Abstract

Emmanuel Lévinas draws certain limits to phenomenology, the il y a, my own life, the Other don’t appear as phenomena. Jean-Luc Marion seems to reopen these limits again recurring to saturated phenomena. Jean-Luc Marion suggests in his Étant donné, that phenomenality means that each phenomenon must be given: the process of giving results in something that develops as a saturated phenomenon and its deficit modes, i.e. the ordinary phenomena of objects. Thus each phenomenon should evolve from the so called »fold of givenness«. The only limit of the phenomenality seems to be the very givenness of every phenomenon: to be given never appears itself, the givenness is not given itself. This approach goes against Lévinas’ underlining of the immediate experience, in which the givenness of life and of the Other not only precedes phenomenalization, as Marion would concede, but is in conflict with the phenomenality. The concept, which Marion integrates, on the contrary, in his phenomenology, was that of M. Henry’s givenness of life in the self-affection. In the case of givenness of one’s own corporeality the phenomenon does not evolve from the fold of givenness; it is rather the giving of the givenness itself.