The Problem of Having both a Body and a Name in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion: Names, Fathers and the Hopeful Possibilities of a Queer Phenomenology

In this essay, and following upon both Jacques Lacan’s and Jacques Derrida’s personal struggles with fatherhood and the naming of their children, I take up what I consider to be Jean-Luc Marion’s failure to deal with the embodiment of fatherhood through an examination of patriarchal signification, or, specifically, the naming of one’s children after the father—at least insofar as Marion’s brief analysis of this symbolic act points toward his failure to think through the various potential and lived embodiments of the father. I aim to illuminate how his efforts to continue this naming of the child with the father’s name speak more directly to an idealized (‘theologized’) vision of our world that need not be serviced, indeed, which we would benefit from not utilizing at all. I wish, in an autobiographical-phenomenological response to Marion, to point to other names, other relationships and other ways of perceiving how one might be situated within our world—what I follow Sara Ahmed in calling ‘queer’ ways in which a phenomenological account of the subject’s identity is not a pretext for perpetuating a quasi-theological, patriarchal agenda.