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The Rigor of Things This page intentionally left blank 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. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 tradition 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 today 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