Michel Henry was a French philosopher and novelist born the 10th january 1922 at Haïphong (Vietnam) and who died the 3rd july 2002 at Montpellier (France).
Its work is based on phenomenology, which is the science of the phenomenon. The phenomenon is not what appears but the act of appearing. Its thought conducts him to the reversal of the Husserl phenomenology, which knows as phenomenon only the appear of the world, that's to say the exteriority. Michel Henry opposes to this conception of the phenomenality a radical phenomenology of the life.
Michel Henry defines the life in a phenomenological point of view as what possesses the faculty and the power to feel and to experience oneself in every point of its being. For Michel Henry, the life is essentially force and affect, it consists in a pure experience of itself which oscillates permanently between the suffering and the joy. The thought is just for him a mode of the life.
Michel Henry has done an important work on Marx, which he considers paradoxically as one of the first christian thinkers, because of the importance he gives in its thought to living work and to the living individual in which he sees the foundation of the economic reality.
The next book he intended to write must have been entitled « the clandestine subjectivity ». A title that evokes the condition of the life in the modern world et which is also probably an allusion to its commitment in the Resistance movement and its personal experience of clandestineness.
Some quotations from Michel Henry
- "The marxism is the whole of the misinterpretations that have been done about Marx." (Marx, a philosophy of the reality)
- "So it's not the autorealisation that the mediatic 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." (The barbarism)
- "The art is the resurrection of the eternal life." (Seeing the invisible, about Kandinsky)
- "The community is a subterranean affective water table and each one drinks the same water at this source and at this well that he is." (Material phenomenology)
- "No abstraction, no ideality has never been neither in position to produce a real action nor, by consequence, what only represents it." (From communism to capitalism)
- "When what feels nothing and doesn't feel oneself, has no desire and no love, is put at the principle of the organisation of the world, it's the time of madness that comes, because the madness has all lost except the reason." (From communism to capitalism)
- "I hear for ever the noise of my birth." (That's me the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity)
- "No object has never done the experience of being touched." (Incarnation)
Description of some books
About the problems of society
- La barbarie (The barbarism) : The culture, which is the auto-development of the life, is threatened in our society by the barbarism of the monstruous objectivity of the technoscience, whose ideologies reject all form of subjectivity, while the life is condamned to escape its anguish in the media universe.
- Du communisme au capitalisme, théorie d'une catastrophe (From communism to capitalism, theory of a catastrophe) : The collapse of the eastern communist systems corresponds to the failure of a system that pretended to deny the reality of life to the benefit of abstractions wrongly universals. But the death is also to the appointment in the empire of the capitalism and of the modern technique.
About the art
- Voir l'invisible, sur Kandinsky (Seeing the invisible, about Kandinsky) : The art can save from its confusion the abandoned man of our technical civilisation. This is this quest that has conducted Kandinsky to the creation of the abstract painting. This is no longer a matter to represent the world but our inner life, with lines and colors that correspond to forces and inner sonorities.
About the Christianity
- C'est moi la Vérité, pour une philosophie du christianisme (That's me the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity) : The Christianity opposes to the truth of the world the Truth of the Life, according to which the man is the Son of God. The autorevelation of the Life who experience itself in its invisible interiority is the essence of God that founds any individual. In the world, Jesus has the appearance of a man, but that’s in the Truth of the Life that he is the Christ, the First Living.
- Incarnation, une philosophie de la chair (Incarnation, a philosophy of the flesh) : The living flesh opposes radically to the material body. Because this is the flesh which, experiencing oneself, enjoying of oneself according to always reviving impressions, is able to feel the body which is exterior to it, to touch it and to be touched by it. That’s the flesh which allows us to know the body.
Bibliography of Michel Henry
Philosophical works
- L’Essence de la manifestation (1963)
- Philosophie et Phénoménologie du corps (1965)
- Marx :
- I. Une philosophie de la réalité (1976)
- II. Une philosophie de l’économie (1976)
- Généalogie de la psychanalyse. Le commencement perdu (1985)
- Voir l’invisible, sur Kandinsky (1988)
- Phénoménologie matérielle (1990)
- Du communisme au capitalisme. Théorie d'une catastrophe (1990)
- C'est moi la Vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (1996)
- Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair (2000)
Posthumous books
- Auto-donation. Entretiens et conférences (2002)
- Le bonheur de Spinoza (2003)
- Phénoménologie de la vie :
- Tome I. De la phénoménologie (2003)
- Tome II. De la subjectivité (2003)
- Tome III. De l’art et du politique (2003)
- Tome IV. Sur l’éthique et la religion (2004)
Literary works
- L’Amour les yeux fermés (1976)
- Le cadavre indiscret (1996)
Books on Michel Henry
- Colloque de Cerisy 1996 : Michel Henry, l’épreuve de la vie.
- Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska : Michel Henry, un philosophe de la vie et de la praxis.
- Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska : L’Art et la sensibilité. De Kant à Michel Henry.
- Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska : Michel Henry, passion et magnificence de la vie.
- Philippe Capelle : Phénoménologie et Christianisme chez Michel Henry.
External links about Michel Henry
An exhaustive biography as well as a complete summary of most of his books can be found on the french web site : http://www.michelhenry.com.
