## 1. Life and Work



Michel Henry was born on January 10, 1922 in Haiphong, Vietnam (then,
French Indochina). After the accidental death of his father, the
family returned to Paris in 1929. In Paris, Henry became a student at
the prestigious Lycee Henri IV, then graduated with a Master
thesis on Spinoza in 1943 with Jean Grenier as director. Soon after
having turned in his thesis, partially published in the *Revue
d'histoire de la philosophie et d'histoire
generale de la civilisation* in 1944 and 1946, Henry
joined the French Resistance and was assigned to the
"Pericles" division in the region of Haut Jura. He
returned to Paris at the end of 1944, obtaining the
*Agregation* in philosophy in 1945. As a researcher at
the French National Research Center CNRS and the *Fondation
Thiers*, he began working under the supervision of both Jean Wahl
and Jean Hyppolite on his Ph.D. thesis, which would be published in
1963 and become one of his major works: *The Essence of
Manifestation*. His second book, *Philosophy and Phenomenology
of the Body*, although published two years later, was already
finished around 1950, having first been planned as a part of the main
thesis but, due to its length, was presented as Henry's
secondary thesis (a requirement in the French academic system at that
time). In 1963, the dissertation committee, composed of Jean Wahl,
Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquie, Paul Ricoeur, and Henri
Gouhier, was impressed by Henry's main Ph.D. thesis, a work that
translates almost a decade of research into more than 900 pages of
complex philosophical argument. Preferring a position in southern
France to one at the Sorbonne, Henry had already been appointed to the University
of Montpellier in 1960 where he remained a professor until his
retirement in 1982. He devoted his entire philosophical career to the
development of his phenomenology of life with, among other
publications, *Marx* (1976), *Genealogy of
Psychoanalysis* (1985), *Seeing the Invisible* (1988),
*Material Phenomenology* (1990), *I Am the Truth*
(1996), *Incarnation* (2000). In addition, he authored four
novels, one of which--*L'amour les yeux
fermes*--was awarded the *Prix Renaudot* in
1976. He died on July 3, 2002 in Albi, France. 


## 2. Phenomenology of Life and the Concept of Transcendental Affectivity



Since the publication of the *Essence of Manifestation* in
1963, Henry's entire oeuvre was devoted to the systematic
development of a phenomenology that, while constituting itself within
the phenomenological tradition, criticizes substantially not only
classical Husserlian phenomenology but also the works of some of
Husserl's most famous successors: Heidegger, Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty. The originality of Henry's phenomenology lies in
the fact that it considers intentionality to be only one of two modes
of appearing. In other words, Henry argues that the way in which
phenomena appear to us cannot be restricted to the
"consciousness of something" as classical phenomenology
would suggest. On the contrary, for Henry, intentional consciousness
must be *founded* in a more fundamental mode of appearing that
is precisely *non-* and even *pre-*intentional and that
therefore essentially differs from intentionality. It is this
fundamental mode of appearing that Henry designates as
"affectivity", "pathos" or
"life".


### 2.1 The Critique of Intentionality and of Ontological Monism



If Henry's critique of intentionality is construed through a
critique of Husserlian phenomenology, it nevertheless comports a much
wider perspective that includes a "deconstruction" of the
history of philosophy in general, insofar as the latter relies on a
limited concept of appearing or phenomenality. Every philosophy, Henry
argues, relies on phenomenological presuppositions and, therefore,
"a critique of phenomenality necessarily concerns philosophy in
general" (PNI 105). Phenomenality as such, however, is the
object of phenomenology. As Husserl notes in, for instance, his
Gottingen Lectures of 1905, phenomenology is concerned with
*how* objects are *given* (*Gegenstande im
Wie*, Husserl [GW]: 117). The mode of givenness, i.e.,
*appearing itself*, is therefore what phenomenology must
investigate. For Henry, however, this line of thought must be taken
one step further to include the fact that appearing itself must
appear. Since things are devoid of the ability to become phenomena by
themselves, Henry argues, that which makes them appear has itself to
appear. Otherwise, nothing would appear at all (PNI 107-8). As a
result, phenomenology cannot be reduced to a method that would make us
see how things appear to us. Instead it finds its proper object with
the question "How does appearing appear?" According to
Henry's reading of the phenomenological tradition, however, we
are faced with a very peculiar situation where intentionality is
considered the sole mode of appearing.



Since intentionality is, as Sartre emphasized, always consciousness of
something *other* than consciousness itself, appearing becomes
"ek-static" by its very essence, i.e., it points to
something exterior to itself. This leads in turn to replace the
question of appearing with that of the appearing *of* entities
or beings and, finally, centers the focus of phenomenology on
*beings* (*etants*) *insofar as they
appear*. This tendency, an "ontological monism" that
according to Henry has pervaded most of the history of philosophy,
leads to a reduction of human subjectivity to the sole function of
being directed outward, and thus to equate it with the exteriority or
"transcendence of the world" (EM 89). Henry does not deny
that decisive results were achieved through the perspective of
intentionality, notably in Husserl's investigations into
noetic-noematic correlation (I 91). His question however is that of
intentionality itself, i.e., the *transcendental* question
regarding the conditions that make intentionality possible. If
intentionality gives access to objects, how do we access
intentionality itself and is such an access also intentional? In other
words, is the way through which intentionality is given homogenous to
the way objects are given? The problem with a philosophical horizon
constituted by ontological monism is that it presupposes "the
understanding of the essence of manifestation as representation"
and, thus, makes "inaccessible to philosophical thought *the
very idea of a reception which would not be essentially the reception
of an exterior content*" (EM 237).



For Henry, the answer to the question of homogeneity is clearly
negative. If intentionality enables us "to see", in the
sense of sight pertaining to consciousness in general, then we must
bear in mind that the act of seeing is not itself seen--on the
contrary, it escapes sight. As a result, an intentional act is not
primarily given in an intentional way. Or, in the language of the
*Essence of Manifestation*, we must admit "*the
impossibility for transcendence to lay its own foundation and thus to
constitute the essence of the foundation*" (EM 210). 



Moreover, if we take seriously the claim that appearing itself must
appear, then in order to avoid an infinite regress such appearing
would have to be *self-appearing*
(*auto-apparaitre*). Intentionality, however, since it
points toward and reveals something other than itself, cannot fulfill
this task of self-revelation. Thus, Henry concludes that the
fundamental mode of appearing, namely the self-appearing of appearing,
cannot have an intentional structure. It must be non-intentional and,
since intentionality is tied to visibility in the general sense of
perception (or representation), *invisible*. In other words,
the origin and the essence of manifestation--the
"archi-revelation"
(*Archi-Revelation*) as Henry will put it later
in *Genealogy of Psychoanalysis* for instance--is a
self-revelation or, in the terminology forged as early as the
*Essence of Manifestation*, an *auto-affection* that
refers to nothing but itself.



In Henry, "life" (*vie*) has therefore no
biological meaning, but an exclusively phenomenological one, which
means that it refers to this fundamental mode of appearing that is, as
self-appearing, radically distinct from the ek-static nature of
intentionality. It is not the opening to an other, but enclosed in
itself, undergoing itself in self-experience (*epreuve de
soi* that Henry distinguishes from *conscience de soi*,
self-awareness), which is precisely for Henry the condition of
possibility of any experience of an other or
*hetero-affection*. As Henry intends to illustrate in
*Barbarism* through the somewhat ironic example of a biology
student, none of the forms of intentional directedness--including
the most elaborate forms of scientific knowledge--would be
possible if they weren't revealed as such to a living subject
that is characterized by auto-affection or, better yet, that
*is* auto-affection. Henry also uses the term
"transcendental affectivity" to characterize this
self-appearing proper to his phenomenological concept of life: it is
*transcendental* in the sense that it is the condition of
possibility of every possible phenomenon, and it is
*affectivity* because the self-experience that characterizes
the living (*vivant*) is a form of primal suffering
(*souffrir originaire*) or *pathos.*



"Pathos" refers to the fact that, because of its
self-enclosed nature, such an experience cannot cease to adhere to
itself. But, like the flip side of a coin, this self-adherence is also
the condition for the greatest joy, namely the joy of living. Joy and
suffering are thus fundamental tonalities that both express the fact
that life cannot escape from itself, that it is irremediably tied to
itself. This explains for instance why the concrete experience of
suffering can become unbearable. Henry's analysis of appearing
is, as one can see, connected to the question of the *subject*
of appearing: phenomena only exist for a subject, and subjectivity is
precisely conceived of as life, i.e., as the essence and origin of
every possible phenomenon. At the same time, and because of its
auto-affective nature, subjectivity is marked by the fundamental
tonalities of joy and suffering.



Henry's approach to phenomenology could be characterized further
as "hyletic", in reference to Husserl's concept of
*hyle* (primal impressions, raw sensuous-data as matter
for consciousness), with one important difference however. Whereas for
Husserl *hyle* is raw matter destined to be shaped into
an intentional form (*morphe*) and only becomes a
phenomenon through this shaping, Henry's "material
phenomenology" *reverses* the relation between
*hyle* and *morphe* by 1) giving to
*hyle* its own form of (self-)appearing as affectivity,
independently from intentionality; and 2) grounding intentionality in
affectivity, the latter becoming the transcendental condition of the
former. As Henry writes in *Material Phenomenology* (1990):



> 
> 
> This self-givenness [...] is structurally different from
> "relating-to". It is not in itself a
> "relating-to" but insurmountably excludes it from itself.
> It is not outside of itself but in itself, not transcendence but
> radical immanence. And it is only on the basis of this radical
> immanence that something like transcendence is possible. Seeing is
> actualized only as a nonseeing [...]. This nonseeing, this
> unseen, this invisible, is not the unconscious. It is not the negation
> of phenomenality but its first phenomenalization. It is not a
> presupposition but rather our life in its non-ek-static but yet
> undeniable pathos. (MP 81)
> 
> 
> 



Consequently, Henry understands his phenomenology as being a radical
departure from monism insofar as it advocates the "duplicity of
appearing". If a non-intentional self-appearing is necessary in
order for intentionality to be possible, than there are indeed two
modes of appearing: an intentional appearing that operates by means of
difference and that constitutes the intentional object as
transcendent; and a non-intentional or "affective"
appearing (*apparaitre pathetique*, which
would--in opposition to "ek-static
appearing"--literally translate as "pathetic
appearing", an expression that remains controversial among Henry
translators) that is given in pure immanence prior to any
subject-object division. 


### 2.2 Sources of Henry's Phenomenology



From the perspective of the history of philosophy, a critique of
monism amounts to a critique of most philosophies, and Henry
recognizes only a few precursors as having a presentiment of the
immanence pertaining to life as self-appearing. One clear case is
French philosopher Maine de Biran (1766-1824), whose work
inspired Henry's second book *Philosophy and Phenomenology of
the Body* (1965), explicitly subtitled: *Essay in Biranian
Ontology*. Through Biran's "sense of effort",
Henry connects the theme of the original essence of manifestation to
that of the subjective body as locus of immanent affectivity (see
Kuhn 1992). Although it appeared after the *Essence of
Manifestation*, it is interesting to note that the Biran-book was
outlined before the *Essence* and originally planned as a part
of this more comprehensive work. Considering Biran's influence on Henry, especially in the light of Henry's handwritten notes (now available at the Henry-Archive at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve), the phenomenology of life has been conceived of as "phenomenological vitalism" (see Jean 2015). This thesis, however, has not been widely echoed by Henry scholars (for a critique: see Kuhn 2019), in part because it relies on notes that Henry himself chose not to publish. 



As for the *Essence of Manifestation* itself, it finds a
precursor concerning the structure of immanence in the works of
Meister Eckhart and, though to a lesser extent, in the concept of love
in Fichte's *Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder auch die
Religionslehre* (*The Way Towards the Blessed Life or The
Doctrine of Religion*) of 1806. Other authors will be interpreted
in a similar way by Henry: *Marx* (1976), but also
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud in the 1985 *Genealogy of
Psychoanalysis.* In the same book, Henry develops an
interpretation of Descartes' Cogito that cannot be overestimated
in its importance for Henry's project insofar as it is
repeatedly used to introduce Henry's own concept of the
phenomenological reduction as "counter-reduction", most
notably in Section 18 of *Incarnation.* As for Spinoza, J.-M.
Longneaux (2004) has defended the thesis of a Spinozism in Henry, who
devoted his Master thesis to the concept of happiness in
Spinoza. However, because Henry almost never again refers to Spinoza
after this early work (the subject of which was imposed by his
thesis-advisor) and will even explicitly distance himself from
Spinoza's rationalism, it seems unlikely that Spinoza
constitutes an important source for Henry's phenomenology,
despite Longneaux' arguments. The writings of Husserl and
Heidegger have played a decisive role in the elaboration of what Henry
termed the "phenomenology of life". but as can be seen
from the critique of intentionality and the emphasis on immanence
against the Heideggerian theme of being-in-the-world, their influence
operates "by contrast", which means that Henry will
develop his phenomenology through a series of oppositions to the
thought of Husserl and Heidegger rather than in accordance with
them.



In the last phase of Henry's work, however, another source of
Western thought came to the foreground, namely Christianity.
Paradoxically, it was *before* he developed his philosophy of
Christianity that Henry was targeted (along with Levinas, J.-L. Marion
and J.-L. Chretien) by D. Janicaud's critique of what he
polemically termed the "theological turn" in French
phenomenology (Janicaud 1991). Janicaud's critique is, in fact,
not so much directed against an explicit reference to
"theology" in phenomenology (which is why the term
"theological turn" is polemical and, in a way,
misleading), but against an attempt to radicalize phenomenology beyond
the scope of object manifestation and intentionality. One can
therefore read Janicaud's essay as advocating in favor of a
"minimalistic phenomenology" or "surface
phenomenology" that remains inside such a scope. However, as
Zahavi has pointed out, practically all of the major phenomenological
thinkers cross such boundaries, especially as they seek to approach
the core of subjectivity as well as "*the*
phenomenological question concerning the condition of possibility for
manifestation" (Zahavi 1999: 236). One can therefore interpret
Henry's explicit "turn" toward a philosophy of
Christianity as his reaffirmation of the possibility of a radicalized
phenomenology in which such a philosophy is grounded (see also Capelle
2004).


### 2.3 Life and the Living: Philosophy of Christianity



With the publication of *I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of
Christianity* in 1996, phenomenology of life was extended to a
philosophical reading of Christianity. This "extension"
was already announced in 1992 with a talk given at the Ecole Normale
Superieure under the title "Parole et religion: La parole
de Dieu" ("Speech and Religion: The Word of God")
which contains--sometimes word for word--some of the main
theses that will be developed in *I Am the Truth. Incarnation*
(2000) and *Words of Christ* (2002) continue to pursue the
project of a philosophy of Christianity by focusing on the concepts of
flesh and revelation, respectively. But what does a philosophical or
even a phenomenological "reading" of Christianity mean
here? To be sure, Henry's philosophical approach does not rely
on religious faith in the sense that his phenomenology of life would
*presuppose* Christian faith. It is rather the other way
around: as Henry himself admitted, it is the development of his
phenomenology that led him to discover in the Scriptures an intuition
of life that, although written in a non-philosophical language,
corresponds to his own phenomenological concept of immanent
affectivity.



From a philosophical perspective, the turning point that leads Henry
to his interpretation of Christianity is the need to account for
individual subjectivity as *rooted* in life, a life that is
common to all the living and therefore *transcends* the living
while remaining at the same time immanent. This aspect is present in
Henry's thought long before he turns toward a philosophy of
Christianity, when, following Kierkegaard, he repeatedly emphasizes
that the "me" is not its own foundation. This is why
auto-affection is, for Henry, essentially tied to a form of passivity:
subjectivity is characterized by a dimension of suffering, i.e., of
pathos, without which it would simply not be *living*
subjectivity. Subjective powers of the "I can" therefore
always refer to a deep-seated and original powerlessness of a life
that cannot escape from itself. It is this relation between the living
and life that Henry seeks to describe through the concept of
"transcendental birth".



Transcendental birth, which is identical to the birth of subjectivity,
cannot be understood with reference to the *world,* for
instance as "being-in-the-world". Henry argues: 



> 
> 
> *in the world and in the externality of its "outside",
> no "Living" is possible--and consequently no livings
> either* (IAT 71) 
> 
> 
> 



In other words, the status of auto-affection as immanent
self-appearing--i.e., Henry's definition of transcendental
subjectivity or ipseity (from *ipse*, self)--cannot be
engendered by something of an entirely different nature (the
exteriority or "externality" of the world), but must be
engendered "within" auto-affection itself, i.e., within
and through life.



Life as capable of engendering the form of ipseity is, for Henry,
*absolute* life, which transcends each individual living being.
Subjective powers described by the "I can" thus take place
when the "I" is given to itself in auto-affection. By
engendering individual life, absolute life engenders in fact itself.
This is, however, only possible in the form of ipseity, since life,
for Henry, equates with auto-affection, which in turn equates with
ipseity. In the language of Christianity, absolute life is God and the
original form of ipseity (or "archi-ipseity") is Christ as
the "First living" (*Premier vivant*).



In Henry's phenomenological terminology, the process of
self-engendering reflects a *transcendence in immanence*:
within the immanence of auto-affection, it is in fact absolute life
that affects itself through each living individual (see Lavigne 2009). Or, as Henry also
puts it, absolute life gives itself to itself through the
individuality of the living and it is only through such
"participation" that the latter can be said to be alive. This also leads Henry to distinguish an auto-affection in the strong sense (i.e. pertaining to absolute life) from an auto-affection in the weak sense (i.e. pertaining to the individual living being).
The relation of the living to absolute life is thus described by Henry
as a relation of "sonship" (*filiation*), whereby
transcendental birth does not denote a singular event but a stable
*condition*, namely the human condition as "son of
absolute Life". Life's self-engendering is here understood
as a continuous process, a movement of life's "eternal
coming forth in itself" (IAT 55) which thereby supports the life
of each individual living. The living is thus understood as being
continuously "traversed by Life", a condition, however,
that, being strictly immanent, can be "forgotten" by the
individual living being--an aspect that will play a fundamental
role in Henry's ethical perspective (see
 Section 4.2).


## 3. Aesthetics



Besides Henry's book on Kandinsky (*Seeing the Invisible*
1988), a 1996 interview with M. Huhl and J.-M. Brohm, published under
the title "Art et phenomenologie de la vie"
("Art and Phenomenology of Life") is the best overview of
Henry's position with regard to aesthetics and the philosophy of
art. This interview not only shows how Henry applies the principles of
his phenomenology of life to art and aesthetics, but also illustrates
such an application in the fields of painting--including the
importance given to Kandinsky's artistic work and
theory--music, architecture, and literature.


### 3.1 Applied Phenomenology: Art and Aesthetics



According to a phenomenological theme that Henry traces back to
Husserl and Heidegger, the world is not limited to any existing world,
but includes in itself the possibility of creating new fields of
experience for the human. Art would thus be such a possibility,
insofar as the artist surpasses "habitual facticity" and
establishes through the work of art a dimension of being that is
"absolutely specific" and "original". Above
all art reveals, through its ability to create a new ontological
dimension, a more fundamental reality than the world itself, namely
"the possibility of world" as such. In this sense, art
reveals that which is ordinarily concealed: "a pure appearing
that brings things into visibility" (AP 284). In other words, if
things are given to us in an immediate way--when we perceive
bodies and, to a certain extent, our own body--such thematic
givenness is only possible because space is given in a non-thematic
way, as Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic already emphasizes.
Space is, therefore, not what we perceive but that which allows
perception. As Henry argues, this is the kind of role that Heidegger
attributes to the world insofar as it is not the sum of beings
anymore, but the condition of their appearing. Thus, by creating
"a world", art reveals precisely this form of *original
appearing*. Beyond the things perceived, art "make[s] us see
the appearing that conceals itself and in which the thing unveils
itself" (AP 284).



Henry follows Heidegger here so far as to say that art reveals an
original appearing. But he opposes Heidegger in at least two essential
points: 1) The idea that the world of art is a world apart from
ordinary experience; and 2) The idea that the original appearing is
the appearing of a world. With regard to the first point, Henry
observes that the rise of art as a separate domain is historically
situated in modernity. Such a separation did not exist when some of
humanity's greatest art works were created, the temples of
ancient Greece or the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, for instance. The
function of these edifices was to serve as a place where the divine
could be worshipped, and the divine was the chief concern of those who
conceived them, not beauty. As Henry concludes, it is only through our
retrospective glance and through the projection of our own
20th-century concept of art that we find these works
beautiful; and beauty has even become the only thing we are capable of
finding in them "since we have lost their original
meaning", i.e., "since we do not anymore see a temple as
an access to the sacred essence of things, but as a work of art"
(AP 285-6).



But Henry's highlighting of the religious origin of art is also
connected to the question of the original appearing that is unveiled
by art. In his critique of Heidegger, Henry distinguishes between
*Being and Time*, on the one hand, and Heidegger's later
texts that were influenced by Holderlin and Nietzsche on the
other. With regard to *Being and Time*, Henry's
opposition is clearly marked: "the original appearing is not the
one that Heidegger thought of, it is not the world", which means
that 



> 
> 
> it is not an ek-static appearing [...], it is therefore not an
> horizon, but what I call *Life*, i.e., *a revelation*
> that is not the revelation of an other, that does not open to an
> exteriority, but that opens to itself. (AP 286) 
> 
> 
> 



The original appearing to which art refers is the immanent
self-appearing of life given through auto-affection or pathos. In a
fundamental sense for Henry, such affective appearing is given in
suffering and joy as basic tonalities. With regard to
Holderlin's and Nietzsche's reference to the Greek
gods, this means that Dionysus has to be seen as the "first
god", since he is the god of desire, of life tied to itself in
both suffering and joy (AP 287). Moreover, Dionysus "has no
world" but suffers the burden of his own pathos from which he
seeks to escape by generating Apollo, i.e., the god of light and,
thus, the hope of distancing oneself from pathos. Here art becomes a
source of light, a figure through which Dionysus strives to escape
from suffering. This is not, however, Henry's concept of art: it
is through the influence of Kandinsky's writings that he
conceives of art as an "intensification of life" (AP 296),
where life is understood as auto-affection and original appearing.


### 3.2 Henry's Phenomenological Reading of Kandinsky



According to Henry, Kandinsky is the first artist to theorize a new
conception of art *and* to root art in transcendental life. But
how could art, and painting in particular, "intensify"
invisible and affective life since it is made of visible elements such
as form and color? For Kandinsky, color is first and foremost a
"radically subjective impression", "an inner
resonance" (AP 290). In the terminology of Henry's
phenomenology, such an apparent paradox is accounted for by the
duplicity of appearing: on the one hand, there is a noematic color,
the color red as a moment of a particular object, which is only made
possible by a primal impression of red that is, on the other hand,
purely immanent and subjective. Or, as Henry writes: 



> 
> 
> There is no red in the world. Red is a sensation, and such sensation
> is absolutely subjective, originally invisible. Original colors are
> invisible; they are, however, laid over things through a process of
> projection. (AP 290) 
> 
> 
> 



For the painter, then, the choice of a color is determined by its
emotional power. It is not the world that is painted, but, in a sense,
emotion itself. This applies to abstract painting, which obviously
does not represent any worldly object, but it also applies to any
other form of painting. A painting that would be a simple copy of what
has been seen in the world would be utterly
"insignificant". As Henry's example of a painting
from the *Quattrocento* illustrates, even figurative
painting--in this case a representation of the Adoration of the
Magi--chooses its colors according to their emotional power, not
according to a "realistic" representation. Thus, while
providing a theoretical basis for abstract painting, it is in fact a
theory of painting as such that Kandinsky provides. For such a theory,
forms are, very much like colors, not entities exterior to life but
the expression of a force (K 123). Kandinsky's theory of
forms--referring to point, plane and line as their basic
elements--therefore amounts to a theory of forces that inhabit
not the world but our body as it is subjectively lived through (K 82).
Such is the essence of Kandinsky's theory of painting: to be a
visible composition that both expresses and touches living
interiority. Through this project, and as Kandinsky himself admits,
painting has been ascribed the same purpose as music: to express
"not the world [...] but the Ground of Being and of
Life" ("Dessiner la musique", PHV III, 272).


### 3.3 Particular Art Forms: From Music to Literature



Following a Schopenhauerian line of thought, Henry states that music
"does not express the horizon of the world or any of its
objects" (AP 292), but *affectivity* itself, i.e., a
force--the Will in Schopenhauer--that lies outside of
representation. More precisely, music is the immediate reproduction of
a force that lies "outside the world" (PHV III, 264) and
which is in this sense *abstract.* For Schopenhauer every great
work of art is the expression of a force. In architecture for
instance, both a Greek temple and a baroque facade express and
represent forces. The specificity of music, however, lies in the fact
that it expresses the Will in an immediate way. Moreover, this
Schopenhauerian standpoint is taken further with regard to another
idea to which Henry will agree, namely that of the living body as
being the immediate manifestation of the Will. As the important
chapter devoted to Schopenhauer in *Genealogy of
Psychoanalysis* shows, Henry interprets the Will within the
framework of his own concept of life as immanent auto-affection or
affectivity, while at the same time acknowledging that Schopenhauer
was "one of the greatest thinkers of all times, albeit a poor
philosopher" (AP 292).



The fact that most of Henry's writings on art focus either on
painting or on music does not allow one to conclude that his thesis of
art as an "intensification of life" would not apply, or
would apply any less, to other art forms. Architecture is repeatedly
used by Henry, for instance in *Barbarism* where the baroque
facade is taken as an example of both expression and
reproduction (for the spectator) of an immanent play of forces (B
103).



The same principle applies to dance. According to Henry, dance is not
figurative; its purpose is not "to tell us a story", but
to express movement abilities pertaining to the body thereby enabling
the spectator to feel these abilities in his or her own body, very
much "like the forms in a painting makes me feel the forces that
are within me and with which I coincide" (AP 306).



Literature, too, occupies a special place in Henry's oeuvre. It
is the one art that he himself practiced as a novelist--his novel
*L'amour les yeux fermes* was awarded the French
Prix Renaudot in 1976--though literature as an art form is never
clearly theorized in his *philosophy*. In a 1991 interview
published under the title "Narrer le pathos" ("To
Narrate Pathos") Henry admits that an aesthetic theory of
literature still remains a task for his phenomenology. Nonetheless,
the interview contains several indications concerning the direction
such a theory would have to take. As the title indicates, novels and
other forms of fictional writing such as poetry for instance, are
conceived both as an expression of pathos (from the standpoint of the
artist) and as its reproduction or intensification (from the
standpoint of the reader). As in the case of painting, it is
Henry's approach to music that provides the foundation for the
aesthetics of writing. In order to accomplish this task, the words of
the poet or those of the novelist must be able to unveil affectivity
rather than be limited to ek-static appearing as their ultimate
phenomenological possibility. In the latter case, they are bound to
give the thing as absent, as Henry argues while commenting on
Heidegger's analysis of Trakl's poem "Ein
Winterabend": the snow, the ringing of the bells when the night
falls, etc., are brought into presence by the poet's words, but,
at the same time, this presence is retrieved from them since they are
given as not really being there. But this is only true in so far as
the presence to which words refer is the one that characterizes what
can be seen or perceived within the ek-static appearing of the world.
In such a context, poetry can only give things through an ambiguous
presence-absence ("Phenomenologie
materielle et langage", PHV III, 333). For Henry, it is
only when words are envisaged as the expression of pathos that they
speak to a living present beneath the words and their representations.
Such a language of affectivity would thus have to be largely
disconnected from any form of realism and objectivity, while making
room for the imaginary as in hallucination, since "in
hallucination pathos governs directly its own images" (PHV III,
313).



As can be seen from Henry's approach regarding different art
forms such as painting, music, and literature, art aims, or should
aim, at being an intensification of life as immanent pathos. Life in
this sense, however, can be forgotten and its force can be diminished.
If therefore, like Henry states, art is an "arising of the most
essential life that breaks through in each of us", then art also
accomplishes an "ethical oeuvre" (AP 296).


## 4. Ethics and Political Philosophy



Even if one does not find a systematic development of ethics in the
few articles that Henry explicitly devotes to this subject, it is
nonetheless possible to use these writings as a foundation for an
ethics from the standpoint of his phenomenology of life. Given the
emphasis that Henry puts on the fundamental nature of life as
affectivity as well as the tendency toward a forgetting of
life's essence, it seems consistent to ascribe to ethics the
task of unmasking and, if possible, overcoming such forgetting. In
this sense, Henry's ethics could be termed an "ethics of
affectivity" (Seyler 2010). Among the possible angles that allow
for further development with regard to ethics in Henry's
writings, the three following stand out: 1) the idea that art is
intrinsically ethical; 2) the critique of contemporary culture through
the concept of "barbarism"; and 3) the concept of religion
as developed by Henry's philosophy of Christianity.


### 4.1 Art as Intrinsically Ethical



As we have seen above, Henry explicitly ascribes an ethical function
to art. This involves two essential concepts: that of life's
"self-growth" (*auto-accroissement*) and that of
the bond between the living and absolute life (the latter concept
being especially important in his philosophy of religion). Self-growth
describes the movement inherent to life, namely "the living
'me'" itself (AP 295). Such a movement, however, is
not simply the continuation of an unchanging state. Self-experience is
primarily an experience (*epreuve*) of passivity, of
pathos in Henry's terminology: We have neither brought ourselves
into existence nor do we continue to make ourselves exist. On the
contrary, it is absolute life that engenders itself "in"
us. But for the same reason, the experience of passivity is one of the
"weight" of subjectivity, leading to the urge to deploy
subjective powers. Perhaps in analogy with intentional acts that seek
fulfillment in intuition, Henry's concept of self-growth refers,
on the level of immanent affectivity, to subjectivity seeking the
development of its powers in the "I can":



> 
> 
> Each eye [...] wants to see more. Culture exists when this
> prescription--which is the energy of vision--is followed in
> this display of what is seen and in the creation of this display. What
> is now entirely clear to us is that this energy resides in vision as
> such. That is to say that it resides [...] in its self-growth, in
> what has been called its will to power. (B 100-1)
> 
> 
> 



In this context, the work of art appears as a possible mediation
toward such a subjective self-growth, both for the artist and the
spectator. Art, however, is not limited to this intensification of
subjectivity. It functions at the same time as a
"reminder" of the bond between the living and absolute
life, and this, according to Henry, is precisely the function of
ethics, namely "to make us relive this forgotten bond" (AP
296). By taking *religio* in its etymological sense as
"bond", Henry's aesthetics are therefore not only
intrinsically ethical but also intrinsically religious. "Art is
by its very nature ethical", just as it is "a form of
religious life" (AP 297), a conclusion that for Henry is
compatible with a Christian as well as Nietzschean approach to art.
However, since aesthetics is not only concerned with art but
encompasses all sensible experience, it is not only art that is
ethically relevant but everything that affects sensibility, and this
includes the world as a whole given its organization in cultural forms
and traditions (B 102-3). For this reason, Henry's
critique of contemporary culture has to be seen as an important part
of his approach to ethics.


### 4.2 The Critique of Contemporary Culture as "Barbarism"



If, for Henry, culture has always to be understood as "a culture
of life", i.e., as the cultivation of subjective powers, then it
includes art without being limited to it. Cultural praxis comports
what Henry designates as its "elaborate forms" (e.g., art,
religion, discursive knowledge) as well as everyday forms related to
the satisfaction of basic needs. Both types of forms, however, fall
under the ethical category of subjective self-growth and illustrate
the bond between the living and absolute life. The *inversion*
of culture in "barbarism" means that within a particular
socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no
longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation of the
bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to
Henry, who echoes Husserl's analysis in *Crisis*, such an
inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature
of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological
developments (B xiv).



Insofar as it relies on objectification, the "Galilean
principle" is directly opposed to Henry's philosophy of
immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean
science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture (B
62). Although "the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as
it seems", (B 72) the line separating culture from
"barbarism" is crossed when science is transformed into
scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an
ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only
through the objectively measurable and quantifiable. Here,
Henry's critique of scientism functions in parallel with his
critique of ontological monism: in both cases, it is ek-static
appearing that is considered as the only access to reality, which
amounts to the (ideological or philosophical) negation of subjectivity
as immanent auto-affection. As the *Essence of Manifestation*
already notes in opposition to Hegel but also to Heidegger: 



> 
> 
> Objectification is not possible unless the essence which objectifies
> itself originally arrives in itself [...]. That this original
> arriving of the essence in itself be not constituted by
> objectification, that it cannot, as Hegel and Heidegger would wish, be
> the consequence hereof, results precisely from its being the condition
> of this objectification. (EM 278)
> 
> 
> 



But the concept of "barbarism" is not limited to a
critique of scientist ideology and its paradigm of objectification.
More importantly, it targets the implications of such an ideology on
the level of everyday praxis in what Henry terms "practices of
barbarism". This rather polemical use of the term
"barbarism" refers to practices that impoverish rather
than develop subjective powers. If it includes the ordinary sense of
barbarism as brutality and extreme violence, it is by no means limited
to it and extends to every form of practice that reverses the movement
of self-growth inherent to subjectivity. On a societal level, the
concept of "barbarism" becomes a reinterpretation of the
Freudian "malaise in civilization". "There is a
malaise in civilization every time that the energy of Life remains
unemployed", explains Henry (B 103). "Reverse" forms
of practice thus illustrate the alienation of subjective praxis
through the domination of the Galilean principle and its technological
outcomes. With regard to the practice of television, for instance,
Henry's critique targets the constant succession from one image
to the other that makes an aesthetic contemplation impossible. As a
corollary to their inconstancy, televised images are also considered
insignificant. If they had any significance, they would not only
capture attention but would also call for reflection and
contemplation. However, this is precisely what an uninterrupted flow
of images makes impossible:



> 
> 
> Emergence and disappearance are thus only the continually resumed act
> of life getting rid of itself. It is only in light of such an act that
> disappearance can become fully intelligible. It presupposes that the
> content of the image is of no interest in itself and that it is
> destined to be replaced by another one. If it were to arouse true
> attention and have a worth of its own, instead, this would imply that
> it would remain and that the perception of it would arouse a growth of
> sensibility and intelligence in the spectator. This would imply that
> the mind, occupied with this inner work, would latch onto the image
> [...], in the omni-temporality of the cultural object that
> delivers it to contemplation. But, in such a case, life would no
> longer seek to flee itself in such an image; instead it would find its
> accomplishment in it, that is to say, in itself. (B 111, translation
> edited)
> 
> 
> 



As this passage indicates, the underlying principle of
"barbarism" is that of a flight from subjectivity into
anonymous processes mastered by techno-science, which are then used
gradually to replace living praxis. Henry's concept of
"barbarism" can thereby be related to Kierkegaardian
despair as "sickness unto death" (EM 680-1, B
64-66). More precisely, "barbarism" is seen as the
ultimate form of despair in which the desire to escape oneself as
living subjectivity takes the form of a negation of life pure and
simple. It is important to note that for Henry such a desire is itself
rooted in life, i.e., in immanent affectivity, as a desire to escape
the tonalities of suffering that life necessarily undergoes.
Consequently, "barbarism" is a project impossible to
accomplish, because life remains itself even through forms of flight
and negation that Henry does not hesitate to characterize as
"madness" (B 52). And it is this movement of fleeing that
Henry recognizes as constituting the characteristic trait of
modernity.


### 4.3 Christian Ethics as Recognition of Absolute Life



Henry's reading of Christian ethics in *I Am the Truth*
confirms that what is at stake for the ethics of affectivity is the
recognition of the bond between individual and absolute life. For
Henry, cultural renaissance is therefore inherently religious and is
connected to the theme of "second birth". In *I am the
Truth*, as in *Incarnation*, the opposition of
"barbarism" and culture remains operative. As an example,
Henry considers the negation of God in the world of techno-science to
be implied by the negation of the human as living ipseity (IAT 263),
since "practices of barbarism" impair the subjective need
for action, in which the human is able to experience life as an
absolute. Paradoxically, the search for oneself in the world, which
according to Henry characterizes modernity, can only be overcome by
abandoning oneself to absolute life, i.e., by renouncing the care for
oneself in the world (*souci de soi dans le monde*) (IAT
143-144). Not to care anymore about oneself as worldly ego means
"to be only a living that is traversed by Life" (DD 169),
i.e., to rediscover what was previously forgotten, namely absolute
life, and to live from the infinite love that the absolute has for
itself. In order to account for this "second birth", Henry
explicitly refers to a *teleology* oriented toward the
recognition of absolute life. Eventually, such recognition expresses
itself through a double negation in which what negates the absolute is
negated in return. But, being immanent and affective, this recognition
also resists its description and escapes representation. "Second
birth" is only possible within subjective praxis and, more
precisely, through the work of mercy, since 



> 
> 
> *only the work of mercy practices the forgetting of self in which,
> all interest for the Self (right down to the idea of what we call a
> self or a me) now removed, no obstacle is now posed to the unfurling
> of life in this Self extended to its original essence*. (IAT 170)
> 
> 
> 
> 



However, it is through the action of immanent life itself that
"the life of the ego is changed into Life of the absolute"
(IAT 165). Consequently, such a mutation of praxis can only be an
interior one, which means that it can never be commanded from a point
of view exterior to immanent affectivity or even be the result of the
ego's conscious caring for salvation. This point is not
unproblematic for an ethics of affectivity, since what has been
identified as its fundamental issue depends not *primarily* on
decisions consciously put into action, but on the immanent dynamic of
affectivity itself.


### 4.4 Political Philosophy



Henry's critique of contemporary culture also raises the
question of social conditions and their impact on the exercise of
subjective potentialities (see also Gely 2007). The issue of
social organization refers here to two important fields of
investigation: economics, investigated in *Marx* (1976), and
politics, investigated mainly in *From Communism to Capitalism.
Theory of a Catastrophe* (1990) as well as in two important
articles: "La vie et la republique" ("Life
and the Republic", 1989) and "Difficile
democratie" ("Difficult Democracy", 2000).
For both economics and politics, Henry's normative critique
targets the forgetting and the occultation of life as a transcendental
genesis in which political organization and economy are rooted.
Politics and economics are both superstructures that are necessarily
tied to representation and measurement, but their legitimacy comes
from what is ante-political and ante-economic, namely transcendental
life. In Henry's view, modernity turns this actual genesis
upside down: superstructures seem to have become autonomous and, in
reverse, tend to impose their laws on immanent life. This reversal is
only possible insofar as the foundational character of life as
immanent appearing remains forgotten. As Henry argues in *From
Communism to Capitalism,* in techno-scientific capitalism, and
even more in totalitarianism, the tendency toward an (albeit illusory)
autonomization of superstructures becomes extreme. Despite the
violence of totalitarianism, and as can be seen from the analysis of
Henry's concept of "barbarism", alienation can never
be total. It is nonetheless very real, precisely because it is able to
affect individual praxis by substituting the "laws of
ideality" for those of "vital teleology" (B 134).
And again, it is the lack of recognition of immanent life as
fundamental phenomenality that makes the reversal that characterizes
"barbarism" possible. While Henry distinguishes between an
original ethics--*ethos* itself as first ethics in which
life accomplishes its essence--and ethics as normative and
discursive (B 96-7), it is to the latter that the philosophical
task of reminding us of the transcendental genesis and, hence, of life
as fundamental appearing is assigned. Thereby, the ethics of
affectivity becomes political insofar as it identifies and unmasks
"hypostases" in economics and politics (VR 158).
Henry's phenomenology can then conceptualize cultural
renaissance as a "reversal of the reversal" operating in
figures of "barbarism". As far as the political realm is
concerned, however, such a renaissance faces the tension--the
*aporia* even--that must exist between invisible life as
ipseity and public affairs as general. This tension, which constitutes
the political, underlies the democratic project as the self-foundation
of communal life (DD 171). From Henry's point of view, democracy
does not necessarily promote culture: if democracy is a chance to
reestablish "the true order of things, the foundation of the
political in life, for which it can be nothing but a mediation",
(VR 162) it also entails the risk that the visibility necessary to
public life be posited as the only possible mode of appearing.
Democracy may thereby favor the occultation of its own foundation and
become the objective ally of the Galilean principle (DD 175).
Moreover, the prospect of political self-foundation is, in its
essence, at risk of reproducing the transcendental illusion of the ego
(IAT 140) on the communal level: just like the ego is victim of an
illusion when it presumes to be the ultimate source of the "I
can", so is a political community misdirected if it presumes to
be the ultimate constitutive power of communal life. On this political
level the religious bond with absolute life can also fall into
oblivion. In such a case, it is the conquest of human rights that is
eventually threatened by the reduction of the human to that which
scientific exteriority is able to measure and enunciate. As
Henry's phenomenology of intersubjectivity in Part III of
*Material Phenomenology* explains, absolute life is shared by
all living and provides the ground for an invisible and immanent
community. The core of Henry's political philosophy lies
therefore in the principle according to which the political is only
legitimate as a mediation for what is ante-political--namely
life, both individual and communal.



The originality of Henry's contribution to phenomenology is
without a doubt his thesis of the duality of appearing, where
"immanent affectivity" or "life" designates
the "first" and more fundamental form of appearing.
Henry's approach can therefore be described as a systematic
phenomenology and philosophy of life. It is also a philosophy of
immanence, but enriched with the heritage of transcendental
phenomenology, since, for Henry, immanent affectivity is nothing less
than the condition of possibility of both the world and consciousness.
Furthermore, this transcendental framework leads him to develop a
critique of the history of philosophy as well as an approach to
practical philosophy and the philosophy of religion. As a philosophy
of immanence, however, the formidable challenge Henry's
phenomenology faces lies in its application to what it regards as
transcendent, namely that which is given to us through the distance of
intentional consciousness: the world and even ourselves as intentional
beings.