Being Given Quotes

“The flesh auto-affects itself in agony, suffering, and
grief, as well as in desire, feeling, or orgasm. There is no sense in asking if these affects come to it from the body, the mind, or the Other, since originally it always auto-affects itself first in and by itself. Therefore, joy, pain, the evidence of love, or the living remembrance (Proust), but also the call of
consciousness as anxiety in the face of nothing (Heidegger), fear and trembling (Kierkegaard), in short, the numen in general (provided that one assigns it no transcendence), all arise from the flesh and its own immanence. Two points allow us to distinguish the saturated phenomenon of the flesh. First, in contrast to the idol, but perhaps like the historical event, it cannot be regarded or even seen. The immediacy of auto-affection blocks the space
where the ecstasy of an intentionality would become possible. Next, in contrast to the historical event, but no doubt more radically than the idol, the
flesh provokes and demands solipsism; for it remains by definition mine, unsubstitutable—nobody can enjoy or suffer for me (even if he can do so in my place). Mineness (Jemeinigkeit) does not concern first or only my possibility as the possibility of impossibility (dying), but my flesh itself. More,
it belongs only to my flesh to individualize me by letting the immanent succession of my affections, or rather of the affections that make me irreducibly
identical to myself alone, be inscribed in it. In contrast with the interobjectivity to which the historical event gives rise and more radically than the indefinite revision that the idol demands of me, the flesh therefore shows itself only in giving itself—and, in this first "self," it gives me to myself.”
― Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness

“The idol is determined as the first indisputable visible because its splendor stops intentionality for the first time; and this first visible fills it, stops it, and even blocks it, to the point of returning it toward itself, after the fashion of an invisible obstacle—or mirror. The privileged occurrence of the idol is obviously the painting (or what, without the frame of the frame, takes its place), not to speak too generically of the work of art. Saturation marks the painting essentially. In it, intuition always surpasses the concept or the concepts proposed to welcome it. It is never enough to have seen it just once to have really seen it, in contrast to the technical object and the product. Totally opposite this, each gaze at the painting fails to bring me to perceive what I see, keeping me from taking it into view as such—so that it always again conceals the essential from visibility”
― Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness