Michel Henry

Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.

Michel Henry at the early 1990s

His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.

Books on Phenomenology and Life

The Essence of Manifestation (1963)

• Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l'intermédiaire d'un sens est dans son essence affectivité.
  • That which is felt without the intermediary of any sense whatsoever is in its essence affectivity.
    • Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963, t. 2, § 52, p. 577

• L'affectivité a déjà accompli son œuvre quand se lève le monde.
  • Affectivity has ever accomplished its work when the world rises.
    • Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 54, p. 604

• La souffrance forme le tissu de l'existence, elle est le lieu où la vie devient vivante, la réalité et l'effectivité phénoménologique de ce devenir.
  • Suffering makes up the tissue of the existence, it is the place where the life becomes living, the reality and the phenomenological effectivity of this gradual change.
    • Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 828

• La puissance du sentiment est le rassemblement édificateur, l’être saisi par soi, son embrasement, sa fulguration, est le devenir de l’être, le surgissement triomphant de la révélation. Ce qui advient, dans le triomphe de ce surgissement, dans la fulguration de la présence, dans la Parousie et, enfin, quand il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien, c’est la joie.
  • The power of the feeling is the gathering which edifies, the being seized by oneself, its blazing up, its fulguration, is the becoming of the being, the triumphant sudden appearance of the revelation. What becomes of, in the triumph of this sudden appearance, in the fulguration of the presence, in the Parousia and, lastly, when there is something instead of nothing, that’s the joy.
    • Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 831

• Mais la joie n'a rien au sujet de quoi elle puisse être joyeuse. Loin de venir après la venue de l'être et de s'émerveiller devant lui, elle lui est consubstantielle, le fonde et le constitue.
  • But joy has nothing about which it may be joyful. Far to come after the coming of being and to marvel in front of it, joy is consubstantial with being, joy founds it and forms it.
    • Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 831

Material Phenomenology (1990)

Phenomenology and the appearing of phenomena

• The question of phenomenology, which alone confers a proper object to philosophy, is what makes it into an autonomous discipline -- the fundamental discipline of knowledge -- and not just a mere reflexion after the fact on what the other sciences have found. This question is no longer concerned with the phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears but with appearing. The invaluable contribution of historical phenomenology is to become aware of this appearing and to analyze it in and of itself. This is its theme. Again, this must not simply be the repetition of the traditional philosophical problem of consciousness or the greek aletheia. For the illusion of common sense, science and past philosophies is to understand the being of the phenomenon always as a first putting at a distance, the arrival of an Outside in which everything becomes visible, a "phenomenon", in the light of this Outside.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2

Material phenomenology and pure phenomenality

• To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2

• Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it is what makes every affect, ultimately every affection, and every thing possible. The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in view is the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself according to the how of its original phenomenalization. Life is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. For what could I know that could not appear ?
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2-3

The immense task of material phenomenology

• The task of material phenomenology is immense. It is not simply to be attached to another order of phenomena that remained neglected up to now but to rethink everything, if one can think reality. Every sphere of reality must become the object of a new analysis that goes back to its invisible dimension. And this concerns material nature as well, which is a living cosmos. Since material phenomenology implies the revival of philosophical questioning in its entirety, it offers a future to phenomenology and to philosophy itself. At the same time, it discovers a new past.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 6

The essence of community and the self-givenness of life

• The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119

• Life is given in its own way, in a completely unique way, even though this singular mode of givenness is universal. Life is given in such a way that what it gives is given to itself and that what it gives to itself is never separated from it, not in the least. In this way, what life gives is itself. Life is self-givenness in a radical and rigorous sense, in the sense that it is both life that gives and life that is given. Because it is life that gives, we can only have a share of this gift in life. No road leads to life except life itself. [...] Life is absolute subjectivity inasmuch as it experiences itself and is nothing other than that experience. It is the pure fact of experiencing itself immediately and without any distance. This is what constitutes the essence of every possible community. Again, what is shared in common is not some thing; instead, it is this original givenness as self-givenness. It is the internal experience that brings to life everything that is and makes what is alive in this experience become alive in and through it alone.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 120

The community, a subterranean affective layer

• La communauté est une nappe affective souterraine et chacun y boit la même eau à cette source et à ce puits qu'il est lui-même – mais sans le savoir, sans se distinguer de lui-même, de l'autre ni du Fond.
  • The community is a subterranean affective layer and each one drinks the same water at this source and at from this wellspring which he is itself -- but without knowing it, without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the Basis.
    • Michel Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, éd. PUF, 1990, p. 178

• Inasmuch as the essence of community is affectivity, the community is not limited to humans alone. It includes everything that is defined in itself by the primal suffering of life and thus by the possibility of suffering. This pathos-with is the brosdest form of every conceivable community.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 133-134

• This pathetic community does not exclude the world but only the abstract world, which is to say, the world that does not exist and has put subjectivity out of play. But community does include the real world -- the cosmos -- for which every element -- form, color, and so forth -- exists ultimately as auto-affective. That is to say, it exists in and through this pathetic community. "The world", Kandinsky says, "sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit." This is why painting, for example, is not the figure of external things but the expression of their inner reality, their tonality, or what Kandinsky calls their "inner sound", an experience of forces and affects.
  • Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 134

Books on Economy and Politics

Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)

• Le marxisme est l'ensemble des contresens qui ont été faits sur Marx.
  • The Marxism is the whole of the misinterpretations that have been done about Marx.
    • Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 9

• Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien.
  • Because practice is subjective, theory which is always the theory of an object, can't access to the reality of this practice, what it is in itself, but only represent it, in such a way that this representation lets out of itself the real being of practice, the effectivity of the doing. Theory does nothing.
    • Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 353

• Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage ».
  • How capitalism finds its substance and its essence in the living work, in such a way that it comes exclusively from it, can't go without it, lives only drawing at each time its life from that of the worker, life that then becomes his own, this is what expresses in the whole work of Marx the theme of vampire. "Capitalism is dead work which, such as a vampire, animates itself only in sucking the living work and the more it pumps, the more its life is cheerful".
    • Michel Henry, Marx II. une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 435

• Marx certes était athée, « matérialiste », etc. Mais chez un philosophe aussi, il convient de distinguer ce qu’il est de ce qu’il croit être. Ce qui compte, ce n’est d’ailleurs pas ce que Marx pensait et que nous ignorons, c’est ce que pensent les textes qu’il a écrits. Ce qui paraît en eux, de façon aussi évidente qu’exceptionnelle dans l’histoire de la philosophie, c’est une métaphysique de l’individu. Marx est l’un des premiers penseurs chrétiens de l’Occident.
  • Certainly, Marx was atheist, "materialist", etc. But for a philosopher also, it's advisable to distinguish between what he is and what he thinks to be. The most important, this is not what Marx thought and that we ignore, but what think the texts he has written. What appears in them, in a way as obvious as exceptional in the history of philosophy, this is a metaphysics of the individual. Marx is one of the first Christian thinkers of Occident.
    • Michel Henry, Marx II. Une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 445

From Communism to Capitalism (1990)

• Aucune abstraction, aucune idéalité n'a jamais été en mesure de produire une action réelle ni, par conséquent, ce qui ne fait que la figurer.
  • No abstraction, no ideality has never been neither in position to produce a real action nor, by consequence, what only represents it.
    • Michel Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme, éd. Odile Jacob, 1990, p. 144

• Quand ce qui ne sent rien et ne se sent pas soi-même, n'a ni désir ni amour, est mis au principe de l'organisation du monde, c'est le temps de la folie qui vient, car la folie a tout perdu sauf la raison.
  • When what feels nothing and doesn't feel oneself, has no desire and no love, is put at the principle of the organization of the world, it's the time of madness that comes, because madness has all lost except reason.
    • Michel Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme, éd. Odile Jacob, 1990, p. 220

Books on Culture and Barbarism

Barbarism (1987)

Preface from Michel Henry to the second edition

• After the diagnosis of Barbarism, the phenomena of self-destruction have seen an enormous and violent intensification. This is not only visible in the streets. The nihilistic attack against all values, the defense of everything that is against nature and against life, expresses this even more. With violence, it is the development of technology outside of any norms that takes to the extreme this substitution of blind processes for the benefit of effort and the joy of living.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. xvii

• There is no longer any more room to challenge the omnipresent objectivism of modernity. After the unilateral objectivism of science, there is the media which tears the human being away from him or herself. At every moment, it produces the content that comes to occupy the mind, thereby authorizing an unprecedented and unlimited ideological manipulation that prohibits all free thought and all "democracy". It condemns every interpersonal relation to be reduced to external manifestations, for example, love is reduced to the objective movement of bodies and to photos.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. xvii

Culture or the self-development of life

• What then is culture? Every culture is a culture of life, in the dual sense whereby life is both the subject and the object of this culture. It is an action that life exerts on itself and through which it transforms itself insofar as life is both transforming and transformed. "Culture" means nothing other than that. "Culture" refers to the self-transformation of life, the movement by which it continually changes itself in order to arrive at higher forms of realization and completeness, in order to grow. But if life is this incessant movement of self-transformation and self-fulfillment, it is culture itself. Or at least it carries it as something inscribed in it and sought by it. What life are we speaking about here? What is this force that is continually maintained and grows? It is not in any way the life that forms the theme of biology and the object of science. It is not the molecules and particles that the scientist tries to reach through microscopes and whose natures are developed through multiple procedures in order to construct laboriously a concept of them that is more adequate but still subject to revision.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 6-7

The absolute phenomenological life of individuals

• The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead, it is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are. But how can "everyone" -- that is, each individual as a living being -- know what life is, except in the respect that life knows itself and that this original knowledge of the self constitutes its own essence? Life feels and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it that would not be experienced or felt. This is because the fact of feeling oneself is really what makes one alive. Everything that has this marvelous property of feeling itself is alive, whereas everything that happens to lack it is dead. The rock, for example, does not experience itself and so it is said to be a "thing". The earth, the sea, the stars are things. Plants, trees, and vegetation are also things, unless one can detect in them a sensibility in the transcendental sense, that is to say, a capacity of experiencing itself and feeling itself which would make them living beings. This is life not in the biological sense but in the true sense -- the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else -- of what we will call subjectivity.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 7

The abstraction of life by scientific knowledge

• The abstraction made by science is thus twofold. First, it is abstraction that defines the scientific world as such. Sensible qualities and the affective predicates that belong to them a priori are put out of play from the being of nature so that they only retain the forms capable of giving them an ideal determination. This nonconsideration of the subjective features of every possible world is indispensable from a methodological point of view, inasmuch as it allows for the establishment of procedures such as quantitative measurement that permit types of knowledge to be obtained that otherwise would be inaccessible. But, the infinite development of this ideal knowledge can only be pursued legitimately inasmuch as it remains clearly conscious of the limits of its field of investigation, limits that it has drawn itself. It cannot escape the fact that the setting aside of the sensible and affective properties of the world presupposes the setting aside of life itself, that is to say, of what makes up the humanity of the human being. That is the second abstraction made by science in the current sense: the abstraction of Life and of what alone truly matters.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 17

• By putting out of play not only the lifeworld but, more seriously, life itself or what we are, the play of knowledge is laden with significant consequences from the outset. If the auto-transformation and growth of culture is the business of life, what we have only glimpsed now appears with a striking clarity: since science has no relation to culture, the development of science has nothing to do with the development of culture. At the limit, one can imagine an extreme development of scientific knowledge that would go along with an atrophy of culture, with its regression in some domains or in all domains at once and, at the end of this process, its annihilation. This image is neither ideal nor abstract. It is the actual world we live in, a world which has just given rise to a new type of barbarism that is more serious that any that have preceded it and from which human beings risk dying from today.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 18

Scientific knowledge as only possible knowledge

• Let us consider a biology student who is reading a work about the genetic code. The student’s reading is the repetition through an act of her own consciousness of the complex processes of conceptualization and theorizing contained in the book, or those that are signified by the printed characters. But, in order for this reading to be possible, the student must turn the pages with her hands as she reads. The student must move her eyes in order to cover it and collect the lines of the text one after the other. When the student becomes tired, she will get up, leave the library, and take the stairs to the cafeteria where she will get some rest and something to eat and drink. The knowledge contained in the biology manual that was assimilated by the student during her reading is scientific knowledge. […] The knowledge that made possible de movements of the hands and the eyes, the act of getting up, climbing the stairs, drinking and eating, and resting is the knowledge of life.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 11

• Science as such has no relation with culture, because it develops outside of its realm. We sought to establish this situation in the preceding chapter, and on its own it does not justify any pejorative evaluation or condemnation that would lead to the disqualification of science. The philosopher has the duty to intervene only when the domain of science is understood as the sole existing domain of true being and subsequently leads to the rejection of the domain of life and culture into nonbeing or an illusory appearance. Once again, it is not the scientific knowledge that is in question; it is the ideology joined to it today which holds that it is the sole possible knowledge and that all other ones must be eliminated. Amidst the collapse of the beliefs, that is the sole belief that persists in the modern world, the previously encountered and universally echoed conviction that knowledge means science.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 23

The radical revolution of an action become objective

• The ontological revolution occurs when action ceases to obey the prescriptions of life and it is no longer what it was at the beginning, that is, the actualization of the phenomenological potential of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, it seems that action has deserted the site that was always its own in order to take place in the world henceforth: in factories, dams, and power plants. It is now wherever there are pistons, turbines, cogs and all kinds of machines that fire away all the time. In short, it is the immense mechanical system of big industry, which can be reduced to the electromagnetic currents of supercomputers and other high-tech machines of "techno-science". This points to the crucial event of Modernity in the passage from the reign of the human to the nonhuman: action has become objective.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 47

The invasion of technology and the expulsion of life

• Let us just say here that if science is capable of making the slightest material modification to nature, this is only insofar as a real action cannot be reduced to a merely theoretical relation between a knowing subject and a known object. In reality, it always takes the unperceived detour through Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation). Only someone who has hands and eyes in the sense of a radically immanent power of grasping and seeing, only a being originally constituted in oneself as a subjective and living Body -- only the scientist not as a scientist but as this kind of being -- can turn the pages of a book and read it. Likewise, only such a person can carry out a scientific operation of any kind: handle a tool, press a button, follow the results of a change on a graph, and then understand the results of a sophisticated experiment. These results are ultimately offered as sensible givens, and they are only accessible in that form. The same goes for experimentation properly so-called. The conduct or handling of it always refers back to and presupposes an action of the original Body.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 50

• This situation does not only hold for scientific practice, it also determines the condition of the worker in the modern world. What characterizes the modern worker is the gradual decrease of the role of living work, or subjective praxis, in the real process of production, whereas the role of the objective, instrumental network continually increases, first in the form of machines in a traditional big industry and later cybernetics and robotics. The law of the gradual decrease of profit margins in the capitalist era is only the expression on the economic level of the crucial phenomenon that has come to affect modern production: the invasion of technology and its expulsion of life.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 50

Note : The philosophical concept of "Bodily-ownness" (or "Corpspropriation" in French) only designates for Michel Henry the access to objective processes and above all the ability to act of our subjective body on the external world (see for example Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 45-46 et 50-51).

The living work at the age of modern technology

• The fact that the use of living work is reduced to almost nothing means that everything that humans once did can now be done by robots. But, the robot does not "do" anything; it is only the trigger and release on a mechanism. The only real action -- the action that exists in the feeling that one acts and that is coextensive with this feeling -- is the act of pushing a control button. From the beginning of the industrial era and as one effect of the gradual replacement of the "force of work" by natural energies, it was possible to anticipate the reduction of the activity of workers to the work of oversight. This signifies an atrophy of almost all of the subjective potentialities of the living individual and thus a malaise and growing dissatisfaction.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 51

• The change that perverts individual subjective praxis does not simply involve its reduction to stereotypical and monotonous acts. Along with this narrowing and impoverishment that already indicate the fall of culture, another phenomenon occurs that pushes this process of enculturation to its culmination: the activity of these meaningless acts reverts to a total passivity. It is the objective device in its various organizations and uses that dictates the nature and type of what little remains for the worker to do. It is true that the capacities of the individual at work, and especially the bodily capacities, cannot be entirely abstracted. This is because Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation) remains the hidden and inescapable foundation for the transformation of the world, in its technical age just as much as in any other age. It just so happens that the force of the Body has been replaced by the objective network of the machine, and the body is only taken into consideration to the precise degree that the device requires the intervention of the individual, however modestly. This amounts to the derisory role that is still conceded to life and its knowledge, that is to say, to culture. The most complex computer ends with a keyboard that is easier than a typewriter. The information age will be the age of idiots.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 51

Note : The philosophical concept of "Bodily-ownness" (or "Corpspropriation" in French) only designates for Michel Henry the access to objective processes and above all the ability to act of our subjective body on the external world (see for example Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 45-46 et 50-51).

Technology or the self-development of nature

• Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on its own. It develops in such a way that all the virtualities and potentialities within it must be actualized, for them and for what they are, for their own sake, so that everything is done that can be done, that is to say, everything that nature can become. It is a matter of making gold, going to the moon, building self-guiding and self-monitoring missiles that can decide on the moment to self-destruction – and destroy us. Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 52

Subjective life or the absolute foundation of all value

• Instead of determining the action of life, ends, norms and values are determined by it. This determination consists in the fact that one experiences oneself constantly and knows oneself at every moment. Life also knows at each instant what must be done and what is suited to it. This knowledge is no different from action. It does not precede it or "determine" it, properly speaking. It is identical to it, as the original know-how of life, as praxis and a living body. Action, as we have seen, is only the actualization of the primitive power of this phenomenological body.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 96-97

• Life confers a value on things -- they do not have any value by themselves -- inasmuch as they are suited to it and satisfy its desires. But this spontaneous evaluation by life is only possible, in turn, if life experiences itself, even through its most humble needs, as what it is and must be, as an absolute value. The fundamental values have no other content than what is implied in life's first experience of itself; they are the proper content of this life.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 97

Culture and barbarism or the unused Energy of life

• The fact that this weight [of existence] becomes too heavy and that it can be experienced as a weight and as an unbearable weight, is due to the fact that it is impossible for life to undo that with which it has been burdened, that is to say, itself. [...] Culture is the set of enterprises and practices in which the overflowing of life is expressed. All of them are motivated by the "burden", the "too much" that prepares living subjectivity internally as a force ready to be dispensed and required to act under this burden.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 99

• La culture est l'ensemble des entreprises et des pratiques dans lesquelles s'exprime la surabondance de la vie, toutes elles ont pour motivation la « charge », le « trop » qui dispose intérieurement la subjectivité vivante comme une force prête à se prodiguer et contrainte, sous la charge, de le faire.
  • The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.
    • Michel Henry, La Barbarie, éd. Grasset, 1987, p. 172

• Energy is within us just as much as it is in itself. This primitive Suffering is our pathetic relation to being just as much as it is the relation of being to itself. To employ our Energy, we receive this Energy as something that brings about the growth of our being, and this necessarily passes through suffering. This passage is our effort. Situated within the work of being, it is what we carry out, in turn. Here the characteristic of the process of decline and what makes it possible becomes visible and comprehensible. It unfailingly occurs on the basis of the following source: barbarism is an unemployed energy.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 101

The destruction of University and media communication

• The second mask worn in the refusal to take into consideration the cultural specificity of the tasks and the condition of the university is the argument of utility. This one is dear to parents. Don't studies serve the purpose of getting a job? Truly speaking, as the development of the potential of individual subjectivity through repeated practice and the transmission of knowledge, teaching helps those who benefit from it to become suited for a certain number of activities, for perfecting their abilities as well as acquiring new ones. It is evident that the more the level of this teaching is raised, the greater are the choices and the number of "outlets" provided. The idea, to the contrary, of limiting knowledge to what will actually be put into practice is both criminal and contradictory. It is contradictory due to the fluctuation of demand in an evolving world and thus to the necessity of constant adaptation. This ability to adapt is a function of one's degree of intelligence as well as the extent of one's mastered knowledge. It is criminal because it signifies the stoppage of the individual's potential development. It is the deliberate reduction of one's being to the condition of a cog in the techno-scientific machine.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 121

• The essence of media communication is television. What media communication communicates is itself, in such a way that the form of this communication becomes its content. This is why something can only be real, if and only if it enters into this communication. What matters is the number of journalists, the number of cameras gathered around what will come into being in and through them: the event. In and through them, the event does not only derive its importance but its existence. The media world thus determines its nature. For what claims the title of an "event" and thus to exist must be such that it can be televised; it is and must be created, cut, limited by this inescapable demand whose essence we have recognized: the news (actualité). This refers to what is there now in its most extreme punctuality and superficiality -- a superficiality and punctuality derived from its ability to be televised and from being televised -- for the time that it will exist and after which it will fall into nothingness.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 135-136

The media of traditional culture and of the technological age

• The media of culture -- mosaics, frescoes, engravings, books, music -- usually had a sacred theme; in any case, their theme was the growth of life's powers up to the exalted discovery of its own essence. The medium was art, namely, the awakening of these powers with the aid of the sensibility that carries all the other ones. The ideal aesthetic image -- whether visual or sonorous -- was the object of contemplation. It was that which remained and that to which one always returned in the repetition of transcendental processes that led to its creation. To become their contemporary is precisely to reproduce these acts and increased powers of life within oneself. It is to reach them in and through the exaltation of the Basis (Fonds). Culture was the set of brilliant works that enabled and gave rise to this repetition -- culture was the set of signs that human beings gave to one another through the centuries in order to surpass themselves.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 140-141

• The media of the technological age have very different characteristics. Their content is the Insignificant, the "news". Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 141

• Ce n'est donc pas l'autoréalisation que l'existence médiatique propose à la vie, c'est la fuite, l'occasion pour tous ceux que leur paresse, refoulant leur énergie, rend à jamais mécontents d'eux-mêmes d'oublier ce mécontentement.
  • So it's not the self-realization that the media existence proposes to the life, it's the escape, the opportunity for all those whose laziness, repressing their energy, make them forever dissatisfied of themselves to forget this dissatisfaction.
    • Michel Henry, La Barbarie, éd. Grasset, 1987, p. 244

Conclusion on clandestinity of culture and life

• The key feature of modernity, which makes it into a barbarism of a hitherto unknown kind, is precisely to be a society lacking any culture and existing independently from it. As ordinary and common as it might seem today, this situation creates an almost untenable paradox, if it is the case that life, as self-conservation and self-growth, is itself a cultural process. This is something that all past civilizations illustrate. Barbarism is thus a sort of impossibility. If it happens nonetheless, it is never through an inexplicable dulling of the powers of life. Instead, the powers of life must be turned against themselves, in the phenomena of hate and resentment. This happens because life, in a suffering that is coextensive with its being and that it can no longer bear, attempts to get rid of itself. Barbarism cannot exist without the emergence of Evil, which is a mad but wholly intelligible desire of self-destruction. Or rather, in every state of social regression, it is possible to discover, underneath the evidence of the features of stagnation and decline, the violence of the deliberate refusal of life to be itself.
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 139

• What does culture become in this state? Its voice is never entirely silenced; it remains in the continual arrival of life within oneself. It remains in a sort of incognito. The exchange that it seeks no longer happens in the light of the City, through its monuments, paintings, music, education, and media. It has entered the clandestine. There are brief words, quick instructions, a few references that isolated individuals communicate to one another when, in chance of meetings, they recognize themselves to be marked by the same sign. They would like to transmit this culture, to enable one to become what one is, and to escape the unbreakable boredom of the techno-media world with its drugs, monstrous growth, and anonymous transcendence. But it has reduced them to silence once and for all. Can the world still be saved by some of them?
  • Michel Henry, Barbarism, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2012, p. 142

Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

Introduction on Kandinsky and the invention of abstract painting

• Kandinsky is the inventor of abstract painting, the one who sought to overturn the traditional conceptions of aesthetic representation and to define a new area in this domain -- the era of modernity. In this regard, he appears as the 'Usher' or the 'Pioneer', to borrow the words of Tinguely. To understand Kandinsky's painting is to understand an art so new and so unusual that in its beginnings it only aroused scoffs, if not anger or spit. At the time of his death in 1944 in Paris, Kandinsky was still unknown to the French public, and misunderstood by the 'critics'. Today, one might wonder whether this situation has really changed.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 1

• Kandinsky’s singularity is due, moreover, to a circumstance that is vital for out project. The 'Pioneer' did not just produce a body of work whose sensuous magnificence and rich inventiveness eclipse even the most remarkable of his contemporaries. He also provided an explicit theory of abstract painting, exposing its principles with the utmost precision and clarity. So, the painted work is accompanied with a group of texts that at the same time clarify his work and make Kandinsky on of the main theorists of art. Facing the hieroglyphs of the last canvases of the Parisian period (which are said to be the most difficult), they provide the Rosetta stone on which the meaning of these mysterious figures is inscribed.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 2

The Feeling or the 'abstract' content of abstract painting

• Kandinsky calls the content that painting must express, that is, our invisibility (or invisible life), 'abstract'. So, the Kandinskian equation can now be written as follows: Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract. Kandinsky also calls the means of painting 'abstract', so long as they are grasped in their purity. To the extent that they are abstract, colours and drawings are likewise inscribed in the equation formulated above, the equation which forms the original dimension of Being itself. In this respect, we have just discovered the true meaning of the concept of abstraction applied to painting.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 11

• Even if this historical genesis is true and does have the merit of making Kandinsky's evolution more or less analogous to those of other great artists of his time and thereby 'comprehensible', it nonetheless falsifies the true meaning of abstract painting to the point of completely concealing its rationality. The problem of pictorial representation did not come to be reconceived due to a crisis of objectivity that is more or less analogous on the aesthetic plane to what it was in the scientific domain, and in particular, the physics of the period. It does not come from a reworking of perceptual representation, either. Kandinsky's abstraction came from a sudden failure of the object, its inability to define the content of the work any longer. This abstraction, this content -- the 'abstract content' -- is invisible life in its ceaseless arrival into itself. This continual emergence of life, its eternally living essence, provides the content of painting and at the same time imposes a project on the artist, namely, that of expressing this content and the pathetic profusion of Being. 'Abstract' no longer refers to what is derived from the world at the end of a process of simplification or complication or at the end of the history of modern painting; instead, it refers to what was prior to the world and does not need the world in order to exist. It refers to the life that is embraced in the night of its radical subjectivity, where there is no light or world.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 16

Emotion or the true origin of painting according to Kandinsky

• As usual, history reverses the true order of things, the ontological order of their foundation. Kandinsky never truly asked himself what would replace the object and what painting would be able to paint from then on. Ever since a walk in the countryside around Munich where the violence of a colour perceived in the undergrowth gave rise to an intense emotion and he decided to paint what surrounded this colour -- the view of this woods -- in order to represent this emotion, he knew with a knowledge that no reflection can clarify and that no history precedes, with a knowledge that is constituted by this emotion itself, that he wanted to paint this emotion and this emotion was the only thing that he would paint thereafter. This was the content of all possible paintings: the profusion of life in himself, its intensification and exaltation.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 16

• Art opens us to a metaphysical knowledge of an entirely different nature (that 'objective' knowledge of the external world): it is a knowledge without object. Life in its ontological milieu, a life which embraces itself entirely without ever separating from itself and without been placed in front of itself like an object. We said that no path leads to life, except for life itself. One must stand within life in order to gain access to it: one must begin from life. Kandinsky just showed us the point of departure for painting -- it is an emotion, a more intense mode of life. The content of art is this emotion. The aim of art is to transmit it to others. The knowledge of art develops entirely within life; it is the proper movement of life, its movement of growth, of experiencing itself more strongly.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 18

The spiritual in art understood as a way of salvation

• The title of Kandinsky's first great theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular (1912) which had a huge influence, thus has a rigorous meaning. It bears a twofold judgment, both on this epoch whose distress is perceived by Kandinsky and on the true reality of things. Our time is a distressed time because it is forgetful of reality and has abandoned itself to the increasing objectivism promoted by science. The ideological fulfillment of this type of thought which is given over to the External and thus deprived of what is essential is naturalism, to which the stiff and empty art from the nineteenth century provides overwhelming testimony. Its practical consequence is the materialism that spreads the negation of life's true essence across all the spheres of life, thereby offering itself as a sort of concrete nihilism whose true name is death. Faced with this situation, On the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular offers a programme of revitalization.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 19

• Art accomplishes a discovery, an extraordinary discovery: it places before our wondering eyes an unexplored domain of new phenomena that have been forgotten, if not hidden or denied. These are the phenomena in fact that open our access to what alone matters in the end: ourselves. Art is not only a theoretical proof of this invisible and essential reality of our being: it does not give it as something to be seen as an object; instead, it makes use of it: it is the exercise and development of it. We experience its certainty as something that must be, much like one experiences love. This certainty is absolutely identical to our life. All other certainties -- those of the sciences included -- pale and break down in comparison to it. Because art accomplishes the revelation of the invisible reality in us with an absolute certainty, it is a salvation. In a society like ours which is divorced from life -- either by being content to flee it in the external world or by stating the explicit negation of it -- it is the sole salvation possible.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 20

The power of expression of linear forms and lines

• The possibility of expressing life through lines can be established, if we suppose that life is essentially -- in virtue of what makes it alive -- a force, and if we suppose that the forces acting simultaneously or successively on the point in such a way as to produce what we call straight, curved, or angular lines are in reality the forces of life, and that no other forces exist. Not only each force but each drive within the framework of subjectivity has its immediate equivalent in a specific linear form, since the force's intensity, its changes, the time of its action, its interruptions and its returns have their exact corollary in the genus (straight, curved or zigzag line) and accidents (slope of the curve, length of various segments and degree of the angles) of the linear forms described above.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 51

• Kandinsky was fascinated by the expressive power of linear forms. Lyricism is the pathos of a force whose triumphant effort enters into action and encounters no obstacle. Because the straight line results from the initiative of a single, unopposed force, its domain is that of the lyric. When two forces are present and thus enter into conflict, as this is the case with the curve or the zigzag line, we are in domain of drama. This dramatic aspect increases and becomes more 'hot', when the action of the two antagonistic forces is simultaneous. It is taken to its paroxysm when a large number of forces come from all sides and fuel the battle to the point of making it a sort of cosmic clash.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 52

The affective tonality or the inner sonority of colours

• Here let us call upon the founder of modern rationalism -- Descartes. In the eyes of one of the greatest philosophers, it was sheer absurdity to claim that colour is external and that it would be spread out in the external world and belong it. If I put my hand on a wall exposed to the sun, I think, 'The wall is hot'. But that is false. To be hot means to experience heat and to experience oneself as being hot. Only what experiences itself, only life, can experience heat and know what it is to be 'hot'. The same goes with pain. I think, 'My arm is in pain'. But, as an extended outer reality, my arm would not be able to experience anything whatsoever, not even pain. In an exteriority that is outside the self and does not touch or feel itself, nothing can be experienced: no pain, no suffering and no joy.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 71

• What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 71

The capacity of expression and communication of painting

• Painting does not use language. Abstract painting teaches us this, and this is what gives it its power of expression. If colour does not relate to the feelings of our soul through an external relation but finds its true being in them – as a pure sensation and a pure experience – then it does not even need to translate, through a means, the abstract content of our invisible life. It coincides with our invisible life and is its pathos: its suffering, its boredom, its neglect or its joy.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 72

• If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 73

The isolation of this popular painting and of abstract art

• It is not at all paradoxical that this popular painting would stand in total isolation today, that there would be practically no audience to view or understand these masterpieces of the one who Argan says 'determined the fate of contemporary art', that the admirable rooms of the Lenbach villa would remain empty all the time or even that the Beaubourg half of the collection donated by Nina Kandinsky would stagnate in the reserves where no one can see them. It just so happens that people today are no longer popular, spontaneous, instinctive, real or alive. A mediation has separated people from themselves. The media has replaced the free play of life and its sensibility, with the substitute of an unreal, artificial, stereotypical, consumer world where life can only flee instead of realize itself.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 73

• The experience of red does not consist of perceiving a red object or the colour red as such and of taking it as being red; instead, it consists of experiencing the power of the impression in ourselves. That is what eliminates all objective mediation from painting: the mediation of objects, the sense that they can be given, thought, 'culture' with its variations by time and place and ultimately the various theories that represent this non-existent mediation. That is also why abstract painting, which bypasses the mediation of language and culture understood as a group of representations, can be called a popular art. It is devoted to the expressive power and the direct communication of colour, its immediate experience in life.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 74

The monumental art and the synthesis of arts realized by Kandinsky

• Yet, we have shown that Kandinsky's dream for the monumentality of synthetic art does not rely on a mere increase of the number of means used. The Bauhaus programme was that the distribution of light and the use of space in a building with mural paintings and sculptures added to the mere functionality of the architecture. It gave the architecture an ability to respond to the multi-faced call of human sensibility and allowed it to exercise its potential richness. But, as a result of overturning the grandiloquence illustrated by the Neo-classicism of the 1830s, Kandinsky understood that the synthesis of the arts could only be subjective. It draws the single but differentiated principle of its constructions from the force of pathos, its inner conflicts and its fate. Kandinsky's abstraction works directly on the affective tonalities; it defines, discloses, sharpens, overlaps and combines them; it scrutinizes and brings out their history together with the secret transformations that they make. The monumentality it builds is the monumentality of life whose full powers are restored. Aesthetic creation is nothing but the construction of this inner monumentality.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 106

• The magnitude of an artwork only results from subjective forces. If these forces happen to be lacking, the edifice will crumble. The colossal works of fascism, socialist gigantism, and, in our eyes, the syncretism of the post-modern era are all the unfortunate testimony to this inner void. Because the exaltation of the powers of life can only be produced in life, life can do without these pretentious manifestations. The size of the material means does nothing for it. This can most surely be found in the small but very precise experiments where Kandinsky puts the elements of one single art or two different arts into relations of belonging or internal reciprocity. This is how he illustrated the stories of the Russian poet Remizov and composed his 'Sounds' collection, an admirable example of 'synthetic' work in which he decorated some of his own poems with coloured wood and other ones in black and white.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 106

The immanent imagination and the subjective forces of life

• This is the miracle of abstract painting: it constructs the unlimited monumentality of a work that no longer has a foothold in the visible world, that ignores its rules and does not seek anything from it, neither aid nor sanction, and that emerges with the pure force and infinite certainty of life. Withdrawn from the weight of things and from the inertial systems in which things are held and have their limited possibilities circumscribed, the work of art proceeds from the imagination. To imagine is to posit something other than what is and what is there right in front of us -- something other than the world. To imagine is to posit life.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 107

• It is the nature of great revolutions not to be limited to the sphere of the phenomena from which they are born. Their effects spread over everything that exists. Such is the case with Kandinskian imagination: it overturns our concept of the imagination. [...] The imagination belongs to life; it develops there entirely and does not leave it. It does not produce a world before itself with luminous images and phenomena that shine -- nor does it produce images that would be the reproduction of these phenomena, copies serving to replace them. The imagination is immanent, because life experiences itself in an immediacy that is never broken and never separated from itself: it is a pathos and the plenitude of an overflowing experience lacking nothing.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 107

• The imagination brings into being what has not yet taken place in being: hitherto inexperienced tones, impressions, emotions, feelings and forces. The imagination is indeed creative, even in a radical sense that gives it a positivity that was not glimpsed by classical thought. Art's creative imagination does not give us decoys to contemplate, for example the depth of a third dimension where there was only a flat surface. It has ceased to be, according to Kant's famous definition, the faculty of representing a thing in its absence. It has become the magical power of making something real. What type of thing is it then? Where and how does the imagination bring it into existence? We have already answered this: it gives a thing life, as a modality of life. What it creates is in fact this new modality. The movement of the imagination is thus nothing other than the movement of life, its internal becoming, the tireless process of its coming into itself, an arrival in which it is felt in ever more vast, differentiated and intense experiences.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 107

The essence of life or sensibility, the Art and the Cosmos

• Art will rediscover its way in a different type of nature (from the Galilean nature). The sensible qualities of this nature are not reduced to external features, as mere signs that are limited to 'representing' a foreign reality. These qualities are modes of life: impressions, tones and tonalities. This is what I mean: by tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature -- the true nature whose essence is Life -- is the cosmos. A dazzling claim from The Blaue Reiter Almanac, highlighted by Kandinsky himself, defines the Arche (or the Origin) where Art and Cosmos are identical: 'The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit'.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 137-138

• What are these beings that constitute the cosmos ? They are every thing and element of a thing, inasmuch as they are sensible. They only exist in this way, that is, in sensibility. In this respect, they are subjectivities. In this respect, the world is filled with resonances: all of the vibrations marking its repercussions in the soul and the spiritual action that they exert. In this respect, all matter -- while seemingly dead -- is a tonality and a living spirit. This much is clear: abstraction's reduction of the elements to their pure pictoriality signifies the reduction of the cosmos to its true reality. The question of abstract painting is the question of the universe.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 138

Conclusion on art and the resurrection of eternal life

• Because it is situated in subjectivity, borne by it, and inseparable from its dynamism and emotion, every concrete object is ultimately a cosmos. The geometrical world of the Bauhaus is thus slowly transformed. The sphere is deformed, thickened, elongated and slowly balanced; it becomes a transparent jellyfish with incandescent filaments caressed by the underwater currents. In this place without heaviness, where weight changes into lightness, forms wander about without their substance -- bodies of light, glorious bodies, bodies of life. They are organic forms with clear and cold colours, all kinds of protozoa, parts of insects, outlines of foliage -- creatures from another world with another nature reveal the nature of all nature, every possible world, and consequently our own world.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 142

• We gaze petrified at the hieroglyphs of the invisible, as they too stand motionless or only slowly change against the background of a nocturnal sky. We watch forces that slumbered within us, waiting stubbornly and patiently for millennia, even from the beginning of time. These forces explode into the violence and gleam of colours; they open spaces and engender the forms of the worlds. The forces of the cosmos are awakened within us. They lead us outside of time to join in their celebration dance and they do not let go of us. They do not stop – because not even they believed that it was possible to attain 'such happiness'. Art is the resurrection of eternal life.
  • Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 142

Books on Religion and Christianity

I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)

Introduction on language and the Truth of Christianity

• I do not intend to ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false,” or to establish, for example, the former hypothesis. Rather, what will be in question here is 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. We are trying to understand the form of truth that circumscribes the domain of Christianity, the milieu in which it spreads, the air that it breathes, one might say – because there are many sorts of truths, many ways of being true or false. And we are also perhaps trying to get away from the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and that, as much in and of itself as in its multiple implications, determines the world in which we live.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 1

• Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that, taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. Since a word has nothing in itself that is identical or similar to what is in the thing, it could as well be united with any other thing whatever. One could use the same name for two different things or else attribute several names to the same thing. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it, in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it. Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 9

The truth of the world and the visible appearance of things

• From these brief preliminary indications it follows that the concept of truth is twofold, designating both what shows itself and the fact of self-showing. What shows itself is the gray sky or the equality of radii in a circle. But the fact of something showing itself has nothing to do with what shows itself, with the gray of the sky or with geometric properties, and is even totally indifferent to what shows itself. The proof of this is that a blue sky can show itself to us as well, just as geometric properties, other forms, or even the fury of peoples killing each other, the beauty of a painting, the smile of a child. The fact of self-showing is as indifferent to what shows itself as the light to what it illuminates – shining, according to Scripture, on the just as well as the unjust. But the fact of self-showing is indifferent to all that shows itself only because by its nature it differs from all that, whether it may be: clouds, geometric properties, fury, a smile. The fact of self-showing, considered in itself and as such – that is the essence of truth.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 13

• Here we may perceive the seriousness of the way in which the world’s truth undermines everything it makes seen, everything that it makes true. To the extent, then, that the truth is a placing outside, seizing everything to render it manifest, it actually casts the thing outside itself at every instant. This putting-outside-itself by no means signifies a simple transfer of the thing from one place to another – as if, in such a displacement, it remained similar to itself, at most receiving this new property of showing itself. Rather, this coming-into-appearance in the “outside itself” of the world signifies that it is the thing itself that finds itself cast outside itself. It is fractured, broken, cleaved in two, stripped of its own reality – in such a way that, now deprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world's Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 18

The Truth according to Christianity or the self-revelation of God

• It is the first decisive characteristic of the Truth of Christianity that it in no way differs from what it makes true. Within it there is no separation between the seeing and what is seen, between the light and what it illuminates. And this is because there is in that Truth neither Seeing nor seen, no Light like that of the world. From the start, the Christian concept of truth is given as irreducible to the concept of truth that dominates the history of Western thought, from Greece to contemporary phenomenology. This traditional concept of truth determines not only most of the philosophical currents that have succeeded one another until the present day but even more so the ideas currently held about truth within the domain of scientific knowledge and within common sense, which is more or less impregnated with the scientific ideal. It is precisely when the Christian concept of Truth ceases to determine the collective consciousness of society, as it did in the Middle Ages, that the divorce from the Greek idea of a true knowledge and a true science appears in full force. And the consequence is, if not the suppression of the Christian concept, then at least its repression into the realm of private life, or even superstition.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 24

• What, then, is a truth that differs in no way from what is true? If truth is manifestation grasped in its phenomenological purity – phenomenality and not the phenomenon – then what is phenomenalized is phenomenality itself. The phenomenalization of phenomenality itself is a pure phenomenological matter, a substance whose whole essence is to appear – phenomenality in its actualization and in its pure phenomenological effectivity. What manifests itself is manifestation itself. What reveals itself is revelation itself; it is a revelation of revelation, a self-revelation in its original and immediate effulgence. With the idea of a pure Revelation – of a revelation whose phenomenality is the phenomenalization of phenomenality itself, of an absolute self-revelation that dispenses with whatever is other than its own phenomenological substance – we are in the presence of the essence that Christianity posits as the principle of everything. God is that pure Revelation that reveals nothing other than itself. God reveals Himself. The Revelation of God is his self-revelation.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 25

• If by chance “the Revelation of God” were addressed to people, this would not consist in the unveiling of a content foreign to its own essence and somehow transmitted to a few initiates. To reveal Himself to people could only signify for God that He gives to them a share if his eternal self-revelation. Christianity is nothing other, truly, than the awe-inspiring and meticulous theory of this givenness of God’s self-revelation shared with man.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 25

The absolute phenomenological Life and the self-revelation of God

• Although it is not thought or some other form of knowledge, although it is not the truth of the world, that gives access to the Revelation of God, at least a single possibility persists, already mentioned as a simple matter of fact and now rendered unimpeachable. Access to God, understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to Him, is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so. There where God originally arrives in himself, in the phenomenalization of phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality proper – there alone is access to God. It is not that thought is lacking and so we cannot accede to the Revelation of God. Quite the contrary, it is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God – the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 27

• Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 27-28

The escape of reality and of the world by Christianity

• In the self-revelation of Life reality is given birth, any possible reality. […] This is why, from now on, we must reject an idea found in Hegel’s philosophy – and in its by-products such as its most tenacious expression, Marxism – before determining in turn many of the commonplaces of modern thought. This is the idea that Christianity is a flight from reality, inasmuch as it is a flight from the world. But if reality resides in Life and only in Life, this reproach disintegrates to the point of ultimately appearing as a non-sense. […] The content of Life – what it experiences – is Life itself, refers back to a more fundamental condition, to the very essence of the “Living,” to a mode of revelation whose specific phenomenality is the flesh of a pathos, pure affective material, in which any cleavage, any separation, finds itself radically excluded. It is uniquely because such is the phenomenological matter of which this revelation is made that we can say that in this revelation what reveals and what is revealed are one and the same. It is this pathetik phenomenological substance of living that defines and contains any conceivable “reality.”
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 30

Love or the primordial self-enjoyment of God

• Experiencing oneself as Life does is to enjoy oneself [jouir de soi]. Enjoyment does not presuppose any differences similar to those in which the world is born: it is homogeneous phenomenological material, a monolithic affective body whose phenomenality is affectivity as such. The self-revelation of Life is not a formal structure that can be conceived on the basis of “outside oneself” and in terms of its own structures, since these are bypassed, overcome while being maintained in this very bypassing. The self-revelation of life is its enjoyment, the primordial self-enjoyment that defines the essence of Living and thus of God himself. According to Christianity, God is Love. Love is nothing other than the self-revelation of God understood as in its pathetik phenomenological essence, specifically, the self-enjoyment of absolute Life. This is why the Love of God is the infinite love in which he eternally loves himself, and the revelation of God is none other than this Love.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 31

The relation of Life to the living in Christianity

• The relation of Life to the living is the central thesis of Christianity. Such a relation is called, from life’s viewpoint, generation, and from the living’s viewpoint, birth. It is Life that generates any conceivable living thing. But this generation of the living can be accomplished by Life only insofar as it is capable of engendering itself. A Life that is capable of engendering itself, what Christianity calls God, we are calling absolute Life – or, for reasons that will emerge later, absolute phenomenological Life. Insofar as the relation of Life to the living occurs inside God himself, it is produced as the generation of the First Living at the core of Life’s self-generation. Insofar as such a relation concerns not just God’s relationship with himself but also his relationship with man, it is produced as the generation of transcendental man at the core of God’s self-generation. […] What is generated in Life as the First Living Christianity calls the first-born Son, or the only Son, or, in Hebraic tradition, the Christ or Messiah. What is generated in Life as man, that is to say, as man himself, it calls “Son of God”. Absolute Life, as it engenders itself and, in doing so, engenders the First Living, is what Christianity calls Father.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 51

The real man understood as “Son of God”

• To understand man on the basis of Christ, who is himself understood on the basis of God, in turn rests on the crucial intuition of a radical phenomenology of Life, which is precisely that of Christianity: namely, that Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ, and for man. This is so because there is but a single and selfsame essence of Life, and, more radically, a single and selfsame Life. This Life – that self-generates itself in God and that, in its self-generation, generates the transcendental Arch-Son as the essential Ipseity in which this self-generation comes about – is the Life from which man himself takes his transcendental birth, precisely since he is Life and is explicitly defined as such within Christianity. He is the Son of this unique and absolute Life, and thus the Son of God. The tautological expression “Son of God” – tautological in that there are no sons except in Life and thus in God – conceals the profound truth that man’s essence, that which makes him possible as what he really is, is not man as we understand him, and still less some humanitas or other. Rather, it is the essence of divine life – that which makes him one of the living, and that alone.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 101

Man’s forgotten of his condition of “Son of God”

• The interpretation of man as “Son of God,” or, more precisely, as “Son within the Son,” has many weighty implications. But before we pursue them, there is one question that cannot be differed. If men are really Sons of God within Christ, how can we explain that so few of them know this and remember it? If they bear within them this divine Life in all its immensity – because there is no other Life but that, and the living can only bow before its profusion – how can we understand why they are so unhappy? In the end, it is not the tribulations visited upon them by the world that oppress them; rather, it is with themselves that they are so discontented. It is their own incapacity to achieve their desires and plans, it is their hesitations, their weakness and lack of courage, that provoke the deep malaise that accompanies them throughout their miserable existence. If they never tire of attributing the cause of their failure to circumstances or to others, it is only to fool themselves and to forget that the real cause lies within themselves. As Kierkegaard puts it: “Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be himself.” But how can one despair of this me if it is nothing less than the coming into us of God within Christ? Such despair is possible only if, one way or another, man has forgotten the splendor of his initial condition, his condition of Son of God – his condition as “Son within the Son.” It is this forgetting that we must now attempt to understand.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 132

Wisdom in traditional philosophical thought

• If, in traditional philosophical thought, it is wisdom – a wisdom built upon knowledge, careful thought, judgment, and so one – that ought to lead to beatitude, then we must recognize that this beatitude has nothing to do with the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. But the banishment of knowledge – any form of knowledge, whether philosophical or scientific, intelligible or sensory – in the process of Christian salvation is not gratuitous but rather is motivated by the very nature of the expected salvation. In order to vanquish the Forgetting that renders the absolute Life Immemorial, the Forgetting in which thought holds Life, we would 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 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 the consciousness’s progress through various kinds of knowledge that will secure salvation.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 153

The Christian ethic and the subjective reality of action

• Thus the Christian ethic presents itself from the start as a displacement from the realm of the word, meaning also of thought and knowledge, to the realm of action. This displacement is decisive for three reasons. First, it leads the world’s truth back to Life’s. Second, dissipating all the illusions that traditionally link the truth to representation, to theory, and to their ecstatic foundation, it unequivocally relates Life’s Truth to the process of its self-engendering, to the power of an action. Third, in life, it is precisely no longer the ego’s power, the I Can constitutive of its will and freedom, that is at issue, but the “Father’s Will,” or the process of absolute Life’s self-engendering. Now the ethic can link the two lives, the ego’s and God’s, in such a way that it assures the former’s salvation in practice. To do the Father’s will designates the mode of life in which the Self’s life takes place, so that what is henceforth accomplished in it is absolute Life in its essence and by its requirements.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 165-166

• Christianity proceeds to overthrow the concept of reality as well as that of action. In tearing action from external Being and from the process of objectivation leading to it, Christianity situates action in its rightful place, where to do is to make an effort, take pains, suffer to the point that the suffering of this effort is changed into the joy of satisfaction. To do refers to life’s internal pathetik self-transformation and finds there its sole motivation, its unique purpose, not to mention the very milieu in which it is accomplished and is possible. So, surprising as it may seem at first glance to the naïve realism of ordinary perception, the subjective conception of action is the only one that preserves its possibility. If we consider action as an objective process similar to a natural process, to a cascade of water that makes a turbine turn, then nothing distinguishes this so-called action from some material process, and there is no longer any action, but only objective phenomena. Human acting and the effort and suffering involved are reducible to causal sequences, to “the action of gravity,” for example.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 172-173

The Christian salvation and mercy practice

• The genius of the Christian ethic is to point out in the simplest of ordinary lives, accessible to all and comprehensible by all, the concrete conditions – the circumstances, as it were – in which the extraordinary event is produced by which the ego’s life will be changed into God’s. As an example, let us consider the parable of the Good Samaritan (whose good deed is terrifyingly represented by Luca Giordano in the painting in the Rouen Museum). Someone like the priest or Levite, who passes by without helping the man robbed by brigands who has been thrown down and is covered with wounds – that person now advances along the route to perdition without knowing it. By contrast, the Samaritan, setting aside his own business, all preoccupations about himself or his interests, is concerned only with the unfortunate one. Taking him to an inn, having him tended, paying for everything – in short, practicing mercy, he has done everything that could be done to “inherit eternal life” (Luke 10:25-37). If such is the metaphysical destiny of the protagonists in the parable, it is good that acts are what count.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 166

• Precise behaviors of the kind indicated in the New Testament were summarized by medieval theology as the “seven works of corporal mercy” (to feed those who are hungry, clothe those who are naked, care for the sick, release captives, visit prisoners, and so on) and of spiritual mercy (teach the ignorant, convert sinners, console the afflicted, pardon one’s enemies, pray for the living and the dead, and the like). It is not conformity with an external model of conduct that is required. Rather, within each person who performs each of the stated acts of mercy, salvation flows. Salvation is the second birth entry into the new Life. The action of the Christian ethic places the living person into the absolute Life that was before him and, giving him to himself, gave him life in his condition as Son.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 166-167

• This is because the doing carries life as its irresistible presupposition, because there is no doing unless given to itself in life’s self-givenness, unless the work of salvation is entrusted to it. Entrusted to doing and to action, but not to any old action. If we examine the list of works of mercy, we see that is not a simple enumeration of empirical attitudes and conduct that would be beneficial to people who practice them. A hidden contrast runs through them, but not an opposition between simple precepts still removed from their achievement in practice, which is demanded as the single road that leads to life. Instead, the opposition appears on the level of the action itself. It distinguishes and contrasts two types of action – in effect, one that leads to life and the other to death.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 167

• The action implied in merciful works is now quite clear. Whether it involves nourishing those who are hungry, clothing those who are naked, caring for sick, or another act, the manner of acting in these various actions has ceased to concern the ego that acts or to relate to it in any fashion; a common trait equally determines them all: forgetting oneself. […] Hence, what kind of action is acting in works of mercy, if it is not a power proper to the transcendental ego that says “I Can”? In this ego there is no power different from its own, different from all the powers it possesses, except for the hyper-power of absolute Life that gave it to itself in giving itself to itself. In works of mercy – and this is why they are “works” – a decisive transmutation takes place by which the ego’s power is extended to the hyper-power of absolute Life in which it is given to itself.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 168-169

The critique of the Law and of its powerlessness to act

• Here arises a critique of the Law within Christianity, formulated with rare violence by Christ, and for which Paul finds and wonderfully explains the ultimate motivation, which relates it to the Christianity’s central thesis, which places reality within life. It is precisely because the Law is transcendent and exterior to life and perceived by life as beyond it that it is deprived of reality. And by the same token, it is deprived of what finds in life’s reality the possibility of being fulfilled: action. The Law is thus unreal and powerless. Because it unites powerlessness with unreality, the Law places the whole system organized around it (especially the people to whom it is addressed) in an untenable situation. On the one hand, it prescribes, in the form of injunctions that are perceived quite clearly and thus indubitably: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and so on. On the other hand, however, this clearly enunciated commandment (not susceptible to being used for trickery) is by itself incapable of producing the action that suits it. “Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law” (John 7:19).
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 176-177

• To see what ought to be done without possessing the power to do so, to see what ought to be done while finding oneself deprived (in and through this seeing, in and through this commandment) of the ability to execute it – this is the dramatic and desperate situation in which the Law has placed each person, despite the fact that it is addressed to him from outside as a transcendent Law. A Law that defines the infraction and the crime, that opens before people the gaping possibility without giving them the power to avoid either, is a cursed Law. An absence of Law would be better, a state of innocence in which the possibility of crime was not every moment within sight. The Law, on the contrary, curses all those who do not put it into practice – in fact, it curses everybody, since it gives nobody the power to follow it. The Law multiples crime, as the Apostle says in a striking phrase: “The law was added so that trespass might increase” (Romans 5:20).
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 177-178

The Sabbath and the rest on Sunday or Saturday

• As for Christ, he has justified his act of healing on the Sabbath by identifying it with the original essence of acting, itself identical with the original essence of Life, that is to say, with the process of its unceasing self-generation. It is because the process of absolute Life’s self-generation does not cease, because “the Father is always at his work,” that Christ, too, does not cease working, not even on the Sabbath day; “I, too, am working.” By identifying his acting with God’s absolute acting, with the unceasing process of self-engendering of absolute Life, Christ refers to himself unequivocally and, once more, as consubstantial in his acting with the action of this process. He is the transcendental Arch-Son cogenerated in the process of self-generation of Life as the essential Ipseity, and the First Living, in which (and in the form of which) this process is alone accomplished. This is why it is given to him, as to the Father, to work – and work without cease. Life does not know rest on Sunday or Saturday – which is better for all livings, moreover.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 181

The Commandment of love of Christian ethic

• The radical and essential pre-destination implied in the condition of Son (identical to his Arch-generation) is what constitutes the principle of the Christian ethic, the Commandment. John perceives this Commandment in its original form, in God’s phenomenological life and identical with it. He calls it God’s love. God’s love is the first and only Commandment of the ethic. “The commandments ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9). […] The Commandment is only a Commandment of love because Life is love. Life is love because it experiences itself infinitely and eternally. Because it is Life, “God is love,” as John says (1 John 4:8). It is because God (as absolute Life) is love that he commands Love. He commands it of all the living by giving them life, by generating them in himself as his Sons, those who, feeling themselves in infinite Life’s experience of self and its eternal love, love themselves with an infinite and eternal love, loving themselves inasmuch as they are Sons and feeling themselves to be such – in the same way that they love others, inasmuch as they are themselves Sons and inasmuch as they feel themselves to be such. If the Commandment only prescribes love because the One who commands is himself love, it is because far from resulting from the Commandment, love is on the contrary the presupposition of it.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 185-186

Faith or the absolute certitude of life to live

• Faith is not produced in the field of knowledge, as a sort of knowledge of inferior degree, whose object is presumed without being truly seen, and perhaps without ever being visible – a knowledge that is not only inferior, then, but illusory. Faith is not a signifying consciousness that is still empty, incapable of producing its content by itself. Faith is not of the realm of consciousness, but rather of feeling. It comes from the fact that nobody ever gave himself life, but rather that life gives itself, and gives itself to the living, as what submerges him – from the fact that in life he is totally living, as long as life gives him to himself. Faith is the living’s certitude of living, a certitude that can come to him ultimately only from absolute Life’s own certitude of living absolutely, from its self-revelation, without reservation, in the invincible force of its Second Coming. Having entered into him in its own certitude that life is for living, Faith is within the life of each transcendental me as the feeling it has of absolute Life. From this comes its irrepressible power, not that of the transcendental ego placed in itself and in its I Can in absolute Life’s self-givenness, but the power of this self-givenness, its invincible and eternal embrace. This is why Faith never takes its force from a temporal act and never mingles with it. It is the Revelation to man of his condition of Son, the grasping of man in Life’s self-grasping.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 193

The abyssal Hunger and Thirst for the infinite love of God

• For someone feeling himself as the source of all his powers and all his sentiments, especially his pleasures, someone who lives in the permanent illusion of being a self-sufficient ego having only from itself its condition as ego as well as all that thereby becomes possible for it (acting, feeling, enjoying) – to that person what is lacking is no less than what constantly gives this ego to itself and is not it: absolute Life’s self-givenness, in which this ego is given to itself and everything else is simultaneously given to it (its powers and pleasures). This terrifying lack in each ego of what gives it to itself – what it is missing even when it feels itself as lacking for nothing, as sufficing to itself, and especially in the pleasure it has of being itself and believing itself the source of this pleasure – this is what determines the great Rift. This lack and absolute void is the Hunger that nothing can satisfy, the Hunger and Thirst for Life, which the ego has stopped feeling in itself at the same time as its condition as Son, when, in pleasure, it takes itself for the source of this pleasure and identifies with it as its own property. “Woe to those who are well fed now, for you will go hungry” (Luke 6;25).
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 206-207

• What is one hungry for, in this Hunger that comes to all those who are well fed, as the misfortune that none of them will escape? What is lacking to each person who sees himself as the site and source of his pleasures and powers, except the power that gave him to himself, and doing so, gave him, in experiencing himself, the possibility of experiencing the power that gave him to himself to enjoy himself and to enjoy the power that gave him the joy of self? It is absolute Life, for which all those who are “well fed” will hunger if each is satisfied with himself as the source if this satisfaction. That they are hungry for absolute Life – whether this absolute Life is the single Food that can satisfy the Hunger, especially the hunger of those who are well fed, or else the sole Water able to quench the Thirst of all those struck by the curse because they live their satisfaction and pleasure as their own doing – is stated in the uncompromising words of the one who speaks about Life as about himself and of himself as of Life: the Arch-Son, in whom Life generates and reveals itself. “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32); “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14). This Food, finally, is the self-accomplishment of absolute Life, as is also stated: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (John 4:34).
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 207

The second birth and the hearing of the Word of Life

• To be born is not to come into the world. To be born is to come into life.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 59

• Thus the possibility of hearing the Word of Life is itself for each person and for each living Self contemporaneous with his birth and consubstantial with his condition of Son. I hear forever the sound of my birth, which is the sound of Life, the unbreakable silence in which the Word of Life does not stop speaking my own life to me, in which my own life, if I hear the word speaking within it, does not stop speaking the Word of God to me.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 226

• The speech of the Word of Life is not made up of words lost in the world and stripped of power. Its word is its embrace, the pathetik embrace in which, holding itself, it holds the person to whom it speaks by giving him life – by giving him to be embraced within this embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself. The embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself is its love, the infinite love with which it loves itself. Its word is that of love, in the end the only one that the anguished people of our day, lost in world’s ennui, still want to hear. But what does this word say to them? Just itself, just their own life, too – the unspeakable happiness of experiencing oneself and of Living.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 226-227

The emotional opening of the living to his own essence

• Man’s forgetting of his condition of Son relates not only to the Concern for the world in which he constantly invests himself. As we have seen, it is the phenomenological essence of Life that makes Life what is most forgotten, the Immemorial to which no thought leads. Because Forgetting defines its phenomenological status, life is ambiguous. Life is what knows itself without knowing it. That it suddenly knows it is neither incidental nor superfluous. The knowledge by which one day life knows what since the beginning it knew without knowing it is not of a different order than the knowledge of life itself: it is a pathetik upheaval in which life feels its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection. This possibility, which is always open to life, to suddenly experience its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection, is what makes it a Becoming. But then, when and why is this emotional upheaval produced, which opens a person to his own essence? Nobody knows. The emotional opening of the person to his own essence can only be born of the will of life itself, as this rebirth that lets him suddenly experience his eternal birth. The Spirit blows where it wills.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 232

The forgetting by men of their condition of “Son of God”

• That one should love the other is a prescription any ethic could accommodate, as uncertain as its foundation might be. An ideology lacking any foundation, as for example democratic socialism in our day, could equally lay claim to it. But that one should love the other who is your enemy, even if he is depraved, degenerate, hypocritical, or criminal, is in effect only possible if this other person is not what he appears, not even this I Can, the transcendental ego who has committed all this misdeeds. It is only if, as Son, the other carries within him Life and its essential Ipseity that he may, in his depravity, be the object of love, or rather not him – in the sense of a person, the one whom other people call a person – but the power that gave him to himself and constantly gives him to himself even in his depravity. The command is to love the other insofar as he is in Christ and in God, and on this condition alone.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 257

• This is why, as soon as this condition fails to appear, the imprescriptible love of others also disappears. The other is now just another person, a person as people are – hypocrites, liars, ambitious, sinful, egotistical, blind, fighting ferociously for their own advantage and prestige, no less combative toward others who oppose their projects and desires. Forgetful of their veritable condition and the other’s veritable condition, they behave toward themselves and others as mere people. Then the whole edifying morality that wishes to found itself on the mere person, on the rights of man, discovers its emptiness, its prescriptions are flouted, and the world is given over to horror and sordid exploitation, to massacres and genocides. It is not by chance that in the twentieth century the disappearance of “religious” morality has given rise not to a new morality, a “secular morality,” albeit a morality without any definite foundation, but to the downfall of any morality and to the terrifying and yet daily spectacle of that downfall.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 257-258

Conclusion on men replaced by abstractions

• “During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them” (Revelation 9:6). Men debased, humiliated, despised and despising themselves, trained in school to despise themselves, to count for nothing – just particles and molecules; admiring everything lesser than themselves and execrating everything that is greater than themselves. Everything worthy of love and adoration. Men reduced to simulacra, to idols that feel nothing, to automatons. And replaced by them – by computers and robots. Men chased out of their work and their homes, pushed into corners and gutters, huddled on subway benches, sleeping in cardboard boxes. Men replaced by abstractions, by economic entities, by profits and money. Men treated mathematically, digitally, statistically, counted like animals and counting for much less.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 275

• Men turned away from Life’s Truth, caught in all the traps and marvels where this life is denied, ridiculed, mimicked, simulated – absent. Men given over to the insensible, become themselves insensible, whose eyes are empty as a fish’s. Dazed men, devoted to specters and spectacles that always expose their own invalidity and bankruptcy; devoted to false knowledge, reduced to empty shells, to empty heads – to “brains.” Men whose emotions and loves are just glandular secretions. Men who have been liberated by making them think their sexuality is a natural process, the site and place of their infinite Desire. Men whose responsibility and dignity have no definite site anymore. Men who in the general degradation will envy the animals. Men will want to die – but not Life. It is not just any god today who is still able to save us, but – when the shadow of death is looming over the world – that One who is Living.
  • Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 275

Incarnation: A philosophy of Flesh (2000)

• Car notre chair n'est rien d'autre que cela qui, s'éprouvant, se souffrant, se subissant et se supportant soi-même et ainsi jouissant de soi selon des impressions toujours renaissantes, se trouve, pour cette raison, susceptible de sentir le corps qui lui est extérieur, de le toucher aussi bien que d'être touché par lui. Cela donc dont le corps extérieur, le corps inerte de l'univers matériel, est par principe incapable.
  • Because our flesh is nothing but what, feeling itself, suffering itself, sustaining itself and bearing itself and so enjoying from itself according to always reborning impressions, is able, for this reason, to feel the body which is exterior to it, to touch it as well as being touched by it. What the exterior body, the lifeless body of the material universe, is by principle incapable.
    • Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 8

• Aucun objet n'a jamais fait l'expérience d'être touché.
  • No object has ever had the experience of being touched.
    • Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 295

• Ma chair n’est donc pas seulement le principe de la constitution de mon corps objectif, elle cache en elle sa substance invisible. Telle est l’étrange condition de cet objet que nous appelons un corps : il ne consiste nullement en ces espèces visibles auxquelles on le réduit depuis toujours ; en sa réalité précisément il est invisible. Personne n’a jamais vu un homme, mais personne n’a jamais vu non plus son corps, si du moins par « corps » on entend son corps réel.
  • So my flesh is not only the principle of the constitution of my objective body, it hides in it its invisible substance. Such is the strange condition of this object that we call a body : it doesn’t consist at all in the visible appearance to which we have always reduced it ; precisely in its reality it is invisible. Nobody has ever seen a man, but nobody has ever seen his body either, if by "body" we understand his real body.
    • Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 221

• Notre chair porte en elle le principe de sa manifestation, et cette manifestation n’est pas l’apparaître du monde. En son auto-impressionnalité pathétique, en sa chair même, donnée à soi en l’Archi-passibilité de la Vie absolue, elle révèle celle-ci qui la révèle à soi, elle est en son pathos l’Archi-révélation de la Vie, la Parousie de l’absolu. Au fond de sa Nuit, notre chair est Dieu.
  • Our flesh carries in it the principle of its manifestation, and this manifestation is not the appearing of the world. In its pathetic self-impressionality, in its very flesh, given to itself in the Arch-passibility of absolute Life, it reveals the one which reveals itself to itself, it is in its pathos the Arch-revelation of Life, the Parousia of the absolute. In the depths of its Night, our flesh is God.
    • Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 373

Words of Christ (2002)

• La vie est incréée. Étranger à la création, étranger au monde, tout procès conférant la Vie est un procès de génération.
  • Life is uncreated. Foreign to creation, foreign to the world, every process conferring Life is a process of generation.
    • Michel Henry, Paroles du Christ, éd. du Seuil, 2002, p. 107

Quotes from the Novels of Michel Henry

L'amour les yeux fermés (1976)

• Le spectacle de la beauté qui s'incarne dans un être vivant est infiniment plus émouvant que celui de l'œuvre la plus grandiose.
  • The spectacle of the beauty which embodies itself in a living being is infinitely more touching than that of the work the most grandiose.
    • Michel Henry, L'Amour les yeux fermés, éd. Gallimard, 1976, p. 48