Michel henry

Michel Henry (Hải Phòng, January 10, 1922 – Albi, July 3, 2002) was a French philosopher and novelist. He was mainly known for his philosophical works.

Biography

Henry was born in Vietnam (then Indochina) and was orphaned at seventeen days old, his father, a naval officer who was a pilot in the port of Haiphong, died in a car accident. His mother returned to France when he was seven years old, first to Lille, where he lived with his grandfather who was a musician, composer and director of the conservatory. His mother was a pianist, so he spent his childhood in an environment steeped in classical music. He then studied in Paris. au lycée Henri-IV In June 1943, he enlisted in the Resistance and joined the Haut Jura maquis under the code name of Kant, and had to come down from the mountains to fulfill his missions in Lyon occupied by the Germans and squared by the Nazis, a clandestine experience that will deeply mark his philosophy.

At the end of the war, he passed the aggregation of philosophy (1944), then he dedicated himself to preparing a thesis under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Paul Ricœur, Ferdinand Alquié and Henri Gouhier. He spent ten years writing his main thesis on The Essence of Manifestation, which was published in 1963, and in which he sought to overcome the main lack of all intellectualist philosophy, which is simply, according to him, ignorance of the real life of living individuals, as each one experiences it from within and lives it concretely in their own affective flesh, that is to say from a purely subjective point of view. The writing of his secondary thesis dedicated to Maine de Biran, Entitled Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, it was completed as early as 1950, but published only in 1965 for academic reasons.

After having taught at the Casablanca secondary school, at the Algiers secondary school then, in 1953-1954 at the Aix-en-Provence faculty as an assistant, Michel Henry was, since 1960, professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier where he patiently built his work moving away from philosophical fashions and dominant ideologies. The only subject of his philosophy is living subjectivity, that is, the real life of living individuals, that life that runs through all his work and that ensures its deep unity despite the diversity of the topics addressed.

Her novel L'Amour les yeux fermés won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.

Presentation of his philosophy

A phenomenology of life

Michel Henry's work is based on phenomenology, which is the science of phenomena. The French word "phenomenon" comes from the Greek "phainomenon" which designates "that which is shown coming to light". The object of phenomenology, however, is not what appears, such a thing or particular phenomenon, but the act of appearing itself. His reflection leads him to invert Husserl's phenomenology, which only knows the appearance of the world as a phenomenon, that is, exteriority. Michel Henry opposes to this conception of phenomenality a radical phenomenology of life.

A theory of subjectivity

While the posterity of Heidegger regained importance in France, and the question of the subject was relaunched, Michel Henry knew how to combine the most lively contributions of philosophy to produce what is today the last complete philosophical system. The “life phenomenological” or “absolute phenomenological life” is the basis or foundation of this philosophical system, it is its radical presupposition and the indeductible principle, and therefore the essence or foundation of all truth according to Michel Henry. Life thus escapes by essence and according to him from all distance, from all transcendence, confusing in the unity of an essay the speculative power of a principle and the material presence of an experience.

The reception of his philosophy

His thesis on The Essence of Manifestation was very well received by the members of the jury who recognized the intellectual value and seriousness of its author, but this thesis had little influence on his later work, as written by Alain David: “All the members of the jury (except perhaps Jean Wahl) have remained riveted, in their work on the history of philosophy or general philosophy, on the notion of horizon and world. The same goes for later readers, who are often admired. Everyone recognizes their exceptional power at work, without this recognition leading to questioning, or even generating emulators or disciples. And he adds that in the face of the fate of other famous theses, such as The phenomenology of perception, Words and things or Totality and infinity, remains &# 39;'The Essence of Manifestation a solitary work, mentioned but rarely cited, and not involving the shock one might expect.”

His work on Marx was rejected by heavily criticized Marxists, such as those who refused to see Marx as a philosopher and reduced him to an ideologue responsible for Marxism. Barbarism has been considered by some as a somewhat simplistic and overly cutting "anti-scientific" and "technophobic" discourse. However, according to him, the technique pursues its blind and unlimited development, most of the time challenging the sensitivity and the real or purely subjective life of living individuals.

The philosopher Renaud Barbaras criticizes the phenomenological definition of life as “self-affection” proposed by Michel Henry. According to Renaud Barbaras, “life [in fact] occupies a singular place within phenomenology”, be it in its founder Husserl, in Heidegger, in Merleau-Ponty or in Michel Henry. Life is, according to him, "at the heart of the great phenomenologies", and ultimately "what they seek to think". But according to him, it is very difficult "to highlight a phenomenological concept of life" in these authors, because "life is never thought by itself." According to him, this would effectively mean taking into account "the activity of a living organism that struggles with an external environment" or with its environment. Although in his phenomenology of life, Michel Henry fundamentally defines life as "pure self-affection", that is to say as "essentially foreign to exteriority or transcendence", since it precisely defines, for Michel Henry, "by the fact that it relates only to itself". A life fundamentally alien to the world, which in fact appears to Renaud Barbaras as "a life exhausted" or as "a life abandoned by the living".

The philosopher Renaud Barabas considers that the fundamental affection of life is not what Michel Henry calls “the fullness of life”, “the embrace of oneself” or even “self-affection ”, but on the contrary “the search” or “the desire” of the other, “separation” or “hetero affection”. A Desire that, according to him, manifests itself in a privileged way in “love desire or simply [ in] love". For Renaud Barbaras, the essence of affectivity is precisely desire, that is, what allows "the reception of any content" or "the very form of receptivity". sentence, at the end of his chapter on Desire as the essence of living: "Insofar as it is Desire, life is the place of all feelings and all tests, it is Affectivity".

It is in particular on these Henryian assumptions of subjectivity at work that Ghislain Deslandes, however, builds his phenomenology and his critique of the managerial condition. He explains that with Michel Henry, “work it stands as the very power to create value and therefore cannot, by itself, be compared to any other particular value. It is precisely the place where the economy can think of itself from an outside where the being of the action itself is produced. We are here in the opposite of the economic analysis of work, according to which it is a value among others, but treated as a negative magnitude –hence the notion of disutility, or negative utility, in economics.. (...) For Henry, instead, work is conceived as the condition of possibility of all forms of organization of the economy, as well as of the economic universe itself.”

Catherine Meyor, PhD in Educational Sciences at the University of Laval (Quebec) who teaches the fundamentals of education, has written a seminal book on Affectivity in Education, which is based on a phenomenological approach to affectivity, and which draws heavily on the philosophical work of Michel Henry. It offers a critique of the main approaches or current perspectives to understand affectivity in the context of education: 1°) the functional or behaviorist approach, for which sensitivity or individuality, existence or consciousness have no methodological value; 2°) the instrumental or cognitivist approach, "which reduces affectivity to the role of a tool or means", "an exclusively academic instrument placed at the service of the cognitive" through the notion of motivation, and that in reality does not give it any value of its own; 3°) and finally the therapeutic or curative approach that is that of psychoanalysis or humanistic-existential psychology, which simply aims to "treat the physical and/or mental disorders of an individual to cure them of their ailments", completely obscuring the strictly cultural dimension of life.

According to Catherine Meyor, “the functional, instrumental and therapeutic statutes seem to obscure, in part or in their entirety, this property, however inevitable and inalienable in affective experience, its sensitive essence. This eviction poses a problem and this to the extent that registering ourselves in the lived experience already allows us to perceive the evidence of sensitivity”. This leads her to formulate the main and fundamental objective of her book: “It is to the improvement of this evidence that our topic will be dedicated; Returning to sensibility will discursively take us along a renewed path of approach to affectivity and towards the enunciation of its sensible status, for now not yet formulated". As Catherine Meyor writes again, at the end of a section dedicated to the questioning of educational approaches to affectivity: “This subjectivity that goes through the modes of sensitivity to make itself felt and experienced, which is fundamentally affectivity: feeling and desire constitutive of The world, which is also the first point of culture, which is full presence working for its own amplification, which also exceeds itself, which, in a classic word, condenses the "human condition", is there, below and beyond any functional and therapeutic modality, what interests us, since both "in" as "after" of managerial approaches, remains intact and bright, unscathed by the tests of its resolve."

As for his works on Christianity, they seem to have rather disappointed certain professional theologians and Catholic exegetes who were content to point out and correct what they considered "dogmatic errors". His phenomenology of life was the subject of a pamphlet in The theological turn of French phenomenology of Dominique Janicaud who sees in the immanence of life only "the affirmation of a tautological interiority". Michel Haar reproached him for his "metaphysical dogmatism". For his part, Antoine Vidalin published in 2006 a book entitled La parole de la Vie, in whose preface Jean-Marie Hennaux, professor at the Institute of Theological Studies in Brussels, states that the phenomenology of the life of Michel Henry “ allows a renewed approach to all domains of theology" and that his philosophy "will allow renewing and deepening many theological questions".

Comparing the phenomenology of Michel Henry with the religious metaphysics of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Gabellieri strives to show that “the concept of Life as self-affection, and of God as self-enjoyment of an essentiality of Life with itself, cannot be enough to think of God" as Trinitarian Love: Michel Henry's phenomenology does not recognize the Holy Spirit, and consequently proves incapable of thinking, first of God, then of man, the essence of the gift, "which is not only the gift of being or of life, but rather the immanent transcendent self-gift whose phenomenality implies what goes beyond it." To Jean-Luc Marion, who rightly claimed to be ashamed by "the evacuation of the person of the Holy Spirit ” on Henry's thoughts on Christianity at the Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium in 1996, however, Michel Henry replied that he only spoke of it in his book I am the Truth, because the Holy Spirit is nothing in his eyes other than "in reciprocal superiority of the Father and the Son in the phenomenological unity of the manifestation of him ”.

As Alain David says in an article published in the Philosophical Review of France and abroad (number 3 July-September 2001), Michel Henry's thought seems too radical, it changes too much habits of thought, it is difficult to receive, even if all his readers say they are impressed by its "power", by the "amazing effect" of a thought that "cleans everything in its path", that "causes admiration" and, however, "it does not convey conviction." Because we don't know if we are facing "the violence of a prophetic word or sheer madness". Rolf Kühn also states in this same magazine, to explain the difficult reception of the work of Michel Henry, that "if one does not agree with any power of this world, inevitably submits to the silence and criticism of all possible powers, since every institution is reminded that its visible or apparent power is, in sum, only impotence, since no one it brings itself to absolute phenomenological life.”

His works have been the subject of numerous translations, mainly into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. A large number of books have been dedicated to him, especially in French, but also in German, Spanish and Italian. Several international conferences were also dedicated to the thought of Michel Henry in Beirut, Cerisy, Prague, Montpellier, Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve in 2010. Michel Henry is considered by specialists who know his work and recognize his value as one of the most important contemporary philosophers, and his phenomenology of life begins to "make school". A Michel Henry Study Center has been created at Saint Joseph University in Beirut under the direction of Professor Jad Hatem

Since 2006, the philosopher's archives have been deposited by his wife at the Catholic University of Louvain, where they now form the Michel Henry Archives Fund, housed under the direction of Professor Jean Leclercq. This fund has also published an annual publication, entitled Revue internationale Michel Henry, in collaboration with Louvain University Press since 2010.

Roland Vaschalde has published a monthly Henryian newsletter since 2010, mainly in French and entitled La Gazette d'Aliahova (referring to the city of Aliahova described in Michel Henry's novel L'Amour les yeux fermés) regularly informed of articles, books, courses, conferences and meetings on the thought of Michel Henry.

Works Translated into Spanish

• Henry, Michel (1991). Phenomenology of life. Editorial Columna. ISBN 84-7809-266-8.

• Henry, Michel (2010). Phenomenology of life. UNGS-Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-987-574-437-0.

• Henry, Michel (1997). The barbarism. Caparrós Editores. ISBN 978-84-87943-53-9.

• Henry, Michel (2001). Incarnation: a philosophy of the flesh. Editions Follow me. ISBN 978-84-301-1431-3.

• Henry, Michel (2007). Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body: essay on the ontology of Maine in Biran. Editions Follow me. ISBN 978-84-301-1642-3.

• Henry, Michel (2002). Genealogy of psychoanalysis. Editorial Synthesis. ISBN 978-84-7738-960-6.

• Henry, Michel (2004). Words of Christ. Editions Follow me. ISBN 978-84-301-1521-1.

• Henry, Michel (2008). See the invisible: about Kandinski. Siruela Editions. ISBN 978-84-9841-150-8.

• Henry, Michel (2001). I am the truth. Editions Follow me. ISBN 978-84-301-1427-6.

• Henry, Michel (2008). The happiness of Spinoza. Editions La Cebra. ISBN 978-987-22884-8.

• Henry, Michel (2009). Material phenomenology. Editions Encounter. ISBN 978-84-749-0910-4.

• Henry, Michel (2011). MARX. Vol. A philosophy of reality. Editions La Cebra. ISBN 978-9872646448.

• Henry, Michel (2014). The king's son. Editorial Nuevo Home. ISBN 978-84-942195-1.

• Henry, Michel (2015). The essence of the manifestation. Editions Follow me. ISBN 978-84-301-1895-3.