Michel Henry's Practical Philosophy by Jeffrey Hanson;Brian Harding;Michael R. Kelly;

Author:Jeffrey Hanson;Brian Harding;Michael R. Kelly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350202788
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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The World or Life’s Fragility

A New Critical Reading of Henry’s Phenomenology of Life

P. Lorelle

From where does the world get its sensibility? This chapter hopes to suggest that the world gets its sensibility from life’s very fragility. Life is taken here in Michel Henry’s sense as the primordial “how” of any phenomenality, the affectivity of that which experiences itself through a self-affection. However, life has precisely not been thought by Henry in its fragility. Life’s self-affection is an indestructible self-affection. Life’s absoluteness, which consists in feeling its own indestructibility, is what Henry thinks as its absolute autonomy. Life would be irreducibly bound to itself and, as such, self-sufficient.

Yet, as this chapter will first try to show through a new critical reading of Henry, one cannot deduce the sensible world from life’s absolute autonomy. If life is not sensible in Henry,1 sensibility is fully alive. And Henry aims at explaining the world’s sensibility from life’s insensible mode of phenomenality. This deduction takes two different forms in Henry, giving rise to two different concepts of “world”: (1) Life’s objectification or exteriorization, elaborated by The Essence of Manifestation and never really questioned since;2 and (2) Life’s inner development, elaborated by Seeing the Invisible, Henry’s essay on Kandinsky. (1) If the world first appears in its exteriority to life, as this heterogeneous, objective, and non-affective mode of phenomenality, (2) the world also appears as an affective world, inhabited by life’s affectivity—that is, as a “cosmos” or a “lifeworld.” If both deductions fail to generate the world’s sensibility, it is not because of life’s “subjectivity”: Life is not a subject’s mode of phenomenality, as a being that would exclude any worldly being,3 but an ontological mode of phenomenality. Nor would such a failure be because of life’s phenomenological determination and structure as a “self-affection”: our point here is precisely to suggest that it would be better if the sensible manifestation of the world were thought about from this primordial mode of phenomenality. According to this contention, whether the concepts of “life” and “world” only exclude each other phenomenologically (as two different modes of phenomenality) or they do not exclude each other at all, nothing prevents the world from appearing as life, in the mode of self-affection—nothing but the “absoluteness” of this self-affection: an absoluteness that precisely ceases to be phenomenological. If Henry fails to generate sensibility from life’s self-affection, it is not because of life’s subjectivity, but rather because of life’s absoluteness.

In a second moment of this reflection, we will try to sketch the converse possibility of the world’s sensibility arising from life’s primordial fragility. There remains, in Henry, a vestige of this fragility in the concept of “self-negation” developed by La barbarie and conceived as life’s very own illness. Self-affection would be essentially subjected to a self-negation. Yet, life’s self-negation is not thought radically by Henry, and one needs to radicalize the essential dimension of this negation in order to reveal life’s essential fragility. Life’s self-affection would originally be exposed to the resistance of otherness, its autonomous character being always already negated.

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