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Early years

Marion was born in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine. Marion studied at the University of Nanterre (now the University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) and the Sorbonne and then did graduate work in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. At the same time, Marion's deep interest in theology was privately cultivated under the personal influence of theologians such as Louis Bouyer, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. After receiving his doctorate in 1980, he began teaching at the University of Poitiers.

Career

From there he moved to become the Director of Philosophy at the University Paris X – Nanterre. In 1996 he became Director of Philosophy at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne), where he still teaches.Marion is currently the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School; also in the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought at the same university.

On 6 November 2008, Marion was elected as an immortel by the French Academy. The Academy traditionally has an ecclesiastical member and Marion now occupies seat 4 an office previously held by Cardinal Lustiger.

His awards include:

• the Karl Jaspers Prize of the city and University of Heidelberg (2008).
• the Grand Prix de philosophie de l'Académie française (1992), for his entire oeuvre
• the Prix Charles Lambert de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques (1977)

Notable ideas

According to John D. Caputo, Marion "is famous for the idea of what he calls the “saturated phenomenon,” which is inspired by his study of Christian Neoplatonic mystical theologians....[The idea that] there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded...or saturated."

The Intentionality of Love

The fourth section of Marion's work Prolegomena to Charity is entitled "The Intentionality of Love" and primarily concerns Intentionality and Phenomenology. Influenced by (and dedicated to) the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, Marion explores the human idea of love and its lack of definition: "We live with love as if we knew what it was about. But as soon as we try to define it, or at least approach it with concepts, it draws away from us." He begins by explaining the essence of consciousness and its "lived experiences." Paradoxically, the consciousness concerns itself with objects transcendent and exterior to itself, objects irreducible to consciousness, but can only comprehend its 'interpretation' of the object; the reality of the object arises from consciousness alone. Thus the problem with love is that to love another is to love one's own idea of another, or the "lived experiences" that arise in the consciousness from the "chance cause" of another: "I must, then, name this love my love, since it would not fascinate me as my idol if, first, it did not render to me, like an unseen mirror, the image of myself. Love, loved for itself, inevitably ends as self-love, in the phenomenological figure of self-idolatry." Marion believes intentionality is the solution to this problem, and explores the difference between the I who intentionally sees objects and the me who is intentionally seen by a counter-consciousness, another, whether the me likes it or not. Marion defines another by its invisibility; one can see objects through intentionality, but in the invisibility of the other, one is seen. Marion explains this invisibility using the pupil: "Even for a gaze aiming objectively, the pupil remains a living refutation of objectivity, an irremediable denial of the object; here for the first time, in the very midst of the visible, there is nothing to see, except an invisible and untargetable void...my gaze, for the first time, sees an invisible gaze that sees it." Love, then, when freed from intentionality, is the weight of this other's invisible gaze upon one's own, the cross of one's own gaze and the other's and the "unsubstitutability" of the other. Love is to "render oneself there in an unconditional surrender...no other gaze must respond to the ecstasy of this particular other exposed in his gaze." Perhaps in allusion to a theological argument, Marion concludes that this type of surrender "requires faith."

Personal life

Marion was married in 1970 to school-teacher Corinne Nicolas with whom he has two sons.