Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
The analytic of Dasein thus rediscovers, in a way that is familiar, but is yet
derived from the care which is distant from familiarity, the metaphysical
avatar of constitutive subjectivity. Thus arises the prodigious paradox
of 1927: the extasis of care, which radicalizes the destruction of the
transcendental subject in Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, nonetheless leads
to a miming of the subject by reestablishing an autarky of Dasein, identical
to itself through itself up to the ponit where this ipseity stabilizes itself in a
self-positing. (Int 90)
Having noted the “autarky” of Dasein, Marion asks two questions: (1) “[T]o what
extent does Dasein still ‘destroy’ the metaphysical project of a transcendental I which
is unconditioned because it is self-constituted? And (2) how might this autarky be
concerned with the question of Being in general?” (Int 90).
(1) While Dasein certainly displaces the transcendental ego and the permanency
of the ousia or res cogitans, can we still distinguish the “self-presence” of these earlier
egos from the self-constancy of Dasein? Can we distinguish constant “presence-athand”
from the constancy of the self (Int 91)? 39 Does not Dasein at least “function” in
a manner analogous to the transcendental subject? Does Dasein require Destruktion
as yet another element of the history of ontology? In Dasein, rather than that which
follows the subject, do we not find “the last heir of the subject itself” (ibid.)? Rather
than “overcoming” the subject, does not Dasein represent the “final appeal of the
subject,” indeed its completion?
(2) The question of Being is a question which Dasein poses to itself. Dasein
questions; Dasein is not questioned by another, is not called into question. The call of
conscience is not a call to responsibility for the other, but rather summons to oneself
(SZ 273/252). Nothing calls Dasein (ibid.); that is, “Dasein calls only to itself” (Int
92). No “claim” (revendication) is placed upon it, and therefore its subjectivity is not
interrupted by anything other. The call of conscience is only a self-disturbance, a
disturbance from within rather than a disruption from without. At no point does
alterity disrupt Dasein; and therefore at no point does transcendence impose itself
upon the immanent autarky of Dasein. While displacing the primacy of theoretical
consciousness, the second reduction (the existential analytic) in no wise disturbs the
phenomenological hegemony of immanence and the sphere of the same.
The violence of immanence: the French critique
A third reduction to unconditioned givenness
Both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s reductions, Marion argues, entail a privileging of
immanence over transcendence. In both, immanence – the finite horizon of the
constituting ego – is the condition for knowing, and thus the phenomenon is forced
to appear under conditions established by the finite ego. In other words, the
phenomenon is not permitted to give itself from itself (kath’auto, Levinas would say);
rather, the phenomenon must give itself within limits. But at this juncture Marion
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