Jacques Derrida und Jean-Luc Marion

This chapter focuses on the reception of Neo-Platonism in Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion against the backdrop of Heidegger’s radical critique of metaphysics as ‘onto-theology’. Derrida refers to Neo-Platonic motifs in his analyses of the limits of categorical language. To his mind, the classical forms of negative theology are not sufficiently radical in that they still transcend the realm of the sayable in a precise direction. Derrida is much closer to Plotinus in that he claims that the first principle is radically withdrawn and allows its non-manifestability to be experienced in each and every linguistic sign. Marion’s approach to Neo-Platonism is based on the conviction that each and every form of philosophical theology, including Plotinus’ doctrine of the One, is conceptual idolatry. To him, Pseudo-Dionysius represents a different form of negative theology that is based on the dialectics between God’s invisibility and the different forms of an ‘excessive’ phenomenological theophany.