The Idol and Distance: Five Studies

Marked sharply by its time and place (Paris in the 1970s), this early theological text by Jean-Luc Marion nevertheless maintains a strikingly deep resonance with his most recent, groundbreaking, and ever more widely discussed phenomenology. And while Marion will want to insist on a clear distinction between the theological and phenomenological projects, to read each in light of the other can prove illuminating for both the theological and the philosophical reader - and perhaps above all for the reader who wants to read in both directions at once, the reader concerned with those points of interplay and undecidability where theology and philosophy inform, provoke, and challenge one another in endlessly complex ways. In both his theological and his phenomenological projects Marion's central effort to free the absolute or unconditional (be it theology's God or phenomenology's phenomenon) from the various limits and preconditions of human thought and language will imply a thoroughgoing critique of all metaphysics, and above all of the modern metaphysics centered on the active, spontaneous subject who occupies modern philosophy from Descartes through Hegel and Nietzsche.

JEAN-LUC MARION teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne and as John Nuveen Professor at the Divinity School and Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. More recently, Marion was elected to the Academie Francaise. His other books for Fordham include The Idol and Distance, Prolegomena to Charity, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, On the Ego and On God: Further Cartesian Questions, The Visible and the Revealed, and, as co-author, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate. Receives Royalties on The Idol and the Distance