Giving, Showing, Saying: Jean-Luc Marion and Hans-Georg Gadamer on Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Revelation

For more than two decades, the phenomenologies of revelation emerging from twentieth century French philosophy have met a North American reception framed largely within the context of a hermeneutic critique. This essay seeks to intervene in this situation by developing Jean-Luc Marion’s own sketch of a phenomenological hermeneutics and putting it in dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of language in Truth and Method. Thus, in an attempt to further develop Marion’s phenomenological hermeneutics of ‘giving’ and ‘showing’, a space is opened for Gadamer’s notion of ‘saying’. As a result, in the midst of the horizon opened by language itself, the ‘impossible’ phenomenality of revelation shines forth.