Abstract:
Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology reveals two attitudes regarding the classification of phenomena. On the one hand, they are classified by type. On the other, the “banality of saturation” reduces these types to possible interpretations, in which case saturation isn’t a qualitative rupture anymore, but a possible hermeneutic attitude to any phenomenon. Hence, there is, in Marion’s phenomenology, a tension between a metaphysical attitude that maintains categorial discontinuities, and a hermeneutic temptation driven by the recovery of quantitative continuities between all phenomena. Yet, Marion does not push this quantitative temptation to its limits; he steps back in front of a specifically saturated phenomenon: the icon.
