in this discussion (epoche) to allow her to appear on the same horizon as the prelapsarian Adam, both of them being full of grace.

9. OS is itself the mythic representation of the reality of moral evil in the world. In Gen 2: 16-17, God orders the freedom of the human to the special relationship with him, and informed the man that any exercise of freedom apart from that relationship would entail death. In the context of choice, and of seeking the 'good,' the human orders that choice to itself, apart from relation to God: when the fruit was judged 'good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom' (Gen. 3:6), choice is ordered against the relationship and to the human alone. The inspired author has witnessed the actions of humans apart from their relationship with God: treachery, murder, theft, pride and selfishness, and dislocates this reality to a mythic action in the past.

10. The plain language of the dogma of IC invites theodicy by presenting Mary's single privilege of grace (SG) in a uniqueness that alienates the rest of humanity in its divine exclusivity. By collapsing concupiscence as it has come to be known, Mary appears, with Adam, in the natural attitude of sanctifying grace, which was meant, from the beginning, for all of human-kind. As such, theodicy cannot make an appearance as an event.

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OS is the religious expression of the experience of the universality of moral evil. It is the sitz im Leben, the condition in which we, like the inspired authors of Genesis, find ourselves, and that which is mythologically represented in the biblical narrative of the fall. OS is itself mythos, and a dogmatic interpretation of mythos. It is therefore a mythos that represents an experience on either side of the mythic and dogmatic enterprise of faith. OS unites scripture with its tradition in a metalanguage of dogma.

To be free of OS, one assumes the position of Adam, who walked in graced freedom with God; and this condition is rather like the fullness of grace imparted dogmatically to Mary. Like her ancestor, Mary is immaculately conceived metahistorically with him, inherits his flesh and in turn gives that flesh to her son, Jesus. This much is already understood in the early Church, as Paul declares the relationship to the first and second Adam. Paul does not examine the condition of the portal of sin, but simply asserts a parallelism of grand design, leaving the examination to posterity.

Jesus then is 'born of a woman' of Adamite flesh. That flesh, Mary's flesh, though, is free of sin, of even the possibility of sin. This condition of the [im]possibility of sin cannot be the evil concupiscence that the Tradition identifies as the consequence of OS. This condition must be instead a simple attribute of the human nature. An attribute that is constitutive of the human partner that in and of itself does no injury to the relationship. Human nature, sanctifying grace, the immaculate conception of Adam and Mary are anterior to the fall. How can there be two outcomes from the lived experience of the same grace? How can impossibility and possibility come from the same grace in the same flesh?


"Their eyes were opened" [Gen. 3:7; Luke 24:31].


These identical phrases in Genesis and Luke read each other, the Tradition and dogma.  For the walkers on the road to Emmaus, there was the vision of a saturated phenomenon, the icon of the risen Christ. For the eaters of knowledge,  there was the vision of the saturated phenomenon, the idol of shame that overwhelms their gaze.

The early chapters of Genesis do not know of prophets, so God himself must declare the state of affairs in Eden.


He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be in some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall. [ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 188].


And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." [Genesis 3:15]


Adam on the precipice of a self-determined good, experiencing his lapse before the fact in some instance to come; God prophesying the struggle between good and evil through motherhood of all human offspring, to the motherhood of the savior: this is the protoevangelium.

In the last gasp of the prelapsarian world the Christ-event becomes a reality, as does the conception of Mary in the grace that preserves her from what is about to happen. Mary does not fall with Adam, because the prelapsarian grace has opened her eyes to the icon of Christ through the providence of God which gazes back at her,  redeeming her through the very event Luke has depicted. Adam's eyes were opened, but Mary's eye's were opened wider on the same grace enjoyed by both. Adam could only be bedazzled by overwhelming gaze upon himself through his new knowledge, but Mary's gaze is saturated by a larger view upon grace and she partakes of the grand affirmation of creation itself: the fiat of creation whose reshith (thought of as perhaps 'chaosmic' time, Joyce's time of 'fall, falling, fallen') has ticked a heaven round the stars, becomes her own fiat, her 'yes' whose time ticks to and fro. Poor Adam, he could have hardly known, with all that knowledge, he was saying 'no.' He just couldn't see it, drowning in grace and blinded by the idol. Mary though, bathing in the sea of faith and the same sea of grace, was seen by God in the gaze that looks upon the gazer.


We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. [Ineffabilis Deus]



Though Mary did not fall, she inherits and inhabits the same human condition as all other human beings. She was heir to everything that is human: joy, sorrow, suffering, death. The dogma states that she is graced, without saying how. Because it is also dogmatically stated and therefore de fide that Adam, too, in "the first instance of" his "conception by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God," he is joined by Mary in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning. Unlike Adam, Mary was left behind in prelapsarian grace, even though she was historically born into the postlapsarian world to receive God in her very flesh, the flesh of Adam, who, in the beginning was very like her. Mary's singularity and privilege play out in this fallen world in the historical motherhood of Jesus. As Adam was, for just a moment, falling out of love with God, God loved Adam unconditionally as he fell, and though Adam was fallen and surprised, God  had already declared the coming of Paul's new Adam. In the light of Christ, Paul could see it all coming.

It is therefore not the grace the marks the difference between Adam and Mary, but the gaze. Mary and Adam appear within the same horizon of grace; but for one, eyes open to the idol, and for the other, eyes open to the icon. The events of the fall and the redemption are released in the phenomenality of grace which pulls both Mary and Adam into selfhood. The gaze trumps the theodical attitude on both the Adamic and Marian trajectories toward the saturated phenomena. God has willed only freedom, the gaze upon which is the only determinant in the different outcomes. The rest is history.

The idol and icon present themselves within our experience in their very givenness. How shall we become? How wide shall our eyes open? Shall our souls lapse, or magnify the Lord? What shall appear to us in a disappearance on our own road to Emmaus? 

This is the stuff of grace, of hope, of what is to come. This is Mary-for-us in her givenness, as gift, as the exemplar of human cooperation in the ongoing creation of the world in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning.  This is Mary, mater et magistra, within the Catholic rule of faith: scripture (read, received, alive), Tradition (read, received, alive) and magisterium (read, received, alive).