The world into which we are born as the horizon of all our behavior is a world both of things and of events. But what are events? Though familiar to all of us, they are philosophically obscure. However central they may be to the question of being in Western thought, from Aristotle to Heidegger, events have always been assigned a derivative status, indeterminate, at the margins of philosophy. Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology. He seeks, above all, to understand a human being as one to whom events can occur, who is able to face them and to appropriate them through experience. "Evential hermeneutics" is the name he gives this approach, which conceives human being as an undergoing of events for which there can be no substitution and as thereby becoming himself. Romano at once forces us to think human existence--or rather, human adventure--in the light of events and helps us understand how and why the event has been neglected in the ontological tradition.

The world into which we are born as the horizon of all our behavior is a world both of things and of events. But what are events? Though familiar to all of us, they are philosophically obscure. However central they may be to the question of being in Western thought, from Aristotle to Heidegger, events have always been assigned a derivative status, indeterminate, at the margins of philosophy. Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology. He seeks, above all, to understand a human being as one to whom events can occur, who is able to face them and to appropriate them through experience. “Evential hermeneutics” is the name he gives this approach, which conceives human being as an undergoing of events for which there can be no substitution and as thereby becoming himself. Romano at once forces us to think human existence—or rather, human adventure—in the light of events and helps us understand how and why the event has been neglected in the ontological tradition.

Jean-Luc Marion's theory of saturated phenomena is one of the most exciting developments in phenomenology in recent decades. It opens up new possibilities for understanding phenomena by beginning from rich and complex examples such as revelation and works of art. Rather than being curiosities or exceptions, these "excessive" or "saturated" phenomena are, in Marion's view, paradigms. He understands more straightforward phenomena, such as the objects of the natural sciences, as reduced and impoverished versions of the excess given in saturated phenomena. Interpreting Excess is a systematic and comprehensive study of Marion's texts on saturated phenomena and their place in his wider phenomenology of givenness, tracing both his theory and his examples across a wide range of texts spanning three decades. The author argues that a rich hermeneutics is implicit in Marion's examples of saturated phenomena but is not set out in his theory. This hermeneutics makes clear that attempts to overthrow the much-criticized sovereignty of the Cartesian ego will remain unsuccessful if they simply reverse the subject-object relation by speaking of phenomena imposing themselves with an overwhelming givenness on a recipient. Instead, phenomena should be understood as appearing in a hermeneutic space already opened by a subject's active reception. Thus, a phenomenon's appearing depends not only on its givenness but also on the way it is interpreted by the receiving subject. All phenomenology is, therefore, necessarily hermeneutic. Interpreting Excess provides an indispensable guide for any study of Marion's saturated phenomena. It is also a significant contribution to ongoing debates about philosophical ways of thinking about God, the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology, and philosophy "after the subject."