The ontology of "I" and "You" without society: On Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon

Marion gives us an ethics that is wholly private and apolitical. Correspondingly, the relevant anxieties concern, or are directed to, the self's value, which is presumed to be doubted or called into question (and is what is called into question). But this presupposes an ontology that consists in essence of individual persons and dual relationships. One kind of anxious question or doubt concerns the self, and here Marion is certainly Cartesian; but one can also question larger entities that we participate in, or share with a plurality of others, or indeed question the subject not just as I/me but as we/us. Our language discloses this as also possible. There is also, derived from this common subjectivity (and objectivity, for both individual and collective selves are reversible in that sense, the direction of cause/effect that is expressed as subject/object, yielding in the individual case the I/you dyad that is solely important to Marion (and Buber and Levinas)), the I as instance of the third person, a "one," as in Kant (who derives it from a rule) and Heidegger (who thinks this impersonality is fundamental and the "I" (and "you") only emerging out of a crisis in it. The question is that of sociology. It haunts bourgeois society, which is never quite sure if "society" exists as something that can be criticized because doubted and called into question, rather than as something, akin to the state, that is just given as is and not modifiable, that is merely some kind of authority (Durkheim and other neo-Kantianisms). Our bureaucratic state capitalist society with its police state and wars enjoys great recourse to psychology, because individuals, who seek their advantage and must be suspected or at risk of crime, are always in question, but whether the society and state are is not so certain, since it becomes instituted and something of an absolute, often associated with language and the similar impersonality of state bureaucracies which govern by administration, sometimes eclipsing the legislative and judicial, which tie reason to pluralism. Yet what "one" is or is like is as questionable as what "I," or "you" are, and so to the not easily constituted "we," whose problem therefore may appear as a "whether" rather than a "how." Linguistic categories do help here: we can see that Marion, like Levinas, focuses on certain "persons" rather than others, the metaphoric availability of trinitarianism notwithstanding. Does the political exist, or is there only an ethical and psychological? Capitalist societies have made this a question; sociology was invented after they triumphed, but it seems to remain one.