Jean-Luc Marion
The Irreducible.
that which we cannot speak, must we remain silent? Probably-especially if we understand why we cannot say anything about it, and have good reason for not speaking. If there is no good reason to talk about it, then we should stay silent. Yet without this prerequisite of having good reason, we could always resort to silence simply through negligence, carelessness, or more often, bad faith. The inability to say anything, or to have nothing to say, can at times come from our decisions, explicitly or implicitly. At other times, in remaining silent, we persist under the conditions of speaking, namely, by thinking.2 Overall, if the questions we pose concerning that which we deem unspeakable are poor, and incapable of receiving an answer, it remains possible, instead of abolishing them without further trial, to interrogate them in such a way that we might find in them another formulation; a first sense, the original utterance of which was spontaneously prohibited.
A Conversation with Jean-Luc Marion
This conversation with Jean-Luc Marion took place at The Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center in the Spring of 2005. The JCRT editors express their thanks to Hent de Vries for arranging the meeting and to Jean-Luc Marion for generously agreeing to join our conversation.