God's Love Proceeded God.

The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is the self-emptying of oneness, so that through this self-differentiation and self-distantiation there might be the differential relation of continual becoming. Love isn't a being, but the ground of being, which is the playful relation between the finite and the infinite; the universal and the particular; and potential and its material impressions. Love desires being, or more accurately, it desires the interplay of being and nonbeing as a becoming without end, which means without a unified intention, as all "good" and "true" play should be without intention and without end. 

But as the ground of the dialectic of being-at-play, it must continually love whatever there is into existence by desiring existence in such a way as not to have a final intention for it, so that becoming might have its own intentions, and as many of them as possible. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because love makes a clearing for being to play according to its own multitudinous intentions, which are the purposeless excesses of the many given by the unbecoming of the one. Love's desire for being is abundance, which is the excessive abundance of love's too-much givenness for one intention to contain. The love that grounds being's play is the utter gratuity of the ambiguity that it gives, which is being to itself as an endless becoming without the conditions of purpose. 

All lack in being is a lack of oneness, which is the lack of an end given by the without-purpose of unconditional love. Whatever there is: every beauty, sublimity, or horror is the excess given by love's uncontrolled becoming, so that love's counter-intention is indistinguishable from an unintended accident. The experience of love is Marion's "Counter-Experience," so saturated with ambiguous affect that the intuition cannot be reduced by the intention. The Counter-Experience's aboutness is the super-saturated non-object. The self-sacrificial love that grounds becoming is the sacrifice of intention to the counter-intention of the without-objectification of the intuition. Love's excessive becoming is unconditioned, unintended, and endless, but not without any of them.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co