Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2014
Publication Title
Theology & Sexuality
Volume
20
Abstract
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.
Issue
1
Publisher Name
Equinox Publishing
Recommended Citation
Dickinson, Colby. 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. Theology & Sexuality, 20, 1: , 2014. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, Theology: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1355835814Z.00000000041
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
© Equinox Publishing, 2014.
Comments
Author Posting. © Equinox Publishing, 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Equinox Publishing for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Theology & Sexuality, Volume 20, Issue 1 (January 2014), pp. 18-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1355835814Z.00000000041.