Presence and Absence of God: The Trace of Heidegger’s Last God and Marion’s Iconic Turn

The enigmatic ‘last god’ in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie is the most extreme way of thinking of God’s appearance within the philosophy of the Event. The last god represents Heidegger’s attempt to go beyond the metaphysical concept of presence, rede ned onto-theo-logy, responsible for reducing God to an object of knowledge. Unlike any God of onto-theo-logy, the last god signi es the ultimate possibility of a future god that can be encountered solely in the impossible promise of its passage. In the wake of Heidegger’s critique of the onto-theo-logy, J.-L. Marion reinterprets the relationship between Western metaphysics and the concept of God in light of two phenomenological instances: idol and icon. Starting from an analysis of Marion’s God without Being, these two concepts are re-examined in relation to the question of the fatigue of seeing produced by the divine invisible omnipresence, and compared with the concepts of satisfaction, boredom, and love.