Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought 9781472547071, 9781441145239

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Notes on Contributors

Renaud Barbaras is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Sylvain Camilleri is Teaching Assistant in Philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Raphaël Gély is Research Associate at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique and Lecturer in Philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Jeffrey Hanson is Research Fellow in Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia and Eric D’Arcy Chair in Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. Michael Kelly is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. Rolf Kühn is Professor of Theology at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Jean-Luc Marion is Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Honorary Fellow in Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.

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Introduction Jeffrey Hanson

Michel Henry (1922–2002) was a French philosopher, professor and novelist whose work spanned decades and genres while nevertheless being united by a singular vision and animated by a devotion to the mystery of life. His inquiries were informed by a profound acquaintance with the history of philosophy and sought to articulate life, understood as the irreducible bedrock of all reality, in its self-manifestation under the rubrics of phenomenological experience, art, religion and politics. His first book, his massive magnum opus of 1963, L’Essence de la manifestation ,1 announced Henry’s lifelong critique of philosophies of transcendence and any phenomenology grounded on intentionality and his preference for an exposition of the field of immanence and affectivity. He continued to develop his perennial themes of life, subjectivity, embodiment and experience in Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps.2 Henry’s application of his fundamental insights extended to politics and culture in his two-volume Marx ,3 Du communisme au capitalisme ,4 and La Barbarie ;5 psychology and modern subjectivity in Généalogie de la psychanalyse ;6 aesthetics in Voir l’invisible ;7 and Christianity in C’est moi la vérité,8 Incarnation9 and Paroles du Christ .10 The themes of materiality, intersubjectivity and the nature and limits of phenomenology returned in Phénoménologie matérielle.11 Henry also during his lifetime published four novels: Le jeune officier,12 L’Amour les yeux fermés,13 Le Fils du roi14 and Le Cadavre indiscret .15 The revolutionary work of Michel Henry is only now beginning to be appreciated by an English-speaking philosophical audience, though in many ways this is a belated development. The Essence of Manifestation was translated into English and published in 1973,16 only ten years after its original appearance in French; however, the reception that greeted this signal achievement was not commensurate with the effort that must have been involved in the undertaking. At 737 magisterial pages it is a literally

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imposing work, and the contents no less so. Sweeping in scope, it packs in sustained engagements with many important figures of modernity, German idealism, existentialism and phenomenology: René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, not to mention literary sources like Franz Kafka, Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin as well as the Bible, especially the Gospel of John, to which Henry would return again and again in later writings. If philosophers in the English-speaking world were at first intimidated they could perhaps be forgiven, but as some of the contributors to this volume remind us, The Essence of Manifestation is indisputably the key to Henry’s entire career, setting the course for all the works that were to follow. This essential foundation of Henry’s thought was made available to an English-speaking audience quite quickly thanks to the tireless efforts of translator Girard Etzkorn, who in short order also published an English translation of Henry’s second book, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body.17 A one-volume abridged edition of the volumes on Marx titled Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality 18 emerged next, in 1983, followed ten years later by The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis19 and ten years after that I Am the Truth. The case could be made that it was in the year 2000 that Henry’s work for the first time made a serious impact on the English-speaking philosophical community. One of his essays, ‘Speech and Religion: The Word of God’, appeared in translation in the volume Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, which centred on a translation of the bombshell essay from Dominique Janicaud ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’ and featured representative essays from some of the targets of his criticism. Since Henry was included among other better known figures like Jean-Luc Marion and Paul Ricoeur, he came unavoidably to the attention of a wider audience of thinkers challenged by and responsive to the debate over the ‘theological turn’, which was at the time and remains a contentious and lively discussion. In the years that immediately followed the publication of this work, interest in Henry, whom even Janicaud admitted was a surprising figure to include in his indictment and one whose way of thinking ‘has long been unique and only recently been turned into a school of thought’, 20 increased considerably, and more serious and sustained attention began to be directed back to his founding writings. Scott Davidson has since translated Material Phenomenology21 and Seeing the Invisible22 into English, and other translations will emerge soon. Conferences devoted to his thought have begun to be held in the

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Anglophone world, and English-language journals have released special issues on his work. Despite the fact that Henry was initially affiliated with the vigorous debate in philosophical and theological circles over the theological turn, if there is one thing this collection proves it is that he cannot be confined to that discussion. Whether implicitly or explicitly, all of the chapters herein begin from the rigorously phenomenological precepts of Henry’s thought as enshrined in The Essence of Manifestation and from that basis develop examinations of the implications of his phenomenology for the other areas of his scholarly interest: Christianity, experience, embodiment, individual and collective action. It is our conviction that this is the appropriate way to read Henry, not as a thinker for whom religion drove his phenomenology but as a phenomenologist whose phenomenology was determinative for his understanding of all else. We have chosen the subtitle ‘The Affects of Thought’ because of this conviction.23 In The Essence of Manifestation Henry declared: ‘This is precisely what affectivity is: the universal form of all possible experience in general, the ontological and transcendental dimension which constitutes the foundation of the reality of everything which is.’24 The structure of this foundation is one in which the form and content are the same; affectivity is auto-affection: ‘This is precisely in what affectivity consists, i.e., the radical immanence of the content as identical to its form, to affectivity itself.’25 Affectivity as immanence means Henry’s phenomenology is one that ‘owes nothing to the work of transcendence’26 and instead seeks to ground transcendence radically in immanence. All phenomena have as their indispensable phenomenological foundation phenomenality itself, which is auto-affective immanence. As such, ‘Affectivity is the universal foundation of all phenomena and determines them all originally and essentially as affective.’27 From affectivity comes all thought determined as affective. Henry’s entire philosophy is a thinking of affectivity. At the same time, his thought, like all thought, has its own affect, inasmuch as thought is determined as affective according to Henry: ‘Affectivity is “understanding” only because understanding is affective and to the extent that it is affective.’28 The world and its horizon are affective inasmuch as what affectivity understands is itself affective. So too is this immediate, passive and non-intentional affectivity the ground of all hetero-affective or intentional experience,29 action30 and value,31 reason32 and feeling,33 sensation34 and subjectivity.35 *** The first section of chapters treats Henry’s lifelong engagement with the phenomenological project and his innovative contributions to the tradition. The first piece, by Jean-Luc Marion, considers the thesis that the

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ongoing success of phenomenology can be measured by its legitimate extension of the field of visibility to encompass hitherto unseen phenomena; yet Marion also considers the questions of what invisible limit might mark the contour of such an extension and what relation can be sustained between the visible and invisible: Do they relate inversely, the more visibility the less invisibility, or could the invisible give depth and intensity to the visible? If so, phenomenology’s legitimacy can also be tested by the ‘dignity it grants to the invisible’. Henry, Marion argues, understood this issue well from the beginning of his career, so Marion exposits The Essence of Manifestation along the lines of Henry’s contribution to a ‘phenomenology of the invisible’. Metaphysics, Marion argues, thinks the relation between the visible and the invisible as continuous and convertible, ‘either in a transition of the invisible to the visible as its outcome or in a return of the visible to the invisible as its foundation’. Whichever direction is pursued, the terms of the relation and the continuity between them remains unchanged fundamentally: Henry’s ‘entire enterprise’ on Marion’s reading ‘amounts to questioning this assumption, which presupposes, without really knowing or understanding it, that by moving from one to the other in this way, the invisible and the visible belong to the same world, hence to the world itself’. For Henry by contrast, ‘only the visible gives itself to the world’ while ‘the invisible neither opens itself to the world nor is one with the world’, such that he contests both the metaphysical legacy of the West and the phenomenological tradition insofar as it has uncritically received this legacy. Concentrating on section III of The Essence of Manifestation , Marion goes on to reconstruct Henry’s argument move by move. Henry’s first move is to break the ‘shared homogeneity’ of the invisible and visible that is underwritten by a ‘univocal phenomenality’, such that the invisible and visible cannot be merely antithetical, but the former is the starting point for any understanding of phenomenality itself. His second move is to clarify that the invisible is the in-principle hallmark of phenomenality by its essence, not provisionally awaiting emergence into visibility: ‘The invisible belongs to phenomenality and obtains even the status of phenomenon not because it would become finally visible but because it determines the possibility and actuality of manifestation itself, as its essence.’ The third movement of section III according to Marion is Henry’s specification that only an intramundane phenomenon can become visible, such that the only path to phenomenality itself would consist in withdrawal from the world and its light. In order to forestall a potential objection that Henry has illicitly radicalized orthodox Husserlianism he takes a fourth step: To prevent

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phenomenality from being construed as just another sort of phenomenon, Henry skirts hypostasization and names phenomenality life, which is not an object at all, neither is nor is not, and phenomenalizes itself without ever showing itself. There are thus phenomena, essential to my living, that manifest themselves only in feeling; the price of the pretense to bring such invisible phenomena to visibility would be the death thereof. On Marion’s reading Henry’s argumentation is rigorously phenomenological, not theological or metaphysical. His unique contribution to phenomenology was thus to think of the visible and invisible in terms of an insurmountable structural heterogeneity. Taking this unique contribution as his point of conclusion, Marion stages an illuminating series of dialogues with the rival phenomenologists of Henry’s day. For Sartre, Marion argues, the for-itself and in-itself are apparently distinct, but by his own admission they both devolve to one in the end, and that one mode of being is precisely a worldly one. The conflict between Henry and Merleau-Ponty is an implicit one inasmuch as Henry could not have known the texts that Merleau-Ponty was working on at the end of his life, but Marion constructs an encounter between their respective positions, with a view to demonstrating that contrary to Henry’s way of thinking, for Merleau-Ponty the invisible does not have its own mode of manifestation peculiar to it, such that the stances these two significant figures take end up being entirely opposed. In the discussion between Henry and Husserl, Marion focuses on the question of formal ontology, which on Henry’s diagnosis remains wedded to the model of objectness, no matter how formally it is construed. Henry’s relation to Heidegger is more complicated, so much so that Marion asserts that a full account of the themes that connect them ‘has not yet received the treatment that it requires’. Clearly Heidegger speaks of the invisible, but it is just as clear that what he means by it does not coincide with what Henry means by life. These conversations demonstrate Henry’s remarkable insight into the limits of his contemporaries’ phenomenologies and his own singular and creative phenomenological legacy. Renaud Barbaras’s chapter takes as its starting point Henry’s opposition to ontological monism, the dominant philosophical bias of Western thought that ‘sees in exposition at a distance – Gegenständlichkeit – the fundamental condition of appearance, and in intentionality, the law of phenomenality’. By contrast, Henry insists upon the non-intentional basis of intentionality, ‘a mode in which no distance is established and no visibility unfolds’. Henry’s own radical project then, on Barbaras’s reading, is to discriminate between the two modes of phenomenalization and to liberate impressional phenomenality from intentionality. At the heart of

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impressionality, in its powerlessness over what comes to itself without itself being responsible for what comes, is life itself, that which experiences itself without differing from itself. Every impression proceeds from and refers to life, which is at work within and manifests itself in the impression, and that means in turn that life is flesh, ‘the point of articulation’, in Barbaras’s words, ‘or the common element of impressionality and life’. Barbaras’s interrogation of this association in Henry’s thought proceeds by way of the suspicion that life and flesh in the latter’s description thereof actually ‘commit us to two phenomenologically very different paths’. Life is foreign to the world as the element of originary phenomenality. In life there is neither distance nor exteriority; ‘life is concerned only with itself’. Flesh, on the other hand, according to Barbaras, is ‘implicated as much in my perception of the world as in my action upon it’ and, therefore, ‘experiences itself in both of them’, such that there can be no flesh without body. For Barbaras, ‘the theoretical wager that distinguishes Henry’s approach, even within phenomenology’, is his effort to understand the relation between the flesh and body on the basis of the flesh and not on the body. And it is on this very point that Barbaras seeks to put Henry’s thinking to the test, in terms of ‘its ability to give rise to an authentic philosophy of the flesh that in turn allows for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenological traits of the body that this flesh also is’. Barbaras accepts the validity of Henry’s beginning, the approach to the body via the flesh and life, but the remainder of his chapter is devoted to questioning the original sense of life that Henry puts forward as affectivity and immanence ‘that remains indifferent to the realm of exteriority’, particularly with reference to the power of movement. Turning to Henry’s key conversation partner on this subject, MerleauPonty, Barbaras underscores the latter’s increasing commitment over the course of his prematurely interrupted thinking to the intertwining of the sensing and moving being with the world to which it belongs. The reversibility and chiasm that are such hallmarks of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy are for Henry the telling indications of his complicity with the bias of ontological monism. Henry is thus on Barbaras’s reading completely consistent (and completely opposed to Merleau-Ponty) when he ‘uproots sensation from the exteriority to which it seemed it should belong as a form of behavior, in order to return it to that which, within sensation itself, he characterizes as “power”, and which is, indeed, dependent on life’. In a fashion that according to Barbaras is at once indebted to and unfaithful to Maine de Biran, Henry ‘claims to rely on the essence of power, to rediscover in it life as auto-impressionality’. This essence of

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power is coincidence with itself at the heart of any doing or producing. Yet Barbaras detects a non sequitur in Henry’s argument: To say that power cannot be situated in the milieu of exteriority does not automatically mean that it is ‘absolute coincidence’ or ‘pure interiority’. Neglected in Henry’s account on Barbaras’s analysis is the ‘dimension of efficacy or production that wrenches the subject of power from itself, throws it into a different element, and prevents it from fully coinciding with itself’. Barbaras concedes that movement cannot consist in mere ‘objective displacement’, which is precisely what makes movement living, but he insists that if movement is to be movement and not the immobility of self-enclosed immanence, it must also be understood as traversing into exteriority. Barbaras concludes that when seeking to give a phenomenologically grounded account of the body, therefore, recourse to the thesis of the duplicity of appearance will not help, and neither ought we to ‘embark on a futile attempt to return all exteriority, which the flesh (and therefore life) comprises, to the sphere of absolute immanence’. Instead, we ought to adopt a path never taken by Henry, ‘to discover how auto-affection leads into intentionality, how we can go from immanence to transcendence’. Borrowing from Jan Patočka, Barbaras refuses to succumb to ontological monism but nevertheless argues for a rethinking of immanence ‘that accomplishes itself only as exteriorization and therefore as an unveiling of the world’, an inseparability between the moving power of flesh and the body in movement, and a self that ‘is an opening onto the self only if it is an opening onto the world’. The fundamental affect for Barbaras would be not drive but desire, ‘in which the subject is given to itself only to the extent that it receives an other than itself’ and which is ‘the other name for life’. Our own contribution focuses on Henry’s ‘The Phenomenological Method’, a thoughtful and challenging reading of Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology. A major point of interest for us is not just Henry’s critique of Husserl, which he unfolded in various places over the course of his career, but the combination in this chapter of his perhaps maddening frustration with and understated appreciation for the founder of phenomenology. It is our impression that Henry devotes significant attention to Husserl in this chapter not merely to criticize him unsparingly, but also to recover some key insights that he seems to have believed Husserl grasped in a way that other phenomenologists, even those who departed from Husserl for other reasons, never did. In particular, we feel that Henry seeks to engage Husserl because he believes the founder uncovered, only to fi nally dismiss, a sense of immanence that was commensurate with the sense Henry himself advocated throughout his career. We seek in our piece to give an account of

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the grounds on which Henry lodges a criticism against Husserl’s notion of the ‘gaze’, the reflective stance that is definitive of the phenomenological reduction. We recapitulate Henry’s argument that Husserl submits the cogitationes that should be the basis of the field of phenomenological investigation to an unwelcome intrusion in the form of reflective attention, thereby trading the immanence that is proper to the cogitationes for a prioritization of the gaze that is directed towards them. This immanence then for Henry is nothing more than a misnamed relation of transcendence. We offer a potential rejoinder to Henry along the lines of suggesting that Husserl is not so much shaping his notion of immanence according to the demands of transcendence as deepening his own notion of immanence and extending its signification to what is necessarily entailed by it. We give an account of Husserl’s admittedly subtle argumentation in order to clearly demarcate the crossroads at which these two thinkers find themselves. In short, Husserl regards it as disastrous to remain with an Henryan sense of immanence; Henry regards it as disastrous to proceed to a Husserlian sense of immanence. Having marked out this divergence, we conclude with some reflections on how Henry characterizes the work of reflection within the parameters of his own phenomenology of life and the place of transcendence within immanence. We raise the possibility that Henry’s attempt to rehabilitate the work of reflection bears only an equivocal relationship with what Husserl meant by reflection, and correspondingly, that his notion of transcendence within immanence ultimately problematizes any relationship of the two. The second group of chapters considers Henry’s sustained engagement with Christianity, which is most clearly in evidence in his final published works (which are the focus of Sylvain Camilleri’s comprehensive overview) but the roots of which are also discernible in The Essence of Manifestation (which is the focus of Kevin Hart’s chapter). Hart contends that Henry’s magnum opus is not only ‘an attempt to reconfigure phenomenology, to rethink it so that all transcendence is understood to be rooted in the prior immanence of life’, but also ‘a critique of received religion and a bold attempt to re-conceive Christianity’. These two valences guide the whole of the chapter. Hart’s first line of discussion begins, therefore, by giving an account of what the essence of manifestation is exactly. The straightforward answer is that it is immanence, but this must be distinguished from the effort made by Husserl to situate transcendence in immanence, an effort that by Henry’s lights failed as soon as it was assayed. Meticulously articulating Husserl’s account of the relationship between the transcendent and

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the immanent as well as Heidegger’s permutation upon this framework, Hart demonstrates where Henry finds both vulnerable to his critique of ontological monism and introduces considerations from both that would have to temper that critique. We will allow ourselves the liberty of a few words on one of Hart’s key points that intersects constructively with our own contribution to this volume. Hart points out that Husserl according to Henry made the givenness that was to be the foundational bedrock of phenomenological investigation coordinate with the gaze that paradoxically presupposes the prior givenness of the cogitationes. What looks to Henry to be a devastating critique Hart diagnoses as a failure on his part to appreciate the difference in Husserl between natural attitude intentionality and phenomenological intentionality and the senses of givenness correlate to each. As Hart puts it, ‘The cogitatio is “prior” to the converted gaze solely in the sense that it is first determined at the level of psychology, a regional science. It becomes an absolute datum only when reduced in and through the gaze.’ Hart’s second approach to The Essence of Manifestation is in terms of its ‘critique of religion’ and ‘reformulation of Christianity’, a project that begins ‘by way of a “critique of knowledge”’. Any attempt to ‘determine an epistemic ground is simultaneously to miss the absolute’ according to Hart’s reading of Henry, and it is on the issue of the hiddenness of this absolute life from conceptual representation that Henry found in Fichte, the young Hegel, and Meister Eckhart inspirational ancestors. In each case, however, Hart is careful to highlight ways in which Henry is selective in his appropriation of these forebears. It is by way of auto-affectivity that we participate in divine life for Henry, a divergence from the appreciation that Fichte, for example, has for contemplation. Auto-affection is also meant to be the explanation in Henry for how ‘transcendence relies on immanence’, but Hart finds this account lacking. Even so, Fichte’s Religionslehre and the preaching of Eckhart remain close in spirit to what Henry is trying to affirm philosophically, the latter being especially prized because he makes the move of identifying the soul’s inward life with the life of God. Concluding with a reading of the three sections on Eckhart in The Essence of Manifestation , Hart again presents a subtler picture of the Rhineland master than Henry adopts for his own purposes, which on Hart’s reading verges into the terrain of Gnosticism. In Hart’s judgment, ‘His “philosophy of Christianity” in L’Essence de la manifestation is therefore not Christianity’s philosophy, in which Jesus is the phenomenality of God, but rather an exterior philosophy of Christianity, in which phenomenality, life, is deemed to be God.’ Arguing for an expanded

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appreciation for the phenomenon of the historical Christ and a broader engagement with scripture (beyond an abridged version of the Gospel of John), Hart advances a view of Jesus as one who authoritatively and ‘repeatedly performs a reduction from “world” to “kingdom” and thereby reveals to us how to live so as to be pleasing to God’, while Henry in this respect ‘seriously departs from what Jesus teaches’ by his condemnation of the world. Having thoroughly accounted for the ways in which Henry sought to translate a significant religious tradition into philosophical terms, Hart nevertheless raises the possibility that something has been ‘lost’ in that translation. Sylvain Camilleri argues in his contribution that Henry’s ‘Christian trilogy’ constitutes the first major linkage of phenomenology with soteriology, though this is a linkage that remains latent therein. Camilleri’s analysis seeks to render explicit this linkage, which depends for its force on the basic elements of Henry’s ‘reversal’ of the canonical phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger exposited from The Essence of Manifestation all the way up to Material Phenomenology. Two principles guide Camilleri’s navigation of the ‘Christian trilogy’: first, that ‘salvation, or the return to the grace of life, gains its intelligibility in the words of the New Testament – even if, of course, these words need to be deciphered’ and second, that ‘the dimension of salvation proper to phenomenological analysis is more therapeutic than it is actually salvific, which is not its proper end, though it is nevertheless at the service of a more original salvation that it helps to decrypt.’ Neither phenomenology nor the texts of the New Testament themselves ‘literally give life’, but ‘both – and even more so the conjunction between them – place us in quest for salvation’. It is on the basis of this conjunction that Camilleri reads the encounter in the ‘Christian trilogy’ of phenomenology and soteriology. This conjunction is discernible in the very first pages of I Am the Truth , which announce Henry’s interest not in truth as adequation but in the kind of truth that Christianity claims to offer, an ‘essential truth’ that has a ‘mysterious affinity’ with human beings ‘to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation’. Camilleri proceeds to distinguish this view of truth, which is always already in operation within human life, from the more traditional views enshrined by metaphysics, exegesis or hermeneutics. This privileged form of truth derives its intelligibility according to Camilleri from the auto-revelation of God, which is not ‘in the world but for the world’. From this thesis follows the corollary that human beings are fundamentally ‘sons of God’ though they often forget this condition and fall into the cares of the world. Being reminded of our fundamental condition as sons is not

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within the capacity of ‘any rational enterprise’ but is the concern of ‘a nonintentional phenomenology of birth, the goal of which is nothing other than a rebirth’ that in turn issues in immersion in feeling and ultimately the action of love, itself anchored in God, who is love. That this God is also incarnate is Camilleri’s pivot point to Incarnation, which he reads as staging a confrontation between the Christian truth or logos as it was commented upon by the church fathers and the Greek logos that is of a piece with the world and thereby ‘cannot have anything to do with the flesh’. In Christianity ‘the logos is given the power to become incarnate’ and is thereby (scandalously to the Greeks) made also the seat of salvation. The paradox of Christian salvation is that the path to it is in the reality of life and not of the world but must be sought from within the very world that is the occasion for our own forgetfulness of our true condition; it is this worldly reality that the Incarnation has transformed, hence signifying ‘not that the world would suddenly become good for us, but rather that we ought no longer to be afraid of that reality’. Participation in the mystical body of Christ is the ‘final accomplishment of salvation’ and at the same time the key to any phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. How that salvation comes about is the concern of Paroles du Christ , which Camilleri interprets as an account of how we can hear and understand the word of life that alone brings salvation. In the final text of the trilogy we learn that Christ’s words and actions are selfsame and provide the means to recognizing ‘the common source of all humanity and divinity’. A phenomenological return to the words of Christ overcomes the worldly methodologies that themselves obstruct those words’ true meaning. To genuinely hear the Word is to realize that salvation is ‘not the salvation of the world, in the world, and for the world but the salvation of man, in man, and for man, that is to say, the salvation of life, in life, and for life’. The vocabulary of the kingdom of God is the most effective expression of what salvation essentially is, and it is this vocabulary that clarifies the relation of the Arche-Son to salvation to a greater degree than was found in Henry’s earlier works. As Christ is himself the kingdom, nothing worldly can stand in the way of an encounter with Christ. Insofar as neither we nor the kingdom of God in and as Christ are in the world, salvation then, Camilleri concludes, is an abiding reality which is never far from us even when we are far from it. The final section of chapters is concerned with the theoretical and practical ramifications of Henry’s thought, and both draw on his phenomenology of life for their inspiration. Rolf Kühn opens his contribution by speaking to the structure and nature of every theoretical discipline and

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the truth into which each inquires. At the bottom of them all, ‘absolute phenomenological life precedes thinking because a work is being carried out in thought whose power cannot be recollected in a thematic meaning’. It is philosophy and theology, Kühn claims, that historically in the West have investigated ‘this originary situation’, and despite the former’s apparent autonomy and the latter’s apparently heteronomous dependence on revelation, phenomenological investigation reveals that both refer to a fundamental claim about the truth of human knowing. While the philosophical tradition has been dominated by those who uphold a correlation between thinking and being, a few exceptions have arisen, including Meister Eckhart and Descartes, who in Kühn’s analysis intimated ‘that before something is thought and before it is captured in a re-presentation it is already seized in the originary certainty of an immanent lived experience’. Such a state of affairs presents ‘an intelligible affinity with the theological concept of revelation as the absolute appearance of truth (of God)’. Pure living phenomenological self-affection then must reveal itself in its own proper truth without devolving thereby into a new discipline like metaphysics or theology or even a non-discipline like mysticism. Instead the step back from any discipline or tradition would lead to ‘the pre-reflexive unity of the life of affecting and affection’ that can only be sought in a corporeality that is given to itself ‘as a radical phenomenological passibility’. The experience of this passibility is at the same time ‘an originary intelligibility’ which is not a representation but the ‘pure practical truth of originary appearing’ older than the traditional correlation of being and knowing. Stripped of metaphysical occlusions, the theological language of the reciprocal relation between Father and Son and the Incarnation can also be interpreted as testimony to ‘the structure of the absolutely revealed truth’. On Kühn’s reading, Henry ‘draws the final consequences of a nonGreek mode of thinking in order to bring together the immediate originary intelligibility of the divine “logos” with the self-giving of our fleshly corporeality’. Following Henry, Kühn traces out the intelligible phenomenological truth of Christian theology, calling upon it to ‘explicitly move to this “flesh” of every living human being in order to establish the “originary intelligibility” of both the Christian mystery and the sacred scriptures’, bringing together the equivalence of ‘my inner phenomenologically constituted truth’ and ‘the truth of the living incarnated Christ ’; the practice of Christianity of course is not just phenomenology, but in the faith tradition and its practice the originary truth of life ‘finds its echo’ and conversely, within a phenomenology of immanent life, Christian practice receives ‘a new significance’.

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The ‘originary gnosis of unity’ to which Henry refers at the end of Incarnation must be read according to Kühn as a radical inversion of every sort of knowing in favour of an indisputable truth of feeling that escapes every ‘conception of interpretation according to the hermeneutical circle’ and by virtue of which all phenomena take on their proper truth with no alienation between them and our own life. The full consequences of Henry’s argument that ‘this understanding of truth is in no way a category of a transcendental theory but rather is the immanent experience of our flesh as radical subjectivity in the sense of the feeling of life ’ have not even begun to be worked through according to Kühn. At the very least we must conclude that wherever we feel the absolute nature of life there also we feel the divine truth of all faith and all reasoning. And wherever we forget ourselves we likewise ‘mistake the representation for the self-grounding measure of all truth and actuality’. Keeping these principles in mind allows us to overcome all body–soul dualisms as well as the twinned errors that are just two sides of the same coin: the Gnostic rejection of the world and the modern hypostasis of the world. ‘Within a pure understanding of life, which is realized only in being carried out ’ Kühn concludes, we experience all thinking as ‘affective certainty’ and all doing as ‘inner activity’, neither of which submit to ‘external normativity’ but are ‘produced solely by the infinite power that originated and continues to originate in life’. Raphaël Gély’s chapter contributes to an underexplored area of Henry’s thought: the nature of social and political action. Gély begins by addressing a potential objection to the very idea of the necessity of collective action for the intensification of life, which is, after all, lived in ‘radically singular experience’. Given Henry’s focus on the ‘individuality of the living self’, collective action could seem to be ‘entirely secondary’, taken up only to meet ‘trivial social necessities’. Relying on Henry’s declaration that ‘the attempt to oppose the community and the individual – to establish a hierarchical relationship between them – is pure nonsense’, Gély grants that clearly Henry refuses to subordinate individual life to social life and pushes towards a stronger thesis that Henry also provides the resources to develop a more robust phenomenology of collective action and even the means to contend that collective action is required for the intensification of life. Considering the typical understanding of collective normativity according to which ‘common action is not possible unless the different actions brought about by individuals link themselves to each other according to criteria that transcend the singular action of any of them’, Gély detects in this view the assumption that ‘what here constructs the community of

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individuals in a collective action is the representation of a certain end pursued in common and a series of actions corresponding to this representation’. This assumption fails to capture what is for Henry a ‘more primitive community’ than any ‘intentional community’: ‘In order for individuals to be able to coordinate their actions and cooperate’, Gély contends, ‘they must be living beings, must share a single experience of life’. What gives collective action meaning on his reading is ‘these actions’ phenomenologically interior relationship to each other’, which in turn is born from ‘their common generation in the originary ipseity of a single power of living’. When seen only from the point of view of intentionality, shared and singular action appear only inessentially connected, whereas ‘in acting together, individuals share a single power to be a living self.’ On Gély’s analysis a complete description of collective action has to hold together the necessity of normatively integrating various individual actions and evaluating them according to a transcending principle along with the unavoidable fact that individual actions are experienced as radically singular and thus evasive of every comparison. ‘The fundamental challenge for a radical theory of collective action thus consists in rendering thinkable both the absoluteness of each individual action and its integration in a space of coordination and cooperation that exceeds it’, a tension that is at work as well in life itself. What holds for singular life, which must be experienced in its irreducible immanence in order for the actions it does to be living, also holds for collective life. While Gély acknowledges that individuals need the power of representation to compare their actions, evaluate them, and even gain critical distance from them, these operations take place at a different level from ‘the radical experience that each has of sharing with others the originary affectivity of a single life-force’. It is for this reason that he can argue that collective action ultimately enhances the experience of the single life-force that all individuals share: ‘if individuals form a community, they do so in the very excessiveness of the life that each one of them experiences in radically singular fashion.’ Shared activity ‘gathers individuals in the experience of an ontological interdependence that is still more fundamental’ than a corporate project or communally adopted set of goals. When shared action is anchored in shared life, a solidarity more profound than that appealed to by the rhetoric of ‘human rights’, for example, is realized. If the ‘desire of life grows as it is shared’, then the curtailment of any individual’s living impulse or expression is a curtailing of the power of life itself. ‘To act as though my life-force did not involve the sharing with others of a common passivity in relation to life’s power of living is necessarily to weaken my

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life-force’, a weakening that can issue not only in lethargy but also in a frenetic busyness. Applying this dynamic to contemporary socio-political situations, and placing Henry in debate with Hegel and Marx, Gély concludes that ‘there can be no real common emancipatory struggle that does not draw already, here and now, on life’s self-celebration.’ Given the enormous scope of Henry’s intellectual interests and the extent of his productivity, it proved impossible to address every aspect of his thinking in this volume. Future research on Henry will need to explore more deeply his contributions to aesthetics, culture, radical politics, materialism and fiction. Our aim with these chapters has been to demonstrate how reading him phenomenologically provides the most fruitful way of reading his work as a whole. Our hope is that this volume will provide a foundation for ongoing research on a thinker who continues to reward the effort of those who are affected by his thought.

Notes and Works Cited 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. Vol. 1: Une philosophie de la réalité ; vol. 2: Une philosophie de l’économie . Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. Paris: Grasset, 1987. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Paris: Bourin, 1985. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Paris: Albin Michel, 1996. Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation. Trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). Trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975). Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). Trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Dominique Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, trans. Bernard Prusak, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 71. Trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2009).

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16 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

We owe a debt of gratitude to our colleague John Mullarkey, who suggested this locution to us. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 511. Ibid., 519. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 486–7. Ibid., 487. Ibid., §57. Ibid., §68. Ibid., 645. Ibid., 534. Ibid., 657. Ibid., §56. Ibid., 495.

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Chapter 1

The Invisible and the Phenomenon Jean-Luc Marion

[W]hatever is said of a nature, unchangeable, invisible . . . must not be measured after the custom of visible things. Augustine, On the Trinity1

I. The Unapparent and the Invisible In its movement of expansion (as a matter of fact, not only the growth of its domain, but also and consequently of its validity) phenomenology does not cease to give rise to new fields of research for phenomenality, so as to place phenomena within it permanently that no eye has yet constituted, let alone seen. Its legitimacy consists entirely in this work of bringing into visibility what would have remained unseen and considered invisible without it and its effort. If there is a single argument in favour of the fruitfulness and coherence of this method (or non -method) of philosophy, it must be sought in the successive extensions that the great phenomenologists have achieved, by unforeseeable measures, but all the same now for about a century without interruption. Yet can and indeed should this expansion of the domain of visibility be continued indefinitely? What invisible will, then, set its limit? And, for that matter, what connection does the visible maintain with the invisible? Does the visible always increase inversely proportional to the invisible so as to end by eliminating it tangentially? Could the invisible not instead intensify the visible, as a deeper layer that would stretch equally far, because it alone would make the visible possible? In various forms, this question spans the entire history of phenomenology because phenomenality, as the definition and essence of the phenomenon, implies the invisible as much as the visible. It is even possible that all phenomenology could be judged by the measure of the dignity it grants to the invisible, just as a thinking of being is judged by the status it accords to and what it can show of the nothing.

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Put differently, how should we understand the enigmatic but unavoidable expression ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’ [Phänomenologie des Unsichtbaren].2 Michel Henry understood this question, bequeathed to us by Martin Heidegger, perfectly when, positing that ‘life . . . conceals itself in principle from every conceivable visualization’, he wondered: ‘Is not a phenomenology of the invisible a contradiction in terms?’3 I will try to show that not only did he confront this question in 1990 but had actually faced it squarely since the massive and masterful opening of his research in The Essence of Manifestation, which in this context begins to appear as not only a beginning but a surprising anticipation. It certainly anticipates his own final writings, but in a sense also Heidegger himself, since Heidegger does not use this expression until 1973, while its resumption by Henry in 1990 formalizes a reflection that goes back at least to 1963. Yet the unapparent and the invisible do not mean the same thing, despite the fact that they challenge the privilege given to the visible. This difference must be measured.

II. The Univocity of the Invisible and the Visible How might one negotiate the link between the visible and the invisible in any definition of the phenomenon? Metaphysics arranges them according to greatly differing measures but which can all be summarized either in a transition of the invisible to the visible as its outcome or in a return of the visible to the invisible as its foundation. In both cases, it assumes explicitly or implicitly the continuity of a conversion, or rather of a transformation, that is to say, their univocity. First it can be a matter of changing the invisible into the visible. For example, in René Descartes, the visible, actually the sensory (the future ‘secondary qualities’, that is to say, the only qualities, since the ‘first qualities’ are quantities) only appears in clear but still confused ideas. This confusion is marked by the impossibility of showing through concepts how one quality differs from another, so that in this way it witnesses to a lack of visibility, which only clear and distinct ideas could offset.4 But these ideas are only imagined as illustrations, or rather as arrangements into shapes. That is to say, these shapes are understood as translating into terms of extension, shape and movement, and they are assumed to generate the clear but confused ideas of the sensory in the name of ‘Nature’, which establishes them. Yet these composite shapes (which Descartes names ‘machines’) remain by definition doubly invisible compared to sensory experience: first, because they remain simple hypotheses from a physical point of view; second,

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because the original figures ‘very little resemble’5 their supposed sensory effects. In fact, sensory things only retain extension in common with their shapes. (This is even more the case in Nicolas Malebranche, for whom it becomes an intelligible extension, which is hence imagined and no longer physical.) More simply, one could also just say that the visible always arises from an unseen, which is itself invisible, without judging the exact nature of this latter in advance as either an intelligible (noumenal) unseen or as an unseen ‘blind’6 to the rhapsody of the variety of intuition. Yet, conversely, it can be a matter of going back from the sensory, taken as a (confused) sensory, to the (visible) intelligible invisible, in such a way that only the intervention of the intelligible and as such invisible concept upon it would in the end make it visible. Either, in the radical fashion of Malebranche, one deems that my own body actually remains ‘invisible’ (this incidentally like all other sensory bodies), while their ideas, as the only thing that can be known, are only opened in the ‘real light’, namely, that of ‘universal Reason and intelligible light’.7 Or, in the even more radical manner of Plato, the sensory body (here the bed produced by an artisan) turns out to be ‘something which is vague [αμυδρον] in regard to truth’, since ‘the more things partake of truth, the clearer they are.’8 Besides, it matters little whether one moves from the invisible to the visible or rather from the visible to the invisible, since this difference in meaning itself relies on a single direction, according to which ‘the teleology which animates it [i.e., ecstatic phenomenology] and whereby it defines itself is to render the invisible visible in such a way that the visible arrives only in the return of the contrary power from which it arises.’9 In fact, not only metaphysics, but also phenomenology in its most current sense, assumes the univocity and homogeneity of the visible and the invisible. And Henry’s entire enterprise precisely amounts to questioning this assumption, which presupposes, without really knowing or understanding it, that by moving from one to the other in this way, the invisible and the visible belong to the same world, hence to the world itself. And this is impossible because (as we will see) only the visible gives itself to the world and opens itself to it, while the invisible neither opens itself to the world nor is one with the world. Making the invisible visible (indeed making the visible invisible) assumes that a transition from one to the other would take place, hence that they remain inscribed in a univocal phenomenality that remains homogenous to them. This is without doubt a common and almost inevitable thesis, so much so that Maurice Merleau-Ponty made it his own when he defined the invisible first as ‘what is not actually visible, but could become visible’, then as ‘what would still have to be thought as a thing relative to the visible’.

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This homogeneity lies in the first instance in the translation of intelligible figures into sensory ideas (both clear and confused ones) and depends in the second instance on the role allocated to the categories of an a priori for the visibility of the sensory. But in either case the invisible behaves towards the visible as a ‘negation-reference’ (zero of . . .), so that it remains throughout at the inside of a single ‘dimensionality of Being’.10 Not only are the visible and the invisible inscribed into a continued and single phenomenal process, with a gradual or sudden transition (it matters little), but above all this one identical process is applied to any phenomenality without exception. This argument arises out of metaphysics, but phenomenology assumes its legacy, at least in its most decisive historical figures (that is to say, all the way to Merleau-Ponty and in conformity with Edmund Husserl).

III. The Manifestation of Essence It is only on the basis of such a conflict of interpretations regarding the connection between the visible and the invisible that it becomes possible to understand in full force – but also (one must insist on this, since the usual readings ignore it) in all its precision – the definitive and foundational decision taken from the outset in 1963 by The Essence of Manifestation . This is particularly true of the third section, which settles ‘The Internal Structure [of Immanence] and the Problem of Its Phenomenological Determination: The Invisible’.11 This is really the essential section, since Section I is limited to displaying phenomenality thought from transcendence, thus from ‘monism’. Section II, in a still mostly polemical fashion, deals with destroying the presupposition of this monism (transcendence) starting from immanence. As for Section IV, for it will be left only (if one can say it like this) the task of interpreting immanence as affectivity and obtaining for it the phenomenological determination as invisible. The heart of the research, then, really lies in Section III, which sets up the powerful if enigmatic paradox of a determination not only of immanence, but also of its phenomenality, by the invisible – a kind of manifestation of the invisible itself and as such. Following the guiding thread of the two fundamental paragraphs of The Essence of Manifestation (§50: “The Facelessness of the Essence” and §51: “Visible and Invisible”) we will try, therefore, to reconstitute the successive stages of this argument. First moment: ‘the invisible is not the antithetical concept of phenomenality, it is rather its first and fundamental determination’; put

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differently, ‘because it is not the antithetical concept of phenomenality, the invisible is not the antithetical concept of the visible ’.12 This declaration nevertheless does not remain without some ambiguity, for one could here still understand that the invisible, for the same reasons as the visible, remains directly involved in a univocal phenomenality, which it does not oppose and which it could hence extend or precede. In this way they would remain in a shared homogeneity. One must immediately point out that the reason why the invisible is here not simply opposed to the visible does not depend on what it forms with the visible but to what ‘phenomenality’ first determines for the invisible, for phenomenality does not come down to the visible alone but refers in a more original way to the invisible. Indeed, but how could we form a notion of a phenomenality of the invisible and starting from it? How could we form a notion of a phenomenality that would first and fundamentally determine the invisible? For that is what is really at stake: Not only does ‘phenomenality’ allow the invisible within it for the same reasons as the regular visible, but it also admits it above all as what defines it most essentially. Or rather, to steer clear of this paradox, should we simply revert to one of the classic positions analysed above, namely, that phenomenality begins with the invisible precisely because it has as its function to bring it finally back to the visible? Yet here, precisely, the invisible does not amount to an unseen [un invu] – this provisional fore-seen [pré-vu] and fore-seeable [pré-visible] invisible – because it remains at bottom a visible of which it is unaware. We must turn even sharper attention to the second moment: If the invisible defines phenomenality originally, it does not owe it to a provisional and preliminary non-visibility, a sort of delayed visibility, but rather to its most essential character. It is essentially, hence definitively, invisible by virtue of the same privilege that determines not only its phenomenality, but also its essence : ‘the invisible phenomenalizes itself in itself as such; it is phenomenon through and through, revelation and, even more, the essence of revelation.’13 The invisible does not belong to phenomenality for the reason of a simple potential visible but by full right and throughout as already and straightaway a phenomenon and the essence of phenomenality. This means an invisible essentially phenomenon, hence a phenomenon essentially invisible. Can one avoid a contradiction in terms here, one of those hyperbolic excesses for which phenomenologists are so often reproached and which would disqualify any pretension to reality? Before rushing into the same old arguments, it is worth rereading the formulations employed here: If the invisible finds itself acknowledged as a phenomenon, it still does not take on responsibility for some phenomenon or other in the world, that is to say, one or another intramundane phenomenon, as it would have to be

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fulfilled in the light of the world. For as ‘this absence of the world and of its light is not nothing, it is not the absence of phenomenality’.14 The invisible finds itself acknowledged as a full phenomenon to the extent to which it takes responsibility for a completely different ‘object’: ‘the invisible phenomenalizes itself in itself as such; it is phenomenon through and through, revelation and, even more, the essence of revelation.’15 It does not have this invisible to make visible, nor that being to adjust to the world in the light of things – a light which moreover retains all its prerogatives, its dimensions and its operations – but this non-‘object’ that Henry here calls essence, the essential of manifestation. Here and elsewhere, The invisible is not merely revelation in itself through and through, it rather defines the nature of this revelation. . . . The invisible, in the positivity of its specific phenomenological effectiveness, constitutes the ‘how’ of the revelation of the essence of revelation.16 The invisible belongs to phenomenality and obtains even the status of phenomenon not because it would become finally visible but because it determines the possibility and actuality of manifestation itself, as its essence: ‘The original revelation of the essence . . . is the invisible.’17 Put differently, ‘The determination of the phenomenality of the essence by the concept of the invisible does not merely define the work of the essence in its effective accomplishment, it makes it possible.’18 The essence of the invisible considered as a phenomenon is not due to what this invisible itself manifests (as) one or another phenomenon, but to phenomenality itself, such that it makes possible all other phenomena. The essence of the invisible consists in manifesting the essence of phenomenality, which is itself invisible. Finally a third moment occurs, which has as its task to make it possible to access in what sense phenomenality can itself self-phenomenalize and, what is more, phenomenalize itself as invisible. At stake is understanding that ‘the essence is invisible’19 because, reciprocally and more essentially, what ‘hides itself is the essence itself’.20 The essence does not remain invisible arbitrarily or due to helplessness but in essence, precisely because its essence requires it, for the essence of phenomenality cannot make itself visible unless it vanishes as such. In fact, only an ontically defined, hence ontically finite, phenomenon can appear: In order to appear – namely, to enter into a light and to expose itself to it – one must first take part in the world, the only place where a light can be lit. In short, only a being and an intramundane being can become visible, by throwing itself into the light, which fills always and only a world. Consequently, it is a matter of manifesting and phenomenalizing neither this intramundane being, nor its finite manifestation, but rather the essence of manifestation, the ‘how’ of manifestation. In short, at

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stake is the phenomenality of phenomena; no visibility of being at all, nor any worldly light whatsoever, would be able to serve us. Quite the opposite, the only certain path that would here be open will consist in abandoning this light and its world, its visibility and its beings. ‘The idea of a manifestation of the essence in the world is in principle absurd.’21 From this follows an obscurity ‘Deprived of the light which arises in the horizon opened by transcendence, and fundamentally foreign to this light which belongs to the world’, and that ‘rather remains in the night’.22 What Henry here calls ‘the work of the night’23 – although, or rather because, he understands it in Novalis’s sense – takes on a strictly conceptual meaning: ‘Night is the reality of the essence.’24 In fact, by suspending visibility and its worldly ecstasis (for, as Novalis says, ‘the rule of night is without time and space’ [zeitlos und raumlos ist der Nacht Herrschaft]), the night and its ‘lovely sun’ have ‘opened our infinite eyes’ [unendlichen Augen]. Thus the night neither suspends manifestation nor experiences it in a certain realm and with a certain splendour, but ‘Its presence alone reveals the wondrous splendour of the Kingdoms of the world’ [die Wunderherrlichkeit der Reiche der Welt].25 The night does not phenomenalize itself in the light of the world, but it does not appear any less as such, in the very obscurity that it alone opens and administers. Understood in their phenomenological sense, Novalis’s words certainly do not mean to say that the night reveals the kingdoms of the world (the opening of the world does this perfectly in the light of the day) but that it reveals what the worldly light upsets and eliminates in them, namely, the wondrous splendour that alone makes them possible, not their manifestation but the essence of this manifestation. For just as transcendence is grounded in immanence (far from purely and simply abolishing itself there), 26 so ‘The hidden state of the essence is its attire, its manner of presenting itself, finally its phenomenality.’27 In fact, this paradox, ‘the paradox whereby ultimately every fundamental phenomenological inquiry bearing on the essence is gauged’, 28 proves illuminating in the end. Or rather, because a paradox illuminates by definition always as much as it remains a figure of arrival [apparition] and not only of appearance [apparence], the paradox of an invisible phenomenality confirms a very classical Husserlian thesis: Phenomenology does not apply only to the phenomenon as visible (object or being) but to the Phänomen im Wie , to the ‘how’ of the phenomenon, which is inevitably invisible. Henry simply radicalizes its import: [The] negation included in the concept of the invisible is not that of phenomenality but determines the mode according to which phenomenality phenomenalizes itself originally and helps us to conceive the concept . . . .

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The invisible . . . constitutes the ‘how’ of the revelation of the essence of revelation and determines this ‘how’ phenomenologically.29 If there were to be a difficulty here, it would not consist in the indeed exclusive insistence on the privilege of the ‘how’ of the phenomenon over the phenomenon itself in phenomenology but in the allocation of phenomenology only to this ‘how’ and, especially, in its denomination as invisible, at the risk of hypostasizing one by the other. For can a mode, a ‘how’, in short, a style, censor a concept and, by realizing the concept, become a quid , even an aliquid , which would be set up in opposition to another aliquid ? The difficulty, if there really is one, which would still have to be established, depends less on some lax heterodoxy than on a Husserlian orthodoxy that has been radicalized too far. Without doubt it is with a vivid consciousness of this danger that the fourth moment of the analysis attempts to control it. For the invisible to remain mode and manner of the pure phenomenal ‘how’ and not a different type among phenomena, Henry decides to name it neither object nor even being but to use a term whose provisional indeterminacy would preserve instead any surreptitious hypostasis, namely, the term ‘life’. In fact, ‘all life is by essence invisible; the invisible is the essence of life .’30 Because ‘the essence of reality and of life resides in the invisible, we cannot actually find it in the world, and nothing which shows itself in the world can contain the essence or make it manifest ’.31 Put differently, the invisible is nothing which might be beyond the visible, it is nothing ‘transcendent’, it is the original essence of life such that, since it takes place in a sphere of radical immanence, it never arises in transcendence and, moreover, cannot show itself in it .32 Yet this invisibility of principle nevertheless does not constitute a loophole or a concession to the indeterminate. Rather it is necessary as soon as we seriously undertake to consider how we have access to our life – this life that we do not only have but which we are. For the question does not consist in deciding whether life is or is not : Both can be said, and Henry does actually say them.33 It is born from the paradoxically obvious fact that no one sees his or her life as one may see a being, that no one can produce its concept or attain the least definition of it. Life only lets itself be said in a negative mode, despite the fact that it precisely has the privilege of negating any negativity. For my life only conceals itself, withdraws and flees far from me as inaccessible and foreign because it happens to me so intimately that I cannot watch it come to me, nor establish the least gap between it and me – this gap without which transcendence, intentionality and horizon cannot

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operate or let anything show itself. I do not see my life because I am it – or more exactly, because I am only within it. Life is that in which we live.34 Hence, my life cannot be seen because it will not let itself be aimed at, even under the exact account of the face.35 In short, the ‘facelessness’ of essence means ultimately that ‘life does not have a face’, it is ‘faceless’.36 ‘Life is invisible’37 not because it withdraws and conceals itself but because it moves so far into me that it coincides with me and that I have no means of aiming at it at a distance from myself. Invisible because in-vis-able – since we can only aim at what belongs to the world and is open to it. And yet I have access to it, since it phenomenalizes itself for the same reason it does not show itself. Must one conclude that what does not show itself could nevertheless phenomenalize itself? Without doubt, for ‘life senses itself’ and ‘the essence of life resides in self-affection’ because it ‘constitutes itself the content that it receives and which affects it’.38 I can never doubt what I sense inasmuch as I sense it: as long as I do not relate it to an external object but assign this feeling to what gives and gives itself, to sensing as such. ‘No one has ever seen a feeling, a feeling has never caused anything to be seen’, simply because ‘a feeling cannot be perceived’.39 No one has ever seen a feeling, especially not I myself – but that is also the reason why I remain alive and am not dead. Similarly for suffering, the sensed (and the feeling) par excellence: ‘No one has ever seen his or her suffering, anguish, or joy. Suffering, as any modality of the world, is invisible.’40 And under this connection also, one would not be able to avoid comparing life to God, as Henry does not hesitate doing as early as 1963: This is why the absolute permits itself to be understood by starting from this hidden state or as that which maintains itself in this state; this is why ‘No one has seen God’, and finally why God is the ‘hidden God’.41 Yet this coming together (what those who denounce it do not see) teaches us precisely as much if not more by a gap it crosses in silence, it seems to me: I die if I see God (and this justifies why we compare God to death or to the sun), while to the contrary I live life as long as I do not see it, precisely because it phenomenalizes itself inasmuch as it remains invisible and as, if I pretend to see it – that is, objectify it as a being that would show itself in the world – not only will I not see any of it, but I will possibly substitute a corpse for it. And if this corpse were mine, I would already be dead. The reason that led us to introducing ‘the paradox whereby ultimately every fundamental phenomenological inquiry bearing on the essence is gauged’,42 namely, the paradox of an invisible phenomenality, is hence proven correct in strictly phenomenological fashion. There are indeed certain phenomena – and the most indisputable, for they are the only ones that coincide immediately with myself (life, suffering, pleasure, joy, and

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the like or more exactly, my life, my suffering, my pleasure, my joy) – that can only phenomenalize themselves by remaining invisible and must manifest themselves by the feeling in which I experience them. These phenomena are manifested without being aimed at, hence without visibility, but by the affection of original feeling. To pretend to make them visible would amount to killing them. Life remains a phenomenon of the night.

IV. The Equivocity of Phenomenality The distinction between the invisible and the visible according to their respective phenomenalities hence results from a purely phenomenological decision, not metaphysical, not religious. What remains is to measure its magnitude and especially its critical import. The Essence of Manifestation marks this distinction with the most explicit clarity. It posits first the structural heterogeneity of the visible and the invisible, on which it confers a validity that is as much ontological (‘the eidetic heterogeneity of the ultimate ontological structures . . . insurmountable and definitive’) as it is first phenomenological (‘the structural ontological heterogeneity of the ultimate dimensions of phenomenality’).43 Such an ‘opposition between the invisible and the world’44 does not, or at least not at first, draw a boundary between two ontic regions, or draw a parallel between being and beings, even less between ‘the fundamental determinations of an ethic’.45 It only testifies but radically so to ‘the impossibility for the invisible “becoming visible”.’46 Put differently, ‘the invisible and the visible would not be able to transform themselves into one another, and no passage, no time binds them together, but they subsist apart from one another.’47 And one must understand this distance as ‘an absolute difference’. It is absolute to the point of establishing the invisible in an ‘indifference’ as absolute (freed from any connection) in regard to the visible as that of the visible in regard to the invisible. Each is ‘entirely occupied with [it]self . . . ignores [the other] and cannot know it’. The difference hence does not allow any connection, not even a forgetting or a conflict, between the two modes of phenomenality, but the ‘indifference of this difference’,48 which neutralizes it, establishes a radical equivocity that is without doubt unique even in the phenomenological tradition. But such an indifferent difference is also and especially opposed to an almost unanimous decision in the phenomenologists contemporary with Henry. Thus, when Jean-Paul Sartre, 20 years before The Essence of Manifestation, introduces the question of the phenomenon definitively into France with Being and Nothingness, he establishes the distinction between the in-itself and

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the for-itself from the outset at the interior of the field of ‘the transphenomenal being of phenomena’, although it is thought by him as radical.49 Yet this formal univocity of ‘being’ (besides being largely indeterminate from a strictly ontological point of view) is finally adapted into the univocity of modes of phenomenality of this ‘being which we shall call the phenomenon and which will be provided with two dimensions of being, the dimension in-itself and the dimension for-itself (from this point of view there would be only one phenomenon: the world)’.50 Thus, not only does the world (and it is not even a matter of what The Essence of Manifestation wants to relativize) become the only phenomenon (and the only mode of phenomenalization), but, very logically, Sartre establishes a metamorphosis between these two derived and regional modes of phenomenality and a continued transition: Since in fact ‘The for-itself corresponds . . . to an expanding de-structuring of the in-itself’,51 one can conclude that these ‘two radically distinct modes of being: that of the For-itself which has to be what it is – i.e., which is what it is not and which is not what it is – and that of the In-itself which is what it is’, remain precisely not distinct; but to the contrary and more essentially ‘the For-itself and the In-itself are reunited by a synthetic connection which is nothing other than the For-itself itself.’52 In this way, the transition and the transformation, the impossibility and even the absurdity of which The Essence of Manifestation wanted to demonstrate, are fulfilled: ‘no passage’.53 The opposition to Merleau-Ponty, however direct, doubtless cannot become as explicit, since in all likelihood the publication of The Essence of Manifestation could not have known the texts that appeared in 1964 in The Visible and the Invisible , although they dated from 1959 to 1960. Yet the connection strikes us more strongly, as Merleau-Ponty seems here to take up and to contradict Henry’s formulations: Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar [sic] which is presented to me as such within the world.54 Let us take up this strange and complicated text. Obviously, the invisible is here not ‘contradictory’ (Henry said ‘antithetical’) to the visible, but it is articulated directly here. Yet this articulation does not simply mean that the invisible is just as much a matter of phenomenality as the visible (what Henry had admitted in a sense). It suggests that the invisible assumes all its phenomenality from the visible itself and for it alone: ‘When I say then that every visible is invisible . . . One has to understand that it is the visibility itself that involves a non-visibility’.55 The invisible, then, does not have

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any specific mode of manifestation available that would be irreducible to that of the visible, but, if one may say so, (the invisible) hooks onto that of the visible, the only direct one, for the reason, in fact, of what is ‘relative to the visible’, 56 that is to say, in the position of the a priori or of the Kantian concept appearing indirectly through intuition that gives it shape. The invisible completes the visible and, by a stroke of good luck, finds in it a borrowed visibility, which does not belong to it. One thus speaks of the invisible as a simple ‘framework’57 of the visible, where it phenomenalizes residually by ‘encroachment’.58 This exactly reverses Henry’s analysis. The invisible, coupled to the visible in this way, without any specific phenomenality, arises well and truly from the world: The invisible ‘is presented to me as such within the world’, hence in ‘the same . . . world’ as the visible, in ‘one sole world’.59 And to conclude that ‘A certain relation between the visible and the invisible, where the invisible is not only non-visible’, but is its ‘counterpart’, means it is ‘in the line of the visible’.60 Not only does the invisible not phenomenalize itself here in itself (nor of course originally) in the face of the phenomenality of the world, but it is also lowered to the point of merely indicating the transition of the world by its absence of visibility. A third opposition, already less implicit, finally comes up in a note of section 51 of The Essence of Manifestation , namely, an opposition to Husserl. Still emphasizing that the visible and the invisible ‘cannot enter into the common genre of a more general essence nor can they be subsumed by it’,61 Henry specifies in a note that the only admissible exception would be that of a ‘purely formal concept of phenomenality . . . whose generality assuredly and in the same way deal[s] with both the invisible and the visible’. But these determinations would only retain a possible validity at the level of ‘formal ontology’, hence of an ‘abstraction’, which ‘leaves the level of reality’. If, to the contrary, one wants to root oneself in ‘the domain of material or concrete ontology’, then ‘the invisible and the visible are the fundamental essences’, which cannot be confused and whose modes of phenomenalization prove decidedly equivocal.62 By definition, formal ontology cannot avoid this equivocity, nor even relieve it, because it does not know of any ontic thing or difference in aid of objectness, indeed of an ‘original objectness’ [Urgegenständlichkeit], itself so abstract that it would only pretend to collect under a single ‘account of diverse [mancherlei ] figures, linked among each other, for example, “thing”, “property”, “relation”, “state of things”, “group” ’, without specifying how they get there, if not precisely by abstraction. Yet, above all, this abstract univocity still does not permit establishing a region, as formal as it would be, that would integrate formally the material (real) regions, since the formal region is not even an extra region but ‘the form of region in general’, ‘properly speaking not a

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region, but the empty form of region in general ’.63 The formal unification of phenomenality by recourse to objectness can, if need be, really satisfy a strict and literally formal ontology, but one must at least recognize, so Henry objects, that such a formal ontology loses any phenomenological legitimacy regarding that which concerns what appears and the modes of appearing of actual phenomena. Not only does formal ontology solely unify phenomena abstractly, but in the best of cases it only succeeds in masking the seriousness and the originality of their real modes of phenomenality. In this sense, The Essence of Manifestation recovers Heidegger’s celebrated objection to Husserl: By dint of indiscriminately ceding to the obsession with objectness, phenomenology as rigorous science does not remain faithful to the phenomena and to their specific phenomenalities – to the point of proving itself ‘non-phenomenological ’ [unphänomenologisch].64

V. What Shows Itself and What Does Not Show Itself The encounter between these two critiques of Husserl depends nevertheless on circumstance, inasmuch as Henry objects also and especially to Heidegger in the name and by virtue of the ‘so radical heterogeneity’ of phenomenality.65 In fact, a page before the note that challenged the univocity of phenomenality according to Husserl, the same section 51 of The Essence of Manifestation devoted a first and even longer note to directing a different but comparable reproach to Heidegger. It is a matter of condemning the presupposition that supports any postulation of (purported) univocity of phenomenality – the claim, never criticized because never really seen, that all phenomenality is accomplished by unveiling, hence following ecstasis, the horizon, and transcendence and inversely that the obscurity of the invisible is reduced to a lapse of unveiling, to a denial of truth. For confirmation, the note cites a significant formula drawn from ‘On the Essence of Truth’: ‘From the point of view of truth conceived as revelation [Wahrheit als Entborgenheit], then, concealment [die Verborgenheit] is non-revelation [die Un-entborgenheit] and thus the untruth which is specific of and peculiar to the nature of truth.’66 The objection is unfolded clearly and forcefully. Heidegger appears not to doubt for a moment that the unveiling determines the non-unveiling (the concealment or the invisible) originally, in other words, that the invisible only offers a negative counterpart to the visible.67 He only admits this decision by an interpolated clause (otherwise would he not have discussed it himself?) indicating that it is a good idea to think the concealment from the opening, the covering over from the uncovering, hence, the invisible from the visible; thus, he does not envision for

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a moment that the invisible could and must also, indeed first, be thought from itself, as an autonomous and even primordial figure of phenomenality, exercising even the function of a condition of possibility for the visible itself. Therefore, not only is Heidegger missing ‘the essence thought of in these investigations [i.e., those of The Essence of Manifestation] as the essence of original revelation and grasped as the invisible’68 – that is to say, he misses the specific and irreducible phenomenality of the invisible – but he also masks in this way the equivocity of phenomenality, namely, the ‘essential structural heterogeneity’ between the visible and the invisible.69 Eliminating the phenomenality of the invisible, he must hence also abandon that of life because he can only see it in the ecstatic opening where the visible beings of the world appear. In the light of being, life has in fact only a ‘negative’ status.70 Without pretending (and not having the need) to confirm with other texts that Heidegger really did at bottom conceal the invisible in his positions by reducing it to the rank of a simple lack of the visible; without excluding that, on the contrary, Heidegger incessantly attempted to re-establish the primacy of the invisible over the visible (since the Sinn des Seins all the way to the Ereignis), we maintain the essential part of the critique: In any case, this in-visible according to Heidegger does not coincide in what is essential with this other invisible, that of life, according to Henry. This central question, which decides without any doubt the connection of Henry to Heidegger, has not yet received the treatment it requires. In fact, one could retrace step by step, since The Essence of Manifestation all the way to Material Phenomenology and to the final publications (especially De la phénoménologie), a polemic obstinately undertaken less against the existential analytic than particularly against the definition of the phenomenon elaborated by section 7 of Sein und Zeit. I will limit myself here to some essential remarks. Heidegger, as we know, defines the phenomenon as ‘that which shows itself’, the self-showing [das, was sich zeigt, das Sichzeigende], the manifest [das Offenbare], that of which manifestation and phenomenality consist in showing itself in the open, or rather, more explicitly, ‘that which shows itself in itself [das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende], the manifest’.71 From this definition of the phenomenon, it follows that phenomenological work consists in letting ‘that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’ [Das, was sich zeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst her sehen lassen].72 In this way, the phenomenon lets itself be neither constituted nor synthesized but itself takes the initiative in showing itself as such. This self-demonstration from itself, a radical decision in which phenomenology breaks with what remains Kantian in it, we

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owe to Heidegger and to him alone. Henry receives it and – let me insist on this decisive point – never puts it into question. He only attempts to understand it with precision and hence questions it seriously from the beginning of section II of The Essence of Manifestation: ‘The assertion which tells us that Being must be able to show itself is ambiguous.’73 What sort of ambiguity? Of course the one that emerges between the phenomenality of the visible (the things of the world) and the phenomenality of the invisible (life other than the world, because in itself and it alone). Here, Heidegger and Henry diverge enough to begin to separate. From the self-showing of the phenomenon, Heidegger draws an immediate consequence: What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’? What is it that must be called a ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly [ausdrücklichen Aufweisung]? Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all [sich . . . gerade nicht zeigt]: it is something that lies hidden [concealed – verborgen ist], in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself.74 Yet what is essential in this debate does not depend on the fulfilment or failure of the project but on the possibility that what does not show itself finishes always by showing itself, that the not-yet-phenomenon ends always by making itself phenomenon, that the non-visible always ends up becoming visible: ‘Behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden [wohl aber kann das, was Phänomen werden soll, verborgen sein]. And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology. Covered-up-ness is the counterconcept to ‘phenomenon’.75 Henry takes the opposite direction. He contests the claim that the invisible would be ‘the antithetical concept ’76 of the visible and that ‘That which does not show itself is the first moment of that which shows itself, its original determination and at the same time its limit-mode.’77 He questions not only whether phenomenology can in all cases proceed to a putting into the express light of invisible phenomena – considered simply as still unseen phenomena, destined for the scene of ecstatic truth – but especially

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whether phenomenology must and has the right to attempt to place into light all the phenomena. Is it not possible that, to the contrary, certain phenomena cannot appear, not by a defect, but because they cannot do so in principle? Does the method of phenomenology (unveiling, putting into light) always and necessarily coincide with its ‘object’ (the phenomenon to manifest)? Or, is it not possible in certain cases that the ‘identity between the object and the method of phenomenology loses its evidence’?78 For example, when it is a matter of phenomenalizing life. If, to the contrary, life . . . escapes from the domain of the visible . . . then the identity between the object and method of phenomenology is broken abruptly. It would give way to a heterogeneity so radical that it is first presented to thought as an abyss.79 Here there is not a refusal (as if by bad will) of phenomenalizing itself at stake but of the work of a phenomenality that does not arise from the open, from evidence and from visibility because it does not give itself to be seen but senses itself by self-affection. Not to respect this phenomenality of the invisible as invisible, in another presence than that of the day, goes back to not respecting the things themselves by imposing on them a phenomenological indifference. ‘The appearing which unveils in the Difference of the world . . . is in principle totally indifferent . . . indifferent to all that which it unveils.’80 The right of the invisible to the difference of its phenomenalization is only captured against the univocity of ontological difference, which remains obsessed with abiding by the ecstasis of the opening. This question does not lack radicality since it implicates the univocity of the horizon of the phenomenality of being to the point where it maybe also implicates the concepts of the horizon and of beingness themselves, thus of being. The long polemic of Henry, which put him in opposition not only to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but especially to Husserl and Heidegger, was nevertheless doubtless not solitary: Emmanuel Levinas, in his own fashion, shared the same quarrel, to measure which phenomena phenomenalize themselves according to the invisible and solely under this nocturnal light. After all, the face is not seen any more than the saying is heard; the call does not depart from the invisible more than the hearing. And if only what gives itself can show itself, then givenness itself, which thus makes possible all showing, would never be able to show itself, nor to convert its invisibility into visibility. It is not the least legacy of Henry to have so forcefully and clearly posed this question – a question of method . Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner

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Notes and Works Cited 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12

‘. . . ea quae de natura incommutabili et invisibili . . . non ex consuetudine visibilium . . . esse metienda.’ Augustine, De Trinitate V.1.2. Martin Heidegger, Séminaire de Zähringen , in Questions IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 339; German translation by Curt Ochwald, Gesamtausgabe 15 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986), 399. See the letters to Roger Munier, 16 April 1973 and 22 February 1974, cited in Martin Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1983), 111–13, 114–15. Nothing more consistent than inferring that ‘the event is the most unapparent of the unapparent’ [Das Ereignis ist das Unscheinbarste des Unscheinbaren] in: Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe 15 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), 247. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3. [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.] Dominique Janicaud cites this text, but sees in it only the obvious and immediate proof of a ‘thought strictly outside the realm of phenomenology’ (‘The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 78 [translation modified]), without finding out whether phenomenology precisely does not have a strict/precise realm, in the sense in which a transcendental philosophy could and must set its limits, because it is exercised a priori, precisely because it never proceeds a priori. The response to the paradox of such a phenomenology of the invisible will be found in the consciousness that ‘the idea of a manifestation of the essence in the world is in principle absurd’ (Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation , §45 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 480; The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 380. [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.] René Descartes, Principia Philosophiae , I, §§44–45. Descartes, Dioptrique , IV, AT VI, 113. In regard to this defiguration by codification, see my study Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes, §12 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981, 1991), 240–1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , A 51. Nicolas Malebranche, Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques , II.1 and III.2; Oeuvres Complètes X (Paris: Vrin, 1959), 19 and 27. Plato, Republic X, 597a and VI, 511e, respectively. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation , §51, 559/446. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 310–11; The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 257. Translation modified. [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.] See Yorihiro Yamagata, ‘L’invisible chez Michel Henry et Merleau-Ponty’, Cartesiana 4 (1982). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 349/279. Ibid., §50, 549/438 and §51, 557/444. This argument will be maintained to the very end: ‘Yet the invisible is not an adequate concept for thinking life unless we

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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distinguish it absolutely from an invisible which is only a limited mode of the visible and belongs hence still in fact to the system of consciousness as one of its degrees’ (the allusion is to Merleau-Ponty). Or: ‘Even less will the invisible be the simple negation of the visible or its result, the hypostasis of a negative term pretending to be valid for being and defining its positivity.’ For ‘the invisible is not the antithetical, formal, and empty concept of phenomenality but its effectuation in the affectivity of feeling.’ De la phénoménologie, Phénoménologie de la vie, vol. I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 48, 49, 50. Ibid., §50, 550/439. Emphasis mine. See also: ‘the determination of the phenomenality of essence by the concept of the invisible does not merely define the work of the essence in its effective accomplishment, it makes it possible’ (553/441). Ibid., 554–5/442. Ibid., 550/439. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 551/439–40. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 550/438. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 553/441. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 549/438. Ibid., §45, 480/380. Ibid., 480/380. Ibid., §50, 549/438. Ibid., 554/441. ‘Work of the Night’, 549/438. Ibid., 549/438. Novalis, ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’, in Werke in einem Band, ed. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel (Munich: C. Hanser, 1981), 153 and 150, cited in §50 of The Essence of Manifestation, 554–5/442. One must emphasize this: In no way does Henry oppose immanence and transcendence here as in a deadly battle but always grounds transcendence in immanence, as in its phenomenal truth – ‘Once they are stripped of the faulty meanings which in a philosophical pseudo-genesis confer upon them an ontic origin which they do not possess, the concepts of transcendence and immanence cease to oppose one another . . . . It is because immanence is not a category of a being that transcendence is not a category of a being either. Immanence is a pure ontological category, it is the fundamental ontological category which makes surpassing itself possible as such . . . . The concepts of transcendence and immanence can then be grasped in their true relationship which is not a relationship of opposition but of foundation. The understanding of the essence of transcendence as immanence shows the emptiness of the criticisms which rest rather on the simple opposition between their concepts. Actually, the pretense of questioning the philosophical value of the concept of immanence, more precisely of refusing it all possible ontological meaning, is useless when the foundation which it lays down is no more than the extension of transcendence to the totality of the phenomenological field of Being’ (The Essence of Manifestation, §33, 322–3/259–60). How many polemics against material phenomenology come from this obstinate opposition, which is here denounced in advance? One must take sections 32–33 very seriously, which establish definitively that ‘immanence is the essence of

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30 31 32 33

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transcendence’, far from contesting it (ibid., §32, 309/249). See Yorihiro Yamagata, ‘L’immanence en tant que fondement de la transcendance: Ontologie de Michel Henry’, Rüiki 2 (1980). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 552/440. Ibid. Ibid., 551/439–40. Emphasis mine. Similarly: ‘The “invisible” is the mode of a positive and truly fundamental revelation’ (ibid., §7, 57/44). Emphasis mine. Ibid., 556/443. Ibid., §51, 565/451. Ibid., 568/453. A study on the meaning of being according to material phenomenology is still missing. It must confront a decisive thesis: ‘The assertion which tells us that Being must be able to show itself is ambiguous’ (The Essence of Manifestation, §17, 165/137). And this must be connected with other statements: either ‘Being is a phenomenon only when it is at a distance from itself’ (§10, 81/66) or ‘The immediate is Being itself as originally given to itself in immanence’ (§36, 344/276). Later he even sounds indecisive: Either ‘Living means being’ or ‘being means appearing, showing itself’ (De la phénoménologie, 40 and 41). This is not a tautology (although here tautology could actually seem appropriate), but see Acts 17.28. Once again, the supposedly head-on opposition between Levinas and Henry seems very fragile. See Rodolphe Calin, Levinas et l’exception du soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). For the face also cannot be seen: ‘The face is present in its refusal to be contained . . . neither seen, nor touched’ (Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), 168; Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194), because it cannot be aimed at: ‘The trace of a past in a face is not the absence of a yet non-revealed, but the anarchy of what has never been present, of an infinite which commands in the face of the other, and which . . . could not be aimed at’ (Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 124; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 97). Respectively, De la phénoménologie, 49 and The Essence of Manifestation, 549/438 (title of §50, which the text itself does not take up again). Henry, De la phénoménologie, 79. Ibid. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §61, 680/543 and 681/544, respectively. Henry, De la phénoménologie, 65 (and 200). See also: ‘no one has ever seen life and no one will ever see it’ (ibid., 48). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §45, 481/382. This entire analysis can be repeated one more time when dealing with phenomena that belong to life. Hence the paradox of a ‘painting [that would] assign itself the task of painting the invisible’, precisely the ‘hieroglyphs of the invisible’, for example, in what we call abstract painting. Henry, Voir l’invisible: Sur Kandinsky (Paris: BourinJulliard, 1988), 22 and 244; Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2009), 9 and 142. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §50, 552/440.

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38 43

44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64

65 66

Ibid., §51, 562/448 and 563/449, respectively. See also: ‘the radical ontological heterogeneity of their [visible and invisible] essences’ (564/450). Ibid., 564/450. Ibid. Ibid., 562/448. Ibid., 561/448. Ibid. See also: ‘in the essence, there is nothing external, nothing foreign . . . there is nothing opposed in it’ (§35, 352/283). One forgets too often that a similar difference (if not the same) crosses self-affection itself: ‘Auto-affection has a twofold meaning’ (§24, 229/187), a ‘fundamental ambiguity’ (§31, 289/234), which plays between ‘the affection of the act of objectification by the pure content which it sets up as an object for itself and the original affection of this act by itself’ (304/245). Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 29; Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), lxii. [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 719/625. Ibid., 127/84 (a strange reminiscence of Henri Bergson, although of course censured). Ibid., 711/617. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §51, 561/448. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 269/215. Ibid., 300/247. Ibid., 310/257. Ibid., 282/229. Ibid., 269/216. For ‘the visible is pregnant with the invisible’ (ibid.). Ibid., 269/215 and 269/216. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 281/227 and 269/215. Criticism of Merleau-Ponty crosses Henry’s entire work. In particular, Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Sections 21 and 31 show how Merleau-Ponty has abolished ‘the insurmountable duality of the two bodies’ (physical body and living body or flesh) ‘in extending them to the entire world’ (163 and 165). See also Henry, De la phénoménologie, chapter 1 and Yamagata, ‘L’invisible chez Merleau-Ponty et Michel Henry’, Cartesiana 4 (1982). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 561/447. Ibid., 561/447, note 4. Husserliana III, Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), §10. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, §13, ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe 20 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), 178. Henry has often very markedly positioned himself vis-à-vis and distanced himself from Husserl but never as clearly as in ‘Hyletic and Material Phenomenology’, reprinted in Material Phenomenology as chapter 1. Henry, Material Phenomenology, 122/90 [translation modified]. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §51, 559/446, note 3, citing ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’, published in Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973), 193;

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‘On the Essence of Truth’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 130. In fact, this objection is not obvious, since Heidegger adds shortly afterwards that ‘The concealment of beings as a whole, untruth proper, is older (älter) than any revelation (Offenbarung) of this or that being’ (ibid., translation modified). One must thus say that, even from the point of view of unveiling, darkening remains for him still more essential. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 559/446, note 3. Ibid., 561/448. Thus Sein und Zeit §10, 50/75 (Heidegger refers to philosophy of life as ‘defective in principle’ [grundsätzlicher Mangel ], §10, 46/72); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962). [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the German version, the second to the English translation.] On the status given to life in and before Being and Time in connection to Michel Henry, see Jean-Claude Gens, ‘Heidegger à Fribourg: le “Frémissement” d’un savoir de la vie’, in L’épreuve de la vie. Actes du colloque de Cerisy, ed. Alain David and Jean Greisch (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 319–32. Heidegger, Being and Time, 28/51. Ibid., 34/58. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 165/137. This question comes back incessantly. For example: ‘Being is thus not a univocal concept. Two dimensions traverse it and tear apart its primal unity (to the extent that it would ever have one): 1. The dimension of the visible where things are given to us in the light of the world and are lived by us as external phenomena, and 2. The dimension of the invisible where, without the light of this world, even before the emergence of this horizon of exteriority that puts every thing at a distance from ourselves and offers it as an object to us . . . life has already taken hold of its own being.’ Henry, Voir l’invisible: Sur Kandinsky, 18; Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, 7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 35/59. Heidegger’s emphasis. Ibid., 36/60. Here it is Heidegger who without saying it (if not without knowing) assumes the gospel word: ‘Nothing hidden which will not be revealed – Nihil opertum quod non revelatur’ (Lk. 12.2). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §51, 557/444. Ibid., 558/445. Henry, Material Phenomenology, 122/89. Ibid., 122/90. Henry, De la phénoménologie, 63. (See the same terms, 198–9.).

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Chapter 2

The Essence of Life: Drive or Desire? Renaud Barbaras

The entirety of Michel Henry’s philosophical enterprise is constructed in opposition to what he calls ontological monism, that philosophy that sees in exposition at a distance – Gegenständlichkeit (objectivity) – the fundamental condition of appearance, and in intentionality, the law of phenomenality. In response, Henry thus tirelessly poses the question: Is the manner in which intentionality is given to itself, itself intentional? Does ek-static givenness also reign over the impression wherein it affects itself? His reply is obviously negative: Intentionality is revealed to itself in a mode that is not intentional, a mode in which no distance is established and no visibility unfolds. Henry refers here to the mode of impression that affects itself, possesses itself completely, and struggles only with itself, because, as he writes: The impression is only possible (and thus objectification ulterior to the impression is only possible) if it touches itself at each point of its being such that, in this original embrace with itself, it impresses upon itself, and that its impressional character consists of nothing other than this first unceasing impressionality.1 It follows from this that the task of a ‘radical phenomenology’ is to dissociate these two modes of phenomenalization.2 And, specifically, to liberate impressional phenomenality from the grasp of intentionality in order to uncover the status of a ‘fundamental and a priori possibility’ that confers upon it an absolutely original and constituting character.3 However, the passivity that is experienced in the impression, or rather, of which the impression is the experience, itself refers to another passivity that is, so to speak, superior, in that, if the impression is given to itself in the sense that it is its own givenness – its own appearance – it nevertheless does not give

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itself as impression and as the impression that it is. The fundamental powerlessness that characterizes the impression, given that it comes to itself without being responsible for this coming, reveals a power that remains at the heart of the impression and that is the very thing that it rests within. This power is nothing other than life itself, insofar as, according to the abrupt definition that Henry proposes, ‘life is nothing other than that which experiences itself without differing from itself, such that this experience is an experience of self and not of something else, a self-revelation in a radical sense.’4 Life must be understood as this originary and transcendental affectivity that makes the experience of itself possible, without the distance that characterizes all impressions. This means that the appearance to and in itself of the impression is always at the same time a self-revelation of life: The impression remains in life because it is life itself that appears in it. Yet, saying that the impression proceeds from a life that appears in it, that its appearance refers to this originary affectivity that is life itself, is necessarily to give this impression a flesh . This flesh designates nothing other than the belonging to the life that is at work and manifests itself in the experience of this impression: The impression has, or rather is, a flesh (Leib) because its proper erleben is the reverse of an originary leben . Life, Henry tells us, is not the dead identity of a thing but an impressional matter that never ceases to experience itself: ‘This living auto-impressionality, it is a flesh. It is only because it belongs to a flesh, because it carries within it this pathetic and living auto-impressionality, that all conceivable impression can be what it is.’5 Thus the flesh is what characterizes the impression when life manifests itself within it, but insofar as the flesh is nothing other than the living auto-impressionality of the impression, this flesh is first of all the flesh of life itself. It refers both to the impression itself, given that life is attested in it, and to life itself, given that it realizes itself only in selfimpressing impressions. The flesh is like the point of articulation, or the common element of impressionality and life. It is the same originary flesh that exists as life and experiences itself as impression or affection: Life is the ratio essendi of the flesh, the affection its ratio cognoscendi . It follows that Henry’s conception of life – the absolute that underpins phenomenality – is worked out under the form of a philosophy of the flesh. But this observation is rather perplexing, as in spite of their profound co-originality, the flesh and life, at least as Henry characterizes them, seem to commit us to two phenomenologically very different paths. Life is the element of originary phenomenality. It is the absolute immanence with out which nothing could appear. In other words, it is the givenness without distance without which no givenness at a distance could come to pass or be

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effectuated within life. Thanks to the disassociation of the two modes of phenomenalization, the realm of life is absolutely foreign to the realm of the object. This amounts to recognizing that all distance and all exteriority are absent from life, that life is concerned only with itself and that its being consists in precisely this fact. Yet, the flesh in which life both realizes and experiences itself is charged with a completely different sense. The flesh is that which, implicated as much in my perception of the world as in my action upon it, experiences itself in both of them. Put otherwise, there is no flesh without what we can only name the body – without passing judgment, of course, on its true signification and the necessity of reintegrating it or not into the realm of objectivity. It is difficult to avoid understanding the flesh and the body (my own body) as one and the same reality, understood of course under different guises or from different perspectives, even if the description of the body seems to lead us down a completely different path than that of pure auto-affection. If the essence of the flesh seems to lead us back to life, its phenomenological efficacy uncovers for us the powers of what we call the body, and it is thus in its capacity to think this body, which the flesh necessarily also is, that a phenomenology of the flesh can be put to the test. This requirement did not escape Henry, for whom the phenomenology of life very quickly opened onto a phenomenology of the flesh: It is now a question of seeing all that this phenomenology of the flesh, as an essential piece of the phenomenology of life, also allows us to understand concerning, on the one hand, the flesh itself, and, on the other, its relation to the body.6 However, strictly speaking, from a perspective that sets the phenomenal regime of ek-stasis, that is, the order of the object, to the side in favour, solely, of vital immanence, it is obvious that the body itself, with all its powers, can only be understood on the basis of the flesh, that is, of life. This is the theoretical wager that distinguishes Henry’s approach, even within phenomenology. It no longer understands the body on the basis of the world, but of life. This amounts to asserting that the relation between the flesh and the body becomes intelligible on the basis of the flesh and not on the basis of the body.7 Hence, the strength of Henry’s philosophy of life can be measured by its ability to give rise to an authentic philosophy of the flesh that in turn allows for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenological traits of the body that this flesh also is. In one sense, it is in the conception of the flesh, at the heart of which Henry’s conception of life

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realizes itself, that Henry’s conception of life must be put to the test. Yet it could be that, in its development as a form of a philosophy of the flesh, Henry’s phenomenology comes up against its own limit. For reasons that I will come back to, I accept the original theoretical path opened by Henry, which consists in approaching the body from the perspective of the flesh and thus from life. But the question is precisely that of knowing what the sense of the life that attests itself in the phenomenon of the flesh actually is, in other words, of putting the initial determination of life as affectivity and immanence to the test of this flesh that is a body. Insofar as it realizes itself in a body of flesh that, as such, is essentially capable of moving itself, should not life be construed otherwise than as this originary element that remains indifferent to the realm of exteriority? There is no doubt that Henry’s reflections on the flesh are constituted within the framework of a radical critique of that philosophy which asserts itself as the philosophy of the flesh par excellence, that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is thus on the terrain of what presents itself to us immediately as the fundamental power of our carnal body, that is, the power of feeling, that the discussion develops. We know that Merleau-Ponty’s entire approach consists in highlighting, as constitutive of sensation itself, the belonging of sensation to what it senses, which, for this very reason, is characterized as flesh. Put otherwise, the power of sensation that is the flesh refers to a more originary process of phenomenalization, which is nothing other than the flesh of the world . We must note that the constitutive intertwining of sensation and movement that Merleau-Ponty would insist upon more and more towards the end of his life is interpreted as proof of the belonging of the sensing being to the world that it senses. To say that there is no sensation without movement, and that sensation can always reach what it sees, is to recognize that sensing is always already on the side of what appears to it. This belonging of the sensing to the world it senses, or of vision to the visible, culminates in a late, and also quite disconcerting, working note from The Visible and the Invisible : To say that the body is a seer is, curiously enough, not to say anything else than: it is visible. When I study what I mean in saying that it is the body that sees, I find nothing else than: it is ‘from somewhere’ . . . visible in the act of looking.8 For Henry, this sort of perspective represents the accomplishment of a philosophy dominated by the ek-static sense of phenomenality, the culmination of a phenomenology that does not know any other form of appearance

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than intentional appearance. In effect, saying that the seer is in principle visible, that its very power of vision is inscribed in the exteriority of the world, is to recognize that the givenness of vision to itself is absolutely homogenous with that of an object in the world, to the point that vision becomes its own object, that the sensing being only senses inasmuch as it is sensible. Reversibility and the chiasm establish the realm of ontological monism: The reversibility of touching and touched signifies nothing other than this realm of a single appearance, which deals, alternatively, with what it gives outside of the self – of the sensed – and then of itself, which gives this sensed but gives itself to itself only in this outside of self, also as sensed. Thus, there is only ever the sensed, and the power of sensation, forever displaced from one moment to another, from one hand to the other, is always presupposed elsewhere than in what only occurs to (the) appearance under the form of what is sensed .9 It is difficult not to subscribe to such a critique: Underlining that sensation can itself be sensed, under the form of the hand that sensed, never clarified the essence of the sensing itself. Displaced to the side of carnal exteriority, it is immediately also brought back to the side of the pure transcendental subject of which this carnal exteriority is necessarily correlative. Otherwise put, it is not in starting from the realm of exteriority – that is, the body, even extended to the dimensions of a flesh of the world – that we have the least possibility of clarifying the essence of the flesh. This is what completely justifies Henry’s decision to approach the body via the flesh, that is to say, from the standpoint of life, rather than approaching the flesh via the body. We should take note of the fact that in thus proceeding we provide ourselves with the means of escaping the coming and going, characteristic of Merleau-Ponty, between the empirical and the transcendental or between carnal exteriority and the consciousness that necessarily underpins it. Starting from life allows one to avoid this alternative, except of course if we prejudge the sense of this life by reducing it to the life of transcendental consciousness. This is why Henry, in a completely consistent manner, uproots sensation from the exteriority to which it seemed it should belong as a form of behaviour, in order to return it to that which, within sensation itself, he characterizes as ‘power’, and which is, indeed, dependent on life. Henry thus employs a manoeuvre that is completely opposite to the one Merleau-Ponty makes in his last work: Rather than exteriorizing the sensing in the sensed,

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Henry returns to the sensing through that which constitutes its proper life, insofar as it reveals itself, first of all, in a power. In Henry’s words: To behave in the manner of a ‘touching’ [being], to ‘touch in the sense of an act that touches’, has precisely nothing to do with a ‘behavior’, or any form of facticity, whether it is active or passive. To touch in the sense of an effective action depends necessarily on a power, a power-to-touch of which the ‘touching’ [being], the very fact of touching, is merely the application, an actualization. But this power-to-touch is not, in turn, a simple facticity, the quality, one might say, of a being endowed with such a property. Power-to-touch signifies finding oneself in possession of such a power, being already placed in it, coinciding with it, identifying with it, and, in this way and only in this way, being capable of what it can .10 This allows Henry to conclude, ‘all power emerges from an essential immanence, it is in this immanence that it deploys its force, that it is an effective power and not the simple concept of a power.’11 We are witness here, thanks to the decisive concept of power, to a transcendental regression that departs from the flesh as sensing flesh in order to arrive at a concept of life understood as pure auto-affection in such a way that the analysis of intentional sensibility confirms, unsurprisingly, the analysis of life as it gives itself in impressionality. Following the example of the latter, sensible intentionality calls for a return to the immanence of life, from the moment where it is recognized as power. It is thus with the aid of this concept that the flesh, grasped initially as a rapport with exteriority, is articulated to life: Power is the presence of life in the work [oeuvres] of the flesh. Of course, everything depends on revealing, at the heart of power, a possession of the self that is, at its core, auto-affection. Here, like elsewhere, Henry is absolutely indebted to Maine de Biran, who appears as the principal inspiration behind his rejection of Merleau-Ponty. In an older article, Henry introduces a sentence from Maine de Biran that he calls ‘one of the most laden with meaning that the philosophical tradition has produced’: ‘there is no force that is absolutely foreign.’ Henry makes the following comment on this sentence: An absolute force, an efficient causality, a power in its efficacy, in the reality and actuality of its exercise, of what it is and what it does, cannot be in the milieu of exteriority, cannot be external to [it]self or as if external to [it]self, cannot be separated from [it]self, and cannot be a stranger to [it]self. This signifies that to all real power a first power is

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given, the power, precisely, to be itself, to take hold of itself, to coincide with [it]self in a sort of original coherence that rejects all types of difference and separation, in short in the immanence of its radical interiority.12 This ‘Biranian’ formula, which decisively articulates force and self, evidently has as its backdrop the theory of effort as ‘original fact’. It is in and by a ‘hyperorganic’ impulsion, insofar as it encounters a resistance (which is why it is effort), that a self constitutes itself as the subject of this impulsion. This original fact, which signifies the primordial duality of impulsion and resistance, is the fact, indistinctly psychological and metaphysical, of the sudden appearance of the self. This no longer falls within the sphere of knowing, it is not grasped in reflection, but realizes itself in an impulsion and understands itself in it as that which opposes the resistance that it meets, in short, as the negation of the not-me. That there is no absolute force that is foreign to itself signifies above all that this relation to oneself that is the self is only instituted in the exercise of a force. Henry’s interpretation of Maine de Biran’s formula nonetheless calls for several remarks. The decisive point is that it claims to rely on the essence of power, to rediscover in it life as auto-impressionality. It proceeds by showing a sort of division of power. The power referred to here is not a simple power-to-do [pouvoir de faire], or rather, in order to be this power-to-do, it must also have the originary power to take hold, or to take possession, of itself, in short to coincide with itself: Power, understood as impulsion, refers back to auto-affection as the power of life itself. As such, power is not understood from the point of view of what it does or produces, but rather of what it is. What is proper to power is that it possesses itself and that I dispose of it, and this is why it is not foreign to itself. Yet, and this is the second remark, we can also ask ourselves if Henry is not forcing something here. Saying that force cannot be in a milieu of exteriority, that it is not foreign to itself, does not yet mean that it possesses itself according to the mode of absolute coincidence – in the immanence of a radical interiority. From the refusal to situate force as an element of exteriority, we cannot deduce its characterization as pure interiority. All that we can say is that the being of power is indeed availability [disponibilité ], the fact of being at its own disposal, and that in this sense it cannot be foreign to itself. But this situation forms an original mode of relation to the self that is undoubtedly not that of pure immanence. The progression of Henry’s argument, which goes from the being in possession of itself proper to power to the

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affirmation of its essential immanence, is questionable to say the least: The truth concerning the ‘self’ of power most likely resides – contra Henry – in the gap that remains between ‘not being foreign to [it]self’ and ‘coinciding with [it]self’. Indeed, we cannot neglect another aspect of power, which Henry minimizes, but which nevertheless constitutes it as such, namely, its relation to doing, to the movement that it drives. It seems, at least at first glance, that it is this dimension of efficacy or production that wrenches the subject of power from itself, throws it into a different element, and prevents it from fully coinciding with itself. It follows that it is only by confronting this dimension, by confronting power as power to move itself, that Henry can test the solidity of his presuppositions. Can we refer the power of movement back to life, understood as absolute immanence? Is the being of movement susceptible to being reintegrated into an idea of life as autoaffection? Or rather, does it not instead set us down the path of contesting this radical acceptation of life? In addition, and this is my third and last remark, Maine de Biran, for his part, qualifies the impulsion where the self appears to itself as hyperorganic, which amounts to saying that it is foreign to life. According to Maine de Biran, life belongs to the objective organism and thus falls under the third-person point of view, which amounts, at the very least, to recognizing that it constitutively implies a dimension of exteriority. This force, which is not foreign to itself, is not yet, as such, a vital force. Henry’s approach is original in that it characterizes as life what, for Maine de Biran, remains a hyperorganic reality, simply put, a consciousness. He does so in order to detach life from the exteriority to which Maine de Biran had himself assigned it. We can ask, here again, if Maine de Biran is not more consistent than his successor. Not only does Henry not back down in the face of this difficulty, but he immediately confronts it in remarking, following Merleau-Ponty himself, that the power of touch is not feasible without this more primordial power of self-movement: ‘Separated from this originary power of self-movement, in the sense of that which moves and is moved indissolubly, i.e., incapable of moving itself, the touching would hardly touch anything anymore.’13 For Henry it is a question of taking Merleau-Ponty, so to speak, in reverse, showing that the same thing that in the eyes of Merleau-Ponty justifies the insertion of sensing into exteriority, that is, its constitutive dependence vis-à-vis movement, is precisely what confirms that sensing belongs to the immanence of life. Yet, it is striking to see that Henry reiterates, concerning movement, the analysis that he had made at the level of sensation. This is completely coherent. Movement, more clearly even than sensation, refers above all else to a power, such that the analysis of power absolutely

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concerns the power to move, on which, in the final analysis, sensation itself rests. Thus, the power of self-movement resides in the radical immanence of life: The movements that we perform refer, by the intermediary of the power that supports them, to what Henry calls at least once the ‘process’ of life – a long way from life being thought in light of the movements that we perform. It is precisely the coincidence with itself characteristic of force, inasmuch as it possesses itself, which articulates the movement of which it is the power in the immanent life in which this movement ultimately resides. This is to say that the movement of the flesh (or the flesh as movement) is never an ‘objective displacement in space’ but always an immanent movement : The movement, which, in its very movement, remains in itself, and itself gets carried away with itself, which itself moves in itself; the self-movement that does not separate from (it)self and does not leave itself, without allowing the smallest part of itself to become detached, to become lost outside of it, in some form of exteriority, in the exteriority of the world .14 We end up with a movement that rigorously merges with the immanence that the force that drives it apparently presupposes. Put another way, we end up with the movement by which life affects itself, that is, is its own affection. This is a very strange sort of movement, to say the least, since it has no alteration, no excess, no negativity; it does not leave itself, never detaches from itself, to the extent that it seems to be purely and simply identical to immobility. In truth, if it rests fundamentally on the initial postulate according to which life is assimilated to auto-affection, this conclusion stems from a coherent decision concerning both the essence of movement and of power, or of the force that produces it. Henry affirms: ‘The reality of a movement is not exhausted in its singular phenomenological effectuation: it resides in the power to accomplish it.’15 We pass here, in a logically inconsistent manner, from the fact that the reality of movement is not exhausted in its effectuation, which would seem to indicate that it also consists of this effectuation, to the affirmation according to which its reality resides in the power to accomplish the movement. It is true that the movement that concerns us here, our movement, cannot be reduced to its phenomenological effectuation, in that it is irreducible to a simple objective displacement. This is exactly what distinguishes a living movement from a purely physical movement. This signifies that this movement refers to a power upon which its effectuation rests, a power in which its own subjectivity lies and

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which specifies the movement as ‘mine’. But the question that we must ask ourselves here, in light of this indisputable description, is that of the mode of intertwining between the subjective power, in the sense where it is not foreign to itself, and a movement that is truly a passage into exteriority. This is precisely the question that Henry brushes aside when he passes from the participation of movement in power (on the assumption that it cannot be reduced to its effectuation) to its pure and simple reduction to this power. The being of movement is the power to accomplish, which is the same as removing the movement from all exteriority and as refusing it all forms of exteriorization. However, as strange as it appears, this affirmation still does not permit us to conclude that it can in effect be interpreted as an insistence on the dimension of ‘subjective’ power implicated in carnal movement. After all, everything depends on what we understand by ‘power’. If it is understood as in essence enveloping its realization, as a force that can only be exercised and thus passes into its other, it becomes less problematic to situate the being of movement in power: Movement can be power if it is, through and through, power to move. But this is clearly not Henry’s position. Rather, he affirms to the contrary: ‘This power, in turn, cannot be reduced to the sum of its potential actualizations. It is a fundamental and a priori possibility that dominates all its “actualizations”.’16 He summarizes this position at the beginning of the paragraph I am referring to here in writing, ‘“I can” does not signify that now I am able to make this or that movement.’17 In effect, the ‘I can’ of power does not refer at all to a power-to-do but to this more originary power that traverses it and brings it into relation with itself, namely, the self-givenness [auto-donation] of life that puts it originarily in possession of itself. According to an approach that is manifestly more metaphysical than phenomenological, the power through which the flesh is described is not exceeded, so to speak, ‘from below’ [par le bas], towards the movement in which it realizes itself, but ‘from above’ [par le haut], towards the originary power that allows it to possess itself and that is nothing other than the auto-affection of life. Power is thus not reducible to all of its potentialities, which always involve their actualization, because it is characterized by a fundamental and a priori possibility, which is none other than the one that is given by life itself. Curiously, it is through a dimension, which is not that of its implementation, that power leads to life. It is only insofar as it does not actualize itself under the form of movements that power is really the power of a life. If the flesh testifies to life, it is not through the movements that it performs but only through the absolute self-proximity that supposedly characterizes the power from which these movements proceed. It goes without saying that

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such an analysis contravenes both the essence of movement and of power. What is a movement that remains within itself, that never detaches from itself, if not a simple immobility? What, if not a pure abstract possibility, could properly signify a power that is not power-to-do, and that cannot be reduced to its potential effectuations? At the heart of Henry’s analysis of the flesh, and what allows it to return to the pure auto-affection by which its life has been characterized from the start, is the revelation of a concept of power or of force that is torn from the movement that it makes possible in favour of an immanence that characterizes it. This is accomplished by way of an unjustified displacement of Maine de Biran’s discovery and in such a manner that, counter to all plausibility, the very being of movement is returned to this immanence. Henry exploits the ambiguity of the lexicon of possession: Force can only be possessed, in the sense of a force that I have at my disposal, if it possesses itself in the sense that it appears to itself. Henry calls this intimate identity of power and auto-affection drive [pulsion]: ‘all force is in itself pathetic, and this is what, essentially, and without knowing it, the concept of drive [pulsion] expresses.’18 Drive designates this surge that I am not the source of and that does not leave itself, a surge [poussée] that is unceasingly self-affecting. It is a surge that is given as an affect or pathos, that is, one that is the sign of a force. We could easily show that Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the drive in Metapsychology also fits well into the framework of Henry’s concepts. Drive is a concept at the frontier of the psychic and somatic that refers to a force that is representation or affect, to an experience that plunges into a vital depth. In any case, all of Henry’s analyses of the power of sensation and the power of movement converge towards the same discovery: As an attestation of a life that is essentially auto-affection, and as the element in which the work of life is its own impression and its power its own possession, the flesh is essentially a pulsional flesh [chair pulsionnelle]. It is from this pulsional flesh [chair pulsionnelle] that the body is constituted. Though I will not dwell on it here, we can note that Henry’s approach is borrowed from Maine de Biran. Drive constitutes the organic body as the resistance, or the ‘resisting continuum’ that this force necessarily encounters. When this force tires, coming up against the internal limit of its surge, in other words, when the resistance becomes absolute, the body becomes an objective reality [réalité chosique]. But it is important to underline that this body remains internal to the surge of the drive. That is, it remains internal to life: There is no exteriority to this body, and life, as it is understood here, still only deals with itself. As Henry clearly explains, again shifting the meaning of Biranism:

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The whole being of that which resists is thus in the force against which it resists. The way in which it resists is the way in which this force experiences itself. It reveals itself as restricted, inhibited, unable to deploy itself freely according to its own will.19 Having completed this lengthy analysis, it is time to investigate the status of the body, no longer as original flesh [chair originaire], organic body or object body [corps chosique], but rather, as purely body [purement corps], that is, as an object accessible to others within the world. In an entirely coherent but also disappointing manner, Henry refers to the duality of phenomenality in his response. The reason for this is that this body – which is also flesh even though no longer constituted in it – this body object is a visible body, subjected to the phenomenological regime of the ek-stasis. This body, however, is no different from the one previously analysed as flesh; but instead of phenomenalizing itself in life, or as life, it phenomenalizes itself as an object. Or, to put it another way, this body sees itself. Understood as such, the duality of appearance does indeed run through the body; it is the duality of the flesh (and of that which its surge constitutes in itself), on the one hand, and of a body object in the world, on the other. The same necessarily applies to the body’s movements, such that the duality of appearance also characterizes the realm of movement, which is one, but nonetheless phenomenalizes itself according to two opposing regimes: Our action does not unfold firstly within us, to then suddenly surge forth outside. Living, it has always belonged to life, which it never leaves. It has always been objective also, under the guise, for example, of the objective displacement of our hand – a hand that is itself objective, just like our objective body of which it is a part. Living corporality and mundane objective body are both a priori . They are two a priori of the experience of our body, and are themselves nothing other than the expression of the duality of appearance, which is an Arche-fact.20 There can be no better way of asserting a radical dualism in place of ontological monism. But, despite being entirely consistent, this conclusion creates a sense of unease. We are left with the impression that the analysis has been taken as far as possible along the lines of the process of the internalization into life of that which gives itself first of all as exteriority, only to finally come up against a truly irreducible exteriority, that is, that of the body as object and of its displacements. This exteriority is reincorporated, like the hidden side of the visible suddenly revealed, in the name

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of a second mode of givenness of the very realities that had up until now been grasped according to the mode of pure immanence. In truth, it had seemed that the analysis of the flesh was taking place at the level of being, and that the phenomenology of life was in fact an ontology, discovering life in the self-impressionality of the flesh and encountering the being of life at the heart of its lived life. However, what we discover is that it is nothing of the sort, since this same life and this same flesh that gave themselves in impressionality can suddenly appear as body in the distance of seeing. What we had believed was their being is only a mode of its appearance. This solution, therefore, creates more problems than it solves. It is the equivalent of asserting that one reality can appear according to different regimes. But how is this possible? How are this being and these two modes of phenomenalization articulated? Just at the moment when we thought we had managed to escape the ontological level, this inevitably leads us back to it, because the task now is to understand the status of this being, that is, of this life, given that it is capable of two modes of appearance. This recourse to duality cannot ultimately be a solution, for what is still and only ever at stake is knowing how the same life can both affect itself and deploy itself in exteriority. This is what lies at the heart of the very problem of life, and it matters little whether the duality that characterizes it is to be found at the level of appearance or at the level of being. As a last word on this duality, Henry (finally) raises the problem of the essence of life, at the very moment he believed himself to have definitively solved it by reducing it to the realm of auto-affection.21 We, therefore, cannot escape the question of the mode of articulation, the question of the unity of these two phenomenalizations that Henry carefully distinguished. My flesh, in which my life attests itself, is also always a body in the sense of a reality that exposes itself in exteriority and offers itself to the gazes of others. To pose the question of the being of the flesh is to confront the problem of the mode of relation between one’s life, which self-impresses, and exteriority. To refer the latter to another regime of appearance is to avoid the problem, not to resolve it. The difficulty culminates with the question of movement. Henry calmly tells us that the same immanent ‘movement’ of life can also present itself as displacement, as objective movement. But can movement really be marked by this duality? Is it not, on the contrary, that which radically contests it ? As we have seen, the movement of life is for Henry a movement that remains in itself, a movement that allows nothing to escape from it, in other words, the immobile coincidence of the impression. If this can still be qualified as movement, then it is only in a pronounced metaphorical sense or for

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theological–metaphorical reasons completely unrelated to phenomenology. But – and this is where the question of being again interferes with that of appearance – it is worth inquiring how that which is immobility (according to the regime of immanence) can suddenly present itself as movement. It is here that we stumble upon a major difficulty, which leads us to contest definitively the division of appearance. Movement can only be understood as incessant tearing away or alteration, a continual leaving of, or non- coincidence with, the self. Movement is precisely that which does not remain in itself; its being is not plenitude but negativity. Of course, this does not mean (at least with regard to our movements) that it is the equivalent of a simple objective displacement, a pure change of location.22 As already shown, this movement is ours; it is the product of a force or power and, therefore, cannot be foreign to itself. Its being is not suited to the scission of appearance into pure immanence and objectivity; it is, in truth, its very contestation. But this is exactly the meaning of life, for its living signifies indistinctly a transitive living (erleben) and an intransitive living (leben). In living, the subject experiences both itself and a world of which it is simultaneously a part and with which, as a living being, it has relations. Just like movement, which is of course its privileged confirmation, life cannot be located solely on the side of immanence; like movement, it upsets the division of appearance instituted by Henry. Thus, rather than embark on a futile attempt to return all exteriority, which the flesh (and, therefore, life) comprises, to the sphere of absolute immanence, it is necessary to rethink life in light of the carnal movements through which it attests itself and in view of which Henry’s dualities shatter. By approaching the problem in this manner, we may equip ourselves with the means to tackle the question of the articulation between the two modes of appearance identified by Henry. He adopted an ascending movement, transcendental in nature, which, in light of the important discovery that intentionality cannot give itself to itself intentionally, aims to return the ecstatic appearance to its ultimate condition of possibility. Although he discovers auto-affection at the heart of all givenness at a distance, Henry never heads down the opposite path to discover how auto-affection leads into intentionality, how we can go from immanence to transcendence. Henry is unable to even ask himself this question because the duality of appearance is an Arche-fact, ‘which nothing can explain, but which must itself form the basis for understanding it’.23 However, given that I contest this duplicity, in the very name of the phenomenon of movement and the life that it attests, perhaps we are now in a position to begin defining a solution to this problem.

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It is thus necessary to pick things up at precisely the point where the difficulties crystallized, that is, at the level of the pathetic power that Henry called drive, which emerges as the operator behind the annexation of carnal movement to a life understood as immanence. What is this powerto-do [pouvoir-faire] of which Henry speaks, which he also names force, and which is nothing other than what Maine de Biran called ‘effort’? It is obvious that the being of this power is inseparable from its effectuation, from the doing through which it accomplishes itself. As such, a power that does not imply an ability to do and is reducible to the power (which it is also) to possess itself, would quite simply not be a power. In this instance, Henry’s reduction of the power-to-do to power, by which it coincides with itself, signifies, purely and simply, its ceasing to be power. Paradoxically, the return of power to life comes at the price of its very effectiveness: The life to which this power is brought back at the same time signifies its death as power. The difficulty here is identical to the one Maine de Biran exposed himself to. He postulated a hyperorganic force that comes up against the body and its movements, as relative resistance, such that the original fact is the original duality of impulsion and resistance.24 But is this duality really a duality? Can one separate the impulsion from that which it impulses and thereby situate it in an order, that of the self, which is different to the order of the body in movement? For it to impulse anything at all, must not the impulsion already belong to that which it impulses and, so to speak, pass over to the side of movement? In truth, its effectiveness demands that the impulsion leave itself in order to become other and that it exist according to the mode of being outside of self or beyond self. This means that, far from being confined to the hyperorganic sphere, it manages to disrupt both the egosubject [sujet égoïque] and the corporeal order [ordre corporel ]. This is what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka observed in the rare fragments that he dedicated to Maine de Biran. He stressed that, according to Maine de Biran, the self was not a simple representation but a centre of efforts, and he asked: ‘Yet, that which puts into motion, can it not itself be contained in the world of forces and movements? Can it not participate, from this fact, in the corporeal world?’25 Even a simple analysis of the impulse demonstrates that, far from referring to an impression from which all exteriority is absent, it necessarily involves a belonging to exteriority, a commitment in and to it, still close to the self but already in the world. This is confirmed by the phenomenological examination of what Patočka names ‘intention of movement’, which is nothing other than the lived experience of a power as power to move. Whereas according to Edmund Husserl all ‘intention’ is characterized by the fact that it can be empty [Leermeinen] or full, the

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specificity of the intention of movement is precisely that it cannot be empty because it cannot intend movement without effectuating it. What sets this intention apart is that its very being as intention presupposes its realization; it could not be the intention that it is without its implementation. As clearly stated by Patočka: ‘motor intentionality, insofar as it is not a quasi-intention or the intention of a quasi-movement , is here, already, the movement itself. There is no difference between intention and its fulfilment.’26 Contrary, therefore, to Henry’s claims, the essence of intention does not keep it bound within the immanence of the power to affect itself but expulses it outside of itself into the world. To assert that intention is its own fulfilment is to recognize that the lived experience of the being of the intention brings about a passage into exteriority: Its very immanence is possible only with an entry in transcendence; it is subjective only insofar as it is already mundane. Henry is thus entirely wrong, ironically, to write that ‘our action does not, first of all, unfold within us to then suddenly surge forth outside of us’, for this crossing of the apparently impenetrable border between the two regimes of appearance is precisely what the intention of movement, that is, the impulse, accomplishes. Patočka expresses it well when he says: The ‘power over the lived body’ is thus not a mere epiphenomenon, but movement itself in its realization. In this movement, it carries out a leap into being. . . . Unlike perception or objectification, which turn around the being without completely reaching it, movement coincides perfectly with what it is experienced as: It is realization and, as such, real. If the subject and the object coincide here, it is not because it is a question of a lived experience as lived experience . . . but rather because the act does not remain within the subjective, because it has a path and a sediment in the external world.27 But it would be wrong to conclude that the impulse is nothing other than the movement that it impulses, in other words, to reduce its lived or subjective being to pure exteriority. This would be to confuse the living movement under investigation here with a simple displacement. Although the impulse does not take form beneath the movement and is, therefore, its own passage within it, the very fact that this movement was impulsed, that it proceeds from power, is precisely what distinguishes the living movements that we are responsible for. Understood in this way, movement is not foreign to itself, as the Biranian saying goes. But that does not necessarily mean that it knows itself: It is characterized by non-indifference towards itself, conferred upon it by its voluntary being, its belonging to a momentum. It

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follows that the movement that the impulse becomes cannot be reduced to a simple displacement. It is more than all of the positions together and more than the transition from one to the other, since, by enveloping an impulse, it is the ability to change direction at any moment, to accelerate, to stop, and so on. All of these are possibilities in which the presence of the power that engendered the movement is revealed at each of its successive phases. As such, the indisputable exteriority of movement goes hand in hand with a form of interiority, which is not immanence but the permanent excess of the power over that which it carries out at every moment. Thus, movement, because it is ours, cannot be considered as belonging to pure exteriority. However, this does not mean that it must be bound to the sphere of immanence: Movement is internal to a power that is nothing other than its own exteriorization. As a result, the être-auprès-de-soi (being-close-to-the-self) that characterizes the living movement, its non-indifference towards itself, cannot be mistaken for pure impressional immanence. This être-auprès-de-soi is broken by the progress that tears it from itself; it can only be itself by passing outside of itself. The subject of movement, the self that reveals itself in it, seizes itself only once it is dispossessed of itself. Yet this cannot be right, for it would suggest that the self possesses a certain consistency outside of the movement that it produces. But this is not the case. As pure impulsion or intention of movement, the self is its own passage into exteriority: It is by passing outside of itself that it becomes itself, by alienating itself that it reassembles, by toppling into the world that it distinguishes itself. We are here confronted with the strange situation of a subject whose being is governed by the exteriority that it makes possible and that for this reason can never accomplish itself as subject. To say that this subject is its own passage into the exteriority of the world is to assert that this is where it can find or accomplish itself. However, given that this exteriority has no limits and that the movement is without rest, it is the same as admitting that it does not manage to do so, that it is unable to reassemble in immanence. One could say that the being of this subject is that of a task, that this being is its own horizon. This subject is always already engaged in the world where it accomplishes itself but which separates it from itself and delays its advent, so long as this world exists only as horizon. As Patočka wrote: The living of experience is like a web pulled between two horizons: one is my self, the other, the world. Living is a manner of explicating these horizons, having this particularity that for me to explain myself to myself I must first step out onto the ground of the world and of things.28

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Thus, the living of life, rediscovered within the movement in which it comes about, does not lead to an impressional immanence but to a self that is its own splitting apart, to an ‘entering into the self’ [entrer en soi ] that is a ‘leaving the self’ [sortir de soi ]. We must, therefore, conclude, as Henry does, that the self does not relate to itself according to the mode of knowledge, that its own appearance to itself is not reflexive. But if the self escapes its own gaze, if it is ‘invisible’, as Henry says, it is not because it is given through the tight embrace of a pure experience but, on the contrary, because it is on the horizon of its own movement in a manner such that the fate of its appearance is tied to the fate of the world’s appearance. It is due not to an excess of proximity but to an excess of distance. This analysis of the self as the subject of movement and as the self of impulsion enables us to articulate what Henry resolutely differentiated and to follow the path he set out but in the opposite direction. As mentioned above, Henry progresses from intentionality up to its condition of possibility, which is nothing other than its self-givenness [auto-donation] in the immanence of originary impressionality. But it seems necessary to investigate how the impression is articulated along with the ek-static givenness – the lived experience along with the seeing – how to descend from absolute life to the world. Henry cannot provide answers to these questions precisely because he argues that they concern two completely impenetrable regimes of appearance. In other words, it is not possible to pass from immanence to transcendence. On the contrary, within the auto-impressional embrace, everything is in place to prevent a window from opening onto exteriority or to prevent an outside from forming. In order to articulate the impression, along with the ek-static givenness, the border must become porous, and ‘immanence’ must be thought in such a manner that transcendence may come about in and through it. To do so is to replace Henry’s duality with one single mode of appearance, yet without returning to ontological monism , since this appearance is no longer that of simple exposition from a distance, of objectivity. Rather, it is an opening to the self, which is also indiscriminately an opening to the other. It is the appearance of an immanence that accomplishes itself only as exteriorization and, therefore, as an unveiling of the world. However, this is precisely the mode of being to which the analysis of living movement has led us. The impulsive self is simultaneously a departure from the self: It exists only as its own advancement in the world. But this also implies that the advancement is not a simple displacement, that it is affected by a subjective sign, that its movement of exteriorization is just as much a movement of revelation, that its doing is a seeing. To say that the self is its own exteriorization is to say that the

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latter does not leave itself, that it remains close to the self. But this proximity, caught up, so to speak, in ek-stasis, is not proximity to itself but very much proximity to the world. In short, inscribed in its own movement, the self is an opening onto the self only if it is an opening onto the world: Its own mode of appearance coincides with intentionality. This implies the radical transgression of the border between the two modes of appearance, assuming of course that they mutually condition rather than exclude one another: Possession of self and the ‘impressional’ being exist only as an unveiling advancement, that is, as intentionality. It then becomes necessary to substitute Henry’s ‘pathetic force’ with what Patočka calls a ‘seeing force’ [force voyante]: The corporeity of the self is first of all, from the perspective of our experience, the corporeity of a force. As a force it is something existing and acting. As a seeing force, it must contain something like a light, a light by which it illuminates its path. This path is a movement toward and penetration of the world, the very possibility of which is implicated in the force that takes on the title of the self.29 This force is the force of seeing, that is, the seeing that is specific to the movement that this force generates. And this seeing is in fact inherent to every force so long as its advancement remains an experience and, therefore, makes visible that towards which it advances. The path that we are following here is rigorously opposed to the one taken by Henry. Instead of annexing movement to the self-apparition of life through the intermediary of the power that it involves, it annexes power to movement in order to turn it into a power to make visible [le pouvoir de faire apparaître]. Tracing phenomenality back to a force does not mean returning it to immanence but, on the contrary, establishing an opening to transcendence in immanence. Must one conclude that by leaving the sphere of impressionality we have also departed the sphere of affectivity? This is the same as asking: Can affectivity only be understood as auto-affection? It would seem, on the contrary, that by abandoning auto-affection in favour of a more originary co-belonging – which is the other name of life – of the self and intentionality, we are in fact brought back to affectivity and perhaps to its most original meaning. It is no longer a case of the pure auto-affection whereby the subject embraces itself without distance, an auto-affection that attests itself only in certain forms of joy or suffering. Rather, the affection in question here is one in which the subject is given to itself only to the extent that it receives an other than itself; it seizes itself only when relieved by exteriority.

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This fundamental affect, to which all our analyses lead, is nothing other than desire , which is, I would argue, the other name for life. This is why it is necessary to substitute Henry’s phenomenology of drive with a phenomenology of desire. How else are we to qualify this impulsion (described above at length) or more specifically, the manner in which it receives itself, if not as desire, a desire that no longer has anything in common with the surge that possesses itself and that Henry names drive? Given that its being is that of a setting in motion, this impulsion achieves itself in being thrown outside of itself: It seizes itself only through a movement of dispossession. Since the moving self [soi moteur] passes into its other and is, therefore, only ever its own horizon, it cannot seize itself as a content or a determination. Its own being, as it experiences itself, is rather that of an emptiness or a lacuna. Consequently, it is given to itself only in the shape of this absence, which, by becoming movement, tends towards its fulfilment and for this reason is indeed an aspiration and affects itself as desire alone. Only desire can qualify the mode of being-for-self of a being that is absence-of-self, so long as, in desire, it is always the being of the self that is lacking; in desire, the subject is always separated from itself. This is why all desire is, at its heart, always desire of self. As noted above, the self, as a source of movement – the impulsive self – throws itself into the world in order to achieve itself. The self thus understood is its own search for self in the alterity of the world. But this search is destined to fail, and the self is condemned to forever remain its own horizon insofar as the world cannot be exhausted or totalized. This is, however, precisely the essence of desire: Unlike a need, nothing can satisfy it, and that which appeases it only frustrates it to the same degree. Whatever desire achieves will always manifest itself as a shortcoming vis-àvis that for which it was truly aiming, or likewise only sketch a transcendence of which it is the negation. This is what happens to the living subject, which, due to the irreducible and unalterable depth of the world, can only find itself in the world if it again loses itself within it. Its aspiration is desire because it is destined to remain unsatisfied precisely there where it is satisfied. Finally, if it is true that the subject only affects itself in the form of this dispossession that it accompanies with its light – such that it has no alternative between seizing itself and seeing the world – it is necessary to conclude that desire, the first of the subject’s affects, is intentionality called by a different name.30 To say that nothing can satisfy it is to recognize that desire is desire of nothing (given or predetermined) and that this is precisely the reason why it can receive everything. Its incessant dissatisfaction is just as much a pure welcoming: The depth of the world that it opens can

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be measured by the power and indetermination of its aspiration. Desire is the very power of the welcome, the form of receptivity – the activity specific to passivity. Because its affection is the experience of a lacuna and can, therefore, only be achieved as movement, it opens the depth of the world. It is intentionality. Translated by Darian Meacham

Notes and Works Cited 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24

Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 74. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 175, 197, 205. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 169, 195. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible , trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 273–4. Henry, Incarnation , 171. Ibid., 196. Ibid. Henry, ‘Le concept d’âme a-t-il un sens?’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 67 (1996): 26. Henry, Incarnation, 197. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 205. Ibid. Ibid.; see also 215, 225, 228. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 217. In truth, one could question whether there is not a hierarchy between these two modes of phenomenalization, such that the givenness from a distance would function as appearance with regard to the impressional givenness. This would bring us close to the Ruyerian conception of the body dependent on a ‘reciprocal illusion of incarnation’, that is, ultimately, an impoverishment of the body to the level of the simple appearance of a reality, which at its heart is not spatial. In short, it is difficult to break with the belief that it is indeed the being of the flesh that is brought to light through the life in which it self-impresses itself, while its exposure in objective exteriority is already a matter of appearance. It is still useful to question, however, whether the mode of being specific to living movement does not release the essence of all movement. Henry, Incarnation, 217. It is important to note that, by positing a movement of life itself, which he sometimes names original corporeity, Henry in no way remains true to Maine de

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Biran, for whom movement was already related to muscular resistance, that is, to the body. However, this is not how resistance sees itself, for it gives itself as docility. This displacement is coherent, and the situation of movement does no more here than express the situation of the body. From the moment Henry posits a first body, a flesh – impulse and non-resistance – where for Maine de Biran there is only a hyperorganic force, it is normal that he should posit a movement where for Maine de Biran there is only a self seizing itself in its impulsion. Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: J. Millon 1995), 60. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 66. Not an affect that the subject receives but the affect in and through which it receives itself as subject, that is, constitutes itself.

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Chapter 3

Michel Henry and The Idea of Phenomenology: Immanence, Givenness and Reflection Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly

Inevitably at stake in the many alterations by phenomenologists of phenomenology’s method and content since Edmund Husserl’s introduction of it in 1900 and its transcendental formation beginning around 1907 is the success of Husserl’s successors’ efforts to better capture the phenomena themselves. Given that the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas attempt to think beyond Husserl by rethinking intentionality and transcendence in order to escape the confines of immanence, it would seem that Michel Henry’s turn to a radically non-intentional mode of immanence understood as life – the proper content of phenomenology that owes nothing to transcendence – is an abject failure or even a betrayal of phenomenology’s guiding ideal to return to the things themselves. Yet in his essay ‘The Phenomenological Method’, published as part of his Material Phenomenology in 1990, Henry returns to interrogate Husserl’s phenomenological method and his understanding of the concepts of immanence and transcendence as articulated in the latter’s 1907 lectures, The Idea of Phenomenology. And it could be said that Henry returns in this essay not only to criticize Husserl’s method for obscuring the content of phenomenology, but also through his engagement with Husserl’s thought to assert his kinship with Husserl on a shared understanding (though one abandoned by the latter) of a revolutionary concept of immanence, one not found again among Husserl’s inheritors, even the most apostate among them. In what follows we shall test the hypothesis that Henry doesn’t engage Husserl merely because Husserl was first in a line of phenomenologists that set a trajectory in the phenomenological movement towards perpetuating Western philosophy’s bias of ontological monism, although Henry would say this is accurate. Rather, Henry returns to Husserl because Husserl

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intuits a form of immanence upon which Henry’s brand of phenomenology will seize and from which Henry’s entire philosophy will develop, namely, the affectivity of life ‘while it is occurring ’.1 Although when all is said and done Henry does not seem to follow all the steps that Husserl takes towards a fully developed theory of immanence in The Idea of Phenomenology, the direction in which Henry moves is one that Husserl himself, even on a corrected understanding of his intention in The Idea of Phenomenology, makes available to Henry’s radicalization of his agenda and that of phenomenology itself. Indeed, Henry believes he develops a possibility left available to him by Husserl’s conceptuality – even if each would believe the other’s mature view of immanence fundamentally misguided. By examining Henry’s critical return to Husserl’s 1907 lectures, we are identifying the root of Henry’s critique of Husserl’s view of immanence by expositing what Henry means by the ‘gaze’ and testing Henry’s critique of Husserl by presenting a more charitable reading of Husserl’s understanding of immanence in those lectures. We may establish the following if our hypothesis proves defensible: (1) Henry’s appreciation for Husserl among other classical phenomenologists and his notion of immanence, (2) the radicality of Henry’s notion of immanence and (3) Henry’s belief that his radically immanent brand of phenomenology presents the most faithful development of phenomenology since Husserl.

I. Henry’s Critique of The Idea of Phenomenology: Phenomenology’s ‘First Theoretical Failure’ In this essay Henry identifies two major lines of criticism upon which he convicts Husserl but also in which Henry will find what he considers the legitimizing resource of his own radical phenomenology of life. The first of Henry’s concerns is the phenomenological reduction discussed as the ‘gaze’; the second is the notion of immanence as a transcendence in immanence that is unique on Henry’s reading to Husserl among all classical phenomenologists but nevertheless unsatisfactory according to the former. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction uncovers both a view of immanence independent of all transcendence (reell ) and a view of immanence in relation with transcendence. As Henry is on his guard against ontological monism, the bias in Western philosophy that reduces all awareness to one form of awareness construed as a dyadic relation of knower to known, he prizes the first form of immanence that Husserl identifies but reacts against the second form.2

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Because Husserl is thinking of phenomenality primarily in terms of the appearance of objects to consciousness, he presents himself as preeminently interested in method, but this interest is only a ‘blind spot’ according to Henry, the unstated assumption that undercuts phenomenology from the outset.3 Concerned as he remained with a phenomenologically construed epistemological attempt to ‘found’ conscious experience of the world, Husserl, Henry argues, obscured the view of immanence independent of transcendence, the proper ‘object of phenomenology’, in favour of the view of immanence in relation with transcendence, albeit in a less egregious way than his inheritors. Despite phenomenology’s self-understanding as a rupture with the history of thought, Henry argues that Husserl’s conceptuality is of a piece with the predominant tradition of Western philosophy and echoes not the concerns of ‘natural thought’ but reaffirms the biases of rarefied epistemological discourse and its obsession with the refutation of scepticism.4 As evidence for this characterization, Henry draws attention to the extent to which Husserl adopts, rather than revises, the Cartesian preoccupation with doubt and securing a bulwark against it. For Husserl, as for René Descartes, it remains the case that ‘Everything is dubitable apart from the fact that I doubt.’5 Again for Husserl as for Descartes, though, within this very milieu of generalized dubiousness is the avenue to certainty. Henry quotes Husserl from The Idea of Phenomenology: Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring. And in this act of seeing it is an absolute givenness. It is given as an existing entity, as a ‘this-here’. It would make no sense at all to doubt its being.6 In this quotation and others like it Henry identifies the basis of the first of the afore-mentioned lines of criticism against Husserl’s argument: The given is only given absolutely if it is given to a ‘gaze’, a regard that is directed to the phenomenon. Henry’s problem with Husserl’s articulation of his method is that the method immediately shifts from the ostensible object, the cogitatio or knowing act, to the gaze to which the cogitatio is presented in order to attain to absolute givenness. He writes, [W]e observe from the outset, a displacement that leads from the real cogitatio – from the real perception, the real representation, and the real judgment – to a regard directed toward them, which is a pure seeing in

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which one holds strictly to what is seen. For, it is under this regard, in this pure gaze, that the cogitatio becomes an absolute given.7 The cogitatio, which is meant to be the absolutely given and thus the indispensable foundation for phenomenological inquiry, is in fact not itself considered as the absolutely given but only becomes so under submission to the gaze of consciousness. The gaze is the gaze of a phenomenologically ‘reduced’ consciousness, a consciousness led back-from-to . . . , back from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude.8 The gaze thus for Henry is a shorthand term for the reduction that yields a cogitatio, established by the method by which Husserl’s phenomenology sought to clarify the form and content of experience, to elucidate the essential structures of subjective acts and their correlate objects – for example, the act of perception and the perceived, the act of imagination and the imagined – without losing the world or invalidating natural attitude intentionalities. Yet this shift, from the alleged fundamentum inconcussum of the cogitationes to the gaze to which they are subordinated, is made possible Henry alleges because in Husserl’s argument there is a latent distinction operative between the given (the cogitatio) and its mode of givenness (to the pure gaze of the phenomenological reduction, a free act of conscious reflection).9 What Husserl never notices or acknowledges is that the given is not in fact given until it is given to the gaze, a state of affairs Henry does not hesitate to dub an ‘absurdity’. The absurdity is that the real cogitatio, the one that should constitute the sphere of absolute knowing which the theory of knowledge needs simply in order to begin, is only an absolute given to the extent that it is submitted to a regard and a pure gaze. Consequently, it is only given to the degree to which, as a real cogitatio, it is subordinated to another power of givenness than itself. This other power gives it purely and absolutely, then and only then making it into an absolute given. The cogitatio is thus not an absolute given in and of itself but as the result of an external givenness that is added on to its own original being.10 What renders this line of criticism similar to yet different from the familiar one to the effect that Husserl conceives of the attention of consciousness to its objects in a mode that is overly reflective, intellectualist or theoretical is Henry’s belief that no thinker of classical phenomenology (indeed the generations before Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation) rightly captures the absolute givenness of the cogitatio or better captured it than Husserl despite

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the latter’s own failings. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, each articulating permutations of Heidegger’s well-known critique of Husserl’s method as overly determinative of the things themselves because of its intellectualist and theoretical emphases, nevertheless, remain guilty on Henry’s reading of subordinating in advance phenomenality to the phenomena, life to the world, immanence to transcendence.11 The originality of Henry’s reading of the history of the method of phenomenology, if you will, is that it considers Husserl’s successors more blatantly guilty than Husserl himself of the bias of ontological monism; to put the point somewhat differently, Henry reads Husserl as much closer to the promise of (a) phenomenology (of life) as Henry understands it than his successors. According to the critique of ontological monism that Henry pursues throughout his career, the very idea of a knower requiring metaphorical ‘distance’ from its object already occludes every form of appearance that does not require ‘distance’ from the knower to be known. When Henry criticizes ontological monism he has in mind not a substance monism but a monism of phenomenality, a way of thinking that affirms only one mode of appearance as decisive. This dominant mode of appearance is one of ‘distance’ where a thing ‘out there’ appears by standing out from a transcendent horizon or the backdrop of the world, to consciousness.12 In The Essence of Manifestation Henry wrote that phenomenological distance is ‘the ultimate ontological presupposition’ of Western thinking.13 This distance is not merely bound to the world but is intrinsic to the world-ness of the world; ‘the unfolding of this distance is, in reality, one with the arising of the world in its purity’.14 Accordingly for Henry the true deployment of the epoché should bracket not merely the realm of intramundane phenomena but the world itself. This Husserl failed to do. For, in this epoché of the world, only the empirical world and the psychological ego inscribed in it, only the contents of this world and the belief in them, are suspended. The epoché does not suspend the world itself – the horizon of visibility where everything that can be seen is shown – this place of light in which evidence is put forward as presence in order to concentrate all the luminosity within it.15 Had it suspended the world itself, phenomenology would have seen a realm of awareness no longer constrained or determined by distance and transcendence. That realm is the domain of life, which on Henry’s analysis is not at a distance from the living. Life cannot be an object; nor can it be a subject, for

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this would be to circumscribe life in the language of the world. Life cannot be known; it can only be lived. An epoché or some reflective philosophical change in attitude or attention may be necessary, but As long as philosophy remains prisoner to the idea of a transcendent horizon of human knowledge, the relationship of the ego to itself cannot be understood except as a particular case of a transcendental relationship of Being-in-the-world. . . . The problem of the knowledge of self is placed on a completely new basis when in the light of the problematic of immanence this knowledge ceases to be looked upon as a ‘relationship’.16 So when he questions the authority of the ‘gaze’ in Husserl’s phenomenology it is not only because the ‘gaze’ is an intellectualizing one (though that may be the case too) but also because it is a gaze that can only see, so to speak, what is far afield and not the life that is being lived right under its own proverbial nose. Reflection per se is not the problem, for the problem rests with the presupposition that reflection in the form of the epoché is predetermined as reflection on the relation between the knower and the known. Hence, if it is wrong to assert that the cogitatio in order to be the absolutely given source of phenomenological investigation has to be submitted to the gaze in order to become so, the question becomes what is the cogitatio apart from the gaze, and furthermore doesn’t the gaze require precisely that the cogitatio already be the epistemological and ontological basis of phenomenological methodology before the gaze ‘takes it in’. To return as Henry does to a quote provided above, Henry emphasizes the phrase ‘while it is occurring’ – when Husserl says ‘every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring ’17 – and asks But if the cogitatio has already been carried out or if it is carried out while the regard takes it into its pure gaze, this is because the cogitatio is independent from and ontologically prior to the pure gaze. It is brought about or rather brings itself about independently. It is already there. The ‘there’ of this already there is interpreted by the pure gaze as something there for itself.18 Phenomenology has always been about the things themselves, what is ‘right there’ so to speak. And yet, as a methodology, it is also about access to

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what is already ‘right there’. Henry maintains in these pages that the ‘right there’ of the phenomena cannot be accessed by the gaze as Husserl maintained. The gaze can only imagine that what is ‘right there’ is right there for it , when according to Henry the ‘right there’ is right there quite apart from what the gaze brings to it. The non-intentional givenness of life, phenomenality, immanence, neither needs the gaze nor can be grasped by it. As a natural consequence of the independence of life from any methodological means of bringing it to presence, it follows that the cogitatio prior to and apart from the gaze must itself really be given. And in fact this is precisely what Henry claims, that ‘the cogitatio is real independently from its givenness in a pure gaze.’ It is this displacement of the cogitatio into the cogitatio as object of pure gaze ‘as if [the cogitatio] were not already in and through itself, an original experience’ that Henry calls ‘The first theoretical failure in the 1907 lectures.’ While the upshot of this failure is that ‘Husserl sought this absolute givenness elsewhere, and by seeking it elsewhere, he will never be able to find it’, it is not yet Husserl’s ‘fatal mistake’ as we shall see.19

II. ‘The Perversion of the Fundamental Concepts of Phenomenology’ Despite his trenchantly consistent critique of the gaze, Henry does not claim that Husserl sought absolute givenness, life or immanence in the manner his critical phenomenological inheritors increasingly would, namely, as exclusively to be found in the world or in transcendence. This is why Henry’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenological method in the language of the ‘gaze’ is so interesting, for it is subtly twofold. On the one hand, phenomenological method that employs the gaze distorts because it is excessively intellectual or theoretical; on the other hand, the phenomenological method distorts because it understands immanence based on transcendence. Henry’s assessment here of Husserl’s method (it should be borne in the reader’s mind throughout) thus shares little with Heidegger’s attempt to rethink how his mentor understood the nature of intentionality in an effort to access the thing themselves, the phenomena, without any preliminary circumscription by a foundational form of consciousness. Even if Heidegger’s rethinking of intentionality as first or more primordially a form of practical engagement with the world that better lays bare the phenomena before the distorting effects of theoretical reflection, his view of

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being-in-the-world according to Henry does not recover ‘phenomenality’, immanence.20 In his essay ‘Material Phenomenology and Language’ he asserted that for Heidegger ‘One of the first consequences of this definition of phenomenology is paradoxical; the definition eliminates the question of the method; the question of the method is at any rate absorbed back into the question of the object.’21 Despite Heidegger’s insistence that phenomenology concerns a ‘how’ rather than a ‘what’, a method rather than a determined set of objects, Being and Time is ultimately about the world and being in the world. The ostensible ‘how’ of phenomenology immediately collapses into a predesignated ‘what’: the world and mundane phenomena. Instead, Henry argues that ‘The genuine object of phenomenology is phenomenality, because phenomenality constitutes our access to the phenomenon; in its very phenomenalization, phenomenality opens the path which leads right up to the phenomenon.’22 It is the consequence of the prevailing bias of ontological monism that even when a thinker of Heidegger’s calibre addresses himself explicitly to phenomenality, the condition for all phenomena showing themselves in the first place, he nevertheless descends right away into a discussion of phenomena, not phenomenality at all. A similar point could be made about Levinas, who would seem to agree with Henry that the Husserlian ‘gaze’ suffers from an overly intellectualist and theoretical regard, questioning whether Husserlian methodology could furnish life itself rather than life as modified by reflective attention thereupon. In his commentary on Husserl’s doctrine of intuition he wrote, Once reflection has been posited as the act through which consciousness becomes explicitly aware of itself, should we not ask whence reflection derives the right to grasp conscious life as it is? The whole philosophical value of reflection consists in allowing us to grasp our life, and the world in our life, such as they are prior to reflection. Hence if Erlebnisse can be revealed to consciousness only after being modified by reflection, then only modified states of consciousness would be accessible to us and not life in its original form. Therefore we must examine the acts of reflection closely. We shall then be able to decide whether phenomenology can reach life in general or only reflected life.23 Yet the critique that Henry is advancing is perhaps a bit more confident and more pointed in its conclusion and a bit more wide-ranging in scope than that of the young Levinas. For Henry, Husserl only reaches ‘reflected

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life’ because he only reaches life ‘thought about’ rather than affective life. But it also is not enough according to Henry to shift from the theoretical to the practical or from categorial-intentionality to operative-intentionality to liberate phenomenality and retrieve life from the clutches of worldly phenomena. Merely liberating intentionality from reflection will not yield the proper ‘object’ of phenomenology because it will not liberate immanence from transcendence, phenomenality from phenomena or life from the world.24 Hence Henry pays less attention to Heidegger and his influence in favour of a critical engagement with Husserl that will reveal something about Henry’s phenomenology of life as ‘founded’ in Husserl’s undeveloped discovery in The Idea of Phenomenology. Whether theoretically or practically encountering the world, phenomenology’s methodological decisions rest on presuppositions themselves requiring elucidation. Husserl’s thought and method set the course for phenomenology on Henry’s reading, but Henry likewise believes that Husserl’s thought laid clear another path that the founder overlooked and his inheritors even suppressed. In fact, on Henry’s reading, the merit of Husserl’s method despite its shortcomings was to have examined immanence before rushing to the call of transcendence. Henry may be sure that Husserl in fact allowed life to slip away under the gaze, but he seems equally sure that Husserl (more so than his successors) left available certain possibilities for Henry’s radical phenomenology of life. Those promises, however, were left unrealized by Husserl himself. If it is the first theoretical failure of The Idea of Phenomenology to have ‘sought this absolute givenness elsewhere’, in the gaze, then what follows from it is what Henry calls ‘the perversion of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology’, the circumscribed ‘categories with which the cogitatio must be thought in its reality’.25 Primary among these concepts and the perversion thereof – the fatal mistake, as we shall see, according to Henry – is the transformation in the concept of immanence attendant upon the displacement of the cogitatio from having its own ‘self-givenness’ and thus being radically immanent in a sense that Henry approves of, into a warped version of immanence that Husserl endorses.26 In keeping with his larger philosophical agenda, Henry maintains that the self-givenness of the cogitatio is the ground of any givenness whatsoever27 such that it is the immanence of the self-given, the immanence of what ‘gives nothing else’ but itself, that is the ‘fundamental category of phenomenology’ and not ‘the banality of seeing’.28 What has to be true of the cogitatio in order for it to have its own absolute self-givenness prior to and apart from submission to the gaze is

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that it be immanent in Henry’s sense, that is to say that it does not partake in the ‘alterity of distance’ and thus refuses to be ‘constituted by exteriority, the phenomenality of the world, and the ek-stasis of Being’, 29 refuses to be a ‘no-thing’ in relation to that of which it is aware30 or even to be constituted by the ‘sight’ of the face of the other. We might say then that Henry returns to Husserl in ‘The Phenomenological Method’ because Husserl seems guilty of the bias of ontological monism to a lesser degree than his proximal phenomenological inheritors. Indeed, Henry acknowledges that Husserl alone among phenomenologists is familiar with the sense of immanence that is appropriate to life and differs completely from the worldly form of manifestation: Husserl (and this is where he went further than all the other contemporary thinkers) never doubted that the cogitatio had its own reality, even if he left its appearing undetermined. This reality, which he calls reell , causes the ontological weight of being to tip into absolute subjectivity and it alone.31 Husserl’s phenomenology is thus not unattractive to Henry; he maintains that the 1907 lectures ‘are not unaware’ of the ‘radical concept of immanence’ that Henry supports throughout his career as being solely fit for the truth of non-intentional life, of immanence, of phenomenality.32 Even if Henry finds Husserl guilty of a methodological distortion that determines immanence by the gaze, then, he does not find Husserl guilty of prioritizing transcendence to the presumptive expense of immanence. Nevertheless, because it is grossly inappropriate on Henry’s terms to impose a worldly form of understanding on life and its deployment, this is precisely the error Husserl makes. He abandons a sense of immanence that is reserved within itself – reell immanence that concerns only the self-showing of life and shows nothing but life itself – in favour of another, depleted sense of immanence, the one that will be uncritically taken up by all phenomenology post-Husserl and pre-Henry. According to this secondary sense, immanence is immanence to the seeing gaze; ‘Thought’s grasp of a content situated outside itself, and in this way seen by it, is a transcendence’,33 which is to say it ceases to be immanence in Henry’s sense. This elision from an authentic Henryan immanence to a depleted sense of immanence modelled on its opposite – transcendence – simultaneously condemns the ostensible object of the gaze, the cogitatio, to vacuity and perpetrates a hopeless muddle, such that now what Husserl calls immanent is really only a misnamed relation of transcendence, of seeing subject

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to seen object. Again the reason why Henry can characterize Husserlian immanence as a form of covert transcendence is because immanence for Husserl is already a relation – or a correlation, it matters not – the manifestation of a phenomenon to consciousness and not the self-manifestation of life. In Husserl’s words, ‘absolute and clear givenness, self-givenness in the absolute sense’ and, therefore, immanence as well, is always immanence to the seeing gaze, that which is fully ‘taken in’ by the gaze;34 but according to Henry, this is an abuse of the literal meaning of ‘absolute’, which is precisely to be absolved of any relation whatsoever.

III. A Husserlian Rejoinder to Henry’s Critique: A ‘Fatal Mistake’ Regarding Two Concepts of Immanence Yet a potential rejoinder to Henry can be offered on Husserl’s behalf to the effect that actually in Husserl’s text he is intensifying the meaning of immanence, not altering it illicitly. Henry’s reading of The Idea of Phenomenology is sufficiently sensitive to detect in the argumentation that Husserl is indeed extending the sphere of investigation open to phenomenology beyond what a naïve ‘philosophy of absolute subjectivity’ might permit.35 Drawing a line then between the absolute givenness of the cogitatio and what transcends the cogitatio, Husserl extends that line to circumscribe the latter.36 The extension of the field of givenness to what is not furnished by the cogitationes though is not unproblematic on Henry’s reading. The extension of the pure seeing of particular cogitationes to their universal essences is not an ‘extension’ in the proper sense of the term. Instead, it conveys a radical discontinuity. It is the rupture between two domains that are forever separated: that of the universal and the transcendent being, on the one hand, for which pure seeing is shown to be the adequate mode of access, and, on the other hand, its domain of incompetence, the cogitatio.37 Because there is at bottom then in The Idea of Phenomenology a rupture between the radical immanence of life lived in the valences of the cogitationes and the transcendence of that which surrounds the cogitationes but can still be ‘given’ in the gaze, ultimately Henry contends Husserlian phenomenology must choose between these two concepts of immanence. It must clearly say which one of them is the basis for its attempt to produce pure phenomena

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as well as which one of these the true nature of pure phenomena, their phenomenality.38 Henry presents phenomenology with a choice between two notions of immanence: one that would consist in the living of life as absolute nonintentional revelation of self to self and have no truck with transcendence and the world and one that would subsume even the inner life of consciousness to a metaphorical ‘sight’ and the worldly form of manifestation that is its sole competence. The former understanding of immanence is one that Henry says is not unknown to Husserl. It remains for us to see why Husserl was aware of this notion of immanence and yet traded it in for a form he preferred. The critical difference between Henry’s and Husserl’s final positions on the nature of phenomenology itself can only be assessed if we thus turn more directly to the issue of what sense of immanence is finally decided upon in The Idea of Phenomenology.39 Husserl does indeed develop different senses of immanence in these lectures, but the claim could be made that he does so rather more purposefully and defensibly than Henry recognizes. Henry does detect a recognizable ‘shift’ in The Idea of Phenomenology, but the precise nature of this shift can be interrogated further, revealing not so much an illicit substitution of one notion of immanence for another but a deepening recognition of what immanence necessarily entails. More specifically, and this taxonomy comes from John Brough, he articulates a three-stage progression from (1) a psychological sense of immanence, whereby the immanent is the content of consciousness and consciousness is understood as a kind of bag or box containing the immanent contents to (2) a real (reell ) sense of immanence, whereby the immanent is what is really inherent (reell ) in the cogitatio, which gives not mental contents but the subjective acts and achievements of consciousness in its purity, and finally to (3) a fully exposited notion of genuine, phenomenological immanence with all its implicit consequences educed. To put Henry’s concern briefly in Brough’s terms, one could say that Henry thinks Husserl should have remained with the second type, that is, real (reell ) immanence. The argument truly turns on this very point, and the question of how best to understand that parting of ways is thus at the heart of any confrontation between these two thinkers on the methodology and object of phenomenology itself.40 Husserl could be seen as attempting at least to open the way ultimately to a sense of givenness that is broader than that of the space of the cogitationes but remains strictly immanent. Prior to phenomenology’s discoveries,

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psychological immanence construes consciousness or the subject as mundane, ‘a little tag-end of the world’41 in which all transcendence, all being resides ‘in the consciousness of a person and in a mental phenomenon’ that represents the object.42 Neither immanence nor transcendence is given in psychological immanence, due to its strictly object-directed model of awareness and knowledge. Husserl contrasts psychological immanence to real [reell ] immanence. Reell immanence denotes what is contained in the stream of conscious life [Erlebnisse] purged of all presuppositions and dogmas – scientific, philosophical, and so on – or phenomenologically ‘reduced’. The label ‘reell immanence’ thus expresses ‘absolutely evident givenness . . . that . . . moment really contained in the act of knowing’, the absolute (purely given) life of conscious acts (e.g., perception, imagination).43 If psychological immanence precludes the givenness of transcendence and immanence, reell immanence secures the givenness of immanence but in a way that leaves transcendence under immanence’s thumb. As Husserl notes, phenomenology secures reell immanence ‘through . . . the phenomenological reduction’ such that what first appears is ‘an absolute givenness that no longer offers anything transcendent’ and again that wins for itself ‘a sphere of absolutely immanent givenness’,44 formulations that are echoed uncannily by Henry’s announcement in his magnum opus that he intends to develop a phenomenology that ‘owes nothing to the work of transcendence ’.45 There was a time earlier in Husserl’s career when he would have been content to leave it at that, having successfully banished transcendence from phenomenology altogether.46 But we’ve only here reached the cusp of the last decisive step in the argumentation of The Idea of Phenomenology, a step by which Husserl innovates on himself (and indeed on phenomenology) and that Henry perhaps fails to notice or too quickly declares – from the standpoint of an Henryan phenomenology of life – a ‘fatal mistake’. Husserl concedes around the midpoint of The Idea of Phenomenology that ‘Before critical epistemology enters into deeper levels of reflection, these two senses of immanence and transcendence are initially interwoven with each other in a confused fashion.’47 Because of this confusion a potential ‘fatal mistake’ arises. That mistake according to Husserl is to assume that all immanence means is that which is really inherent in the conscious act, the givenness of the pure subjective act itself without any invasion of any transcendent material content or data and without any regard for the objects intended by consciousness. While Husserl believes it is a ‘fatal mistake’ to stop here insofar as real (reell ) immanence precludes consciousness from a relation to its objects,

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Henry believes Husserl mistakenly arrived by way of the gaze at this correct point and then compounded this ‘first theoretical failure’ by committing the ‘fatal mistake’ of moving beyond the matter of real (reell ) immanence before analysing its full resources for phenomenology. According to Henry’s critique of the first theoretical failure, Husserl’s developed sense of reell immanence is only a veil for the transcendent object relation, taking as its domain the cogitatio under the gaze of consciousness. But Husserl’s full development of real (reell ) immanence does not model immanence on transcendence as Henry accuses him of doing. The case could be made that Henry should concern himself with Husserl’s broadened understanding of immanence, genuine phenomenological immanence, which Husserl distinguishes from both psychological immanence and reell immanence. What the reduction ultimately reveals is a new ‘broader concept’ of immanence such that we may now speak not only of that which is given as the act of knowing, but also that which is given as the thing known, a transcendence in immanence. Husserl thus distinguishes ‘between real (reell) immanence and immanence in the sense of . . . self-givenness’.48 The broader concept of immanence that Husserl pries open holds that ‘as far as selfgivenness extends, so far extends our phenomenological sphere, the sphere of absolute clarity, of immanence in the genuine sense’.49 Whatever gives itself – whether self or other, immanence or transcendence – if purged of presumption and dogma – gives itself in ‘evidence’ with the absolute clarity demanded by phenomenology as a rigorous science and thus qualifies as genuine phenomenological immanence. The true endpoint of Husserl’s analysis is his assertion that immanence belongs to whatever is given, and givenness is the whole terrain of phenomenological investigation, a terrain that cannot be bordered. Much later in the text, Husserl writes, ‘Absolute givenness is an ultimate’, and he maintains that If one has thrown off the first and immediate prejudice that sees the absolutely given only in the singular cogitatio and the sphere of real immanence, then one must also do away with the additional and no less immediate prejudice, according to which new self-given objectivities grow only in the general intuitions derived from this sphere.50 To fail to cast off this final prejudice is indeed a ‘fatal mistake’ according to Husserl, for it would foster the notion that the only interest phenomenology can have is in whatever is available in the cogitatio for the reductive gaze

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in reell immanence. But Husserl anticipates this final breakthrough in the introductory ‘Train of Thought in the Lectures’, when he says that real immanence (and, respectively, transcendence) is only a special case of the broader concept of immanence as such. It is now no longer obvious and unquestioned that what is absolutely given and what is really immanent are one and the same thing.51 What is absolutely given – available for phenomenological investigation within genuine phenomenological immanence – is both reell immanence and its way of being given and irreell transcendence and its way of being given, the really inherent moments of conscious life and its act(ivity) and the non-inherent moments of conscious life that nevertheless remain available for intentional consciousness.52 What this means practically – and here too we can speak of what this means for transcendence – is that the terrain opened by the reduction is not a restricted one but is one without in-principle limits. As Brough puts it, ‘Genuine immanence is no longer restricted simply to real containment in consciousness or in an act of consciousness. Genuine immanence is givenness, wherever it is found, even in the case of a transcendent object.’53 What fully developed and authentic transcendence means for Husserl is the given that is neither contained by nor reducible to the conscious act and yet must be properly called immanence – a transcendence in immanence. A rejoinder to Henry then would wish to argue that Husserl does not model immanence on transcendence so much as situate a complete and authentic understanding of transcendence within a complete and authentic understanding of genuine phenomenological immanence, where both can be understood as valences of the self-giving. And yet on Henry’s reading Husserl has committed a ‘fatal mistake’ of a different kind. Husserl has foregone the promise of a phenomenology of life, a phenomenology of immanence unmediated by transcendence, because genuine phenomenological immanence denotes a transcendence in immanence that is likewise an immanence in transcendence but examined with a different (noetic) focus and thus a (or the) most phenomenologically subtle permutation of ontological monism. It is not without irony that the end result of Husserl’s analysis, situating transcendence in immanence, is a shared goal of Henry’s, even though there surely seem to be some deep disagreements about the method of securing immanence and the radical articulation of immanence. In this matter of phenomenological method, Husserl’s ‘gaze’ is reflective and distortedly emphasizes the intellectual and theoretical, a critique Henry shares with

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Husserl’s more proximal inheritors (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas). But whereas Henry seems to appreciate that Husserl took phenomenology methodically from the inside out, from immanence to transcendence, from reell immanence to genuine phenomenological immanence, his more proximal inheritors foreswore reflection and the gaze and passed straight to transcendence, ‘fatally’ bypassing immanence. Indeed, Henry’s critique of Husserl’s method of the gaze at best seems to make Husserl an inadvertent discoverer whose conceptuality and bearing brought him mistakenly to the proper content of phenomenology, pure absolute real (reell ) immanence that ‘no longer offers anything transcendent’.54 The gaze that was a ‘first theoretical failure’ that nonetheless produced a fortuitous result according to Henry, at the same time brings both Husserl and Henry to a crossroads at which each one could make a ‘fatal mistake’ – a mistake that each would believe the other makes. Husserl believed the fatal mistake would be to remain within reell immanence, divorcing consciousness from its objects, its world and its nature as intentional; Henry believed that Husserl’s fatal mistake was to have taken the treasure of reell immanence and hidden it in a field of transcendence.

IV. The Paradox of Reflecting on Life ‘While It Is Occurring’ Needless to say, from such a significant divergence deep differences emerge. Perhaps the most consequent of these would be the difference between a non-intentional model of phenomenology and the classic intentional model. The latter of course assigns an important role to reflection, and by the same token the Husserlian approach likewise cannot do without the pre- reflective. A final question we might pose to Henry in the discussion we have been unfolding between these two thinkers would be to do with whether in the end Henry is attempting to valorize the pre -reflective, to rehabilitate its fortunes in reaction to a perceived slight against it committed by reflection and the overvaluing thereof, or whether he is ultimately affirming the non -reflective. In the course of his final thoughts in ‘The Phenomenological Method’ Henry asks ‘How can we acquire a pure seeing of the cogitatio? How is the phenomenological method possible ?’;55 as he has spent the bulk of the essay arguing against Husserl, this question is likely already in the reader’s mind. If Husserl’s methodology, his prizing of reflection, and his concept of immanence all obstruct ‘a pure seeing of the cogitatio’ itself, then what alternative

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does Henry provide? His answer is that ‘one would never have any concept of life, if the primal knowledge of life were not already included in the seeing that is directed toward it. This primal knowledge of life is living itself.’56 The only real disclosure of life to itself is to be found in the radical passivity of pathos in living life and not in thinking about life, and so Henry seeks to account for the ‘initial knowledge’ of what life is, which life bears within itself: Since each real property of real mental processes is revealed originally to itself and thus carries the initial knowledge of what it is within itself, a regard is able to arise on the basis of this knowledge. This regard casts the content of this knowledge – immanence and pathos – before itself. 57 Life’s initial knowledge is none other than the fact of life’s own self-revelation; it is not only within itself but is of itself and of nothing else. Its content, immanence and pathos, is nothing other than the phenomenological matter of life itself, while the regard that casts that content before itself must be a function of living as well: ‘It is not simply the case that the seen is derived from life; in addition, seeing itself is only a modality of life.’58 If reflection is itself understood as a function of life, and the phenomenological method as nothing other than ‘the self-justification of the transcendental life of absolute subjectivity in its self-objectification’, which is to say its own deployment of itself in its very living, then in point of fact ‘I can represent life to myself, and this principle is a part of life.’59 At this point in the final stages of his argument, Henry returns once more to the phrase from Husserl – ‘every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension, while it is occurring ’, and he underscores the final clause. Henry highlights on the basis of this clause the possibility that phenomenology can think life quite literally only ‘while it is occurring’, in the very act of its self-revelation, in the immanence of life without which nothing would ever be seen at all,60 such that ‘it is the immanent revelation of life in the cogitatio which allows seeing to see and know everything about life, to the extent that life can be known’.61 On this point as well then Henry seeks to recover from Husserl an element of his pioneering thinking that he believes he can deploy to greater effect than Husserl himself realized. Speaking of the possibility that the ostensible goal of representation could be realized when it is situated in life, Henry writes, Paradoxically, this possibility does not reside in representation but in what ultimately founds representation. It resides in the Archi-revelation

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of the life in which every lived experience ‘occurs’, in such a way that ‘while’ it is occurring, one may try to represent it to oneself on the basis of what is being experienced.62 What Husserl meant by ‘while it is occurring’ was not best realized by Husserl himself, but this meaning can be liberated by Henry’s phenomenology of life: Not only can life be represented to itself in the end if its seeing and seen are selfsame, all reality can be known only if it is situated in life. Henry claims, ‘all possible reality, including the reality of nature, the cosmos, the other, the absolute and even God, only becomes actual by being situated in Life’,63 that is to say that transcendence can only be grasped in its reality by being situated in immanence. But what results from such a situation? Only the fundamental heterogeneity of (1) the ‘initial knowledge’ borne within life, speaking only of itself,64 which in turn opens a ‘Way’ that is no different from its ‘Truth’65 and (2) anything that could be called ‘seeing’ in the sense of reflective knowledge or the result of the application of traditional methodology.66 The invincible foreignness of these realms to each other is one of Henry’s constant refrains, beginning with The Essence of Manifestation67 and repeated here: ‘But the rootedness of the logos in the phainomenon offers no parallel to the Word of Life. The latter founds the former and makes it possible. It is only to be seen in living, on the basis of the pathos that is essentially unseen within it’68 while the former remains entirely the product of and confined by ‘the intelligence of the world’69 with all the negative connotations that bears for Henry. So the promise at first seems that on the basis of life a (new and different?) ‘regard’ can arise that has as its content immanence and pathos and on the basis of which can not only life itself be known but all transcendent realities as well – the cosmos, the other, God, and the like. But transcendence itself seems to offer nothing to complement, correct or enhance the ‘initial knowledge’ of life; it can offer only its ‘essential irreality’.70 As we argued above, Husserl’s articulation of a complete understanding of immanence entails the objects intended, both the inherent and noninherent moments of conscious life. Henry too seems to indicate that the transcendent can be situated in immanence, but the transcendent itself seems to contribute nothing to immanence by being so situated. And as a correlate to that point, reflection in its traditional characterization seems to have no bearing on the regard that arises from life as lived. In the absence of any discernible rapport between this regard and the classical posture of reflection, one is left to wonder if there is only an entirely equivocal relation between the ‘regard’ that arises from life while it is

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occurring and the regard that features in Husserl’s thinking and that of the phenomenological tradition as a whole. If this is so, then the question of ‘How can we acquire a pure seeing of the cogitatio?’ can be answered only in terms of a ‘Way’ or a ‘regard’ that differs so radically from anything that could recognizably be counted as ‘seeing’ that the true character of such a ‘Way’ or ‘regard’ is lost to meaningful description.71 If the ‘seeing’ referred to by Henry in his essential question has nothing whatever to do with the ‘seeing’ in which Husserl took such an interest, then Henry’s question itself is potentially vacuous. Either reflection can be other than objectifying (in the pernicious sense) – something Henry never seems to concede, or if he concedes this he never seems to describe it – or there is no meaningful role for reflection to play at all, and the ‘philosophy of affectivity’72 is not pre-reflective but entirely non-reflective in its definition and development. The reason this is a potential problem for Henry is that it seems to solicit the dangerous conclusion that there is only one form of phenomenalization that matters in the end: Far from transcendence taking on its rightful place by situation in immanence, immanence would exclude transcendence. If this conclusion is intolerable, then the question remains: If reflection truly is itself a function of life, in what way might it shed a light of its own upon the dark region of its birth?

Notes and Works Cited 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10

Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 24. On this point see Dan Zahavi, ‘Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible’, Continental Philosophy Review 32.3 (1999): 223–40. Michel Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, in Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 44. Ibid. ‘Without even knowing it, it [traditional phenomenology] thus adopted the most common prejudice of Western philosophy. This label “Western philosophy” may appear to be vague. By “Western philosophy”, I mean that philosophy whose logos is the phenomenality of the world and whose logos is based on this phenomenality’ (Ibid., 96). Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid. See Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 45. Ibid., 45–6.

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See Jean-Luc Marion’s paper herein as he traces Henry’s divergence from these other classical phenomenologists. See also Renaud Barbaras’s paper, wherein the author situates Henry in relation with other theorists of the body and its activity. Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), §9. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 58. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 45. It is no accident that this phrase catches Henry’s notice. The English translation obscures the significance to him of the wording chosen in the French translation. The phrase rendered ‘intellectual experience’ is the familiar vécu, often used as an equivalent to Erlebnis, both of which have an etymological relation to their respective language’s words for ‘life’ lost in most English renderings, while the phrase ‘while it is occurring’ reads ‘pendant que nous le vivons’, which would more literally be rendered ‘while we live it’ and thus in the French signals a connection with the notion of life as it is lived more readily than in English. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 46–7. Ibid., 47–8. In the first paragraph of ‘The Phenomenological Method’ Henry recurs to Heidegger’s claim from the decisive section 7 of Being and Time that phenomenology is a methodology first and foremost. Ibid., 43. Henry, ‘Material Phenomenology and Language (or Pathos and Language)’, Continental Philosophy Review 32.3 (1999): 344. Ibid. Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 136–7. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §61. See also the entirety of ‘Material Phenomenology and Language’ and chapters 2 and 3 in Henry’s I Am the Truth. For related arguments on the incapacity of Husserlian epoché or intuition to deliver its object, see Jeffrey Hanson, ‘Michel Henry’s Critique of the Limits of Intuition’, Studia Phaenomenologica IX (2009): 97–111. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 51. Ibid., 52. See especially section III of The Essence of Manifestation. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 52–3. Ibid., 52. The allusion here is of course to Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, wherein consciousness is construed contra Kant and Husserl as the transcendence of the ‘ego’ in its pre-reflective engagement with the world before Husserl’s phenomenologically self-defeating positing of an ego that does the reflecting, a transcendental ego or absolute consciousness. One would be right to insist in a discussion of Henry, nevertheless, that Sartre does not secure the radical phenomenality of immanence sought by Henry insofar as Sartre emphasizes too strongly transcendence, the ego as a no-thing or not-the-thing-of-which-it-is-aware in its awareness of objects in the world. See Michael Kelly, ‘Self-Awareness and

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

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42 43 44 45

Ontological Monism: Why Kant Is Not an Ontological Monist’, Idealistic Studies 32.3 (2003): 239–56. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 55, 54. Ibid., 67. Ibid. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 70. It should be noted that despite the detailed exposition that Henry himself provides, he claims that ‘It is not foremost a matter of arriving at a complete knowledge of the Husserlian text but of delineating an essential lacuna within it’ (‘The Phenomenological Method’, 92); his reasons for saying so should now be obvious. Nevertheless, a clarification of The Idea of Phenomenology on this rather more complex point is necessary and can be much aided by the outstanding scholarship of John Brough. Brough has demonstrated quite successfully that it is helpful heuristically to read the lectures as proceeding along the lines of a gradually unfolding set of implications; it is, therefore, highly inadvisable to cherry-pick from among Husserl’s statements in the lectures without attending carefully to the stage of the argument from which we sample our quotations. We will refer to John Brough, ‘Consciousness Is Not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology’, Husserl Studies 24 (2008): 177–91. See also Michael Kelly, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Husserl’s Doctrine of Immanence: The Specter of Spinozism in Phenomenology’s Theological Turn’, Heythrop Journal, forthcoming (2012). As an aside, the case could be made that it is precisely the real (reell) sense of immanence – the integrity of the cogitatio in itself as a self-giving – that the phenomenological reduction of Husserl initially secures. If any posture towards the cogitatio threatens the proper understanding of the cogitatio it is the psychological sense of immanence, which, in the fashion of Descartes, configures the cogitatio as a mental content that is ‘in’ consciousness in the same sense that an object is ‘in’ a box or bag (to use Husserl’s own language that Brough picks up on). This sense of immanence, that both Husserl and Henry reject, would arguably be the one that most involves positing consciousness as a relatum at a remove from its natural correlate at that metaphorical ‘distance’ that Henry finds so objectionable. On such a reading one could argue that by moving from the first, psychological conception, to the second conception of real immanence, and unfolding the consequence thereof, Husserl precisely breaks with a sense of immanence that would reduce the cogitatio to a mental content passively inspected by a mind at a distance from that content. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 24. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 65. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 34, 33. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 40.

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Brough, ‘Consciousness Is Not a Bag’, 184. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 28. Ibid., 65, 63. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 45, 46. Ibid., 65. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), §93. Brough, ‘Consciousness Is Not a Bag’, 186. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 34. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 94. Ibid., 94–5. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 95. Ibid. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 99. For a more complete account of the heterogeneity in Henry’s thought between life and the world see Jeffrey Hanson, ‘Phenomenology and Eschatology in Michel Henry’, in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, ed. Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 153–66. See section 18, wherein Henry, in conversation with Hegel and Heidegger, argues that the Parousia in which natural consciousness lives ‘is radically independent with regard to each and every grasping of an act of consciousness directed toward it’, 147. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 99. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 94. A similar worry was voiced very soon after the publication of L’Essence de la manifestation by Georges van Riet: ‘Pour notre part, nous ne contesterions pas que la conscience (de) soi constitue une condition nécessaire de toute manifestation. Mais nous ne voyons pas comment elle en constituerait aussi la condition suffisante, et donc finalement l’unique condition . . . Quel intérêt y a-t-il à ajouter, à propos de tout phénomène, qu’il est conscient, et que ce caractère constitue son “essence”? Ne risque-t-on pas de verser dans l’équivoque, ou de se perdre dans le verbiage? L’immanence devient en effet l’essence de la transcendance . . . Tout détermination positive est rejetée dans le domaine de l’“ontique” ou de l’“existentiel”. Qu’on appelle l’immanence “affectivité” ou “sentiment” n’est guère éclairant, puisque le sentiment ne révèle rien, sinon lui-même, et n’est révélé par rien, sinon par lui-même. Il est aussi bien “activité” que “passivité”, “joie” que “souffrance”. Il est “soi”; il n’est pas “autre”, tout en étant l’essence de l’autre . . . L’immanence, d’après lui, n’a “rien à voir” avec la transcendance. Certes, il déclare aussi que l’immanence “fonde” la transcendance. Mais, chez

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lui, cela signifie simplement qu’elle en constitue une des conditions de possibilité. Comme elle ne la “crée” pas, il semble que, pour expliquer adéquatement le phénomène de transcendance, il aurait dû faire appel à une seconde condition de possibilité, phénoménologique elle aussi, et qui serait l’être de la transcendance, son indépendance (consciemment saisie) à l’égard de l’immanence.’ ‘Une nouvelle ontologie phénoménologique. La philosophie de Michel Henry’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 64 (1966): 455–6. Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, 90.

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Chapter 4

Inward Life Kevin Hart

In early September 1813 a musket ball struck a young Prussian soldier fighting in the battle of Dennewitz. He had been a student of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and had carried an edition of his teacher’s 1806 Berlin lectures on religion with him into battle. Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben had been a spiritual guide for him, as for many in those days, and he held it close to his heart. The French musket ball hit him in the chest but did not penetrate his flesh, for Fichte’s Religionslehre stopped it, and when the relieved soldier plucked it from the book he found that its nose pointed at these words: ‘denn alles was da kommt ist der Wille Gottes mit ihm, und drum das Allerbeste was da kommen konnte ’ [for everything that comes to pass is the Will of God with him, and therefore the best that can possibly come to pass].1 As his early patron Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have wished, Fichte gave his lectures on how to attain the blessed life with a heavy stress on the importance of ‘inward life’ in the quest for God. Accordingly, he disparaged miracles as merely external events, instances of the superstition that an enlightened philosophy such as his own must dismiss. Gotthold Lessing’s axiom, ‘Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason’, was ringing as loudly in Fichte’s ears as it did in Immanuel Kant’s a generation earlier.2 Kant’s response was to bring Christianity within the circle of the moral law. Fichte though taught that Christianity, while not historical, is nonetheless still metaphysical. (Not that he had turned against Kant, for in his Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1806) Fichte tells us that the religious person passes through morality without overcoming it.3) He assures those listening to him deliver his Religionslehre that if we think rightly, we are ‘divine life’, immortal, and are to be transformed into Christ.4 All this must have been very comforting to the young soldier as he went into battle; and yet, inured against miracles as he surely was, he must also have been thankful for the external, material existence of Fichte’s lectures in his breast pocket, and once he plucked the

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musket ball from the book he must have pondered the passage from the eighth lecture with more than usual devotion to his teacher. Michel Henry was undoubtedly pleased to have a copy of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft when he joined the maquisard on the Haut Jura in 1943. It was the only thing that he brought with him, and so his amused fellow resistance fighters gave him the code name ‘Kant’.5 Fortunately, no German bullet found him, for the Kritik der reinen Vernunft was sufficiently large to have to be kept in his backpack, not in his chest pocket. Fichte’s Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben is no small book, but it is more compact than the 2003 one-volume edition of Michel Henry’s L’Essence de la manifestation , which runs to 906 pages.6 We may doubt that any soldier going into battle in Afghanistan or Iraq today would take it as a spiritual guide; no US or French uniform would have a breast pocket large enough to contain it, unless it were downloaded onto a Kindle, which at the moment is not likely; and modern bullets with lead or hardened steel cores would rip through anything except the strongest ballistic vest. Nonetheless, L’Essence de la manifestation is for some younger philosophers and theologians almost what Fichte’s Religionslehre was in his day. Scarcely ‘popular’, in the way that Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben was, and was intended to be, L’Essence de la manifestation nonetheless continues and extends the project of affirming the primacy of ‘inward life’. To be sure, it is first and foremost a theoretical work, more akin in ambition and scope to the Wissenschaftslehre than to the Religionslehre ; it is an attempt to reconfigure phenomenology, to rethink it so that all transcendence is understood to be rooted in the prior immanence of life. And yet it is also a critique of received religion and a bold attempt to reconceive Christianity. Henry folds Fichte’s Religionslehre into his project, agreeing with him about the primacy of the fourth gospel for Christianity, sprucing him up here and there, and adding another German thinker into the mix: Meister Eckhart. This is not the entire philosophical and religious heritage of Henry, not even in relation to the thematic already introduced. With respect to that thematic, he also answers in his own country to certain emphases in spiritualisme (especially as represented by Émile Boutroux and Félix Ravaisson) as well as to themes in Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.7 Nor is it all that Henry has to say about religion. He will develop his philosophy of Christianity in his trilogy, C’est moi la vérité (1996), Incarnation (2000) and Paroles du Christ (2002), but these books rely on the insights of the earlier one. ‘All thought is essentially religious’, Henry declares towards the end of L’Essence de la manifestation ,8 for thought bears within itself the immanence of life, and we, individual

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‘livings’, are moments in divine life.9 The ‘theological turn’ of the late 1980s had happened for Henry in the 1960s it would seem, though if it did, it did not make Henry do theology that was not phenomenological.10 Certainly a comparison with the magnum opus would reveal how the trilogy elaborates the earlier book’s central claims, though I do not propose to do that here. Instead, I shall organize a brief reading of L’Essence de la manifestation around its treatment of religion in general and Christianity in particular, and I shall orient myself by way of what Henry says about the gospel writer we call John, about Meister Eckhart, and of course about Fichte. First, though, I need to give a preliminary answer to the question, ‘What is the essence of manifestation?’ Immanence, Henry replies, pure immanence. But isn’t this exactly what Edmund Husserl says when he tells us that all transcendence falls before the reduction? This question takes us to the root difference between the two philosophers. *** ‘Noli foras ire ’, Augustine writes in De vera religione, ‘in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas’ [Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth].11 And Husserl, concluding the Cartesianische Meditationen, tells us, ‘I must lose the world by epoché, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination’, and then, to reinforce his point, he quotes Augustine’s words.12 The meditations have been Cartesian, informed by the quest for an absolute foundation, as revealed by the cogito. For Henry, however, the cogito must be recovered from Kant’s deformation of it as meaning not ‘I think’ but ‘I represent to myself that I think’, which directs Husserl in his meditations (and later will guide Heidegger in his treatment of René Descartes in Sein und Zeit).13 It must come to mean, as Henry thinks it did for Descartes, ‘that which appears to itself immediately in everything that appears, or rather in pure appearing (what Descartes calls thought)’,14 and what Henry calls cogitatio, soul or life, to distinguish it from the Kantian and Heideggerian sense of the cogito as an objective reality.15 Also, for Henry, epoché and reduction do not lead us to the ‘inner man’, or at least not the inner man he wants, the pure auto-affectivity of life, but rather give us an inadequate immanence. He insists there are two modes of immanence: that of the reduced phenomenon and that of the cogitatio; and Husserlian phenomenology flounders at the very moment the reduction is discovered in Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907) precisely because Husserl does not properly grasp the difference between them and prioritize them in the right way. Like Descartes, Husserl wishes to find an absolutely firm ground, one without any presuppositions, on which to found his philosophy. The

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base of phenomenology must be completely evident in self-givenness, Selbstgegebenheit . At first Husserl offers a familiar Cartesian claim: However I might perceive, imagine, judge, infer – whether these acts are attended by certainty or uncertainty, whether they actually have objects or not – it remains absolutely clear and certain that with respect to perception I am perceiving this or that, that with respect to judgment, I am judging this or that, etc.16 Then, a few pages later, he notes that seeing gives itself to itself. He claims, ‘Seeing cannot be demonstrated or deduced.’17 It would follow from these two claims that the cogitatio is coordinate with or secondary to the gaze, and yet Henry quotes Husserl apparently against himself: ‘Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring. And in this act of seeing it is an absolute givenness.’18 It is the four words that Husserl emphasizes that attract Henry’s attention: ‘while it is occurring’. The Frenchman responds, ‘But if the cogitatio has already been carried out or if it is carried out while the regard takes it into its pure gaze, this is because the cogitatio is independent from and ontologically prior to the pure gaze.’19 And then Henry fires his deadly question, ‘How can the existence of the cogitatio be founded starting from its being absolutely given in a pure gaze, if this pure gaze presupposes the prior existence of the cogitatio?’20 Does this bullet hit Husserl? Or does Die Idee der Phänomenologie stop it? Husserl tells us that the Cartesian cogitatio ‘itself requires the phenomenological reduction’.21 That is, there is no independent priority of the cogitatio; the gaze has had to be converted in order to find the very certainty that Descartes claims. The point is underlined several years later in Aus den Vorlesungen: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, a series of lectures given in the winter semester of 1910–11: Everything the empirical psychologist lays claim to as psychic experience of the human and animal I-consciousness respectively becomes only a cogitatio in the absolute sense, in the sense of a pure phenomenological givenness, by way of the phenomenological reduction, and only then is the givenness pure and absolute in the sense that the straightforward positing of a this, of a being, leaves open no possible doubt whatsoever, i.e. would render doubt meaningless indeed. This is precisely what was important for Descartes, whereas for us it is not the main thing. . . . What interests us here is not the absolute

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universal science (absolute Universalwissenschaft), but rather science (die Wissenschaft) within the phenomenological attitude. 22 The cogitatio is ‘prior’ to the converted gaze solely in the sense that it is first determined at the level of psychology, a regional science. It becomes an absolute datum only when reduced in and through the gaze: The apparent immanence of the cogitatio in the stream of psychological events is secured as reelle Immanenz , genuine immanence, only after the reduction. Of course, in the conversion of the gaze Husserl regards the cogito by way of intentionality, and this leads to the paradox that, as we hear in the Paris lectures, ‘I become the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life ’; but this is not the deadly self-contradiction that Henry believes he has secured.23 The transcendental and the natural are distinct levels. By the same token, Henry’s claim to have found a mode of radical immanence, one he claims to be ontological, is of great importance when considering the foundation of his own philosophy. Indeed, bypassing Husserl, one can find evidence in Descartes’ own text that the cogito affects itself before any act of representation takes place.24 Certainly Henry’s entire philosophy, his ‘material phenomenology’, is predicated upon the absolute priority of immanence. His interest is less in the phenomenon that appears before us than in the mode of givenness by which it appears, its phenomenality; and his claim is that intentionality, in determining appearing as what appears, masks phenomenality.25 Selbstgegebenheit , for him, is the self-appearing of life. Not life regarded by way of the genome or chemical formulas or considered in terms of matter animated by intentionality but rather life as non-intentional pathos : anterior to representation, utterly immemorial. It is by way of reversing phenomenology as practised by Husserl and Heidegger that he brings his own view of phenomenology into focus. What the two great German philosophers share, he thinks, is a fundamental commitment to transcendence: not ontic transcendence (the way in which God is said to surpass his creation) or ontological transcendence (the way in which being, according to Aristotle in the fourth book of the Metaphysics, exceeds beings) but epistemological transcendence (the recovery by consciousness of presence by way of representation). It is this last version of transcendence that yields the transcendence of the ego and that determines what Henry calls ‘ontological monism’, the view that regards being as alienated, exterior to consciousness, and to which epistemological transcendence responds by showing that this exterior being may be represented to consciousness by way of concepts. This epistemology is valued because it leads to truth as

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certitude, and this is the main reason why the ontology it supports is longstanding.26 The exteriority of being is a deep current of Western thought; even apparent dualists, such as Descartes, are closet ontological monists, Henry thinks, and within ontological monism immanence is systematically devalued.27 Let’s see what Henry has in mind with respect to Husserl. For the father of phenomenology, immanent acts may be found whenever perceiver and perceived are concretely and entirely one. When a nonabstract distinction between the two can be drawn we have transcendent acts, such as when my mental process directs me to another ego, a physical object, or even something internal but not immanent, such as a memory of a past event.28 Husserl’s project is to lead all transcendent acts back to acts of genuine immanence so that one might recognize the precise ways in which a phenomenon has been constituted, has appeared on one’s intentional horizon, has been rendered meaningful. To this end, he distinguishes between ‘being as consciousness’ and ‘being as something which becomes “manifested ” in consciousness’, that is, in terms of Kant’s well-known distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent.29 Everything transcendent, in as much as it becomes given in consciousness, is an object for phenomenological investigation not only with respect to the consciousness of it – e.g., the different modes of consciousness in which it becomes given as the same – but also, though this is essentially involved with the former, as what is given and accepted in the modes of givenness.30 The transcendent is to be led back to the transcendental, presence to representation; and looking sideways, as it were, from a transcendental vantage point, we shall see how the transcendent has been constituted as meaningful by being embedded in particular intentional rapports. Heidegger follows a different path, bypassing ontic and epistemological transcendence, and seeking to think ontological transcendence more profoundly by way of the difference between the ontic and the ontological. His early concern is to affirm what is essential to Dasein: fundamental–ontological transcendence. He explains the situation in Sein und Zeit (1927), although his exposition is clearer in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (1928). Transcendence, he says there, is not a matter of overcoming a barrier between the inside and outside of a person’s mental life; it is not at heart an epistemological question – how can we know what exists outside consciousness? – but rather a matter of subjectivity and freedom. ‘To be a subject means to transcend. This means that Dasein does not sort of exist and then occasionally achieve a crossing

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over outside itself, but existence originally means to cross over. Dasein is itself the passage across.’31 In knowing we do not pass from ourselves, as it were, to an object exterior to us and then represent it to ourselves. The situation can be dealt with more pragmatically than this theory proposes and more satisfactorily as well. Our transcendence is a fundamental existential of our being in the world: We are always transcending this or that being by dint of being-in-the-world, that is, by belonging to an interlocking series of relationships (‘for-the-sake-of-which’, ‘in-order-to’, ‘towards-this’, ‘in-which’) that make a whole and in terms of which Dasein works practically and purposively, its understanding always projecting it into new possibilities.32 This transcending is not a capacity we acquire, develop and may lose but something we are, and accordingly it is ontologically finite. It is prior to intentionality and all mental acts, and it essentially marks Dasein as free, for Dasein is ontologically independent of anything it encounters. What Heidegger determines then is a level of human being that precedes the distinction between the immanent and the transcendent: resoluteness, Entschlossenheit , ‘the self-opening for the open’.33 Far from being a question of mundane decisions operating at the level of psychology, resoluteness turns on Dasein being ‘en-owned by be-ing’. In the words of the Beiträge, ‘The enopening in and through projecting-open is such only when it occurs in the experience of thrownness and thus of belongingness to be-ing.’ And with a backward turn to Husserl and Neo-Kantianism, he adds, ‘That is the essential difference from every merely transcendental way of knowing with regard to the conditions of possibility.’34 Henry develops a critique of Husserl in L’Essence de la manifestation section 30 (1963) and later in Phénoménologie matérielle (1990), and part of the earlier book is directed against Heidegger – see in particular sections 11–16 – especially against his proposal that Dasein is at once ontic and ontological, an ambiguity that involves Heidegger in an uncritical commitment to the alienation of being. One might think that Henry cannot refute Heidegger if the German thinker succeeds in finding a level of human being prior to immanence, since Henry’s project consists of recovering the fundamental immanence of life. Yet Henry seeks to show that Entschlossenheit relies on a prior auto-affectivity that opens the temporality that Dasein requires in order for it to make its decision for existence.35 More generally, Henry asks us to admit the reality of the pre-reflective movement of life in each of us and then shows that Heidegger does not, and on his own terms cannot, account for this life or how ‘the ego can rise to existence and acquire its own Being’.36 For Henry, Heidegger determines Dasein as being-directedto-death and overlooks the fundamental upsurge of life in each and every human being.37 Moreover, his conceiving of phenomenology as a method

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for showing how we cope with the outside world, a phenomenology of Dasein’s ek-stases, is already shading his phenomenology as a philosophy of death, he thinks. For the outside world is clouded, Henry believes, as soon as attention to the phenomenon occludes due awareness of its phenomenality and its origin, individual consciousness, or, more broadly, as soon as the subjectivity and creative force of the individual is forsaken for an abstraction such as ‘institution’, ‘society’, ‘party’ or ‘the state’ or – in terms of political economy – as soon as production is prized above work.38 We are not thrown in the world, as Heidegger tells us; we fall into a world of representation from which we can be saved by recognizing the primacy of pre-reflective life. More precisely, Henry wishes to propose and defend the proposition, ‘Transcendence rests upon immanence’.39 He does this by contesting the common idea that manifestation originally takes place in the world; on the contrary, he argues, manifestation is first of all an affectively structured revelation of subjectivity, and worldly manifestation is alienation, being represented outside its being, a mode of manifestation in which being is hidden as well as revealed.40 The invisible yet deeply felt life of consciousness is itself parousia , full presence, and abides in solitude and darkness, without reference to the world of representation; and the proper task of phenomenology is to examine the auto-affectivity of life with its poles of suffering (passivity) and joy (active receptivity), which Henry regards as the most basic mode of phenomenality. This position leads to many questions: about the justice of Henry’s critiques of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology; about whether he establishes (rather than declares) his major proposition; about how that proposition, if true, would modify the practice of intentional phenomenology, which, after all, is a response to things, not representations; and about whether non-intentional phenomenology can ever be anything more than theory, an abstract celebration of inner life. But I shall concern myself solely with his critique of religion and his reformulation of Christianity. Henry approaches ‘the essence of religion’ by way of a ‘critique of knowledge’. Immediately, he distances himself from the Kantian associations of this language, for he is not concerned to establish transcendental conditions for knowledge and in the process regulate religion by way of reason. Nor does he propose, as Karl Barth does (perhaps with a faux-innocent smile), that the critical philosophy leaves open the opportunity of developing a theology, one that answers to a revelation that supplies its own conditions of possibility and does not look to philosophy to provide them for it.41 Instead, his critique of knowledge is a criticism of any epistemology

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that seeks to represent its ground, whether that is in ‘pure exteriority’42 or, as with Kant, in ‘the determination of its internal structure, of its nature and of its possibility’.43 To determine an epistemic ground is simultaneously to miss the absolute, ‘the essence of life’,44 which cannot disclose itself by way of representation. For support, Henry looks to Fichte, not to his youthful exemplary Kantian work Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (1793), in which revelation is brought to heel by the moral law, but to Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben (1806). There he quotes Fichte, as if citing scripture, ‘divine life . . . subsists in the only place where it is able to . . . hidden and inaccessible to conceptual thought ’ [göttliche Leben . . . bleibt da, wo es allein seyn kann . . . verborgenen und dem Begriffe unzugänglichen].45 One must be careful not to let Henry’s selective quotation of Fichte give a skewed view of the German’s doctrine of religion. To be sure, Fichte stresses that the immediate divine life cannot be represented to consciousness. Yet earlier, Fichte has told his audience, ‘it is only by means of Thought, proper, pure, and true thought, and absolutely by no other organ, that man can approach the Godhead and the Blessed Life which proceeds from the Godhead, and can bring them home to himself’, and a moment later, he says, ‘Pure Thought is itself the Divine Existence; and, on the other hand, the Divine Existence, in its immediate essence, is nothing else than pure Thought.’46 Feeling will not bring us to God, as Schleiermacher was taken to argue in his Reden über Religion (1799), nor will the exercise of virtue open a path to the blessed life, as Catholics believe. Only thought will do so.47 Not that this ‘thought’ is anything other than what Christians have traditionally called ‘faith’, Fichte assures us.48 What he has in mind, it seems, is something akin to contemplation, ‘really earnest and sustained attention’ [zusammengefassten und angestrengten Aufmerksamkeit],49 or the exercise of one’s ‘spiritual eye’ [geistigen Auge].50 As Heidegger would say over a century later, this is ‘meditative thought’, not ‘calculative thought’ or what Henry calls ‘conceptual thought’.51 Fichte stays on the side of philosophical contemplation and does not press the wavy border between it and contemplative prayer in his lectures. There is no doubt that Henry finds ‘the essence of religion’ coming into focus in early German idealism. He cites approvingly the young romantic Hegel, writing in his essay ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal’ (1799), ‘The hill and the eye which sees it are object and subject, but between man and God, between spirit and spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectivity; one is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other; both are one’ and ‘God cannot be taught or learned since he is life and can be apprehended only with life.’52 When he also quotes the angels’

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words to Jesus’ female disciples in Luke 24.5 (‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’, KJV), the ‘two men . . . in shining garments’ are witnesses for Henry to the death that he finds implicit in representation and exteriority. Jesus, as Fichte says (and in doing so gains Henry’s approval), ‘explains absolutely nothing of the world by means of his religious principle and deduces nothing from this principle’ [er erklärt durch sein Religionsprincip schlechthin nichts in der Welt, und leitet nichts ab aus jenem Princip].53 This ‘religious principle’ is that there is a ‘structural opposition between Being and knowledge’,54 which means that religion affirms being, which for Henry is the immanent movement of life and not ousia or substantia. Atheism, he thinks, is a perfectly legitimate response to religious persons who propose God in terms of ontic transcendence: a divine being, abiding in another world that is invisible but that, in principle at least, can be represented to consciousness. This is the God that Fichte believes to derive from superstition and that William Blake satirizes under the name of Nobodaddy.55 If Fichte finds the way to the blessed life, life without death, in terms of philosophical contemplation, it is because he thinks of God as light, and although he speaks of the union of human and divine being, of life and Life, he also underlines that, Even in our union with him he does not become our own Being; but he floats before us as something foreign to, and outside of, ourselves [als ein fremdes und ausser uns], to which we can only devote ourselves, clinging to him with earnest love.56 So Fichte acknowledges that while we immediately participate in the divine life, there is a real distinction between human and divine life. He is, therefore, able to draw upon the philosophy of the contemplative life and even on contemplative prayer in order to specify the nature of the ‘blessed life’ on earth. Although he does not make it clear, Henry differs sharply from Fichte in this regard. Life (or God) for him is ‘more than man’ insofar as it auto-affects itself in a distinct way from how I auto-affect myself in order to become myself. Yet he relies more surely on Spinoza’s God as immanent cause than does Fichte.57 God, for Henry, is inaccessible darkness, not because of his sovereign transcendence, as with pseudo- Dionysius and the tradition that answers to him, but because of his elemental immanence.58 Accordingly, Henry speaks of ‘The coldness of grasping, the indifference of contemplation and the theoretical look’.59 Contemplation, for him, whether in a Neoplatonic, Christian or phenomenological mode, is firmly aligned with knowledge rather than being; and so our participation in the divine life must occur otherwise. The only contemplative life that Henry affirms is

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one that is not opposed to praxis but rather attends to ‘the original force that abides in every force and throws it in itself before it unfolds itself’ and in doing so ‘experiences itself more intensely’.60 Auto-affectivity will show us how we participate in the divine life. It is in explaining auto-affectivity that Henry also indicates the manner in which transcendence relies on immanence. He elaborates his case in considerable detail in sections 30–33 of L’Essence de la manifestation ; it is part of an overarching, loose reductio ad absurdum – if the Husserlian and Sartrean doctrine of the transcendence of the ego is correct, then intentionality is impossible – and rather than summarize those dense pages I shall look at a later passage in which Henry reviews his case.61 He does so in the context of clarifying how empirical sensibility arises. Although ‘empirical sensibility’ seems to be ‘pre-indicated in nature and founded by it’, this sensibility ‘actually fi nds its condition in the effectiveness of pure sensibility whose essence is the internal sense’.62 But this ‘internal sense’, time, must itself be grounded. Why? To prevent an infinite regress of answers to the question that phenomenality requires us to ask, namely ‘How?’ Just how is this internal sense to be grounded? Henry explains: If the power of sensing something in general, namely, of receiving it and being affected by it, resides in the formation of a sensible horizon, then the act which forms this horizon and thus receives it, if it is anything other than the object of a metaphysical affirmation and if that which it accomplishes is real, must itself be shown in its reality. The question of the reality of transcendence itself was henceforth [a été ] circumscribed and recognized as follows: The act which forms the horizon, before receiving it and even before forming it, receives itself in such a way that this original reception of self assures the ultimate possibility thereof [en assure la possibilité dernier]. Hence, by a definite progression and by escaping the tempting horizon of monism, the problem of receptivity no longer deals with opposed-Being but with the very possibility of opposition and the maintaining close to itself of the act which accomplishes it. The maintaining close to self of the act which accomplishes opposition, the maintaining close to self of the act of transcendence in the original receptivity wherein transcendence receives itself, discovers its Being, masters itself, controls itself, coheres with self in the unity which makes it to be, to be what it is and what permits it to act, the original affection of transcendence, not by the world but precisely by the act which forms the world, namely, by itself, the auto-affection of transcendence, its Beingalready-affected before it affects itself as time, is the condition and the

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foundation of every ontological affection by the world as of every affection by a being; it is the condition of the internal sense.63 Ontological monism is tempting only if one accepts that being is always alienated from itself, abiding outside a subjectivity that it helps to constitute. If that is so, intentionality determines consciousness and its relation to the world, and there is an unbridgeable ‘phenomenological distance’ between subjectivity and what it represents to itself. No intentionality without distance. Yet it is not also true to say no transcendence without intentionality. For Henry distinguishes two senses of ‘transcendence’. On the one hand, there is a transcendent act that projects a temporal horizon and is in turn affected by it. On the other hand, there is a transcendent act in which the act is affected by its own content. This content, this phenomenological material, is drawn from the self-revelation of immanent life. And immanent life reveals itself by way of auto-affection, which is distinct from the self-affection that relies on a temporal horizon.64 The subject comes into itself, Henry maintains, on its own terms, before any positing of a world. ‘Being must be able to show itself’,65 Henry tells us; and the basis of his phenomenology is that being, the immanence of life, shows itself by dint of auto-affectivity. Yet this unconditioned being is faceless, invisible, abiding in a night that knows nothing other than itself. It cannot be nudged into the light, as usually happens in phenomenology by epoché and intentional analysis. If it shows itself it must be otherwise than by intentionality, and as we shall see Henry indicates a way in which this happens. Yet no Evidenz or even evidence is offered to show how immanence gives rise to transcendence and how transcendence generates a horizon that it receives, that is, how phenomenality phenomenalizes itself. All this is construction on Henry’s part, an account of what would have to be the case for immanence to be the essence of transcendence, and we are left to puzzle out why auto-affection must give rise to transcendence. Besides, we may well wonder what difference it would make to phenomenology if we accept this genesis of transcendence. What is actually hidden in the manifestation of a phenomenon if we forget to take account of phenomenality? A range of examples would need to be given before accepting the large amount of phenomenological theory that Henry offers us. Life, Henry tells us again and again, is pure, unconditioned immanence. Yet life is not inert; it is always in movement, seeking to transform itself and to grow. Only when life’s mode of appearing is suborned to visible phenomena, when subjectivity and individuality are denied

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by the world (i.e., by abstractions such as ‘the economy’ and ‘the state’, as already indicated) or are drained by its forces (the will to busyness, the preoccupation with objectivity, and, especially today, the enervating fascination with television, Facebook, the web, etc.) does it succumb to diminishment: a situation arising in early modernity that Henry calls ‘barbarism’.66 Otherwise, life feels its own activity, Henry maintains, and so it incessantly transforms itself. If asked to explain the nature and force of this ‘so’, Henry has no answer. It is in the very exercise of life that life experiences and affirms itself. Life is praxis, never anything less until such time as one falls into representation and the forces of barbarism arrest the movement of life. (It is noteworthy that Henry has little to say about fatigue, illness, ageing or the general sense of life running down, no awareness of those occasions when one watches ‘time crawl / Over the ceiling / Like a wounded fly’.67) This is the basis of Henry’s claim that the essence of transcendence is immanence: Life feels its own surge to be more life and does not need an exterior horizon of space or time in order to accomplish this. Indeed, the upsurge of life is the very condition of experiencing time, for if there is no action, then there cannot be any experience of time, Henry thinks. (Again, it is notable that he does not consider there being a more telling experience of time in melancholy, sickness or boredom than in action.) Of course, the auto-affection of life, its transcendence or transformation, takes place pre-reflectively and is, therefore, not accessible to conceptual thought. We might, therefore, ask how Henry can speak so confidently about it. True, there are always testimonies about an intense feeling of life. Iris Murdoch, for example, writes to a friend during the worst days of World War II, ‘I feel even at the lowest moment, such endless vitality within me.’68 Yet this experience of vim and vigour could easily be something peculiar to an elite group – artists and athletes, say, or more broadly the young and those with particularly good constitutions – and Henry’s claim is more general. A Freudian can say that a verbal slip can reveal the unconscious. Is there an equivalent for Henry? There is, and he takes it directly from Descartes’ Passions de l’âme (1645–6). Consider article 26, which Henry takes to be a Cartesian reduction, which enables phenomenality to show itself: Thus often when we sleep, and sometimes even when we are awake, we imagine certain things so forcibly, that we think we see them before us, or feel them in our body, although they do not exist at all; but although we may be asleep, or dream, we cannot feel sad or moved by any other

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passion without its being very true that the soul actually has this passion within it.69 In dreams, representations are usually misleading, yet the passions we feel when dreaming and sometimes recall on waking are genuine: They bespeak the deep suffering and joy of life that precedes intentionality. Henry could also cite Descartes when he indicates, in article 17, that not all our passions come from outside the soul and, in article 91, that intellectual joy ‘comes into the soul by the action of the soul alone’.70 There we have a clear case of autoaffection. To admit that we feel life in the self-experience of the soul would be consistent with an entirely secular view of reality, and yet Henry goes further than that frame allows. ‘Life’, after all, is his name for what Descartes calls the soul, and for Descartes, the soul is always inhabited by God. *** Fichte’s Religionslehre , itself a translation from religion to philosophy, is very close to what Henry wants to affirm in his material phenomenology. The German understands that the absolute is immanent yet tells us that we cannot know anything of this ‘divine life’, and Henry thinks that this ignorance exists because Fichte does not take the short step of recognizing that the self is identical to this absolute, that life is one with itself in all its forms.71 The manifestation of the absolute is self-manifestation in the self, not in the world. Similarly, when Henry turns to Meister Eckhart he finds a philosophy that overlaps significantly with the one he wishes to affirm.72 Once again, he has to translate from religious to philosophical language in order to find his own philosophy largely confirmed: a task that may be more difficult than he anticipates. Eckhart preaches that humility and poverty will bring God into the soul, achieving a union between the soul and God. To this teaching, Henry responds with a rhetorical question: must not humility and poverty be rather interpreted as bearing in themselves an ontological meaning, and their appearance in the problematic as pertaining to the movement of a type of thought which aims at the essence and more precisely at the determination of this essence and its internal structure?73 The ontological meaning in question is that God and the soul are fundamentally one, requiring for salvation only that the soul forms an existentiell unity with God; they are one as Life and life, without images (i.e., in humility and poverty), and love supplies only an existentiell unity that is added to ontological unity.

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It is easy to see what attracts Henry to Eckhart, for the master argues that esse est deus (rather than Thomas Aquinas’s deus est esse) and, for Henry, this quickly becomes Life is God (rather than Aquinas’s ‘God is Life’).74 Also, Henry is fond of quoting a passage from a version of his thirteenth sermon, In hoc apparuit caritas dei in nobis : If a man asked life for a thousand years, ‘Why do you live?’ if it could answer it would only say, ‘I live because I live.’ That is because life lives from its own ground, and gushes forth from its own. Therefore it lives without Why, because it lives for itself.75 This is Henry’s answer to the question I posed earlier about the weight of the word ‘so’ in ‘life feels its own activity . . . and so it incessantly transforms itself’. One thinks also of a passage such as in sermon seven, Videte qualem caritatem dedit nobis Pater : ‘But so that nothing may be hidden in God that is not revealed to me, there must appear to me nothing like, no image, for no image can reveal to us the Godhead or its essence. Should any image or any likeness remain in you, you would never be one with God.’76 It is this sort of remark that allows Henry to see Eckhart as a corrective to Fichte. In his third lecture, Fichte tells us that in ‘the lower grades of the spiritual life of man . . . that Divine Being (Seyn), as such, does not reveal itself to Consciousness’ but that a revelation does occur ‘in the true central-point of spiritual life’, and that it assumes the form of ‘an image, representation, or conception’ [einem Bilde und einer Abschiderung, oder einem Begriffe].77 These remarks about the absolute allow Henry to catch Fichte in the crosshairs of his sights: ‘It is necessarily at the moment when it [God or the absolute] is thus understood in this way by Fichte that its phenomenological character suddenly becomes uncertain, or better, questioned and finally denied.’78 The very next paragraph, section 39, is titled ‘Eckhart’, and this master is the one who shows us that God is ‘without image’.79 It is when discussing Eckhart that Henry makes it clear that he is not proposing there is only the one phenomenality, that of the invisible, but rather that what appears and appearing have their own ways of being: Thus the concept of phenomenality is divided in the essential eidetic analysis. This division is the one instituted by Eckhart between what he calls ‘twilight knowledge’ which takes place in the form of images, i.e. in exteriority where in principle the ‘creature’ itself as such is grasped and, on the other hand, ‘daybreak knowledge’, whose structure is unity and which as such encloses in it nothing distinct or represented, to which the creature can

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yield only on condition of being grasped, not in itself, but in its Being-identical to the Being of God , i.e. on condition of being grasped in Unity. ‘When one knows creatures as they are in themselves, that is “twilight knowledge”, in which creation is perceived by clearly distinguished ideas; but when creatures are known in God, that is “daybreak knowledge”, in which creatures are perceived without distinctions, all ideas being rejected, all comparisons done away with in the one that is God himself.’80 In Von Edlen Menschen , to which Henry is alluding here, and of which much of L’Essence de la manifestation could be taken as a philosophical allegory, Eckhart draws on Augustine’s distinction between evening and morning knowledge as elaborated in Book four of De Genesi ad Litteram .81 Asking himself why Genesis says, ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day’ rather than, as one might expect, ‘And the morning and the evening were the first day’, Augustine answers in terms of angelic cognition. In Creation, the angels were first given knowledge of things as they are in themselves, and this occurred in the evening. Then, in the morning, they were shown how all created things are related to the Creator, and this is the incomparably higher knowledge of the two. For Henry, the representation of the exterior world gives us ‘evening knowledge’, images, while that given to us in auto-affection is ‘morning knowledge’, an immediate awareness of God, without images. The strain in Henry’s adaptation of Augustine’s distinction by way of Eckhart can be felt in three ways: morning for him must be regarded as pure darkness; what is given in the morning is life, how we are, and not knowledge at all; and morning knowledge is for Augustine angelic knowledge of the relations between Creation and Creator. Augustine told Reason in his Soliloquia that he wanted to know only God and the soul.82 Eckhart apparently abbreviates the lesson that the saint desired to learn. ‘The soul’, he says, ‘is the same thing that He is . . . it is itself the kingdom of God’. 83 Henry quotes this sentence in L’Essence de la manifestation section 39, the fi rst of his three paragraphs on Eckhart. He will tell us, with the Meister in mind, that ‘The soul was not created’, 84 though here as elsewhere we need to be wary of Henry’s tendency to fall on one side of an issue when the author in question holds a more subtle view. To be sure, from time to time Eckhart speaks of the soul as uncreated – ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground’, for example85 – but he also writes of it as created and does so without risk of self-contradiction. We think of God as the Creator only because we are created beings, Eckhart believes, and we rise to a higher

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awareness of the divine when we contemplate God before Creation. ‘For before there were creatures’, he says in sermon eighty-seven, ‘God was not “God”: He was That which He was.’86 God created the soul, but the soul is called to turn radically to God and to be one with the divine ground that is uncreated, ‘mode without mode, and essence without essence’, and that pre-exists ‘God’. 87 Henry is unquestionably Gnostic in his affi rmation that the soul is uncreated (or, as Valentinus would put it, the pneuma , the spark at the base of the soul, is uncreated), but Eckhart appears to sound more Gnostic than he is when read in winter light.88 When one tries to translate from Christianity to philosophy one often ends up losing one’s place and translating from Gnosticism to philosophy: The radical historicity of Christianity, the coming of the Christ in flesh at a particular place and time, resists translation into concepts. When Christians talk about the phenomenality of God, as we must, we are not talking in the abstract of how God may or may not appear but rather of how God uniquely manifests himself in Jesus of Nazareth. It is Jesus who is the phenomenality of God: in his preaching, his acts, and in his suffering, death and resurrection. A bullet is, therefore, aimed directly at Henry: that his ‘philosophy of Christianity’ is Gnostic, not Christian. Will L’Essence de la manifestation absorb its impact? Not on the ground of God’s free creation of the soul, it seems. Perhaps, though, we should look further. There is no doubt that Henry wishes to assimilate Christianity to his philosophical position and that he trims the faith as Fichte had done earlier before he does so. One way in which Henry does this trimming is by attending almost exclusively to Johannine Christology and only to particular elements in the fourth gospel: The seven miracles, wonders or ‘signs’ are passed over, as is the idea of sin as that which makes the world dark. The synoptic tradition is largely put to one side, as is the Pauline testimony. His ‘philosophy of Christianity’ in L’Essence de la manifestation is, therefore, not Christianity’s philosophy, in which Jesus is the phenomenality of God, but rather an exterior philosophy of Christianity, in which phenomenality, life, is deemed to be God. After section 49, the third paragraph on Eckhart, we read what we have perhaps already begun to suspect to be Henry’s view: ‘The understanding of the invisible, in its insurmountable – not dialectical – opposition to that which is visible and to its element, is accomplished for the first time in Christianity wherein this understanding finds its concrete historical [historique] realization.’89 It is Jesus who embodies the invisible, which, as we have seen with Fichte, is not a metaphysical structure above or beyond the world but one that is

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anterior to all representation in consciousness. Henry glosses the situation as follows: With the appearance of Christianity there is actually discovered, as constituted by the invisible and by the effectiveness of the phenomenality which properly belongs to it, a new and infinite dimension of existence such that everything which presents itself in the world and manifests itself therein under the title of ‘phenomenon’ henceforth is shown to be without any relationship to existence or with that which it essentially comprises.90 The appearance of Christianity in history allows us to recognize the prior immanence of life in ourselves. But when does this take place for Henry? Not with the public ministry of Jesus or his death and bodily resurrection or the testimony of the synoptic gospels or the early letters of Paul but with the disclosure of the Word in the fourth gospel. When Henry speaks about ‘the appearance of Christianity’, he is speaking in the register of the historial, not the historical, wishing to establish the beginning of the history of the essence of Christianity.91 The value of ‘evening knowledge’ has been put aside it seems: Little attention is given to the phenomenon of the Christ, only to his phenomenality, his mode of appearing. Now Henry sees Christianity, ‘morning knowledge’, siding exclusively with appearing rather than what appears and casting representation negatively as ‘the world’ in its Johannine sense (Jn 1.10, 3.17, 7.7, 8.12, etc.). One is saved not by recognizing the distinct phenomenalities of what appears and modes of appearing and holding them in the right relationship – the enstatic coming before the ecstatic – but by clinging firmly to appearing. Accordingly, belief is not the affirmation of propositions about actions that originate in the supernatural sphere, regarded in ontic terms, but the immediate grasping of life in its immanence.92 Needless to say, Christians are called to reject ‘the world’ in the sense of that which occludes life but not ‘the world’ in the sense of that which has been created and has a material history. Henry allows his reading of Eckhart to confuse the two, so much so that we might be forgiven for recalling the Cathar prayer, ‘Car nos no em del mon nil mon no es de nos’ [For we are not of the world nor is the world of us].93 In Eckhart’s terms, readily adopted by Henry, it is the ‘inner man’ and the ‘inner eye’ that both stand for salvation, as opposed to the ‘outer man’ and the ‘outer eye’.94 Since Henry does not have much time for Paul, the saint’s emphasis on Jesus showing himself (1 Cor. 15.3–8) would be unlikely to move him.

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Yet Henry values the fourth gospel, and when we open it and read the sublime prologue we find a stress on visibility – sarx and phanerōsis – rather than invisibility. It is only later in his gospel and in John’s first letter that there are repeated directives as to the invisibility of God, though they are embedded in the confession of the flesh of Christ (1 Jn 4.2). John clearly is seeking to overcome dissension in his community, possibly an antipathy between Jewish and Gentile Christians, the former claiming a priority over the latter by being children of Abraham and Moses. John responds to them: ‘If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ (1 Jn 4.20, KJV). It is the created flesh of Christ that Henry downplays in L’Essence de la manifestation in favour of an uncreated flow of life. What he values is Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom, which for him is the realm of auto-affection that is the soul. The question remains why that particular teaching has authority, for there have been a great many people who have urged their own philosophical, social and spiritual views upon us. Is Jesus, in his teaching of the kingdom, merely for Henry a forerunner of material phenomenology, someone constrained to use a religious language when a philosophical one would have been better had it been available? The answer would be ‘yes’ were we not to ponder why the proclamation of the coming of the kingdom has authority. It would be ‘yes’ (with appropriate shading) because in his teaching and his acts Jesus repeatedly performs a reduction from ‘world’ to ‘kingdom’ and thereby reveals to us how to live so as to be pleasing to God and because Henry urges us to pass from ‘world’ to ‘kingdom’ in the sense of forsaking that which occludes life for an inner life with God. Yet when Henry condemns the world as the horizon of constituted phenomena, the sign of creation and the theatre of history, he seriously departs from what Jesus teaches, so far indeed that one must question whether he is talking about Christianity at all. The one who asked us to consider the lilies of the field (Mt. 6.28) did not ask us to remove ourselves from the world but only to live in it with compassion and in eschatological hope. As soon as we look to the authority of Jesus in his preaching of the kingdom, however, the force of any untroubled relation between a religious discourse and a philosophical one begins to weaken. The proclamation of the kingdom imposes itself on us not simply because Jesus taught it, not even because he died as a consequence of preaching it, but because God the Father raised him on the third day and, in doing so, vindicated Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom. After the resurrection, there could be no doubt among Jesus’ followers that the proclamation of the

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kingdom was not one spiritual view among others but was the teaching that God offered to us through the Messiah. The truth of the kingdom turns, then, on the raising of the historical flesh of Christ, not on the gnosis that the discovery of pure subjectivity saves us from the fallen world. That discovery would readily allow us to say that our salvation is in art as in the Christ, and this is just what Henry says in a later book.95 It should also be noted that Jesus preached the coming of the kingdom: It is here and yet not here, here to the extent that he and his disciples are already participating in the divine life and not here to the extent that only they are. Henry could take this to mean that only those who affirm appearing over what appears are actually living in the kingdom, enjoying true inward life, despite the barbarism in the world around them. To do so, however, would be a flawed translation of a religious confession into a philosophy, for what would be lost in translation would be the authority of the teaching of the kingdom. Rather than the confirmed eschatological truth of God, the kingdom would be just one more philosophy, one that could never stop the bullet of death from finding its mark.

Notes and Works Cited 1

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte , trans. William Smith, 2 vols (London: Trübner and Co., 1889), II, 443. Smith relates the story in his ‘Memoir of Fichte’, I, 140. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power’, in Theological Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 53. See Fichte, ‘The Characteristics of the Present Age’, in The Popular Works, I, 268. Fichte, ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, 392, 376, 453, 396. See ‘Vivre avec Michel Henry: Entretien avec Anne Henry’, in Auto-donation: Entretiens et conférences, ed. Magali Uhl (Paris: Beauchesne, 2004), 247–8. Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003). An English translation is available: The Essence of Manifestation , trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). See, for example, the title essay of Émile Boutroux, The Beyond That is Within , trans. Jonathan Nield (London: Duckworth and Co., 1912). For Henry’s views about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see his The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chapters 5 and 7. Needless to say, a fuller account of the influences on Henry would include Maine de Biran and Henri Bergson. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation , 727. Ibid., 387. See Dominique Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

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Augustine, ‘Of True Religion’, in Earlier Writings, ed. John H. S. Burleigh (London: SCM Press, 1953), xxxix.72. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 157. Towards the end of his life Husserl distinguished between the epoché and reduction, though earlier he sometimes called the reduction the epoché. See his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 151. The point is made crisply by Henry in ‘The Critique of the Subject’, in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 159. Ibid., 166. See Michel Henry, La Barbarie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 33. For Henry’s rejection of Heidegger’s account of the cogito, see his The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 78. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 23–4. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 24. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 46. Ibid., 47. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 64. Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 41–2. Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum (1967; repr., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 15. See Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Does the Cogito Affect Itself? Generosity and Phenomenology: Remarks on Michel Henry’s Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito’, in Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics, foreword Daniel Garber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 109. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 52. Husserl identifies the ambiguity in ‘phenomenon’ – what appears and the appearing – in The Idea of Phenomenology, 69. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, §§11, 12. The remark about certitude may be found on page 82. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 99. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), 79. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 172. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 165. Also see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 417. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 120, 184–5.

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Martin Heidegger, ‘A Triadic Conversation on a Country Path between a Scientist, a Scholar, and a Guide’, in Country Path Conversations, trans. Brett W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 93. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 169. Of course, Henry could not have read the Beiträge (1989) when writing L’Essence de la manifestation. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 367–8. For Heidegger’s remarks on life, see Being and Time §10. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 2. Ibid., 360. See Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) and Michel Henry, Du Communisme au capitalisme: Théorie d’une catastrophe (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 41. Ibid., 240. See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1973), 307. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 401. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 401. Ibid. Smith translates the passage as follows: ‘Divine life . . . abides there, where alone it can be, in the hidden and inaccessible Being (Seyn) of Consciousness, which no conception can reach’ (360). The italics in The Essence of Manifestation are of course Henry’s. Fichte, ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, 315, 316. Ibid., 307. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 316. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1966), 46. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’, in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 265, 274. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 402, 407. For Henry’s citation, see The Essence of Manifestation, 408. For Smith’s translation, see ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, 405. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 405. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 405, and William Blake, ‘To Nobodaddy’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 471. Blake has in mind not merely this God’s ontic transcendence but also that he is ‘Father of Jealousy’. Fichte, ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, 365. See Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics: Preceded by On the Improvement of the Understanding, ed. and intro. James Gutman (New York: Hafner, 1949), Part I, prop. 18.

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Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 50. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 481. Michel Henry, ‘La Question de la Vie et de la Culture’, Phénoménologie de la Vie, 4 vols, IV: Sur l’éthique et la religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 29. For Henry on this reductio, see The Essence of Manifestation, 45. Also see Sébastien Laoureux, L’Immanence à la limite: Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Michel Henry (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 73. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 461. Ibid. Henry distinguishes self- and auto-affectivity in The Essence of Manifestation, 187–9. He rejects the notion of auto-affectivity as self-objectifying as proposed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason B67 and as discussed by Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), §34. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 133. Henry’s notion of barbarism should be distinguished from Nietzsche’s notion of ‘semi-barbarism’. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. and intro. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), §224. Charles Simic, ‘To Boredom’, in That Little Something: Poems (New York: Harcourt, 2008), 10. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York: Norton, 2001), 229. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), I, 343–4. Henry also cites the passage in ‘Le corps vivant’, Auto-donation, 114. See Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 27–8. For Henry on the reduction, see The Essence of Manifestation, 53. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 372. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 308–9. It is worth noting that Husserl felt much the same way. See Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 91. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 313. See Meister Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans. Armand A. Mauer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 85, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I. q. 18. Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe, rev. and foreword Bernard McGinn (New York: Herder and Herder, 2009), 110. See, for example, Henry, Du Communisme au capitalisme, 27. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 74. Fichte, ‘The Way towards the Blessed Life’, 345. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 304. Ibid., 304, 330. Ibid., 330. See Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 562. See Augustine, Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul, trans. and intro. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Avis and Phillips, 1990), 31.

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See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 310. Also see Eckhart, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), 249. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 310. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 109. Yet see the opening of sermon seventy-eight: ‘The soul is one with God and not united.’ Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 421. Ibid., 142. Valentinus argued that the ‘inner man’ is saved through gnosis. See Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.24.4. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 448. Ibid. For Henry’s use of ‘historial’, see his Marx, 14. See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 406. See Henry-Charles Puech, En quête de la gnose, 2 vols, I: La Gnose et le temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 211. Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 557, 336; Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 330, 331. See Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2009), 20.

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Chapter 5

Phenomenology and Soteriology in the ‘Christian Trilogy’ of Michel Henry Sylvain Camilleri

I. Introduction Contemporary philosophy of religion of phenomenological inspiration is in the process of mutation, and the work of Michel Henry is playing a central role in its multiple transformations. The recent rediscovery of a lecture course by the young Martin Heidegger has provided a glimpse into the early fecundity of encounters between the discipline of phenomenology and religious life.1 It has further shown the interest of an Auseinandersetzung [confrontation] of phenomenology with certain theo-logical spheres such as eschatology. If Henry has never shown any more affinity with the young Heidegger than with the late Heidegger, it is certainly not false to suggest that he has unwittingly repeated Heidegger’s gesture on the terrain of the phenomenology of religion, since – at least in my opinion – Henry’s ‘Christian trilogy’ developed between 1996 and 2002 introduces into the philosophical scene the first serious linking of phenomenology and soteriology. In order to do justice to these two thinkers and to avoid embarrassing confusions, it is necessary from the outset to clarify first, that the phenomenology of Henry is absolutely no longer that of Heidegger and second, that the encounter evoked between phenomenology and soteriology in Henry’s oeuvre comes into view only in latent form. The fact that Henry notoriously departs from the ‘canonical’ phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Heidegger and develops a radically new and different kind of thinking is something that one quickly grasps from the first pages of The Essence of Manifestation and that becomes even clearer in Material Phenomenology. Rather than simply repeat the critiques addressed to the ‘masters’ and recapitulate the cardinal principles instituted in place of the methods and concepts applied up to this point, it

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seems more appropriate to note that the reversal of phenomenology that Henry enacts from his very first writings still strongly undergirds his last writings devoted to Christianity.2 To note the solid phenomenological base of the ‘Christian trilogy’, the way in which it inherits innumerable macro- and microanalyses spread over almost 40 years of the development of the phenomenology of life, is useful but hardly beneficial. Why? This observation still does not say anything special about the encounter between phenomenology and soteriology in the context of Henry’s thought. This encounter – of which it is necessary to draw the contours as well as the limits – is in fact so unique that a few preliminary remarks are needed. I begin, therefore, with the observation that in the New Testament the word ‘σωτηρία’ covers a profound multiplicity of meanings. It is important to emphasize that certain New Testament occurrences of the word complicate the rapprochement between material phenomenology and soteriology. For example, exegetes strongly emphasize that in the Gospel of John so dear to Henry the theological specificity of the notion of salvation does not come to expression.3 This undeniable problem aside, there is no longer any doubt that the idea of salvation in the New Testament nevertheless covers a zone of signification that can reach Henry’s fundamental intuitions. Thus the exegetes agree that σωτηρία connotes in many places a completely new way of life, a return to life as opposed to the loss of it, which is ex officio assimilable to death (Lk. 15.32 and 19.9).4 From the perspective of a fruitful dialogue, though one no less resting on solid scriptural bases, it is necessary to keep in mind the broadest meaning of σωτηρία in the New Testament and thus as a dénouement that liberates us from our earthly or worldly attachments and carries us back to the original and ultimate life. Hence, it is no surprise that the most interesting data for a rapprochement between material phenomenology and soteriology are found in the Gnostic ideas that are both contained within and alongside the New Testament. Where Henry’s phenomenology encounters Gnostic and biblical soteriology head-on (as it were) – that is, in its highly problematic character – there is a bipolar tension between two temporalities. Sometimes salvation is an event that lies in the future, the entrance into the kingdom of God; sometimes it is the trace of an event already past but always in operation and so an action happening in the present life. In the New Testament the two temporalities surrounding these two conceptions, far from being mutually exclusive, coexist and complement one another in order better to transmit the message of salvation. The requirements of the narrative make for a law: It is necessary to announce the parousia and simultaneously to explain

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its delay. But it is not the same in the work of Henry, where the urgency of finding forgotten life banishes all ambiguity of language for the sake of a radical and straightforward formulation.5 The obvious choice is to consider salvation sub specie aeternitatis : Christianity knows ‘only one life, the unique essence of all that lives’,6 the absolute life that is only able to be understood as ‘eternal Life’.7 It is here that one realizes that salvation is a moment of this eternal life and that far from coming to an end there – surely a contradictio in adjecto – it rather serves life’s liberation, renewal and intensification. It is, therefore, not strictly a matter of awaiting salvation, as if salvation were an event and was a matter of indeterminately passing from non-being to being, virtuality to actuality or power to act. It is rather a matter of going to find salvation within the night in which it silently operates and continues to determine our existence – despite the forgetting and veiling that are so common for it. To realize this requires practice in seeing anti- or antephenomenologically: the vision of not the phenomenon of salvation as it is seen or read in the scriptures but its phenomenality or appearance in itself, even as the text evokes and suggests it, without however (let us say) being able to give it fully and, above all, without delivering it purely and simply to the world, which threatens to bury it ever more deeply. For Henry it is not the corpus of New Testament texts that can offer us access to the Truth, to that absolute Truth of which the corpus speaks. On the contrary, it is Truth and Truth alone that can offer us access to itself and by the same token to that corpus, allowing us to understand the text in which Truth is deposited and to recognize it there.8 These two conditions mutually complement one another. The New Testament is the ‘sole mode of access’ – and nothing other than that – to Christ and to God,9 and phenomenology is the only truly viable methodological approach to the textual corpus and to life in general. Their conjunction, however, does not permit the regeneration of life precisely because religious texts and phenomenological analyses are only distant emanations of individual lives, themselves resting on and within the sole, unique absolute life. In order to comprehend the virtue of this circle, two propositions ought to be granted: The first is related to the affirmation just quoted according to which the New Testament is the single mode of access to Christ and to God. Concerning this, it is necessary to admit that salvation, or the return to the grace of life, gains its intelligibility in the words of the New Testament – even if, of course, these words need to be deciphered.

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The second consists in recognizing that the dimension of salvation (Heil ) proper to phenomenological analysis is more therapeutic than it is actually salvific, which is not its proper end, though it is nevertheless at the service of a more original salvation that it helps to decrypt. But if deciphering the words of God and phenomenological decryption do not suffice to literally save the individual, they at least make a fundamental contribution to the question of this identity between ‘life’ and ‘salvation’ that Heidegger, starting from the New Testament, already posed in the 1920s.10 In whatever temporality or ontology one is placed, originally there is no difference between these two terms. Hence to inquire into life, as material phenomenology does, is to search for the intelligibility of salvation through the divine words that the New Testament offers us. It is certainly true that neither phenomenology nor the texts literally give life. Yet both – and even more so the conjunction between them – place us in quest for salvation. It is likely that in this capacity we can speak of an encounter between phenomenology and soteriology in the work of Henry. It is desirable here to study its modalities in the ‘Christian trilogy’.

II. The Breakthroughs of I Am the Truth The discreet but powerful presence of the soteriological thematic in Henry’s ‘trilogy’ is verified from the very beginning of I Am the Truth . It is stated there that the purpose of the book is not to interrogate the truth of Christianity from an epistemological or dogmatic point of view but to question what Christianity considers as truth – what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation.11 From the outset the canonical definition of truth as adequation of thing and thought is implicitly rejected. This definition, of Aristotelian origin, later ratified by medieval philosophy (Thomas Aquinas) as well as by critical philosophy (Immanuel Kant), is not likely to teach us anything about life since the thing and the thought, the correspondence of which it affirms or invalidates, are inherently worldly and objective. It is well known that the biblical and more generally religious concept of the ‘truth’ (aletheia)

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differs from every philosophical and theological conceptualization by its process of interiorization and existentialization of the idea. It is this kind of mystical and confessional truth that is depicted by the Gospel of John and in which dwells Henry’s phenomenology of Christianity. Our philosopher, therefore, insists on marking the irreducible difference that exists between biblical-religious truth and theoretical truth. But further he explicates human nature as the first ‘spouse’, as if truth and humanity were originally made for each other. Why is it that humanity almost spontaneously feels in communion with religious truth, whereas they are naturally wary of theoretical truth? First, religious truth is primarily given in the affect, whereas theoretical truth is expressly addressed to reason. Furthermore, the former is given in an undivided way, whereas the latter is acquired by construction and the assemblage of fragments of thought. But beyond these observations that one could qualify as ‘traditional’, Henry argues that religious truth draws its value for human beings insofar as it manifests itself capable of saving them from an uneasy sickness if not a pressing danger. The truth that is found at the centre of Christianity and which springs from the heart of Henry’s phenomenology is what it is by virtue of a purportedly salvific power. The following question is, therefore, posed: How can human beings have such confidence in this truth even though it has not yet proven its so-called power to save? Some argue that it is precisely here that the supernatural character of Christianity and the Christian conception of truth begin to make sense. This is not Henry’s position, for as I have already said, Henry begins from the idea that the ‘mysterious affinity’ of human beings with the Christian truth is explained by the fact that the salvation accorded to it is already in operation. Such is precisely why human beings feel so comfortable with Christian truth and are convinced of its salvific power. That said, however, human beings are no longer aware of the reasons for the ultimate foundation of this affinity, namely, the identity of life and salvation. Does this mean that human beings are in a space of psychological denial in relation to this truth and that which makes it possible? For Henry this would be a bad form of reasoning because one could then explain the mystery of the affinity of believers with Christian truth by means of a Freudian theory of the unconscious. But as Henry observes in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis , ‘the unconscious does not exist’ as such.12 What Sigmund Freud called the unconscious is only a derivation from and distortion of the fundamental pathos of life. However, there is no doubt that, like psychoanalysis, though in a radically different way, Henry’s phenomenology sets for itself the goal of curing an evil that could be grossly

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qualified as psychical: Human beings are prisoners of unwarranted conceptions from which they ought to be liberated if they hope to live fully and realize their potential. *** Henry later explains that radical phenomenological analysis is not intended to be the ‘conducting of research without end’. In other words the phenomenological treatment of the New Testament is not a simple exegetical enterprise. In saying this, Henry attacks twentieth-century biblical hermeneutics from Rudolf Bultmann to Jean-Luc Marion to Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, seeing in the reading of both Testaments an infinite task. If the majority of these interpreters, either by art or design, conceive the interpretation of sacred texts as a work without limits, it is perhaps because each of them, in his own way, depends on the Heideggerian definition of understanding as a moment of Dasein and even as being-able (Sein-können).13 Yet this definition is itself placed under the sign of the famous maxim, ‘Higher than actuality stands possibility.’14 According to Henry there must come a time, however, when the reading and interpretation of testamentary texts comes to an end so that one may begin to live them anew. Understanding comes to an end by giving way to living. Why, exactly? Because these texts are objects waiting to have a genuine vocation in life and the communication of life rather than freezing in multiple interpretations of little use to existence. This cessation of the act of reading and interpretation demanded by Henry can nearly be likened to a new kind of ‘the end of metaphysics’. For indeed, at least in theory, such an end is supposed to sign the death certificate of all speculation concerning religious texts. This cessation carries within a beneficial dimension that Henry chooses to describe with particular reference to Kierkegaardian irony: The second feature of an approach to Christianity on the basis of the above-mentioned corpus of texts is not only that it leads to endless research. Accordingly if you wanted to question the Gospel about the salvation of your soul, then you would not merely, as in Kierkegaard’s ironic remark, have to await the publication of the very last book on the question, you would still have to put everything else aside and throw yourself into study, which death would surely interrupt before you could obtain from so many realms of knowledge and exegesis even the fi rst word in an answer to the single question that matters. This is because what the answer depends upon, the truth of Christianity, has precisely

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no relation whatsoever to the truth that arises from the analysis of texts or their historical study.15 Does this movement put in action by Henry, contra Heidegger, mark a return to actuality over possibility? Yes – if actuality is understood according to the order of immanence and not that of transcendence, and if possibility is conceived as the antithesis of materiality, that is to say, as that which always and indefinitely repels the effectuation or pathetic accomplishment of life. The first dimension of salvation that emerges in this approach to biblical texts corresponds to the abandonment of our exegetical pretentions, which is like a ‘little death’ that should bring great benefits on the plane of life. *** I Am the Truth also provides valuable indications for determining what could be called Henry’s topology of salvation. A first question concerns the meaning and scope of ‘salvation’ in a material phenomenology; a second question concerns where this can take place. The question of ‘where’ ought not to be understood, of course, in terms of geography. It is not a matter of finding a secret space in a physical horizon the coordinates of which would be revealed through decoding Henry’s writings. It is rather a matter of somehow locating the site of the event of salvation according to the principles of the phenomenology of life. Here topology refers to the problematic crucial in Henry’s thought of the conflict between immanence and transcendence. In order to interrogate the relevance of this conflict for our question it is necessary to refer to the following gloss: That God’s revelation as his self-revelation owes nothing to the phenomenality of the world but rather rejects it as fundamentally foreign to its own phenomenality is something that powerfully emerges in Christ’s final prayer on the Mount of Olives: ‘I am not praying for the world’ (John 17:9). Now, it is not the circumstances, tragic as they may be, that explain this terrifying declaration; instead, it finds its striking justification in a proposition whose theoretical character cannot easily be challenged: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36). Here again one would be sorely mistaken if one imagined this to be primarily a matter of moral judgment. Everywhere in Christianity, the ethical is subordinated to the order of things. ‘Kingdom’ does not mean a sort of domain across which divine power extends, a terrain reserved for its action. It is the very essence of Christ as identified with ‘the Revelation of God’, with His

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absolute self-revelation, that is designated foreign to the world: ‘even as I am not of [the world]’ (John 17:14).16 Although nowhere does it explicitly broach the question of salvation, it is possible to see in this passage a soteriological tonality. Indeed, what do these lines say? They clearly establish that the revelation of the God who gave salvation is in fact the auto-revelation of God. Contrary to what a simplistic reading of the scriptures would have us believe, God is not revealed in the world but for the world. And if we ought to respond to the question of where God has revealed himself and therefore where he has enacted his salvation, it would be necessary to say the following: God reveals himself by and in himself, and similarly, he has placed the salvation of mankind in himself. Nothing of God or his salvation falls into the world – not even Christ, his Son, whom the scriptures designate as ‘Saviour’. Does this mean that Christ did not exist? Suffice it to say here that Henry situates himself outside of the classic theological alternative between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history. His interrogation, rather, is truly transcendental. What matters much more to him is emphasizing the radically non-worldly aspect of the revelation of God and of the salvation that accompanies it. For Henry, to be outside of the world, therefore, signifies to be in immanence. We know that salvation is consubstantial with the revelation of God; we now know that salvation has no other place than this revelation. Thus the phenomenality of salvation is not other to the divine phenomenality. This also implies that, like God – the Deus absconditus – salvation, as it were, ‘loves to hide itself’. It is fundamentally mysterious, hidden in the ‘night’ about which so many mystics (John of the Cross first among them) have spoken with such passion and pain. *** The key feature that emerges from these analyses scattered throughout I Am the Truth is a certain conclusion: If the Christian truth as life is the depths of our selfhood and at the same time the way that is supposed to lead us there to the degree that we are all sons of God in the Arche-Son, then there is no longer any doubt that we have forgotten our condition as sons and have fallen into the cares of the world at the expense of the truth that saves . However, Henry says, Christianity asserts the possibility that someone may surmount this radical Forgetting and rejoin the absolute Life of God – this Life that

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preceded the world and its time, eternal Life. Such a possibility signifies nothing other than salvation . To rejoin this absolute Life, which has neither beginning nor end, would be to unite with it, identify with it, live anew this Life that is not born and does not die.17 Hence we see that salvation is conceived according to an order of return, a new beginning or a ‘second birth’. From the decisive intuitions of Christianity one can define salvation then as the task that consists for the ego of finding once again in its own life the absolute Life that does not stop engendering it. . . . To live as a living transcendental me, given to itself in a life that does not itself give but that is given in the self-givenness of the absolute Life that is God’s, such is the Christian definition of man, its condition of Son. This condition of man as Son is precisely what allows his salvation .18 This filial condition is, therefore, transcendental: To find it is to regain the salvation that it makes possible. But finding it implies a particular action . In a first step, we must put out of play any idea according to which salvation could be acquired by the path of knowledge and thus through the biases of the world. Henry strongly emphasizes the radical and irreducible difference between the beatitude of Greek philosophy and the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount: The first involves a gnosis, though one totally marked by reflection and theory, whereas the second implies a return to brute life that has absolutely nothing to do with reason.19 Thus Henry can write: In order to vanquish the Forgetting that renders absolute Life Immemorial, the Forgetting in which thought holds Life, we should precisely not ask that of thought. The salvation that consists of rediscovering this absolute Life escapes all orders of knowledge, expertise, and science. It does not spring from consciousness as understood by classical or modern thought, as in ‘consciousness of something’. It is not some ‘becoming conscious of’ that can liberate a person. It is not consciousness’s progress through various kinds of knowledge that will secure salvation.20 In this way any rational enterprise is banned, especially the debate concerning the catastrophic consequences of the ‘proofs of the existence of God’ initiated by St Anselm, which, however, by means of his very question

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(‘If thou art not here, where shall I seek thee?’) has ‘at lightning speed’ perceived the ‘condition of access’ to God.21 Henry clearly intends to establish a non-intentional phenomenology of birth, the goal of which is nothing other than a rebirth. To this end he seeks to separate categorically the intelligence of faith from the intelligibility of salvation. And it is a reading of the scriptures that shows us the way to achieve it: Salvation consists of carrying God within oneself while being his Son in this new sense, according to the amazing declarations in Revelation (3:4; 3:5; 7:17). . . . And that this filiation comes from radical becoming, from the transformation of one who in his identification with Life receives his salvation from it, is also stated no less abruptly: ‘Behold! I am making all things new! . . . I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. A draught from the water-springs of life will be my free gift to the thirsty. All this is the victor’s heritage; and I will be his God and he shall be my son’ (Rev. 21:5–7).22 In reading this quotation, one has the impression that the call to humanity in its condition as Son, which is indispensible for salvation, can occur only in the mode of an irruption or to say with Paul concerning the day of the Lord, ‘like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5.2). This Pauline reference is interesting in that it involves specifically the image of the ‘night’ so dear to Henry. It is certainly true that Henry could have rejected its use here by virtue of its metaphorical tenor marked by the ‘like’. But if one were to respect fully Henry’s notion that the New Testament contains no metaphor, then the objection can be waived. It seems possible, therefore, that the call to the condition of son comes in the mode of an irruption and that it takes place in the ‘night’ that The Essence of Manifestation already described as the ‘revelation of the essence of revelation’.23 But one can still wonder how this call that announces salvation occurs. Although it seems that the call of the condition of Son is manifest in the mode of an irruption, this does not at all mean that it is expected and received in the mode of a vulgar passivity. That was the whole point of chapter 10 of I Am the Truth , namely, to show that Christian ethics ‘explicitly grants acting, specifically an action that is the doing of an individual, the power to reestablish him in his original condition of Son and, in this way, save him’.24 Not to know the day, hour or moment, does not, therefore, dispense with the necessity of striving to live, or more precisely, with living and acting in a certain tension conducive to the rediscovery of salvation.

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If one were to admit, as it seems to be the case with Henry, that salvation is the effect of divine grace, then it would be immediately clear that faith, the organ that receives grace (gratia operans) and cooperates with it in view of salvation (gratia cooperans), is not ‘of the realm of consciousness, but rather of feeling’.25 Yet the pathetic dimension of faith is precisely what links it to love as is mentioned in the Gospel of John. Henry remarks: It is in the repeated assertion of the necessity of obeying the Commandment of love, in its fulfillment, that John situates salvation. It is not only in the work of love that love proves itself, but it is in work that love is nurtured and from work that love takes its reality. Since salvation consists in the realization of love, it comes from work.26 And this work is the absolutely unique act, this radical ‘I can’ that renders to human beings all their original liberty of living according to life, that is, living in God. It is remarkable that the call to the realization of love makes recourse to the same pathos as faith and salvation. I point out again that the love that he talks about is obviously not eros but agape , the charity-love deployed in the Gospel of John that makes Jesus say: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (15.12). In the thirteenth and fi nal chapter of I Am the Truth , Henry studies the intersubjectivity particular to what is at work in this commandment of love. Here we retain only the following lucid explication: By implicating God in the intersubjective relation between ‘people’ understood as his ‘Sons’, Christianity has given that relation an incredible depth, a character that is not only pathetik but tragic. It is pathetik because the substance of this relation is life, whose substance is pathos, and tragic because when Sons either forget their own condition or rediscover it, this relation correspondingly plays out for them their own perdition or salvation. There is salvation when a Son relates to the other as to another Son – as to someone given to himself in the original Ipseity of absolute Life and in the originating Self of this Ipseity.27 It seems, therefore, that our quest for salvation is bound to pass by another who is a son in the same way that I am myself a son. Even more, it seems that, on the model of the Gospel of John, Henry enjoins us to draw near

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to these other sons in the mode of love, the only mode that lets them be recognized for what they really are. Thus understood in the originary self of their ipseity, they are no different from us but are like us in suffering and experiencing joy. Finally, it also appears that if love is the form that our relationships to others ought to take, it is because God, who lives in us, is love (1 Jn 4.8). But we never can forget that according to John God or the ‘word [logos] became flesh’ (Jn 1.14). The exploration of the flesh enables us precisely to complete the second tier of the phenomenological doctrine of salvation introduced by Henry and to show how becoming incarnate brings about salvation in Christianity.

III. The Centrepiece: Incarnation With I Am the Truth , we must mainly remember the following lesson: ‘Foreign to the world, the Christian problematic of salvation is unfolded exclusively in the field of life.’28 Accordingly, Incarnation is given precisely the task of showing that while the world goes hand in hand with the concept of ‘body’, life is essentially related to the ‘flesh’. From the introduction to the second instalment of his trilogy, Henry endorses Husserl’s famous phenomenological distinction, subsequently taken over by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, between Körper and Leib.29 More radical than his predecessors, Henry wants to think incarnation phenomenologically and not simply remain content with attesting to it and describing it.30 However, to surpass this situation, the first direction Henry looks is Christianity, more precisely John 1.14 (‘and the Word was made flesh’) as well as all the glosses derived from it, most notably among the fathers of the Church.31 Before returning to these microanalyses, let us first see how the thematic of salvation in the economy of Incarnation announces itself and is developed. *** In this context, Henry returns to the classical contrast already invoked between Greek thought and Christian thought. The purpose is rooted in the difference between two conceptions of the logos. As is well known, for the Greeks the logos ‘unfolds its essence outside of the sensible world and all that pertains to it – animality as well as inert matter – exhausting this essence in the non-temporal contemplation of an intelligible universe’.32 For this very reason it cannot have anything to do with the flesh, which for the Greeks is the hallmark of the sensible realm and its weakness. The situation is different for Christianity, where the logos is given the power to

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become incarnate. And Henry notes that if things become truly problematic, it is not only because of the clash between two conceptions of the nature of the logos (one is reason/idea, the other is word/flesh), but more fundamentally because of the opposition between two conceptions of the nature of their telos. What does this mean? The Greek logos and the Christian logos both mean salvation, explains Henry. But they do not achieve it by the same means. For the Greeks, the logos saves in that it constitutes our gate of access to the intelligible; for Christians, the logos saves in that it becomes incarnate and announces the resurrection of the flesh. In Incarnation we read: The radical incompatibility of the Greek concept of Logos with the idea of its eventual incarnation reaches the level of paroxysm as soon as the Logos assumes the significance that Christianity imparts to it, namely that of conferring salvation. Indeed, this is the thesis that one should consider ‘crucial’ for Christian dogma – and the principle of all its ‘economy’. . . . And thus Christianity situates salvation in the body. This material and corruptible body, which is prey to becoming as well as the assault of sin, is the organ of sensible attraction, the victim predestined to all illusions and all idols, which bears the responsibility of delivering us from the grip of death! We will move forward to the degree to which we have acquired the means of analyzing this strange economy that provoked the laughter of the Greeks. When, on the Areopagus of Athens, Paul tried to explain to them how the immortality of man rests on the resurrection of the body, his listeners, as we know, parted from him smiling: ‘Let us hear him again!’ (Acts 17:31).33 The truly determining factor is not just the notion of salvation – since it is not sufficient to distinguish Greek from Christian thought – but the path of its fulfilment, namely, incarnation. *** Paradoxically faithful to the historical approach of certain of his predecessors such as Heidegger, Henry is not thrown directly into the study of original sources but begins from the end. Therefore, it is through the first step of his Wirkungsgeschichte that the philosopher takes hold of the issue of incarnation in the Christian sense and its essential relationship to the question of salvation. The first references invoked in order to illustrate historically what had already been illustrated in I Am the Truth , namely, that ‘the radical Truth of Christianity is not of the order of thought ’, are thus patristic. It is to ‘the Fathers of the Church – Greek or not’ that Henry

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attributes the merit and even the ‘genius’ of having known ‘the Truth of Christianity in its most puzzling assertion, that of the Incarnation’.34 To better understand Henry’s process it is best to move directly to section 46 of Incarnation , titled ‘The Way to Salvation according to Irenaeus and Augustine’. Based on the parallel between the ‘becoming man of God ’ and the ‘becoming flesh of the Word ’35 established in the introduction of Incarnation and partly discovered in I Am the Truth , Henry now directly interrogates the notion of salvation in connection with the Incarnation of the Word in the Son. We read there: If for Christianity salvation rests on the condition of the Son, which is originally that of transcendental man, and if it is this condition that has been lost – forgotten, or rather broken in the sin of idolatry that has substituted the relation to the idol for the primitive relation to Life – then salvation surely consists in finding, practically and not merely theoretically, such a condition. The adopted Sons of which John and Paul speak are those in whom the condition, which was initially that of all men, has been restored. If the radical passivity of life – a life like ours, generated in the auto-generation of Life in its Word – contains the path to salvation, this is because there is no other salvation for a life generated in this way, than in this generation in which it originally lives from the very life of God.36 Without neglecting the terrain of theory, Henry situates the accomplishment of salvation on that of praxis. Indeed, one can find forgotten life, which echoes our condition as son, in the terrain where it was originally born and where it was given to us in common. We understand that this ground has not disappeared; we have just forgotten how to see and to appreciate it. Adrift in the world, we have forgotten that we are not of the world. However, like all things with feeling, we will remember at some point the need to reconnect with our roots. Our task is clearly to return to this necessity that Christ and his disciples have enacted. To glimpse this necessity is to perceive salvation; to satisfy it is to be saved. But we do not pass from one stage to the other in an instant. Conventional wisdom often says that it is necessary to find oneself before finding God. Henry would rather tend to say the opposite: It is necessary to find God in order to find oneself or one’s self. This imperative ought to be understood under the sign of a radical passivity. Certainly, such radical passivity is an experience, but as a passive passivity, it needs that which has generated it in order to be actualized. But what has been instituted is the original life identical to God. Only this Wholly Other who is God can lead us to salvation. We know

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that in Christianity this God was made man. Henry recalls this by citing Irenaeus commenting on John: ‘That John knew only a single and same Word of God who is the unique Son who was made incarnate for our salvation, Jesus Christ our Lord.’37 Irenaeus has equally summarized the entire Christian paradox: [T]he place where this salvation ought to be accomplished can only be that of reality . . . the place of salvation is also that of sin; their reality is cut from the same cloth: specifically that of our flesh, our finite flesh.38 We ought, therefore, to find the path of salvation in the reality of life and not of the world, but precisely from within this very ‘reality’ that has corrupted us or by which we have let ourselves be corrupted. However, we cannot overlook the fact that the event of the Incarnation has radically transformed this reality for us: ‘By becoming incarnate, the Word has taken upon himself the sin and death inscribed in our finite flesh and he destroyed them by dying on the Cross.’39 Principally this signifies one thing: not that the world would suddenly become good for us, but rather that we ought no longer to be afraid of that reality. Precisely because Christ has neutralized sin we ought no longer to float along to our doom in the world but rather thank him for returning us to the Son who healed reality. Henceforth, by virtue of the will, nothing comes between us and original life. The world and its values no longer frighten us. Now we can live authentically in the world without being of the world, exactly as Christ did before us. By virtue of the structural similarity between the phenomenological relationship of reciprocal interiority of absolute life and its (incarnate) Word, on the one hand, and the relationship of reciprocal phenomenological interiority between this Word and all living beings in Christ, on the other hand, nothing is opposed to the ‘sanctification’ that Augustine has described so well in commenting on this verse from John:40 ‘I in them and thou in me, that their unity may be complete’ (17.23). Henry sees in this verse the sign of a conception of the mystical body, and he believes that this concept makes intelligible the Christian problematic of salvation: ‘The mystical body of Christ where all men are one in him is a limited form of the experience of others.’41 In essence the conception of the other in question here does not pertain any more to Christianity than it does to any other domain of life. Yet, Henry wants to show that it acquires its most acute meaning in the ‘decisive intuitions of Christianity’ and especially in ‘its extraordinary conception of intersubjectivity’.42 These intuitions can be summarized by the inversion of a famous formula of Ricoeur: the other as oneself [l’autre est (un) Soi-même].

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The mystical body of Christ is not a collection of alterities (him + another + another, etc.), but a reunion of identities (self = him = me = self = him = me, etc.). Its construction does not proceed by the accumulation of additional elements . . . but rather because in Christ there is the Word through which the construction occurs, it continues as the construction of the transcendental Self of each one, given to himself in the Word, one with him, and at the same time given to himself in the same unique Life of the same unique Self in whom all the other selves are given to themselves. . . . Because one shall not fail to distinguish in this common person that which builds and that which is built, the head and its body, we must say with Augustine that ‘head saves and the body is saved’. But because what builds penetrates that which is built, because the head and the body are one . . . it is given to this body to accomplish and achieve that which is not yet complete in Christ.43 With this last declaration, Henry signifies clearly that what is involved here is the final accomplishment of salvation. This happens precisely when one is joined to the mystical body of Christ: ‘eternal Life will be given so that in this Life it will become their own and they are saved.’44 But how to join with this mystical body of Christ? Is it enough to desire it? The will certainly plays a central role, but by itself it cannot accomplish salvation. What is needed is the development of another quality, a quality of hearing. For in order for us to know more profoundly how the Word is incarnate and why in this event we can expect salvation,45 one must first hear and understand the Word .

IV. Attaining Salvation: Paroles du Christ Paroles du Christ completes the Christian trilogy begun with I Am the Truth and continued in Incarnation . In this fi nal work, Henry returns to the fundamental themes of his phenomenology of life but now articulates them more clearly around the very source of Christian life, to wit, the Christ. A key dimension of the figure of Christ is his ‘words’. In fact, in Christ, action and speech are not separated: His speech is itself an action; it is, to use modern terminology, ‘performative’.46 Henry proposes to study what is accomplished in us and for us by the ‘Speech of God, that is to say, the way God speaks to us’, and in what his ‘claim to the truth’ consists.47

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If we are to believe the philosopher, this quest for the words of Christ is concerned with ‘a correct comprehension of our human condition’.48 But it is necessary not to misinterpret this program: It is not a question of an anthropological approach to Christianity and to its texts but of a phenomenological approach in a radical sense, by which one is able not only to defi ne the humanity of man in regard to divinity or in contrast to it, but more essentially to accede to the common source of all humanity and divinity. Henry modestly wants to show how it is possible ‘to understand the Speech of God’, to be ‘open to hearing it’, and fi nally to understand that by himself man is intelligible ‘only in his interior relation to this absolute of Truth and Love that we call God’.49 Such is always the salvation of man, but here Henry seems to want to show that salvation is neither accessible nor conceivable without hermeneutical effort: We must hear and understand Christ’s words in order to appropriate them and in order that they can be authentically made an instrument of our salvation. It is important to understand that the hermeneutical effort is not an end in itself, as it is, more or less, with ‘the positivist, pseudohistorical and atheistic exegesis of the nineteenth century’, repeatedly denounced by Henry. 50 His is a philosophical Christology that presents itself as the ripest fruit of the encounter between phenomenology and soteriology. Strangely, the more one approaches the end of the trilogy, the more scarce the theme of salvation becomes. In Paroles du Christ , it is only a very small question, at least explicitly. This is not to say, however, that Henry has let the question fall to the side, quite to the contrary. It is rather a matter here of promoting the Eckhartian model of letting-go. In our very pursuit of salvation we have come to block the very path that could take us there. By means of our own seeking we have become blind to the indications given by Christ’s words about it. In desiring to make every effort to be saved we have utilized the methodologies and instruments of the world that as such cannot enable our passage towards salvation. Henry thus advocates a return to the words of Christ, most especially to those contained in the synoptic gospels: Indeed, he who wants to save his life (psyche) shall lose it, but whoever loses his life (psyche) for my sake shall find it (euresei ). (Mt. 16.25) Indeed, he who would save his life (psyche) shall lose it, but whoever loses his life (psyche) for my sake and the gospel will save it (susei ). (Mk 8.35) Indeed, who would save his life (psyche) shall lose it, but whoever loses his life (psyche) for my sake will save it (susei ). (Lk. 9.24)

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These words – and Henry does not even provide here their references in the Gospels – he retranslates in this way: ‘The one who wants to save his life will lose it, the one who wants to lose it will be truly alive.’51 Besides siding with many translators in translating psyche by life, we see that Henry tied together the two versions involved, that of Matthew on the one hand, and that of Mark and Luke on the other, into a single formula: to make alive [rendre vivant]. To be alive is to find life and to find life is to be saved. Or better: To be alive is to be saved and to be saved is to find life. This interpretation assumes that we are not entirely alive. We are, of course, not dead, but even so, we are not fully living. We are what Paul called ‘asleep’. But to arise from this dogmatic slumber, we must reverse our relation to the world and to the language of the world as Christ has done before us. In doing so, we realize that authentic salvation is not of this world. It is necessary to deny what we know of salvation in general in order then to comprehend what it really is: not the salvation of the world, in the world and for the world but the salvation of man, in man and for man, that is to say, the salvation of life, in life and for life. The best way to speak of salvation without linking it to the world is to speak of that which according to the scriptures will succeed the world as we know it, to wit, the kingdom of God. What interests Henry is not, however, the descriptions of the kingdom of God that we encounter in the Gospels, especially in the Beatitudes and the Woes, but ‘the relation of human life to this Kingdom, the modalities of life which lead there . . . the connection uniting them in the work of salvation that they make possible’. 52 Henry has been criticized for not having included the central figure of the cross in his radical phenomenology and ensuing philosophical Christology. But is this criticism correct? The experience of the cross that Henry refuses is that of Martin Luther and most of Protestantism. This does not mean, by contrast, that Henry would take as his own the Catholic conception of the cross and its experience but rather that he develops a personal perspective, symbolic and parabolic, of the cross as intersection of man and God in the person of Christ. This is why the words of Christ not only teach us about the kingdom but reveal Christ himself as the threshold of the kingdom: It is he who opens the doors of the Kingdom to those who recognize him. . . . If it is Christ himself who opens or closes the door of the Kingdom according to whether someone will recognize him and pronounce his name before men, or being ashamed of him and his name, he will reject him, is it not because he is the Gate – the relation to God as such ?53

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We return here to the idea of Christ as the transcendental Arche-Son developed especially in I Am the Truth . Here the relation of the Arche-Son to salvation is made clearer. Emphasizing the repetition of gospel formulas such as ‘because of the Son of Man’ (Lk. 6.22–23) and ‘because of me ’ (Mt. 5.11–12) to mark the transcendental dimension of Christ, Henry also tells us about the issue of salvation. In his retranslation of Matthew 16.25/Mark 8.35/ Luke 9.24 evoked above, Henry omitted the eneken emou: ‘who loses his life for my sake will save it’. This was in order better to return to it in the present context, thereby showing that, as the kingdom of God, that is, as the relationship to God as such, Christ is himself the Ursache of salvation. Does this mean that hearing suffices in order to be saved? No, because, as we have seen, it is necessary to lose one’s life in order to gain it. Hearing Christ is only a path towards living in him. This is clarified in the following passage: It is not only the case that the destiny of man – the only judgment that matters and that is lasting – depends on his relation to Christ, but this relation appears identically to the relation to God. The first accomplishes the second in a concrete modality: the beatitude of the Kingdom. With such a judgment – which is the Father’s who sees in secret and against whom the judgment of the world has lost all power – it is a matter in fact of the destiny of each person. Such is spoken in the same passages with a violence in which the paradox reaches its breaking point: ‘Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it’. ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the Gospel will save it’. ‘For whoever would save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake will keep it’ (Luke 9:24; Mark 8:35; Matt. 16:25, respectively). If Christ is inscribed in the inner relationship of man to God to the point of identification, thus defining the path to the Kingdom, then seeking the Kingdom is a matter of following him. Following him and for him renouncing one’s own life, its pleasures and the world’s glory, accepting the suffering that this renunciation entails – the suffering of which the existence of Christ offers the mysterious example. Here, in the immediate context of the words on which we have been meditating, arises the repeated injunction: ‘He said to them: whoever wants to walk after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me’ (Luke 9:23; with analogous proposals in Matt. 16:24 and Mk. 8:34). . . . ‘He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me’. . . . Not to want to live one’s life for himself but to give it to Christ, to give it for Christ’s sake, is to receive the life

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that does not die. At the extreme point of the paradox where life must be lost in order to gain it, arises the stupefying assertion of Christ about himself, his identification with God.54 It is a matter thus of showing that Christ is not only the one who brings knowledge of the kingdom and gives us entrance there, but that he himself is this kingdom insofar as he has eternal life and communicates it.55 With the Christ-event, salvation has already come. Participating in it and thus being saved is above all the recognition of him as Saviour.56 Yet this recognition is realized through hearing and understanding the words of Christ. The bad-willed will argue that, no longer being present, he cannot challenge us in a direct encounter. However, such a way of thinking conceives the encounter between human beings and Christ in a worldly mode. A closer look will disclose that nothing prohibits our entrance into communication with Christ, and even of hearing and understanding him without it necessarily being manifest, because it is the essence of his manifestation that speaks to us of the essential. If, however, we accept that ‘we do not gain access to life, to our own life, to the life of others and to God by the pathways of the senses’, but on the contrary by ‘silence’, thereby hearing Christ in our ‘heart’, we can enter into this communication.57 In our heart we can hear Christ speaking of salvation, where we can receive his parables formulated for that purpose. For it is truly in parables that Christ speaks of our salvation. This salvation has nothing to do with what we find and know in the world, and precisely for the sake of saying the most obvious Christ resorts to stories and comparisons. The parable bases itself on mundane reality in order all the better to reverse it. It pushes the language of the world to incongruity, foolishness, the illogical, the incredible, and up to the self-contradictory. In short, language is pushed to the absurd, in the Kierkegaardian sense. The goal of the parable is therefore to establish an analogy between two universes, that of the visible and the invisible, the finite and infinite, in such a way as to produce in the first a series of events that incite us to conceive the second, the reign of God. Many parables involve the structure of analogy directly expressed in the text, stating: ‘The Kingdom of God is like . . .’58 Who could believe that the kingdom is actually a ‘mustard seed’ (Mt. 13.31–32), or actually the ‘leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal’ (Mt. 13.33; Lk. 13.20)? The parable does not speak of

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the being of a thing, but of the being that it is not. The parable has the function of always starting from a situation or from phenomena that fall within common experience and moving on to what is not known or what is not yet seen except through a veil, like ‘a dim reflection in a mirror’ in the words of Paul. The purpose of Christ’s teaching never fails: to elevate the spirit of men by detaching them from worldly affairs, marked with the sign of transience and vanity, in order to open them to what alone matters.59 That which alone matters we could term salvation. In the New Testament the elevation to salvation is concomitant with divine judgment. According to Mark 14.62, Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man by whom the judgment is realized in order to signify that with his coming the judgment becomes acosmic. Henry does little to explicate this conception. First, the negative: He sweepingly ignores an entire swath of exegesis that privileges the idea – above all Pauline – of a temporal parousia absolutely yet to occur. Second, the positive: He endorses the idea – above all Johannine – that the judgment has already begun. According to John in fact (Jn 5.24–30) the judgment is the present itself: Eternal life is hic et nunc at hand. Henry writes: Because Life is the violence of an auto-revelation without withdrawal or reserve, without delay or discourse, that is revealed to itself in the flash of a timeless Parousia, it immediately bears witness to itself. But the Truth of absolute Life is not only the condition of every testimony – surpassing every other testimony – it is also that of the Judgment. Such is the Judgment of God which nothing can escape, if it is true that each I is revealed in its heart in the invincible auto-revelation that is the Truth of absolute Life. The Judgment is not different from the arrival of each Self to itself and accompanies it as long as it lives. And as the revelation of Life in each living self inhabits each of the modalities of its life, its joys and wounds, its resulting acts, it is each of these acts, in the moment where they are accomplished, that is known by God, as well as its motivation, blameless or not.60 As salvation is no different from the life that is perpetually brought to itself, there is no distance between salvation and life, there is not and never was a ‘concept’ of salvation. Only the language of the world has sought to make us believe in the idea of salvation as carrying some ‘content’. But if,

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as Henry argues, ‘there is no difference between Christ’s words and actions’,61 then this idea fails. Through giving us life by and in his word, Christ has saved us. The question then becomes: Do we want to be saved? If we want it, then it is sufficient for us to hear the Word of God and make it our own: ‘He who hears my words . . . gains eternal life’ (Jn 5.24). Henry concludes: Because the Word of Life bears the inconceivable power of giving life, it is an action, the action of giving this life, that is, of engendering it in the timeless birth of everything living, of reviving it when it no longer is.62 *** With Christ salvation is incarnated, and since then it has become impossible to say that we still await it: The Incarnation of the Word has taken place for men; the Word of God is their destiny. If among the words addressed to men certain of them are understood, which speak nothing about them but only of Christ, it is because he is obliged to justify what he said to them – very strange indeed. But the essential reason concerns their salvation because he himself is salvation – a salvation which consists in sharing with all the living a joy without limit, which comes from the reciprocal interiority of Life and the First Living.63 Since the Incarnation, salvation is here, has never ceased being here, and will never cease being here. Yet it is we who are not here, who are absent from ourselves, and if we still want to be saved, we still have the duty to make ourselves present to our present, to raise our ‘doing ’ to the level of our ‘speaking ’, for the sake of finally experiencing, like Christ, eternal life bringing itself about in ourselves. The realization of this process is really what saves, and its logic is what in the end makes Henry’s soteriology – in the image of his phenomenology – radical . Translated by W. Christian Hackett

Notes and Works Cited 1

2

See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life , trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). See C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 23–5; Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans.

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 14–16 [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.]; and Incarnation: Une Philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 31–3. Werner Foerster, ‘σωτηρία’, in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament Bd. VII, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), 998. Ibid., 989–92. See, for example, Henry, I Am the Truth , 269–91/215–33. Ibid., 72/54. Ibid., 95/73. Ibid., 17/9. Ibid., 11/5. Heidegger, GA 60, 69. Henry, I Am the Truth, 7/1. Michel Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse. Le commencement perdu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 384; Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 315. On Sein-können see Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927), §§61, 65, 67 and 68. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §7. Henry, I Am the Truth, 9–10/3. Ibid., 37–8/25–6. Ibid., 190/151. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 192/152. Ibid., 193/153. Ibid. Ibid., 194–5/154. Ibid., 204/161. Michel Henry, L’Essence de la Manifestation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 550; Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 439. Henry, I Am the Truth, 240/191. Ibid., 242/193. Ibid., 240/191. Ibid., 322/258. Ibid., 208/165. Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair, 8–9. Ibid., §§16–32. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 333. Ibid. Ibid., 334.

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Ibid., 338; 335–9. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 358–9. Ibid., 359. Ibid., 366. Michel Henry, Paroles du Christ (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 135. Henry explains that the philosophy of language is wholly inadequate to the speech of God because ‘it unilaterally deals with human language’ (Paroles du Christ, 10), but he would undoubtedly not have refused to speak of the ‘performativity’ of the speech of God. Ibid., 10, 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 11, 59. It ought to be emphasized that Henry is profoundly unjust to speak this way of nineteenth-century theology. He assuredly had a truncated and imperfect knowledge of it. Ibid., 33. Emphasis mine. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 57–8. Ibid., 60–2. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 140.

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Chapter 6

‘Truth’ as the Originary Intelligibility of Life Rolf Kühn

Every knowing in the area of an already constituted discipline depends not only historically – and thus hermeneutically – on a ‘something’ that lies before it, but this something in its own right depends on this knowing inasmuch as it founds a discipline. If we wished to search out the ‘truth’ for every existing discipline, then we would also be required to return to the something that is the object of each knowing in order to be able to grasp the truth of human being for every manner of thinking. For every thing taken as a recognizable form of cognition and thus made into the ground of human being would itself be less than this, insofar as each ‘thinking on something’ already precedes the possibility of thinking. This does not originate from thinking itself but rather is older than it. It is in this radically reductive sense that absolute phenomenological life precedes thinking because a work is being carried out in thought whose power cannot be recollected in a thematic meaning.

I. Intentionality and Radical Origins in Philosophy and Theology There are two disciplines that historically in the West (in addition to art) directly investigate this originary situation: philosophy and theology. Philosophy appears to be autonomous because it recognizes no law outside itself to which it must conform. Theology, on the other hand, seems to be heteronomous by comparison insofar as it receives the truth of God through his self-revelation in scripture and tradition. If, however, one begins to investigate this distinction in phenomenological perspective more closely, it quickly becomes apparent that, whether autonomous or heteronomous,

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they share in this case a similar intentional structure in that both refer to a something that they claim to be the truth of human knowing. The distinction between philosophy and theology is thus, in truth, non-existent, since in both we arrive at a cogitatum that is not the immanent product of thought but the sole source of the originary character of the actuality of truth.1 These sites are kept separate from an intentional recollection by any science (as these have evolved from the beginning of thinking with the Greeks). As such, they are entirely overlooked by such a reductive inspection of originary self-giving where scientific ‘objectivity’ under the name of ‘truth’ moves ineluctably into the representational realm of a theoretically or practically significant ideatum .2 Philosophy, like theology, retreats from this recollected product of thinking with an eye towards a first appearing or self-revealing that nevertheless is retained or implied as the intentional correlate of a presentation (evidence) of, or belief in, the foundation of the structure of Western science, namely, appearing or revealing as objectivity, being or the (highest) being itself. This quality-of-being-present – something Martin Heidegger wanted to circumvent by way of another sort of ‘thinking’ – without a doubt shows the difficulty of philosophy, namely, how to give itself an absolute beginning that is not directly determined by the categorical power of thought. Philosophy desires that ‘something be’ without having to explain this self-giving of ‘being’ in this onto-logical datum [Bezug]. The difference between being and beings with respect to the unity of event and temporality ultimately does not arise from this intentional foundational structure of thought, no matter how close I might come to being, insofar as being presents itself as transcendent and remains temporally external to itself. This is true even if being calls Dasein out in the ‘in-sisting’ [In-ständigkeit] of this difference in the openness of ex-istence.3 If Thales and Parmenides are in a certain manner the first thinkers of such a rationality or correlation of being and thinking, it is equally true that one finds only once in the history of thought (we here pass over Meister Eckhart) a short though unequivocal analysis of this pure thinking understood as life or power, namely, in René Descartes, insofar as he was a proto-phenomenologist. Everything is in doubt and to be discarded as treacherous, including the horizon of visibility itself, so that each ‘doubt about . . .’ only appears in order that the pure passio or affectio remains as the true cogitare . As the ‘Second Meditation’ describes it: ‘Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false. Properly speaking, this is what in me is called “sensing”. But this, precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking’ [consciousness].4 This means that before

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something is thought and before it is captured in a representation it is already seized in the originary certainty of an immanent lived experience. This experience constitutes the apodictic path of thinking apart from any other transcendental or categorical elevation. In being seized by the absolute of life as ‘something’ that I could not have brought about and yet in its particular self-giving [Selbstgebung] is in no way separated from me because it has affected me in an originary manner, I encounter for the first time an intelligible affinity with the theological concept of revelation as the absolute appearance of truth (of God).

II. Originary Corporeality as Initial Appearance The pure living phenomenological self-affection , as a perpetual or new birth in life, thus designates every mode in which I move outside of the intentional, scientific or objective manner of thinking in order to become immersed in the passibility of this absolutely originary life, which as the independent phenomenalizing of all disciplines constitutes an unavoidable ‘truth’. If this life remains in its originary state, it cannot become the ground for any discipline, be it biology or current neuroscience; rather it must reveal itself in its proper truth, that is, it must fulfil its proper revelation in and through itself without being cast as theological knowledge in its (dogmatic) objectivity. This radical phenomenological truth was grasped by Meister Eckhart in its equally originary absolute character as universality when in the name of all living human beings he says: ‘Why not remain within yourself and take hold of your own treasure? For you hold all truth essentially within you.’5 If one avoids thinking of this ‘essentially’ as something that implies a new discipline (for instance, metaphysics) and sees it rather as the living essence of every moment of being affected [Impressionabilität] in the performance or power of life, then the following objection also slips away, namely, that we are sliding into the non-rational sphere of the mystic – far from all thinking – so that we are left only with the inner experience of a problematic ‘absorption in God’. We, therefore, are engaging neither the historical constellation of theology/mysticism6 nor the constellation of thinking/mysticism because this would lead once again to developing a new discipline. In fact, the radical phenomenological situation stands, rather, at a middle point where for each human being the difference between ‘being’ or ‘God’ is surpassed in order for every theoretical difference or noematic transcendence of intentionality to be brought (or, to be more precise, to bring itself) into

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relation with the self-giving of the pure phenomenological life. The step back from each philosophical, theological, mystical (tradition) or scientific way of thinking thus follows, in which the pre-reflexive unity of the life of affecting and affection [Affizierendem und Affizertem] would be sought in our corporeality – in fact it would be sought where this corporeality would be given in itself in the original power of life. This life is the previously mentioned passibility of life as pure conception [Empfängnis]7 of all, what we could think of as our transcendental, even empirical, potentializing and performing. It is here that every thought of a particular something is surpassed, since equally thought is only a modality of the life that precedes it. In this way the self-giving of life and the giving of myself (in the accusative) are one in the absolute character of such a conception [Empfängnis]. The absolute character of being-given here means that in the pure conception of life there is absolutely no initiative of any kind from myself – neither will nor freedom – but rather what is given is simply the inaugural being-born [Geborenwerden] as a radical phenomenological passibility. The affinity to Christian theology and mysticism as the living out of belief lies simply in the fact that in the mode of the pure being-born into life I am thereby a ‘son’ or ‘daughter’; in other words, from the same inner property of life itself (as long as we here bracket all the other categories and understand the life (of God) only as he is in himself). This vitality of all existing living beings thus implies the self-revelation of life in its originary self-appearance in my immanent being-born as such. To cite once more Meister Eckhart, in the sense of a primordial phenomenalizing he states, ‘himself as myself and myself as himself ’. In this way Eckhart can allow the fundamental beginning as the unity to be an originary intelligibility. [God] brings me into being as himself and himself as myself and myself as his own Being and Nature. In the inner source . . . there is one Life and one Being and one work. All that God does is One. Therefore he brings me into being as his Son without any distinction.8 This immanent structure of intelligibility is not a representation but rather, as the ground of our pure phenomenological corporeality, it is a pure impressional affection of self-feeling. In each affect, that is, in the deepest ground of our corporeal being as flesh, I touch the absolute character of the Godhead, insofar as it, in giving life or – even more – new life, begets me and touches me. The unity of my vitality with my corporeality signifies a pure practical truth of originary appearing, which in its phenomenological absoluteness

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is given [ge-geben] only in the fulfilling of each moment of sensuality and affection before subsequently losing itself in the intentional gaze. Here, the immediate quality of the generation of life in its iterative inner necessity can in no way be united in any horizonal intentionality – though this may be traversed as an unthematized ‘living present’. So, the originary beginning in the originary revealing nexus of life/body is older than the alliance of thought/ being as understood from Parmenides to Heidegger. It is this originary nexus that lies before all disciplines and so equally shapes the true ‘life world’ from which all historical theory and praxis emerge. If phenomenalizing is rooted in the original production, consumption and enculturation of life, then the evidence of the revealing power of life is once again given precisely in its continuous iteration. Since what is individual or social in intentional meaning can be designated and made actual, life’s absolute ‘more’, which corporeally generates itself, always precedes such projects to which it, in its pure passibility, makes available its power to bring to fulfilment every imagined act and thereby refers back to the birth of absolute life as deixis. The ‘inner property’ of self-appearing is accordingly affectively or impressionally palpable at each instant and at each point of its immanent praxis, once the particular forms of representation, which wish to possess securely the absolute, are overcome, something both the phenomenological object-reduction and the mystical criteriology of knowledge and action demand.9

III. Revealed Truth as Incarnation If one understands our originary being-born in life as ‘sonship’ [Sohnsein], then one also has a connection to the Christological Incarnation. This constitutes the proper concrete actualization of the self-revealing of God in theology and of the self-appearing of appearance in phenomenology, which, insofar as it is their reality, precedes both disciplines in their mode as instruments of conceptualizing. To the extent that corporeality shapes our originating vitality [Lebendigseins] as passibility, one could also say that it is conceived with life itself in which it gives itself. The self-revealing of God as the truth of Christianity is the ‘Word’ (logos) of the Father in and as his ‘Son’. If one divests this theological manner of representation of its metaphysical implications – understood along the lines of a generation analogous to natural generation – one is left with the phenomenological truth of the absolute self-giving of life that gives birth to an initial ipseity so that it might receive itself in its giving.10 The pure relational character of life thus occurs in a ‘self’ whose absolute phenomenality as ‘Word’ is invested with

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the immanent (phenomenological) materiality of the originary initiation of the Incarnation of God. This Incarnation – before time – presents the concrete essence of the self-revealing of God, in other words, a ‘reciprocal innerness’ within the divine that is without difference or otherness insofar as the ‘Word was with God from the beginning’ and in this beginning was also ‘made flesh’, as John’s prologue attests. If we receive our life in this corporeal fashion so that we may be able to partake in this way first of all in life, then we fulfil our transcendental ‘becoming human’ within the inner godly incarnation of God himself, because he can give himself only as incarnated in the Word – and thereby shows himself as self-revelation. Michel Henry formulates it as the proper resolving of the previously mentioned problem of appearing or revelation: ‘In the depth of its Night our flesh is God.’11 Henry thus draws the final consequences of a non-Greek mode of thinking in order to bring together the immediate originary intelligibility of the divine ‘logos’ with the selfgiving of our fleshly corporeality – though this is in no way accessible as a mode of worldly understanding according to an intentional ‘consciousness of . . .’12 The structure of the absolutely revealed truth as the reality of the Incarnation is in no way a ‘logos’ of thought but rather a purely affective logos, which is the originary immanence of life in each impressional moment or affection within the ipseity of the first-incarnation as the First Living (of Christ). This principled entrance of God’s truth in life for each and every moment constitutes the ‘truth of Christianity’ as a corporeally affective truth for every discursive philosophy and theology. This truth even precedes phenomenology once such a philosophizing is understood only in the sense of the constructive or deconstructive phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger or their followers. It is a matter of a radical ‘turn’ in phenomenology itself inasmuch as phenomenology no longer directs itself to a purely formal account of the givenness of truth or revelation but rather has slipped away from corporeal (incarnational) concretion and fallen into every sort of division of form and content or (more precisely, into the division of the ontic and the ontological).13 Because Heidegger conceives of philosophy as ‘the formally indicative ontological corrective of the ontic and, in particular, of the pre-Christian content of basic theological concepts’,14 these deictic relations become inverted by a life-phenomenology that understands the proper ‘content’ of the truth of Christianity – whether philosophical or theological – as functioning in a purely regional, constituting, or existential sense. Appearance, on the contrary, constitutes itself in its fleshly self-appearing.15

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IV. Word and Scripture as Truth The founding principle for the intelligibility of Holy Scripture is understood here to be phenomenological. A person could not understand the truth of God’s self-revelation if she or he were not already absorbed in this essence in her or his very being. This is the absolute self-affection of life, which in the life-generating ‘inner reciprocity’ between God the Father and God the Son determines the divine Word (logos) in the form of the previously mentioned Incarnation that occurs before time begins. In so far as God reveals himself in this Word as eternal life, which is conceived from and as the Son, so too is each ‘human being’ in her or his transcendental condition conceived in this Incarnation within the Godhead. In this way she or he is already absorbed in this inner Trinitarian Word of God and is able to ‘hear’ it in every affective mode of living. This understanding of the truth of human nature within this life-phenomenology is thus grounded in Christology, because the manner whereby each ‘self’ is given as ipseity itself occurs in the originary-becoming-ipse [Ur-Ipseisierung] of the Word of God or Christ. In this way it is clear from the very beginning that the Word of God, as related first in John’s prologue, ‘has not become text, but rather flesh’ and that our inner hearing of this word corresponds to our fleshly or affective ‘experience of our self in Christ’ in the incarnate life of God.16 The invisible immanence of this revelation of life – in the form of the connection between Father and Son as well as between the absolute and me in Christ as the originary son – means in both cases a self-revelation wherein life reveals itself as affective ‘logos’. This entails that this self-revelation is discovered in the experience of oneself as pathos, this pathos which in God is love that exists for human beings in the fundamental affections of joy and sorrow. This affinity and ultimately identity with the Passion and Resurrection of Christ here rests not only on an existential–hermeneutical structure, but also on the remembering of the affectivity within us, which as critique would be carried out in exegesis (according to another prevailing theory of language).17 This pure affective remembering implies furthermore a radical phenomenology of corporeality in which the absolute subjectivity of every living capacity to feel [Empfindenkönnens] refers, on the one hand, to the immanent self-generating process of divine life and, on the other hand, to the transcendent or intentional disclosure of the world with its axiological implications. In light of Henry’s study of Maine de Biran, the linguistic problem can be integrated with the analysis of these post-Cartesian thinkers of the

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doubling of conventional signs [doppelten Zeichengebrauch]: If, for instance, I use the word ‘see’, I spontaneously draw on the representation of the transcendent organs of sight, but this presupposes at the same time an inner transcendental experience. This experience is the living self-affection18 of the originary corporeality of our absolute subjectivity as a self-apperceptive ‘effort’ [Anstrengung]. In this manner, an additional demand is revealed for the theological use of language that we are pursuing, namely, that for any discursive referential system of signs or predicates a pure immanent feeling must have already occurred within the experience of referring that must be given phenomenologically in order that any determinate meaning at all can be grasped. If one links this corporeal analysis of language with the Christological reality of the Incarnation, then one is able to understand that every intentionality is preceded by the aporetic immanent self-movement of invisible life, such that every ordinary gesture or word is bound to the inner reality of the ‘word of life’ as affection. If theology wishes to make what it is saying intelligible when it declares the salvation of humanity, then it must explicitly move to this ‘flesh’ of every living human being in order to establish the ‘originary intelligibility’ of both the Christian mystery and the sacred scriptures. Because this purely immanent flesh, as the site of the revelation of the word of life, can in no way be deceptive – since as passible affection or pathos it is bound up with the Incarnation of the Son of God – it bears witness to our invisible birth in the life of God. Consequently it follows that my inner phenomenologically constituted truth is equivalent to the truth of the living incarnated Christ . Access to the text (as a corresponding theology and pronouncement) lies in feeling in the biblical word of the ‘being of the Son’ equally my own true inner sense of life (or affective life) [Lebensaffektion]. This is so because in my ‘originary passibility’ the ‘originary intelligibility’ of the incarnated Christ is already given, and in the word of the faith tradition it finds its echo.19 In a more properly theological sense, the scriptures thus proceed from the Mass as a ‘work of remembering’ Christ’s life and reality, where the central point is that the ‘body’ of the Eucharist can be jointly revealed in the pure affective ‘flesh’ of our joys and pains. This revelation brings all the typical words and literary expression of truth, life, flesh, remembering, incarnation, passion, bread, wine, and the like to the site of their originary phenomenological production. Here we have in our possession a fundamental theology that is also a (Christian) philosophy of religion and thus an actual ‘Word of God’ (theo-logos) that finds in life the source of its modes of being. Certainly Christian activity in the Sacrament and in the church goes beyond mere phenomenology, insofar as the latter can only display

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the conditions of possibility of reality without itself being this reality. The reality of the Incarnation, Eucharist and Christian salvation about which theology speaks, however, finds in the immanent life of phenomenology a ‘new significance’, which is bound up with sensation as much as with the simplest form of life.20 Christ’s words to humanity and concerning himself in Holy Scriptures, according to this view, are not only heard in the pleasures and suffering of our lives but equally in every originary passibility of the connecting to life of affection [ur-passiblen Lebensumschlingung der Affectivität], which is as powerful and old as ourselves.21 Once this word of life in Christ has been named as his very being, it is just as equally named in every human being. In this way theology is in its essence no mere human word ‘concerning God’, but a human word that is, from the very outset, grounded in the reality of the truth of the absolute life. In contrast to Greek thought (particularly in the Gnosticism of the Hellenistic period), beginning with the earliest church fathers, a logos without flesh (asarkos) has no meaning for theology.22 In fact, the concrete possibility of faith is rooted in our fleshly condition as such, which is implied in sin just as much as salvation: sin, insofar as we, in an illusory fashion, pretend that the power of the ‘I can’ is solely our own. And in salvation insofar as we (re)cognize [(wieder)erkennen] in all of our physical–spiritual deeds the invisible revelation of life as the revelation of the Son in Christ.23 Beginning with the memorial of the Eucharist, in which the presence of Christ is proclaimed , the Gospel is taken up by the church bit by bit. This is in no way an alien act, but rather it aims to lead to communion with God in his Son: So this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us . . . and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 Jn 1.2–3) This indissoluble unity of the Eucharist and the Gospel would be tied to the Old Testament understanding of the history of Israel in its successive retelling of sin/forgiveness, exile/return and death/life. In this way there appears, for example, a totally new living genealogical history of the development of the canon that in the Resurrection accomplishes ‘the completion of the historicality of the Absolute’ and signifies the definitive overcoming of suffering by joy.24 Such an understanding of scripture frees itself from the universally prevailing conception of interpretation according to the hermeneutical

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circle (Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, semiotics, narrativity, etc.). These methods of interpretation – this is also true of those who follow the historical–critical method of scriptural exegesis – remain caught up in an understanding of the word that is completely subjected to the categories of distance and the difference between sign and reference central to transcendental phenomenology, while a ‘hermeneutic’ oriented by the absolute life of affection is committed to the ‘heart’ of the particular. In this heart as the absolute, that is, Christological, affectivity of life, there is no more abyss. Word and hearing are the same because in the begetting of hearing itself, and further in its particular birth in absolute life, the self-revelations of God – as well as the hearing itself – take place immediately and at the same time.25 Once I am no longer able to feel any modality of life apart from this remembering [Rememorials] of the incarnated life of God, the living meaning of scripture and its proclamation will no longer involve submission to a proper interpretation, but rather it will be ‘felt in us what was in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 2.5). Through his passion, Christ has fulfilled all that is of substance [Wirklichkeit] in the scriptures, and in this fashion the ‘exegesis of the Bible by means of the Bible itself’ is a traversing of this living reality of Christ. This reality is equally given in us as: (1) the mystery of the unity of Christ and the church, (2) the mystery of the sonhood of Christ and the faithful and (3) the mystery of salvation into which we, through our own life, are brought ever deeper. For the people and the faithful there is no greater idea to accept (and even desire) than that in the transmission of the scriptures, with its mutually illuminating and deepening symbolic impulse, our goal should be to allow the reciprocal innerness between God the Father and God the Son to appear in us as the reality of our essential being. In a way, ‘eidetic variation’ leads from the phenomenological description of desire, bread, water, house, and so forth to the experience of the same reality in Christ, in which all of these phenomena have their proper truth without it being at all alien to us.26 In such a ‘hermeneutic’, one encounters not only philosophy and theology or reason and faith – as one finds in the customary attempts in fundamental theology or philosophy of religion – but rather one discovers the common originary condition of both in the concrete inner life of each individual. In this way, one finds the compelling answer to our current experience of the human condition in the inner truth of Christ, the church and the scriptures themselves that allow a unity of the Word to arise that would be committed neither to a simple discursivity, speculation, nor a social condition, but rather implies the undeniable experience of a full life in this phenomenological, as well as divine, essence.

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V. Compassion Rather than Gnosis One might raise an objection concerning the importance of what has just been discussed by arguing that the critique of the Gnostic hostility of the body by all phenomenologies of life in the end is also a critique of every understanding of truth that is given with the unity of the self-revelation of God and the living self-affection of human beings, particularly given that Henry himself, in the last sentence of his work on the Incarnation, declares: ‘The originary gnosis is the gnosis of the one.’27 This way of thinking misses, however, not only all mythological or speculative elements, which typically distinguish Gnostic teachings, but also that this available ‘unity’ itself that is in question here refers to a central saying of Irenaeus of Lyon that Henry even describes as the fundamentally ‘Christian’ or ‘corporeal’ cogito: ‘This power of the flesh – to receive the life [of God]’ – shows itself through this life, wherein the flesh lives.28 On the other side of any picturing, speculation or discursivity is the flesh. It is this flesh that through life makes possible an originary intelligibility and an immediate or singular cogito that can never be bound up with any intentionality, as we have said, but, as John’s Gospel repeatedly tells us, this ‘way of truth’ is identical with Christ himself. This ‘originary gnosis of unity’ for every constructed knowing gnosis does not allow for any sort of circle of initiates but rather in a radical sense inverts every knowing that considers itself to be a theoretical ‘understanding of truth’. By way of this phenomenological and material concreteness, the carnal absolute affection along with the universality of salvation is made central for everyone.29 The history (understood philosophically) of ideas points to the fact that with Christianity a fundamental inversion of the understanding of truth has occurred. This inversion, whether we are speaking of philosophy, theology or the philosophy of religion, has as yet scarcely been realized, namely, that this understanding of truth is in no way a category of a transcendental theory but rather is the immanent experience of our flesh as radical subjectivity in the sense of the feeling of life [Lebenspathos]. In this way every gnosis, intuition or rational grasp of the foundation is denied from realizing itself in a detached knowledge of the truth. Since truth only can be ‘experienced’, the passibility of this absolute experience (épreuve) is equally the self-revelation of God, which originally can in no way depend on our capabilities but rather is in itself always ‘given’ in his making happen [Wirktatsächlichkeit]. The ‘Christian cogito’ of our flesh admits of no remote or alien God who must always be sought by way of

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a particular struggle of thinking in order to bring him near to us.30 The never absent originary intelligibility of God for reason and faith in their intentional significance is equally the originary intelligibility of our radical first affection with which we are given to ourselves in life so that we perceive God in everything whenever we sense ourselves as affective in our living certainty in which we equally feel the absolute nature of life. It follows as a consequence, however, that we forget God as well as the other when we forget ourselves. This means that I mistake the representation for the self-grounding measure of all truth and actuality. If the ‘Christian cogito’ no longer is any sort of gnosis of rational insight but rather a reversal of every abstract hypothesis concerning truth in favour of a pure inner practice of affection, then this means equally that from the very beginning we are embedded in a form of activity that is the Word of absolute life. In order to clarify the status of this pure inner or practical truth (or equally the Gnostic significance of the previously mentioned mysticism), let us insist with Eckhart on a unity of being and the acts of God by citing once again one of his sermons: [God] does not beget me only as son; he begets myself as himself and himself as myself and myself as his Son and as his nature. In the inner source . . . there is one life and one being and one work. All that God brings about is one. In this way he begets me as his Son without any distinction. Even further one should take notice of the following in the same passage: For this reason is the heavenly Father [and not my earthly father] my Father, as I am his son, and I receive everything from him. I am the same Son and no other. For the Father (only) brings about one work, and this is why he begets me as his only begotten Son without any distinction.31 Consequently, one can no longer speak of a mystical knowledge of the pure work of the absolute knowledge of life that is higher than this and could be properly called ‘mystical’ because such thematic self-assurance would lose what is its truth for all disciplinary knowledge, namely, Eckhart’s notion of the ‘uncreatedness’ found in the pure power of life understood as the inner bringing into completion of all doing and thinking in the sense of the birthing of one act. In other words, the originary intelligibility is here equally an ethos in the sense of an absolute ‘alliance with life’ that in its essential unity can be nothing else than the regeneration of every

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individual and communal life. This regeneration refuses the endless inner ‘more’ of the increase of life that could no longer perceive the absolute character of its ‘new birth’ in Eckhart’s sense.32 The connection developed in the living phenomenological act of God found in the unity of body and soul or flesh as the incarnational ipseity thus resolves a conflict between Gnostic knowing and ethics – a conflict normally understood to be found both in the belief that the world no longer is accepted as part of the kingdom of God (of the Creator) and in the view that understands corporeality as only part of the worldly elements and thus, from the perspective of salvation, is numbered among the lost. At its most basic level, the fleshly originary intelligibility overcomes not only all Gnostic (or later forms of) body–soul dualism, but it equally overcomes an ethical understanding that would be realized in a rejection of the world (Gnosticism) or in a hypostasis of the world (modernity). If there is only one act of God, then this act of God in the world is certainly invisible – just as the self-revelation of God in his Son remains invisible in this world.33 We have, however, this immemorial character of the absolute as incarnate life equally as an unfailing present potentiality that can be expressed thanks to the originary affection of our corporeality. This means that the world from the Christian perspective cannot be reduced to its external appearance, as modern science does, but rather it constitutes itself according to its phenomenological reality thanks to the immanent capacity of the body, which, as the immanent axiology of life, comprises an immediate ‘measure’ [Bewertung] of all being. This lies at the bottom of every history, insofar as it ultimately constitutes a history of our affective need and its permanent iterations – and not a temporal or dialectical transcendence involving unintelligible ‘meaning-events’. If, however, the ethos of practical life has always already overcome every gnosis, insofar as the world for its part arises and persists in the invisibility of absolute life,34 there remains a final question concerning this ‘Christian ethic’ that needs to be clarified. This question is identical to the question of salvation in Christianity. How can the divine desire of life itself become lost in life and subsequently found once again therein if in principle we can never fall out of the transcendental birth in life? We have already implied that we can ‘forget’ our pure origin. By falling into transcendental illusion, the ego may be taken to be the source of all power inasmuch as the transparency of the purely passible-me would no longer be seen. It is in this passible-me that every subjective power is given as living capacity as it is in itself, that is, as the absolute desire of life that is the ‘gift’ of God that cannot be refused. Gnosis, in its attempt to

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get beyond this forgetfulness by dwelling on determinate ways of understanding ‘supernatural’ revelation or salvation [Retter], which is supposed to pass beyond the negatively defined bodily and worldly character, forgets in such an attempt its proper power – for which it substitutes a thinking or speculating – that always already is active as the original effectuating power to act. In other words, it is the dogmatic postulate of an absolute difference (understood as strangeness or otherness), which such thinking then claims to overcome (this is true even if we are talking in the lofty terms of ‘deconstruction’). If, however, ‘salvation’ fundamentally cannot be victorious apart from any form of ‘knowledge’ (as contemporary psychoanalysis believes), then we return to our original question: In what manner is a ‘science’ of all disciplines, whether historical or hermeneutical, likely to appear? It is within a pure understanding of life , which is realized only in being carried out , that the transcendental requirement of human beings and their life provides the absolute nature of life itself and which thus represents an aporetical active before. Being forgotten can only be overcome if the ‘doing’ is immediately experienced in its inner activity as affective certainty. It must be understood that this doing was produced by no external normativity but rather is produced solely by the infinite power that originated and continues to originate in life. When the New Testament and the Christian tradition thus speak of the actuality of love or compassion , this means that in doing something a power of life is at work, which constitutes the self-love of life itself that works in all the ‘abundance of life’. This abundance is that which the Christ of John’s Gospel proclaims as the truth of God, himself, in which he, the Son, is this very abundance. Whence would this abundance come – other than from the life that God eternally is and in which, through our transcendental birth as his ‘Son’, we always already are? The ‘site’ of this science of all disciplines is this abundance as such, in the lowliest just as much in the highest. It is in the ‘common one’ [einig Einen] of all according to Meister Eckhart, where there is no longer any forgetting – and thus also no longer any care for oneself in the form of the lonely ego understood according to the transcendental illusion of wearisome action.35 If we do not take Meister Eckhart’s words as simply the statements of a classical mystic but rather as an ever [je] given actuality [Aktualität] in us, then this unavoidable actuality [Wirklichkeit] is understood as follows: There is nothing like this life that we so covet. What is my life? That which would here bestir itself from within. If we thus live with him, so

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we must also act together in him, so that we do not act from an external source. . . . If we ought, thus, to live in or through him, so must he be our true self and so must we act from our true self. In this way God acts to bring about all things from his true self and through himself. . . . All things are for me true in him; and if we should come to this possession, namely that all things are ours as well, then we must in a similar sense find him in all things, no more in one than in another, since he is in all things equally.36 The originary site of all truth is thus ‘foolishness’, which means ‘in all things equally’ in order at the same time to sense God ‘in the right way’,37 since he is the life of the ‘being’ of all insofar as he brings it about – and in this unity we bring it about with him. Translated by Mark D. Gedney

Notes and Works Cited 1

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See Michel Henry, ‘Par-delà phénoménologie et théologie: l’Archi-intelligibilité johannique’, in Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 361–74. On the problematic attempt by philosophy to overcome this aporia by means of genesis or dialectic see Rolf Kühn, Anfang und Vergessen. Phänomenologische Lektüre des deutschen Idealismus – Fichte, Schelling, Hegel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003). On this subject see particularly Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929) (Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1981); Formal and Transcendental Logic , trans. Dorion Cairns, 9th edition (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977). Cf. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), especially in the two parts: ‘Zeit und Sein’ as well as ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens.’ ‘At certe videre videor, audire, calescere. Hoc falsum esse non potest, hoc est proprie quod in me sentire appelatur; atque hoc praecise sic sumptum nihil aliud est quam cogitare ’. Rene Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, ed. Lüder Gäbe (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959), 50–1; Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress, 3rd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 20. On the phenomenological meaning of this question between Descartes and Husserl, see also Henry, Incarnation, chapters 8–12. Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, ed. Josef Quint (Munich: Diogenes, 1979), 181. In relation to this discussion, see also Meister Eckhart – Erkenntnis und Mystik des Lebens. Forschungsbeiträge der Lebensphänomenologie, ed. Rolf Kühn and Sebastian Laoureux (Freiburg: Alber, 2008). See also the recent work Das Schweigen Gottes in der Welt. Mystik im 20. Jahrhundert , ed. Marco A. Sorace and Peter Zimmerling (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2007).

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Translator’s note: I have translated Empfängnis and empfangen more or less consistently as ‘conceived’ and ‘conceive’, respectively. The related term, Zeugung, I have translated generally with the somewhat archaic term, ‘begotten’, since this term (often used in translating Eckhart) preserves the equivocal nature of Zeugung as conceiving and giving birth. This also allows for the word born/birth to be reserved for translating geboren and the various cognate terms that Kühn uses (Geborenwerden , Geburt , etc.). Eckhart, Predigt 7, 185. On the conception of such a criteriology of affinity see Rolf Kühn, Geburt in Gott. Religion, Metaphysik, Mystik und Phänomenologie (Freiburg: Alber, 2003), 12–14. See Michel Henry, C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996); I Am the Truth, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). [Translator’s note: Henceforth the first page reference will refer to the French version, the second to the English translation.] See also Francesco Gaiffi, ‘La dimension trinitaire dans la philosophie du christianisme de Michel Henry’, in Michel Henry, Pensée de la vie et culture contemporain, ed. Jean-Francois Lavigne (Paris: Beauchesne, 2006), 149–66. Henry, Incarnation, 373. Ibid. This is a critical issue for the prospects of a final ‘formal call’ as the possibility of revelation according to Jean-Luc Marion, Le Visible et le révélé (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 13–34: ‘Le possible et la révélation’. See also Kurt Wolf, Philosophie der Gabe. Meditationen über die Liebe in der französischen Gegenwartsphilosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006), 110–12. In his lecture ‘Phenomenologie und Theologie – 1927’ (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1970), 51; ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 52. On the religious impact of Heidegger and Henry, see also Jean Greisch, Le buisson ardent et les lumières de la raison. L’invention de la philosophie de la religion, vol. 2: Les approches phénoménologiques et analytiques (Paris: Cerf, 2002). On this methodological question see Rolf Kühn, Individuum und Geschichte. Phänomenologie politischer Aktualität (Freiburg: Alber, 2008), chapter 3. See Antoine Vidalin, La Parole de la Vie. La phénoménologie de Michel Henry et l’intelligence chrétienne des Ecritures (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2007), 18. See Rolf Kühn, Gabe als Leib in Christentum und Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Echter, 2004), 19–21. See Maine de Biran, De l’aperception immédiate: Mémoire de Berlin 1807 (Paris: LGF 2005). Yorihiro Yamagata, ‘Sprache, Stimme und Kinästhese’, in Sprache und Pathos. Zur Affektwirklichkeit als Grund des Wortes, ed. Ekkehard Blattmann et al. (Freiburg: Alber, 2000), 125–45. See Henry, I Am the Truth, 120–2/94–6, and Incarnation, 372–4. See Vidalin, La Parole de la Vie, 113–15. See Henry, Paroles du Christ (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 63–5. For the controversy with Gnosticism, see Henry, Incarnation, 172–4. Ibid., 323–5. Beyond the previously mentioned work by A. Vidalin, see also Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry: les derniers écrits de Michel Henry en débat, ed. Phillippe

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Capelle (Paris: Cerf, 2004), in which he also discusses the intertextuality between the Old and New Testaments according to Henry. See Henry, Paroles du Christ, 127–9. See Vidalin, La Parole de la Vie, 211–13. Henry, Incarnation, 374. See also Michel Henry, ‘La vérité de la gnose’, in Phénoménologie de la vie, volume IV: Sur l’éthique et la religion (Paris: PUF, 2004), 131–44, in which he gives a clear critique of the idea of gnosis as a flight from the world. Against Heresies, Book V, 3:3, cited in Henry, Incarnation, 192. For this discussion see Jad Hatem, Le Sauveur et les viscères de l’être: Sur le Gnosticisme et Michel Henry (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). For an example of this critique of Anselm’s ontological proof, see Henry, ‘Hinführung zur Gottesfrage: Seinsbeweis oder Lebenserweis?’, in his Radikale Lebensphänomenologie. Ausgewählte Studien zur Phänomenologie (Freiburg: Alber, 2002), 251–73. Also on the claim of absolute power as a normative conception of God and reason based on the witness of the three monotheistic religions see Markus Ender, ‘Ist der Mensch von Natur aus religiös? Zum Verständnis des Menschen aus der Sicht christlicher Religionsphilosophie’, Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie 6 (2007): 37–68, especially 64–6. Eckhart, Predigt 7, 185. Already before the chapter on ethics in I Am the Truth, 216–18/171–3, as well as before Incarnation, 353–5, Henry had previously worked through this analysis in Die Barbarei. Eine phänomenologische Kulturkritik (Freiburg: Alber, 1994), 189–91. See Raphael Gély, Rôles, action sociale et vie subjective. Recherches à partir de la phénoménologie de Michel Henry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007). Concerning the relationship of the world and life in reference to creation, see Henry, Incarnation, chapter 45: ‘Les degrés de la passivité: De la Genèse au Prologue de Jean’. See Henry, ‘La vérité de la gnose’, 142–4. On the overcoming of concern by compassion that with the New Testament in no way has in mind a self-referential action, see Henry, I Am the Truth, 233–5/185–7. Eckhart, Predigt 5, 118. Eckhart, Predigt 7, 176–8.

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Chapter 7

Towards a Radical Phenomenology of Social Life: Reflections from the Work of Michel Henry Raphaël Gély

The fundamental objective of this article is to show how Michel Henry’s radical phenomenology offers important resources for thinking in a new way the connection between the living individual’s radically singular experience1 of his life-force and the social dimension of his existence. I will approach this problematic, more precisely, through an investigation of collective action. On one level, one could perhaps say that Henry’s work leads away from any reflection on the place of social life in the individual’s experience of being radically given to himself in life’s originary affectivity. Henry does not, of course, deny that there are collective actions from the point of view of our inscription in a social world – no more than he denies the necessity for individuals who experience themselves in radical fashion in this social world to make it the occasion for an intensification of life. Nonetheless, it remains a question if this experience is, as such, essential to subjectivity’s experience of its originary possibility, or if individuals merely have to take it up in the most life-filled way they can. In the same way that life, according to Henry, needs art to increase the experience that it has of itself, can one say that individuals must engage themselves in collective actions to increase their radically singular experience of their life? A first reading of Henry’s work could lead us to respond negatively to this question. How, indeed, could a phenomenology reputed for the radicalism of its approach to subjective life – a philosophy that founds the individuality of the living self on the radical immanence of one’s auto-affection – take account of collective action otherwise than as a tribute to be paid to the organization of a social world, otherwise than as that which living individuals have to assume to live concretely together? The experience of

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collective action would then be entirely secondary. With regard to what founds the radical individuality of each of us, and with regard to the affective community of living selves, collective action can seem to arise only from trivial social necessities. Even if collective actions are determined by the radical experience that life has of itself in them, they would not be, as such, constitutive of the originary community of living beings. They would not participate in the constitution of the common being of life, but would, rather, be formed by the experience that can be had of it. In his constant dialogue with G. W. F. Hegel and the other currents of thought inspired by him, does Henry not, in fact, refuse, with the greatest possible conviction, to found the community of the living on anything other than the purely invisible experience of life’s affectivity? This life can only, of course, be experienced where living individuals are concretely in the process of living and interacting. But do these individuals’ life-forces intrinsically call them, for all that, to collective actions so that these life-forces can increase? Does Henry not, to the contrary, always insist that in the radical experience that the living self has of himself, there is no master, no slave, no man or woman, no father or mother, no professor, no doctor, no café waiter? The experience that life has of itself thus seems foreign, in so far as its originary possibility is concerned, to all forms of taking up roles in collective actions. Certainly life, which is always that of finite and situated living beings, cannot fail to be experienced in a radical way over the course of the roles one plays and the experiences one has in it. The diversity of collective actions, of roles and their actualizations, belongs to the adventure of life, to its historicity. Individuals are in this sense radically affected by the roles that they take charge of, by the collective actions in which they engage themselves. But, even so, this does not mean that subjective life in itself calls for experiencing and intensifying oneself through the sharing of particular forms of collective action. From the perspective of such a reading of Henry’s work, therefore, it would not be possible to develop the project of a radical phenomenology of social life. In any case, Henry can never allow the singular life of individuals to be subordinated to a social life that would be, so to speak, endowed with its own ontological consistency. As he writes, The attempt to oppose the community and the individual – to establish a hierarchical relationship between them – is pure nonsense. It amounts to opposing the essence of life with something that is necessarily entailed by it. When one political system or another advocates if not the elimination of the individual at least its subordination to more essential structures or

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totalities, even a greater community than it, this is not a community. The totality, for example, of a bureaucracy is an abstraction, which has taken the place of life and claims to speak and to act in its name. In life the individual is never an unnecessary excess or a subordinate; instead, it is the proper mode of phenomenological actualization of this life.2 But if it is legitimate to denounce every kind of denial of the singular life of the individual for the sake of a social life that would be superior to it, this does not mean that common action is not necessary for the intensification of the individual’s experience of his radical singularity and his originary life-force. The objective of this chapter is precisely to show that it is possible to find resources in Henry’s work for developing a truly radical phenomenology of collective action, a phenomenology capable of linking the question of the social to the experience that the radical singularity of each individual has of his power to participate in the very force of life.3

I. Collective Action and the Singularity of Acting From the point of view of an intentional approach to collective action – a point of view that I certainly will not call into question but to which I will link something of the radical immanence of life – common action is not possible unless the different actions brought about by individuals link themselves to each other according to criteria that transcend the singular action of any of them. According to the way in which singular action links itself to this common normativity, we thus encounter different forms of collective action. From this perspective, individuals’ belief in the fact that they are actually in the process of realizing a collective action rests entirely on the fact that their action is mediated by the pursuit of a common objective and by the sharing of a certain way of proceeding. In other words, what here constructs the community of individuals in a collective action is the representation of a certain end pursued in common and a series of actions corresponding to this representation. Collective action as we understand it here implies the introduction of a principle of equivalence permitting the evaluation of individuals’ actions according to a single selfsame criterion, specifically that of their participation in the production of a certain social reality. Such an ontology of collective action founds the community of acting individuals on the sharing of principles of action that transcend the singular acting of any (the normativity of these principles being able to take different forms, of course, according to the types of action and the

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situations). The central question is then to know if such an ontology of collective action, based on individuals’ power to represent their actions to themselves, to realize them, and to evaluate them in accordance with their common objectives, entirely takes account of the life of collective action, of the experience that life has of itself through it. For Henry, the response to this question is negative to the extent that the intentional community of acting individuals rests on a more primitive community, which is that of life’s radically affective power of living. In order for individuals to be able to coordinate their actions and cooperate, they must be living beings, must share a single experience of life. If collective action implies the experience of acting together, this common acting, however intentionally it is constituted, rests on the affective experience of a common power of life. What unites many different actions in a given collective action is then not only the representation of a certain targeted end. Neither is it only a certain common way of attaining this end. More fundamentally, it is these actions’ phenomenologically interior relationship to each other, their common generation in the originary ipseity of a single power of living. To act together, from this perspective, is for each acting individual to enter into a particular way of singularly experiencing a common power of life. It is for this reason that Henry criticizes any ontology of collective action that is centred unilaterally on its intentional dimension. Such an approach to collective action, resting on the priority of consciousness, necessarily leads, according to Henry, to supposing that collective action does not imply the radically immanent experience of an originary shareability of life, does not have a stake in individuals’ affective experience in their participation in life’s power. From the point of view of the radical phenomenology of life, what is common to partner individuals in a collective action is not only a single situation and a single project. Neither is it only a set of interactions. More fundamentally, it is the fact that they share a single radical experience of life. There is no collective action in which an end targeted in common is not established in intentionality, but neither is there a collective action in which radically singular individuals do not experience themselves as sharing life’s single power of living. The arche-intelligibility of collective action, its most fundamental condition of possibility, is in this sense nothing other than the radically affective experience that life’s power of living has of itself in sharing itself. To act collectively is to activate, in one way or another, the originary shareability of life. A certain philosophy of collective action is in this sense necessarily correlated to a certain philosophy of subjective life.

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For Henry, any approach to collective action that is unilaterally centred on its intentional dimension necessarily involves a bracketing of the originary affective foundation of collective action. It hides the fact that there is only collective action where singular individuals share the radical immanence of a common life. When collective action is seen only from the point of view of its constitution in intentionality, it appears as though the fact of experiencing a single power of life in both a singular and shared way were inessential, as though this did not participate in the fundamental intelligibility of collective action. We have just shown that such an approach to collective action hides the fact that common action is, as such, inseparable from the experience of common life. In acting together, individuals share a single power to be a living self. Just as from a certain point of view there is only collective action when individual actions are submitted to criteria of evaluation that transcend them and thus make them comparable, so too from another point of view there is only collective action when it is composed of living actions, realized by individuals who are radically singular but for whom singularity refers precisely to a single shared and activated life. What permits individual actions to be integrated in a given collective action is at the same time then what makes each of these actions radically singular – fundamentally incommensurable because of its inscription in the essential ipseity of life’s single power of living. A complete description of collective action requires holding onto these two dimensions at once. According to the first dimension, any collective action necessarily involves the normative integration of various individual actions, their evaluation according to a principle that transcends the particularity of each. From this perspective, the very possibility of collective action depends on individuals’ capacity to see actions from points of view other than their own, to engage in processes in which they adopt ideal roles. Collective action by its nature requires processes that permit comparing and evaluating people’s actions according to more general criteria, that is, according to criteria that transcend them. According to the second dimension, every collective action necessarily involves a series of individual actions that, because they are living actions in Henry’s sense, by their nature escape every comparison. There can only be collective action when individual actions, even as they are integrated into a given project, are experienced as radically singular actions, as actions that are in this way absolutely incommensurable. When the radical singularity of the living action of individuals is denied in a given collective act, it is this collective act’s reality itself that is called into question. By proceeding as though certain people’s acts were only an objective element in an objective process,

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one hides the fact that the only collective action is living action, realized by individuals who share together the same power of being a living self, the singularity of a single power to act. In this sense, there is a correlation between a certain understanding of life’s living and a certain understanding of the very being of collective action. Henry thus compares universal life as Ludwig Feuerbach understands it to money, in so far as it makes all things equivalent: That there is not, or rather that there must not be, a universal reality superior to individuals, distributing to them its predicates and qualities as so many determinations coming to them from the outside (one affecting one individual, one affecting another, predicates and qualities that could be distributed otherwise between them) is what is shown in the same period by the critique of money, which Marx borrowed from Shakespeare but took up with a passion all his own. For, to look at it closely, money is nothing else than the genus as Feuerbach understands it, a power superior to individuals that arbitrarily sees to the exchange of the predicates of being between them. Money really possesses these predicates itself, whereas the individual is only the always-provisional and always-partial site of their actualization.4 For a radical phenomenology of life, this is altogether unacceptable, insofar as life is phenomenologically defined by the radically singular experience that life can never fail to have of itself. Hence, if we can share a life that exceeds us – but without having to sacrifice our individualities to it – it is because this life is defined by the power of being oneself, by the power of experiencing oneself as a self. To share a single life with others is to share with them the very power to be a self that is at the heart of life. It is in this sense that we can understand Henry’s fundamental thesis that individuals are only united to each other because they share the same essential ipseity of life, the same power of being a self. Living individuals do not live as united in a single life by diminishing their individuality. Quite to the contrary, they do so by becoming radically individual, by manifesting in an ever-unique way life’s power to be itself. As Henry writes in I Am the Truth , The gift by which Life (self-giving) gives the ego to itself is in reality one with it. Once given to itself, the ego is really in possession of itself and of each of these powers, able to exercise them: it is really free. In making the ego a living person, Life has not made a pseudo-person.5

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In this sense, what happens to living beings is not so much what happens to life in general as it is what happens to life’s power to be itself, to life’s power to be always a living, irreducibly singular self, an individual radically given to himself. The fundamental challenge for a radical theory of collective action thus consists in rendering thinkable both the absoluteness of each individual action and its integration in a space of coordination and cooperation that exceeds it. This tension, internal to the reality of common action, is exactly the same as that which is at work in life itself. It is thus a matter of affirming with Henry that life cannot nourish itself on vapidity in living beings.6 In the context of a theory of collective action, this last thesis amounts to saying that a common act that suggests the denial of an acting individual’s radical singularity is an act that undoes itself, that cuts itself off from its affective foundations, that is, the experience that life has in it of its essential ipseity. What makes collective action a living reality is precisely the fact that it is both general and composed of radically singular actions. It is precisely the tension between these two orders that we must maintain. From the perspective of a radical phenomenology of collective action, individuals’ belief in the reality of their common action is inseparable from the experience they have in that common action of the essential ipseity of life, of its very power to experience itself as a self in the midst of each individual action. To deny this radical singularity of action is to alienate it, to render it purely and simply unreal, in its individual dimension as much as in its collective dimension. Individuals’ belief in the reality of their collective action is founded on the affective experience that they have both of their radical singularity and of the originary shareability of life. One thus finds in Henry the idea that a certain romantic approach to life, asserting life’s constitutive anonymity (life being above all universal before being in each case the life of a radically singular living being), is simply at bottom the dialectical opposite of a purely functionalist approach to collective action. Whether one is a pawn in society’s immense functional machinery or a tiny and provisional participant in life’s savage progression, in any case the transcendental individuality of the individual is denied – subordinated to the realization of a reality on a higher level. As Henry writes, It is the concept of a Life separate from the Individual that has furnished romanticism with its major themes. It is not that romanticism eliminates the individual from the start. On the contrary, the individual is taken as the point of departure – as a probability, appearance, to be more precise.

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Romanticism aims at the dissolution of this somewhat provisional individual in a higher reality, in the flow of the boundless river that is universal life. Only by bursting the bounds of his individuality would the individual be able to rejoin the impersonal depth of reality as a whole and fuse with it.7 It is exactly the same for all conceptions of collective action in which individuals’ acting is only seen as a variable in the objective functioning of an organization. For Henry, by contrast, no general act can take priority over the radically singular experience that individuals have of this act. Here Henry situates himself in the ontological order. In the context of a radical phenomenology of life, the reality of an action is nothing else, in the end, than its subjectivity: There is only action when an individual, in doing a particular something, experiences the radical singularity of his act. The subjectivity of action is thus not one element of action among others. It is action itself in the radically immanent experience that it has of itself.8 The same goes for collective action: There can be no fully experienced common action except where individuals act with attention to the radically singular experience that each one has of the original shareability of life. If action is not simply an objective series of behaviours and cannot be reduced to the meaning that one gives to these behaviours, it is because action only happens when an acting individual experiences himself as radically given to himself in his power of acting. Henry explains: Let us imagine a runner on a stadium track. As an object of intuition, as an empirical phenomenon – objective, sensible, natural – his race is there for all and for each. But the spectators watch and do nothing. It is therefore not the empirical intuition of the race, its objective appearance, that can define it, constitute its reality; it is, precisely, only its appearance. The reality of the race is in the subjectivity of the one who runs it, in the lived experience that is only given to him and constitutes him as an individual, as this individual who is running, as a ‘determined’ individual, to speak like Marx.9 But it is no different for a collective action, which cannot be confused with a third-person process. In order to be an act in the phenomenological sense, collective action necessarily involves the affective experience of common acting. There is only collective action because there are individuals who act together, and who, in doing so, experience themselves as sharing the singularity of one power of life. What founds a community of living action

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is just as much in this sense what founds the irreducible singularity of each acting individual as it is what founds these individuals’ affective solidarity. One cannot say of a robot that it is capable of acting, precisely to the extent that it cannot have the radical experience of itself as an acting individual. Neither can one affirm that robots are capable of acting collectively. For Henry, the very reality of collective action is necessarily founded in a certain common experience of the originary ipseity of life: Thus being-in-common has taken on a body in the living subjectivity of individuals well before political thought makes it the object of its aim as common business. Far from being able to result in this aim or to constitute itself in it, being-in-common is this aim’s cause or its condition.10 Individuals can only in this sense experience themselves as deeply involved in a common project if, in bringing this project about, they experience themselves as sharing and putting into play a single participation in life. It is for this reason that any theory of collective action that hides the fact that individuals need each other to participate in life – and not just to realize themselves in it – participates in a denial of the originary affective foundation of common action and its profound dynamic. Moreover, an alienation from common action, the denial of its originary affectivity, can only lead to a weakening of life-forces, to their exhaustion. The intentional community of acting individuals certainly implicates these individuals’ capacity to compare their actions and evaluate them. This evaluation implies a power of representation and, through it, individuals’ capacity to gain distance in relation to their action. But the community of common action involves still another level, precisely that of absolute subjectivity, a level on which the community of individuals does not found itself in a common intentional aim but in the radical experience that each has of sharing with others the originary affectivity of a single life-force. What decentres the individual and associates him with others in a single common undertaking is then not only his inscription in the practical and linguistic sphere of a shared normativity. It is just as much, and more fundamentally, the experience he has of the originary solidarity of his life-force with that of others. These two levels must clearly be held together, since Henry’s fundamental thesis is that individuals’ power to engage themselves deeply in common projects rests on their experience of belonging in solidarity to a single life-force. Each time that this belonging in solidarity to the affectivity of a single life-force is denied, it is the experience of the common character of collective action that is, in turn, weakened. There

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is, therefore, an a priori of the community of living beings inhabiting the radically singular experience that each individual has of the living of his life. Henry writes: It is in this way that any conceivable community is born and forms itself in its originary phenomenological possibility. In consequence, these communities display certain essential traits. The first concerns what is common in the community or, if you will, its content: transcendental life.11 From a certain point of view, what individuals necessarily have in common when they are acting together is the sharing of a single situation and a single project, as well as the sharing of abilities. From another point of view, what individuals have just as necessarily in common when they act together is the experience of a single power to be a self, the power of a single affective experience of life. From this latter perspective, if individuals form a community, they do so in the very excessiveness of the life that each one of them experiences in radically singular fashion. To be together is to share the same passivity with respect to a life that radically gives each individual to himself, activates him, and exceeds him, all at the same time. As Marc Maesschalck writes, Each individual is, through his own affect, destined for the excessiveness of his life, as total felt-experience [pâtir]. This becoming oneself totally through life’s excess opens onto a previously unknown conception of the community through the im-mediation of life, which realizes itself by exceeding its singular destinies.12 Just as the first level of investigation, that tied to intentionality, renders individuals as partners gathered in a particular project that mobilizes an entire series of interdependent powers, so too the second level of investigation, that tied to the affective immanence of life, gathers individuals in the experience of an ontological interdependence that is still more fundamental, that of their life-forces. It is a question then of individuals’ solidarity in life’s desire to be experienced, to enjoy its very power to be life. All collective action involves the constitution of a certain objective and a certain organizational form for the actions individuals realize. But it also involves, more fundamentally, the common experience of a life-force, a desire to experience life, a desire

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that can only fully participate in itself and grow insofar as it shares itself. Henry writes: Hence, we can say that every community is essentially affective and based on drives. This holds not only for the fundamental communities of society – the couple and the family – but also for every community in general, whatever its interests and explicit motivations may be.13 The question of the community of action is then not only tied to individuals’ capacity to coordinate their action and to cooperate in realizing certain objectives. It goes back to individuals’ experience of sharing and activating together the originary ipseity of a single life-force. It is for this reason that the question of alienation in Henry does not arise only from the question of existence’s self-realization, but arises also from its participation in the felt-experience [pâtir] of its own life-force. What is activated in the way in which individuals are led to interact is their participation in life, the immanent passage from a life stuck in its originary suffering to a life participating in its own power.

II. From Common Action to Life-Forces It is from this perspective that we can comprehend Henry’s thesis that reason is incapable of generating the experience of individuals’ participation in the originary intersubjectivity of a single power of life by itself alone. Henry writes, Suffering, joy, desire, or love bear in themselves an infinite power greater than that attributed to ‘Reason’. Strictly speaking, reason has no power to gather, inasmuch as, from it, one cannot deduce the existence of a single individual, nothing of what must be gathered in a ‘community’.14 What is common in collective action is not only a certain common aim and a certain common way of attaining a given objective. It is more fundamentally the shared experience of a single life-force, a force that each person experiences in a radically singular way but which refers at the same time to the originary ipseity of a common power of life. ‘It is in this sense that Life is being-with as such, the essence of every community, being-in-common as well as that which is in common.’15 Collective action’s modes of organization are in this sense laden with import not only for an action’s instrumental

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efficacy or its normative propriety, but also for life-forces – individuals’ capacity to share together the fundamental dynamic of a common lifeforce, their capacity to invent a life together, a community of destiny.16 It is precisely from this perspective that one must understand some of the critiques that Henry brings against appeals to human rights that understand these rights as though they were founded solely on the recognition of universal human qualities in each individual. Obviously, human rights can be invoked in a way that does not involve the homogenization of individuals. By becoming normative social representations, human rights permit individual and collective actors to position themselves in fields of reciprocal influence, that is, to constitute their different situations as obligatory way-stations in a single normative endeavour.17 Still, the question remains whether the community that human rights anticipate can be understood solely as a community founded on individuals’ mutual recognition of their common human qualities or if it needs to be understood more fundamentally as a community of the sons and daughters of life, that is, a community of individuals who experience themselves as sharing the originary ipseity of a single life-force.18 The difficulty that any approach to human rights centred exclusively on the recognition of the constitutive qualities of human existence encounters is that, by itself, it risks completely putting aside the affective experience that individuals can have of their participation in the radical singularity of a single life-force. It is not because we recognize each other as equally worthy of respect that we experience ourselves as sharing a single lifeforce. After all, what does recognizing that we share one human life mean? Does it simply mean that individuals recognize themselves as living beings endowed with the same qualities? Does it mean recognizing that we all need each other in order to actualize some of the powers inherent in our human condition? All of these considerations are certainly important, but what escapes them is life’s constitutive force. Individuals’ solidarity in life is a solidarity in a life-force. One cannot, therefore, base the requirement of a solidarity between individuals solely on the intersubjective nature of their powers, including the universal power of reason. The powers that constitute human existence are living powers, and they take their reality solely from life’s radically singular experience of itself. It is impossible to disassociate our various powers, which give force and reality to life, from life’s power to participate in itself, which demands the sharing of this power. It is possible, for example, to show that an attack on individuals’ rights of expression implicates the very meaning of this fundamental power, namely, speaking. In attacking another’s power to speak, I distort my own power

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of speech; I impede the actualization of its highest possibilities. But what matters here is to show the fact that our different powers’ interdependence implies an even more profound solidarity. There is no power that is not given to itself through the very force of life. The power to speak is only real because it is interiorly inhabited as the subjectivity of a radical desire to bring itself about and to experience itself. At the heart of any power, there is desire – that of life itself in its originary force. And this desire of life grows as it is shared. It is for this reason that the originary solidarity of the living cannot be founded solely on the process by which they recognize themselves as bearers of interdependent powers. It must be founded on a more profound solidarity – that of everyone’s belonging to the ipseity of a single shared life-force. In Henry’s words, ‘Freedom and equality can only be actualized in the reactivation of the interior tie that binds every living being to life.’19 There is in this sense a way of speaking to the other that not only distorts what speaking means, but also distorts, more profoundly, the very desire to speak, the experience that, in speaking, life affectively has of itself. To speak together is to activate life’s power to be experienced and to be intensified as a shared life. To respect the other in talking with him is then not only to take seriously what he says and to construct with him a true communication-space between partners who are legally free and equal. The linguistic exchange must also be the occasion for each to have the common experience of the originary life-force that dwells in their speech-acts. Henry’s reflections on common action are guided by the fundamental thesis that individuals’ power to act is weakened when they are ontologically isolated from one another, when they act as though their own radically singular life-force did not affect the radically singular life-force of others. To act as though my life-force did not involve the sharing with others of a common passivity in relation to life’s power of living is necessarily to weaken my life-force. From this perspective one acts as though the individual were himself the foundation of his own desire to live, as though he owned his power to live. When life is weakened and individuals isolate themselves ontologically from each other, they pretend as though the lifeforce of some were not in solidarity with the life-force of others. A situation of hyperactivity can thus emerge – a frenzied activism, individuals’ frantic busyness. This activity is merely the opposite of the exhaustion of lifeforces. We hasten to activity in an attempt to convince ourselves that we are really the source of our power to act, in the same way that we can hasten to an act of unbridled passion for the sake of reinvigorating a weakened feeling of existing. There is thus in our societies a dialectical connection

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between this frantic busyness and depression, the weariness of being oneself. What permits the individual to make use of his different powers is his originary passivity before a life-force that he does not own. When the acting individual denies the radical singularity of the acting of the other, he denies the radical singularity of his own acting. He cuts himself off from the sources of his action, from his passivity with regard to a life that is radically his only as radically shared with others. In the concrete relationships that individuals have with each other through their different collective actions, this capacity to liberate common life-forces is radically activated. There is here a radical solidarity of individuals in relation to each other, a solidarity in the originary ipseity of a single life-force. As Henry explains: If society is something other than a collection of ‘individuals’ reduced to their objective appearance and treated as separate entities – if it is, precisely, a community – then community and individuals are linked according to a relationship of reciprocal phenomenological interiority, which is nothing other than living beings’ relationship to Life. This relationship renders the idea of any ‘opposition’ between them a priori empty of meaning. But it is a third characteristic of life that we must underline here: before defining the content of what is held in common, Life in its originary Ipseity constitutes the transcendental possibility of the beingin-common of what is common, relationship as such, ‘being-with’ in its anteriority.20 The relationships that individuals have with each other in their collective actions cannot be evaluated then according to either the criterion of functional efficiency or that of a mutual respect for their constitutive powers. They must be evaluated according to individuals’ capacity to make of their different relations a space where their common passivity before a single shared life-force is experienced and increased. This solidarity does not in any way involve a homogenization of individuals’ life experiences. To the contrary, it implies that the singular life experience of the other must be constituted as a required way-station in everyone’s living, a way-station required by the very life-force that everyone shares. The experience that the individual has of his situation thus only becomes common if he shares in a truly living action with others at the same time. For example, the need to eat, in which every individual experiences his most radical singularity, becomes a truly common need when individuals engage in an action in which they can share a single culture of life – the

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positivity of a single life experience, of a single activation of life. The motor of action cannot be simply the recognition of a lack. More originarily, it is the desire that life has to take pleasure in itself as it intensifies. It is for this reason that there can be no real common emancipatory struggle that does not draw already, here and now, on life’s self-celebration. The attention to the radically singular life of the other happens through a living interaction with him. This is the fundamental thesis upheld by the reflections that Henry dedicates to the essential ipseity of life. It is by increasing our solidarity in a single individualizing life-force that we experience ourselves as truly united to the life of others. It is precisely for this reason that individuals placed in a situation of oppression cannot experience themselves as really sharing a single situation unless they relate in a living way to each other, unless they initiate the history of a common action in which each individual life counts. It is not then sufficient to have projects to liberate our life-forces. We must also be able to believe in these projects, believe in our ability to make them truly our own. This belief is not founded solely on our resources and abilities. Its deeper origin is in the experience that we can have of the life-forces in us through these projects. It is not enough to be able to speak, and it is not enough to have something to say, in order for a speech-act to happen. An individual must be there, must have the radical experience of himself, must participate in the life-force that makes him himself. In the same way, our projects only lead us along the path of freedom if the way in which we seek them in the here and now permits life-forces to participate in themselves. The experience of life that we are speaking of here is not exterior to the realization of our projects. It constitutes their radical interiority. In a given community of action, there is thus a certain way of interacting that does, or to the contrary does not, respond to the life-force’s pure need to share itself in order to intensify itself. A living culture of collective action increases individuals’ energy and permits them to act better in this way, but it is not in any manner dictated by the demand for greater productivity. It is precisely because it is experienced as worthwhile in itself that it also offers individuals more energy to go after their different objectives. An entire dimension of the field of social interactions is altogether obscured if one does not see that individuals seek, in a stronger or weaker way, to share through their collective actions a common link to the originary ipseity of life, to the originary ipseity of its force. Maesschalck thus writes: If community depends, as Henry would say, upon the typological relationship of the arche-begottenness of the arche-Son – that is, on a transcendental

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concept of filiation – it is, in fact, because this is only accessible as a form of life through its arche-intelligibility, that is, through individuals’ attention to what constitutes them fundamentally as living beings. Without attention to this, constituted as an intermediate culture between empirical individualism and transcendental communitarianism, no community of action seeking to maintain itself in a form of life is possible.21 Every action in this sense carries a double ethical import and, therefore, implies a double form of self-consideration. First, does the action develop itself in such a way as to be as autonomous as possible? Second, does the action develop itself in such a way as to allow the experience that the individual has in it of his originarily singular power to live and act to grow? With regard to this double problematic, Henry’s fundamental thesis is that when one obscures the purely immanent dimension of subjective action, its foundation in the affectivity of life, one obscures the very foundation of its originary dynamic, the originary affectivity of its force. The deep dynamic of collective action cannot be tied solely to the satisfaction of immediate or mediated interests. It goes back farther still – to the originary enigma of a life that must be shared in action to grow in its affective participation in itself.22

III. The Affective Foundation of Normative Practices According to Henry, Hegelian philosophy of action rests on a fundamental denial that life is both radically singular and shared. From the point of view of consciousness, it is apparent that the individual’s immediate participation in his needs necessarily leads to an action that lacks autonomy. How then can our needs be subjugated [subjectivé ] in the first sense of this term? The Hegelian response is clear. It is normative action that subjugates need. It is important to see that what here strips need of its originary subjectivity is the very same as that which claims to return it in a mediated form. For this to happen, the action that will satisfy the need must no longer be subordinated to the need’s satisfaction. When the individual gives in to his needs by satisfying them immediately, he no longer inhabits them. They impose themselves upon him in the mode of alterity. They can only be truly subjugated through the mediation of shared intersubjective action. Action in Hegel must be organized, not only for reasons of functional effi ciency, but also for reasons that touch on its very being, its subjectivity. But this is to say that the subjectivity itself of action does not find its guarantee

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in itself, in the radically affective experience that it has of itself, but in its participation in the construction of a shared intersubjective world: This is why the action of the individual is not really his own, it is the action of action, the self-production of being in objectivity, ‘the development of individuality qua universal objective being; that is to say, it is the development of the actual world’. It is in the light of this ultimate ontological proposition that must be read the ‘self-evident’ texts in which the necessity of action is monotonously reaffirmed along with its immediate interpretation as ‘objective action’, that is, as action which makes what it does enter into the sphere of objectivity and, in this, submits what is done to the laws of objectivity, to its destiny in the world.23 There exist, therefore, different levels of the subjugation of action, which correspond to different levels of action’s rationalization. Hegelian action gains in subjectivity when it gains in reflexivity, such that the question is to know if this constitutive reflexivity of action’s subjectivity in the intentional sphere does not develop in such a way as to deny the affective foundation of its power to act, the affective foundation of its very force. The subjectivity of action in Hegel is merely that of the individual – in mediated form. The becoming-subjective of action is tied to its inscription in normative practices. Hegel means in this way to surpass all forms of abstract opposition between action and the consciousness of action. Fully subjective action is action whose enactment normatively includes in itself the reflexivity of spirit. Even as he remains prisoner to the priority of consciousness, Hegel refuses to reduce the reality of action to the acting individual’s consciousness of it. Action’s subjectivity is to be found nowhere but in its enactment. Henry explains: ‘It is imprecise to say that consciousness acts in order to render itself objective. It is objectification that produces consciousness, namely, the becoming-real of spirit in the actuality of its phenomenal condition.’24 What renders action fully subjective is its intrinsic normativity. One of the most fundamental implications of this last thesis is that action in Hegel can only truly take possession of itself, of its subjectivity, by becoming collective. The true function of this intersubjectivity is not just to augment the actuality of action. It truly functions to incarnate the individual. Through the mediation of intersubjectivity, the negativity of consciousness incorporates itself in the reality of action. Seen this way, collective action cannot be considered as one type of action among other possible ones. To the contrary, one must consider it to be an indispensable condition for the self-realization of consciousness.

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True action is not merely a series of objective behaviours animated by a certain intentional aim. In itself, it calls forth a stabilization through custom, in the habitual sharing of a normativity, wherein one must interrogate the relationship between consciousness and the practices in which it is engaged and through which it becomes incarnate. On the one hand, consciousness is characterized by its capacity for distancing, by its ability to question custom. On the other hand, it seeks to incarnate itself in shared practices. From the perspective of a radical phenomenology of collective action, the dynamic of the reflexive relationship of the individual to the collective action in which he engages (his capacity to criticize but also to engage himself) involves attention to another level of action, that of his absolute subjectivity. A radical phenomenology of collective action’s contribution is here to show that the very dynamic of individuals’ relationship to the normativity of their practices is a function of the affective experience that they have of life, of life’s very force, which is at the same time singular and common. Individuals’ ability to experience reality itself, and along with it the power of enacting their different social practices, has no other site than that of life in its originary affectivity. Robots do not complain or judge or by their customs performatively make the institutional reality of a tribunal exist. Quite to the contrary, it is living individuals who do these things. Their practices, however regulated they are, are living practices, practices in which irreducibly singular individuals’ lives are radically activated. According to the manner in which individuals are living their lives through these practices, the experiences that they have of these different normative realities is always changing. One could content oneself with thinking that an institutional reality such as that of the legal system exists to the extent that the customs corresponding to its constitutive rules are respected. It is true that a judicial decision that is not made according to the right procedure fails to be a judicial decision as it performatively claims to be. But is this sufficient? From the perspective of a radical phenomenology of life, the response to this question must be negative. When individuals’ radical solidarity in life is denied in a given practice, when the constitutive rules of a given practice are no longer really experienced as rules applied by radically singular individuals, it is the very normativity of this practice that changes in meaning. Indeed, it can seem as though collective action’s norms have no other reason to exist than to make possible the pursuit of a common objective, such that the dynamic of this common action need not seek any more originary foundation in the experience of common life.

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What characterizes such alienated practices is that they pay no attention to whether or not they permit individuals to have the experience of a life that is at once singular and shared. There is in this sense an archeintelligibility of the normativity of practices – that of the radical affective experience that life has of its very power to be lived and to be shared. What makes of a norm something other than an objective principle of regulation of a process that is itself objective is precisely the fact that it involves living individuals, radically singular individuals, sharing the experience of a single life-force. When a practice is constituted in such a way as to deny the radical singularity of individuals, its normative reality is implicated, along with individuals’ force to engage themselves in this practice. What is at stake here is the relationship between practices’ normativity and individuals’ life-forces. The way in which Henry interprets the debate between Hegel and Karl Marx relies on this problematic in the sense that Hegel emphasizes the ideal transcendence of practice in relation to its particular effectuations while Marx emphasizes the radical singularity of the experience that is had in each of them. In Hegel, what is distinctive about work is that it inscribes an intersubjective mediation between the individual and his action. Henry explains: This close connection between action and objectivity is recognized in the Jena manuscript with regard to the necessity that labor be realized in accordance with a rule that is, doubtless, discovered by the individual, ‘learned’ by him and in this appears as external to him, as ‘inorganic nature’ Hegel says. But the fact that the labor of men conforms to a rule such as this gives it precisely the form of this rule, the form of the universality in which it can alone find its efficiency along with the actuality of recognized-being.25 Conversely, in a Marx liberated from Hegel, and thus in Marx as Henry interprets him, work points back to the radical subjectivity of the person who performs it. Henry writes: But praxis never lifts itself above itself and never dismisses the particularity and the individuality that are consubstantial with it. That praxis is subjective means that it exhausts itself in the interior experience that it has of itself. It is the lived tension of an existence that is circumscribed by the experience of its act and coextensive with its doing. It is but what it does – and it is everything that it does. It experiences [subit] its doing

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without the slightest respite, without being able to gain any distance in relation to it, without being able to escape from itself.26 From this perspective, the intersubjectivity that is constitutive of normative action takes on another meaning. If action is shared through normative means, it is not to the detriment of the individual’s radical singularity. To the contrary, this sharing permits the individual to experience the radical singularity of his action as that of a life that is lived in just as radical a way in himself as in others – a life that, moreover, needs to share itself to grow in its participation in itself, in its participation in its constitutive power. In this sense, for Henry, norms are not only necessary to mediate freedom, but also are necessary more fundamentally to increase freedom’s participation in life. Rather than thinking the normativity of social life on the basis solely of the negativity of consciousness, we should think this normativity through life’s radical experience of the fundamentally intersubjective dimension of its force. When this fundamentally affective dimension of a single shared lifeforce is denied, norms cannot be lived as anything other than pure instruments of the objective regulation of action. They are no longer experienced as what permits radically singular actions to share a single participation in the living of life. Far from gathering individuals affectively, the norm then isolates them, tending to enclose each one in a purely solipsistic experience of his life-force. It comes to seem as though the organization of social life were foreign to the increasing or decreasing of individuals’ life-forces. There is in this way a manner of naturalizing life’s participation in itself, of acting as though living individuals did not need each other to participate fully in the very forces of life, that must entrust to norms the single objective of a pure and simple functional regulation of social life. When the radically singular life of individuals is denied in the very immanence of its felt-experience [pâtir], it is the very meaning of normativity that is deeply changed. The radical phenomenology of Henry enables one to show that the relationship between the normativity of common action and the self-realization of individual freedoms rests upon a more profound experience of norms, that of their implication in the growth of life’s affective participation in its own power. Norms cannot serve the self-realization of the freedom of individuals unless they more deeply serve the affective participation of these freedoms in life. If, on one level, norms permit the mediation of life, then on another level, that probed by Henry, they are entailed by the increase of life’s participation in its own force.

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IV. Conclusion As this reflection comes to an end, we can see that the fact that the processes structuring the interactions among individuals in a given society require levels of analysis that integrate variables other than simply personal ones does not make the individuals who are interacting not be (always already, and still) radically singular. Henry writes: It is not chronology that here is in question. It is clear that a given social setting exists before a given individual has the privilege or the misfortune of being born in it. The question is to know what is real – in this ‘setting’ or in the living individuals that ‘compose’ it.27 In this way a negation of the radical individuality of acting individuals leads to attributing to society and to societal roles a causal power, an ability to determine their action mechanically. Henry describes the view of society underlying this negation as follows: Society is what acts and makes one act, what carries all. Individuals are nothing but corks floating on the surface of the sea. An entire practical ideology is tied to this conception of the Society/individual relationship, understood as a relationship of causation, of radical determination of the latter by the former.28 We would hence commit an error if we thought that the actualization of practice involves the respect of certain social norms because it is itself an objective reality, that is, a process in the third person. As Henry explains, It is an absolute illusion to believe that objective laws are capable of eliciting the passage into act of any activity whatsoever, determining in this way individuals’ practice, playing the role of cause in relation to them, such that individual actions would be their effects.29 No one has ever seen a representation of a waiter serving a coffee. This role only exists and is only experienced in the life of those who play it. One makes a similar error in reasoning when one supposes that societies that ignore the concept of the individual were not, as such, composed of individuals. Henry insists, ‘It is to the idea of the individual that one can seek to assign a date of birth in history. In no way can one do so for individuals themselves, for historical materialism has shown that history begins with them.’30 One must thus

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distinguish between the representation that individuals can make of their own individuality and the practical and affective individuality of their life: ‘It is as though one said that the Pyramids were constructed by themselves under the pretext that the concept of the individual had not yet been born in Egypt.’31 It is for this reason that social anonymity cannot be opposed to the radical singularity of acting individuals. Still, if practices necessarily involve, in one way or another, radically singular individuals, they can at the same time construct themselves in a denial of this radical singularity of individuals’ living action, which cannot but weaken individuals’ very power to engage in these practices. This is the case precisely when practice is evaluated only according to the criterion of how it satisfies its constitutive rules. It seems here as though the objectivity of rules must win out over the living action of individuals or in a dialectical inversion as though the living action of individuals must win out against the normativity of their practices. In these two scenarios, we find a weakening of the very living of life. This weakening of individuals’ lifeforces goes hand in hand with an assimilation of norms to pure and simple rules of functioning. Norms are no longer lived as permitting living beings to experience both their radical singularity and the radical shareability of life. In contrast, when collective action is constructed with attention to the singularity of the life of each, when individuals are led to experience the fundamental solidarity of their life-forces, one can no longer oppose people’s radically singular lives to the reality of their collective action. To the contrary, collective action permits individuals to experience and to intensify what founds the radical singularity of each, namely, the originary inventiveness of life. For participation in life increases as it is shared. What emerges from this reflection is that individuals’ capacity for inventive participation in normative practices that are at once individualizing and socializing can only be nourished through attention to the experiences that individuals can have in these practices of their solidarity in the force of life itself. Translated by Carl S. Hughes

Notes and Works Cited 1

Translator’s note: Throughout this chapter, Gély draws on Henry’s distinctive use of the term épreuve , which I here render imperfectly but consistently as ‘experience’. The meaning of this word ranges in French from ‘experience’ in an ordinary sense to ‘trial’, ‘testing’ or even ‘ordeal’. It has none of the Kantian associations of ‘experience’ in English. I also translate subir as ‘experience’,

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variants of pâtir as ‘felt-experience’, and vécu as ‘lived experience’ – signalling the use of these words in brackets when it seems helpful. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121. For the implications of such an investigation from the more specific point of view of the experience of roles, allow me to refer to Raphaël Gély, Rôles, action sociale et vie subjective: Recherches à partir de la phénoménologie de Michel Henry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007). Michel Henry, Marx II: Une philosophie de l’économie (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 15–16. Translator’s note: A highly abridged one-volume English translation of this work exists in English (Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983)). I quote from this text when possible but always include references to the two French volumes. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 141. See Michel Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse: Le commencement perdu (Paris: PUF, 1985), 243. For this question see also Rolf Kühn, Leiblichkeit als Lebendigkeit: Henrys Lebensphänomenologie absoluter Subjecktivität als Affektivität (Freiburg: Alber, 1992), 291–380. Henry, I Am the Truth , 121. See Henry, Marx I: Une philosophie de la réalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 370. Ibid., 353. Michel Henry, Du Communisme au capitalisme: Théorie d’une catastrophe (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990), 195–6. Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 348. Marc Maesschalck, ‘L’attention à la vie comme forme d’une rationalité politique’, in Michel Henry. La parole de la vie, ed. Jad Hatem (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 270. Henry, Material Phenomenology, 131. Henry, Incarnation, 348. Phénoménologie de la vie, volume IV: Sur l’éthique et la religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 160. See Marc Maesschalck, ‘Sens et limite d’une philosophie du don. Entre théorie sociale et phénoménologie radicale’, in Archivio di filosofia: Actes du colloque international « le don et la dette » organisé par M. Olivetti, 2004, 281–95; and Marc Maesschalck, ‘Radikale Phänomenologie und Normentheorie’, in Perspektiven des Lebensbegriffs. Randgänge der Phänomenologie, ed. Stefan Nowotny and Michael Staudigl (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005), 277–300. See Raphaël Gély and Margarita Sanchez-Mazas, ‘The Philosophical Implications of Research on the Social Representations of Human Rights’, Social Science Information 45 (2006): 387–410; Raphaël Gély, Identités et monde commun: Psychologie sociale, philosophie, société (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 161–209. On this question, see Marc Maesschalck, ‘La forme communautaire du jugement éthique chez M. Henry’, in Retrouver la vie oubliée. Critiques et perspectives de la philosophie de Michel Henry, ed. Jean-Michel Longneaux (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2000), 183–211.

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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Michel Henry, Phénoménologie de la vie III: De l’art et du politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 181. Henry, Incarnation, 349. Maesschalck, ‘L’attention à la vie comme forme d’une rationalité politique’, 271–2. See Rolf Kühn, ‘Lebenspraxis und Kulturkritik. Zu Michel Henrys jüngster Veröffentlichung “La Barbarie” im Rahmen seiner Phänomenologie der Immanenz’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 42 (1988): 124–33; Rolf Kühn and Stefan Nowotny, Michel Henry: Zur Selbsterprobung des Lebens und der Kultur, ed. Stefan Nowotny (Freiburg: Alber, 2002); Rolf Kühn, ‘Crise de la culture et vie culturelle’, in Retrouver la vie oubliée: Critiques et perspectives de la philosophie de Michel Henry, 139–63. Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, 150 [Marx I, 336]. Henry, Marx, 337. Henry, Marx, 334 [Marx I, 337]. Henry, Phénoménologie de la vie III: De l’art et du politique, 33. Henry, Du Communisme au capitalisme, 76. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 63. Henry, Marx II, 36. Ibid., 37.

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Index

absolute 27, 41–2, 45–6, 57, 64–8, 70–2, 74–6, 90–1, 95, 100–1, 113, 118–19, 131, 139–43, 145–6, 148–50 absurd 25, 65, 130 action 51, 55, 104, 112, 119, 126, 132, 154–64, 166–75 activism 166 affection 34, 38, 41–2, 45–53, 58, 97–100, 105, 139–49, 154 affectivity 1–3, 41, 43, 58, 63, 80, 89, 93–4, 97–8, 109, 154–5, 162 alienation 93–4, 162, 164 Anselm 119, 153 appearance 25, 40–1, 43–4, 51–3, 55, 57–8, 60, 66, 104, 113, 140–3 appearing 31, 34, 89, 91, 98–9, 101, 104, 106, 138, 140–2 Aquinas, Thomas 101, 114 arche-fact 51, 53 arche-intelligibility 157, 169 Arche-Son 118, 129, 169 Aristotle 91 Augustine 19, 89, 102, 124–6 auto-affection 42, 45–6, 48–50, 52–3, 58, 97–8, 102, 105, 109, 154 see also self-affection barbarism 99, 106, 109 Barth, Karl 94 Beatitudes 119, 129 being 24–9, 32–4, 36, 37, 39, 43–4, 46–7, 49–50, 52–9, 91–4, 96–8, 101, 130–1, 138, 141, 146, 148–51, 160, 170 being-with/-in-common 162, 164, 167

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Bergson, Henri 38, 106 Bible, The see also Old Testament and New Testament and Paul 1 Corinthians 104 1 John 105, 122, 145 1 Thessalonians 120 Acts 37, 123 John 2, 10, 89, 103, 104, 105, 112, 115, 117–18, 121–2, 124–5, 131, 132, 142–3, 147, 150 Luke 39, 96, 112, 127–30 Mark 128–9, 131 Matthew 105, 127–30 Philippians 146 Revelation 120 birth 120, 144, 146, 148–50 Blake, William 96 body 21, 38, 42–4, 50–2, 54–5, 60, 61, 81, 122–3, 125–6, 147, 149 Boutroux, Émile 88 Brough, John 73, 76, 82 Bultmann, Rudolf 116 Catholic 95, 128 Christ 87, 103–6, 113, 117–18, 124–32, 142–6, 147, 150 Christology 103, 127–8, 143 church fathers 122–3, 145 cogitatio 64–5, 67–8, 70–3, 75, 77–8, 80, 82, 89–91 community 155–7, 161–5, 167–9 compassion 105, 147–51 consciousness 44, 47, 64–6, 68–9, 72–7, 81, 82, 83, 91–2, 94, 96, 170–1 contemplation 95–6 corporeality 139–41, 143–4, 149

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creation 102–3, 105 cross 125, 128–9 culture 167–9 Dasein 69, 92–4, 116, 138 death 93–4, 96, 103–4 Descartes, René 20, 64, 82, 89–92, 99–100, 138 desire 59–60, 146, 163, 166 difference 28, 30, 34, 92, 138, 142, 146, 150 distance 27–8, 40–2, 52, 57–8, 60, 66, 82, 98, 131, 146, 162 doubt 64, 71, 138 drive 47–8, 50, 54, 59 dualism 51, 149 Eckhart 88–9, 100–4, 127, 138–40, 148–50, 152 ecstasis 21, 25, 32–4, 42, 51, 53, 58, 71, 104 ego 66–7, 81, 91–3, 97, 149, 159 epoché 66–7, 89, 98 eucharist 144–5 exegesis 116–17, 127, 131, 143, 146 exteriority 43–58, 92, 95–6 face 27, 30, 34, 37, 71, 98 faith 95, 103, 118, 120–1, 123, 144–6, 148 feeling 27–8, 95, 121, 144, 147 Feuerbach, Ludwig 159 Fichte, J. G. 87–9, 95–6, 100–3 First Living 132, 142 see also Christ flesh 38, 41–5, 48–53, 60, 61, 103, 105–6, 122–5, 140, 142–5, 147–8 force 45–51, 53–4, 58, 61, 97 forgetting 28, 113, 118–19, 150 freedom 92, 140, 166, 168, 173 Freud, Sigmund 50, 99, 115 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 146 gaze 55, 57, 63–72, 75–7, 90–1, 141 generation 124, 141 givenness 34, 40–1, 49, 52–3, 57, 60, 64–5, 68, 70, 72–6, 90–2 gnosis 103, 106, 110, 112, 119, 145, 147–9, 153

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God 27, 79, 87, 91, 95–6, 100–3, 105–6, 113–14, 117–22, 124–33, 139–51, 153 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 87 Hegel, G. W. F. 83, 95, 155, 169–70, 172 Heidegger, Martin 20, 31–4, 39, 62, 66, 68–70, 77, 81, 83, 89, 91–5, 107–9, 111, 114, 116–17, 123, 133, 138, 141–2, 146, 152 hermeneutic 116, 127, 145–6 horizon 26, 31, 33, 56–7, 66–7, 97–9, 105, 141 human rights 165 Husserl, Edmund 22, 25–6, 30–1, 34, 38, 54, 62–82, 89–94, 97, 107, 109, 111, 122, 142 image 100–2 immanence 22, 25, 36, 41–3, 45–8, 50, 52–8, 62–4, 66–80, 88–9, 91–4, 96–9, 104, 117–18, 142–3, 154, 156, 158, 163, 173 impression 40–1, 45–6, 50–2, 54, 56–8, 139–42 incarnation 122–5, 132, 141–5, 149 intentionality 26, 40, 45, 53, 55, 57–60, 62, 68, 70, 91, 93, 97–8, 141, 144, 147, 157–8, 163 interiority 29, 46, 56, 89, 125, 127, 132, 157, 166–7, 172 intersubjectivity 121, 125, 164, 170, 173 invisibility 26–35, 94, 96, 101, 103–5, 143–5, 149, 155 ipseity 121–2, 141–3, 157–60, 162, 164–8 Irenaeus 124–5, 147 Janicaud, Dominique 2, 35 Jesus 96, 103–6, 118, 121, 125, 131, 145–6 John of the Cross 118 joy 27–8, 58, 94, 100, 122, 131, 144–6 Kant, Immanuel 30, 32, 81, 87–9, 92–5, 109, 114, 175 Kierkegaard, Søren 116, 130 kingdom of God 102, 112, 128–30, 149

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Index language 67, 113, 128, 130–1, 143–4 Lessing, Gotthold 87 Levinas, Emmanuel 34, 37, 62, 66, 69, 77, 116 life 26–8, 32–4, 41–59, 62–3, 66–74, 76, 78–80, 87–91, 93–106, 112–32, 139–51, 154–75 life-force 154–6, 162–8, 172–3, 175 logos 79, 122–3, 141–5 love 100, 105, 121–2, 150 Luther, Martin 128 Maesschalck, Marc 163, 168 Maine de Biran 45–7, 50, 54–5, 61, 106, 143 Malebranche, Nicolas 21 manifestation 24–5, 28–9, 71–2, 89, 94, 98, 100 Marion, Jean-Luc 116, 152 Marx, Karl 159, 161, 172 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 21–2, 29, 34, 36, 38, 43, 45, 47, 62, 66, 77, 122 metaphysics 20–2, 116 method 19, 34, 36, 62, 64–72, 76–8, 145–6 movement 43, 47–60, 96, 98–9 Murdoch, Iris 99 mystic 115, 118, 125–6, 139–41, 148, 150 mystical body 125–6 natural attitude 65 nature 20–1 negativity 26, 48, 53, 170, 173 New Testament 10, 112–14, 116, 120, 131, 150, 153 see also Bible Nietzsche, Friedrich 88, 106, 109 night 25, 28, 98, 113, 118, 120, 142 non-intentional 62, 68, 71, 87, 91, 94, 120 normativity 150, 156, 158, 160, 165, 169–75 Novalis 25 object 24–7, 34, 42, 44, 51, 64–78, 90, 92–3 objectivity 40, 57, 95, 132, 138–9, 170, 172, 175

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objectness 30–1 Old Testament 145, 153 see also Bible ontic 24, 28, 30, 36, 91–3, 96, 104, 142 ontological 28–9, 34, 52, 66–7, 90–3, 100, 142, 161, 163, 166 ontological monism 40, 44, 51, 57, 62, 63, 66, 69, 71, 76, 91–2 parable 130–1 paradox 22–3, 25–7, 35, 37, 54, 69, 77–8, 91, 125, 129–30 Parmenides 138, 141 parousia 83, 94, 112, 131 passibility 139–41, 144–5, 147, 149 passivity 40, 45, 60, 78, 82, 83, 94, 120, 124, 163, 166–7 pathos 41, 50, 54, 58, 78–9, 91, 115, 117, 121, 143–4, 147 Patočka, Jan 54–6, 58 Paul 103–4, 120, 123–4, 128, 131 see also Bible and New Testament phenomenality 19, 21–5, 27–34, 36, 40–1, 43, 51, 58, 64, 66, 68–71, 73, 80, 81, 91, 94, 97–9, 101, 103–4, 113, 117–18, 141 phenomenon 19, 20, 23–6, 28–9, 32–4, 37, 43, 53, 55, 64, 69, 72, 74, 89, 91–2, 94, 98, 104, 107, 113, 161 Plato 21, 96 pleasure 27–8, 129, 145, 168 power 41–50, 53–6, 58, 60, 97, 113, 115, 120, 122, 132, 138–41, 145, 147–50, 153, 156–75 praxis 97, 99, 124, 141, 148, 169–72, 174–5 prereflective 77, 80, 81, 93–4, 99, 140 Protestant 128 Pseudo-Dionysius 96 psychology 46, 50, 66, 73–4, 82, 90–1, 93, 115 Ravaisson, Félix 88 reciprocal interiority 125, 132, 142–3, 146, 167 reduction 49, 54, 63, 65, 74–6, 82, 89–91, 99, 105, 107, 109, 141 see also epoché

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reflection 46, 57, 65, 67–70, 74, 76–80, 81, 119 reflexive 57, 170–1 representation 50, 54, 64, 74, 78–9, 89, 91–6, 98–102, 104, 138–41, 144, 148, 156–7, 162, 165, 174–5 revelation 23–6, 31–2, 37, 39, 40–1, 45, 50–1, 56–7, 73, 78, 94–5, 98, 101, 117–18, 120, 128, 131, 139, 141–5, 150, 152 Ricoeur, Paul 116, 125, 146

soteriology 111–12, 114, 118, 127, 132 soul 89, 100, 102–3, 105, 110, 116, 149 speech 79, 126–7, 130, 132, 134, 165–6, 168 Spinoza, Benedict de 88, 96 subjectivity 44, 46–7, 48–9, 53–9, 61, 65–6, 71–4, 78, 92, 94, 95, 98, 106, 143–4, 147, 149, 154–5, 157, 161–2, 166, 169–72 suffering 27–8, 58, 94, 100, 103, 122, 129, 145, 164

salvation 94, 100, 104, 106, 110, 112–32, 144–7, 149–50 Sartre, Jean-Paul 28–9, 34, 62, 66, 77, 81, 97 Schopenhauer, Arthur 88, 106 self 41, 44–7, 53–4, 56–9, 61, 67, 73, 75, 97, 100, 121–2, 124, 126, 131, 141, 143, 151, 154–5, 158–60, 163 self-affection 27, 34, 38, 50, 98, 100, 109, 139–40, 143–4, 147 see also auto-affection self-givenness 49, 57, 70, 72, 75–6, 82, 90, 119, 138–41, 159 self-manifestation 32–3, 41, 58, 71–2, 78, 91, 98, 100, 117–18, 137–8, 140–3, 146–7, 149 self-movement 47–8, 144 self-realization 164, 170, 173 sensibility 43–5, 47–8, 50, 97, 122–3, 141, 145, 161 Shakespeare, William 159 social 141, 154–6, 165, 168, 170–1, 173–5 society 94, 164, 167, 174 solidarity 162–3, 165–8, 171, 175 son 118–22, 124, 129, 131, 140–1, 143–6, 148–50, 165

telos 21, 123 Thales 138 time 25, 28, 93, 97–9, 103, 112, 114, 119, 131, 138, 142–3, 149 timeless 122, 131–2 touching 40, 44–5, 47, 140 transcendence 22, 25–6, 31, 36, 37, 53, 55, 57–9, 62–4, 66, 68, 70–7, 79–80, 81, 88–9, 91–4, 96–9, 108, 117, 139, 149, 172 truth 21, 31, 33, 36, 39, 71, 79, 87, 89, 91, 106, 113–18, 124, 126, 127, 131, 137–48, 150–1

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Valentinus 103, 110 visibility 19–26, 28–34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43–4, 51, 58, 66, 98, 103, 105, 130, 138 Word 79, 104, 122–6, 132, 141–6, 148 words of Christ 127–8, 130, 132, 145 world 21, 23–30, 32–5, 38, 39, 42–4, 48, 51, 53–60, 64–71, 73–4, 77, 79–80, 81, 83, 89, 91, 93–4, 97–100, 102–6, 112–14, 117–19, 122, 124–5, 127–31, 142–3, 149–50, 153, 170

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