| Summary: | According to Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of Descartes, there is a strong ambivalence of Cartesian thought regarding metaphysics. On the one hand, Descartes has achieved metaphysics in the sense that he has completed it, by fixing all its major concepts and stakes for the modernity to come. As Marion shows, there is two onto-theo-logies in Descartes: one ruled by the concept of causa sui, and a second one built, from the subject, around the concept of cogitatio sui. We could then see Descartes as the most paradigmatic agent of classical metaphysics. But on the other hand, Marion states that Descartes has opened the possibility of the end of metaphysics by showing its limits through the non-metaphysical use of the infinite and the flesh, as well as the secondarity of the subject. Each onto-theo-logy is then always already broken and opened, pointing at an outside of metaphysics. Thus, Descartes is used, by Marion, as the philosopher who draws the borders and the limits, not only between philosophy and metaphysics, but also those that pass at the very heart of phenomenology, between constituted phenomena and given phenomena. Yet, on many occasions, Marion shows that those borders are not as clear as they seem, given that there is an original blurring of the inside and the outside of metaphysics, blurring on which Marion built his entire phenomenology of givenness. Then, for Marion and his phenomenology of givenness, Descartes is a kind of ghost, that should have been eliminated by the phenomenological overcome of metaphysics, but that lingers in all the major concepts of Marion’s phenomenology.
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