“What are we thinking, when we say ‘creation’?”

With this question, Jean-Luc Marion begins an investigation of how the concept has been forged by the history of metaphysics, and how it informs our present view of the power to create. Does art come from the artist or from somewhere else? “Something was writing within me,” Jon Fosse has remarked about his own writing. What is this “something”?

Marion sees creation in biblical terms: not in terms of production, but goodness, gift, and love. This presents a new paradigm for artists, framing creation as a way of seeing and listening: «The artist only succeeds in achieving his work by inventing nothing.»

This book is the written edition of the 2025 Fosse Lecture. Jean-Luc Marion’s Creation is the first of a planned series of lectures on literature and art – in honour of the fourth Norwegian Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.