EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIVENNESS The phenomenon, as Marion has outlined it, is so overwhelming and bedazzling that it defies all attempts to comprehend, categorize, or even to see it.1 Being Given articulates it as a phenomenon which gives itself without any conditions being imposed upon it. It is with intuition to the point that intention cannot grasp it and no easy signification can be given.2 It cannot be constituted by the recipient because it overwhelms all categories that might be used to determine it and exceeds all horizons within which it might be contained: In this way, by giving itself absolutely, the phenomenon also gives itself as absolute - free from any analogy with already seen, objectified, comprehended experience. It is freed because it does not depend on any horizon. In any case, it does not depend on this condition of possibility par excellence - a horizon, whatever it might be. I therefore call it an unconditioned phenomenon.' It is blinding in its excessive effect on the observer, barely distinguishable from total darkness. Thus, apparently it cannot have any epistemological dimensions, and indeed in this work Marion repeatedly emphasizes the essential anonymity of the phenomenon, which is only identified in the response of the witness to its impact - a process Marion calls counter-experience. He explores these experiences further in his work In Excess, which devotes a chapter to each of the types of phenomena he has outlined: historical event, painting, one's own flesh, the face of the other and the doubly phenomenon of revelation, and he reiterates his stress on the absoluteness of such phenomena, which reaches its height in the unknowability of the divine expressed in mystical theology. In response to the claim that such phenomena are rare or even non-existent, figments of his own imagination, Marion explicates what he calls the banality of saturation in an article under that title, where he suggests that such phenomena are indeed quite common and experienced on an everyday basis by many people.6 He illustrates this by giving examples for each sense (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching), in each case showing how a phenomenon might move from being poor in character and easily constituted in a concept to being rich or saturated in character and defying any attempts at constitution or comprehending in a concept. This essay in particular raised the epistemological question again more forcefully: How might we know when a phenomenon has moved from being poor to being saturated? How can a phenomenon be identified as one or the other? The concept of negative may well be read as a response to precisely this question. Marion's most recent work Certitudes negatives claims that the phenomenon has become a commonly accepted phenomenological term and must now be supplemented with the notion of negative certainty.7 He begins the work by apparently aligning knowledge with certainty and suggesting that on this reading only the hard sciences with their emphasis on evidence truly have knowledge in this sense.8 He immediately goes on to challenge this conception, which effectively excludes most of our knowledge and experience, especially anything treated by the social sciences or humanities. Only objects can be known with any sort of certainty derived from perception and its types of evidence. Any phenomena that appear to us in other ways (i.e., that cannot be reduced to objects) defy the attempt to provide evidence based on observation, which simply is not appropriate to what they are and how they appear. Marion suggests that in these cases knowledge of such phenomena not only must be disconnected from certainty, but in fact we can have a kind of negative that they will remain unknowable, that they cannot possibly be known in the sense in which objects are known. …