The Critique of Metaphysics as a Disarticulation of Transcendentality

A Philosophical Analysis of Jean-Luc Marion’s Thought

Abstract

The article provides a philosophical analysis of Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of metaphysics, understood according to the concept of onto-theology. In the first part, the way in which Marion separates the being of metaphysics from the Divine being, refusing the doctrine of the convertibility between ‘being’ and ‘good’, is analysed. In the second part, I criticise Marion’s claims on the finite nature of human thought. This claim is a rejection of the transcendental character of thought, whose horizon is reduced to that of the imagination. Finally, I emphasised that Marion’s concept of donation is a supertranscendental concept, placed beyond ‘being’, ‘thought’ and the principle of non-contradiction, whose validity is reduced to the ontic domain, denying de facto its transcendentality. Marion’s thought is thus one of the most relevant contemporary attempts to reject the transcendental, understood as what cannot be transcended, but ends up replacing it with a surrogate.