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In other words, givenness is still modulated, in classically egological terms, as confirming the ‘necessary’ self. Thus, in Husserl, it seems that a very egological economy prevails: whatever its deconstructive power, geneticism ends up sanctifying autarchy. 37 What is more, and as our next chapter will show, the essential features of this problem remain in place for the most celebrated contemporary treatment of givenness, that of Jean-Luc Marion. His subject may well be a far more attenuated figure than Husserl’s equivalent; nonetheless, and as we shall now see, the same structural tension persists in both projects.

Jacob Rogozinski, ‘Questions’, in Annales de Philosophie, 21, 2000, 25-30, 26; he suggests that an aspect of the adonné must also be adonnant, inasmuch as it ‘precedes’ givenness in order to render it possible. 22 (One of Marion’s main concerns, of course, is to emphasise the basic phenomenological dictum that phenomena give and show themselves, not representations or images of something else. ) As Marion puts it: … the origin of givenness remains the ‘self’ of the phenomenon, with no other principle or origin besides itself.

The scales shift back to a conventional, metaphysical, position. As Marion puts it: “The phenomenon is possible in the strict measure that it agrees with the formal conditions of experience, thus with the power of knowing that fixes its attention on them, and 26 Levinas understood this well: “To say that intuition actualizes the mere intention which aims at the object is to say that in intuition we relate directly to the object, we reach it. That is the entire difference between aiming at something and reaching it...