Volume 61, Issue 1, Winter 2017
Special Topic on Heidegger and Paul Klee
Gabriel Andrus
Pages 211-232
The Cogito and the Gift
An Analysis of the Relationship between Descartes and Jean-Luc Marion
Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology has received much attention recently, both critical and constructive, but much less work has been done looking at the relationship between Marion’s work on Descartes and his phenomenological project. The present article begins by making a point of clarifying Marion’s understanding of the meaning of Descartes’s cogito, and contrasting it with the standard understanding as found in Leibniz, Kant, and Heidegger. Following the discussion of these various interpretations of the cogito, we examine some of the similarities between Marion’s particular interpretation of Descartes’s cogito as a performative exercise and Marion’s particular phenomenological analyses of givenness and the saturated phenomenon. Notably, in Marion’s view both the cogito and givenness overcome incorrect conceptions of objectness and being, both of them exceed the limits of syllogistic logical formulations, and both are irreducible to their apparent constituting parts.