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La Vie et les vivants

 | 
Grégori Jean
, 
Jean Leclercq
, 
Nicolas Monseu

Abstract/Résumé

Texte intégral

1Thierry Berlanda

2In his christian trilogy, Michel Henry interacts with many philosophers, but not with Pascal : it is the reason for this oversight we want to explain. Pascal says the immeasurable gap between men and God, that only the grace of Christ offers to fill. Many conclude that this is a thought of an absolute transcendence. On the contrary, Michel Henry develops a thought of an absolute immanence. Would his opposition apparently diametric to Pascal be sufficient to explain his ignorance of his predecessor ? Rather we will try to infer from the analysis of common Pascal and Michel Henry’s postulate (the most authentic vocation of men is turning to God), the emptiness of the formal opposition between immanence and transcendence. Indeed, if according to Pascal as well as to Michel Henry, God is both more intimate and strange to the human heart, we could hold the view that Michel Henry’s silence about Pascal is rather an indication of a very close than an opposition.

3Anne Devarieux

4Up to his very last book, Michel Henry never ceased to render homage to Maine de Biran and to make use of the key concepts of Maine de Biran (« the sentiment of effort », « the continuity of resistance », etc.). Michel Henry’s debt towards Biran appears in the first book he wrote (Philososophie et phénoménologie du corps) that is not only an interpretation of Biran’s system of thought but must be read as the first chapter of the key book of Michel Henry : L’essence de la manifestation. It finally appears that the concept of an immanent movement has two different meanings : one properly biranian, and the other one, both speculative (Spinoza) and theological (christianism) represents the « auto-affection » of the finite life of one self as inherent to the auto-movement of life itself. Michel Henry calls it « reciprocal inwardness ». Though there is but one process, our action is not drowned in its pathos. So the « nexus » between force and affectivity must have its own specificty that this paper would like to stress.

5Yukihiro Hattori

6The aim of this paper is to make an approach to the origin of the philosophical scheme in the material phenomenology, which leads Michel Henry to a concept of the absolute Life on his late works. Focusing on a series of his interpretations about Biran’s notion of « primitive fact », presented with a concept of « internal and transcendental experience » in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, this paper firstly reveals the double movement against the idealism, which is implicated in this work and consists in overcoming both a scission of the being of ego and its disembodiment as the pure subjectivity, secondly shows that this movement follows an ontological interpretation of « resistant continuum » relying on the permanent unity of the will as subjective body on the one hand and the development from its permanent being into the « transcendental phenomenon » on the other, and finally concludes by bringing out the question about the sensate body these results make difficult to solve.

7Ezio Gamba

8The concept of soul has no constructive role in Michel Henry’s phenomenological theories ; however it has an important role in his interpretations of some outstanding moments in the history of philosophy. In this paper, I examine Michel Henry’s interpretation of the problem of soul in Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer and Maine de Biran. These reflections about the role of soul can be important in order to understand well the contraposition of phenomenology of life to contemporary scientistic perspectives about man.

9Roberto Formisano

10At first defined as « phenomenological distance », the notion of transcendence discussed in Michel Henry’s L’Essence de la manifestation is clearly based on the results of Martin Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse, from Sein und Zeit. However, the progression of Michel Henry’s critique of « ontological monism » shows that Michel Henry’s notion of transcendence cannot be completely identified with the phenomenological structure of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein. That means that Heidegger is not the only source of Michel Henry’s idea of transcendence. The aim of the paper is to show the importance and the role of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Religionslehre into the genesis of this idea.

11Emmanuel Gabellieri

12Comparing S. Weil and M. Henry may lead to conclude, as Rolf Kühn suggested, there’s an unavoidable gap between the Weilian « dis-creation » which appears to be a negation of the self and the being, and the Henrian « Life », self-esteem and self-affirmation of oneself and Life. This placing in perspective yet risks to hide too much the most striking view shared by both authors. Simone Weil, as Michel Henry, rediscovered, in the middle of the twentieth century, the theme at the same time scriptural and mystical of « the second birth » of the soul, its antinaturalism allows to link christianism, French spiritualism and phenomenology. But still we must understand that the Weilian « dis-creation » is in fact a « re-creation », the vocabulary of « begetting » in God taking little by little its place, from the Marseilles Notebooks to the American ones. The true debate then becomes to know if this begetting to the divine life must be thought on the only level of immanence (Henry) or if it also implies the extatic dimension of the trinitarian gift (S. Weil).

13Elodie Boublil

14This paper analyzes Michel Henry’s critique of Husserl’s approach to individuation and intersubjectivity through his reading of Husserl’s fifth Cartesian meditation as presented in Phénoménologie Matérielle. The intentional relation subjectivity has to the world and to others would prevent her from achieving a real individuation which would necessarily take place, according to Michel Henry, out of sight and independently from any objectification grasp. Authentic individuation would be better described through the process of self-affection and thanks to Michel Henry’s notion of passivity. The latter seems to take up Husserl’s own intuitions about the genesis of intersubjectivity while divesting it of its idealist structure in order to preserve the absolute and immediate life of the Individual.

15Ben Schewel

16Cet article soutient que la phénoménologie matérielle de Eugen Fink se soucie de la même problématique qui anime l’ensemble de la phénoménologie matérielle de Michel Henry, à savoir la vie absolue immanente. Par la même occasion, cette étude me permet de répondre à la critique portée par D. Janicaud sur la phénoménologie matérielle de Henry. D. Janicaud affirme que la phénoménologie matérielle viole le principe fondamental de la phénoménologie, à savoir le lien entre sa méthode et son objet. Dans la mesure où la phénoménologie matérielle peut être comprise dans le prolongement de la méthodologie directrice de la connaissance telle qu’elle prend forme dans les œuvres de Husserl et de Heidegger, c’est une telle critique qui se trouve mise en question.

17Christophe Perrin

18Since Michel Henry begins his philosophical work by letting Martin Heidegger begin and since the latter begins his first treatise by evoking Descartes’ conception of beginning, both these contemporary figures grant their elder ones to have begun « again from the original fondations » and they agree on the necessity, in order to succeed in their own aims, to begin by re-beginning. Since they share cross references, let those thinkers cross in their readings of Descartes, at least let their re-writing cross from its own starting point. The identities will appear as well as the specificities of the cruisade accomplished by the first one against Descartes, and of the crossing enabled by the second one.

19Mario Lipzits

20Michel Henry’s critique of intuitionism in The Essence of Manifestation is in the form of a long philosophical repetition of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant. In the end, Michel Henry’s philosophy of the immanence of life inherits not only Kant’s problematic and conceptuality, but also Kantianism’s difficulty in accounting for the diversity and thisness of the beings that populate the world. We will try to evaluate the consequences of Michel Henry’s methodological decision for the possibility of thinking the world in its ontic significance.

21Yukio Naka

22It is well known that Derrida proposes the idea of « différance », especially with regard to the problem of temporality, and thus criticizes Husserl’s thought of « living present » ; but this idea clashes obviously with Michel Henry’s concept of immanent « auto-affection ». In the first place we will refute, therefore, this conception of Derrida, which is founded merely on the continuity between the present and the retention and which will logically mislead into the eternal non-appearance of the present. We will examine in the second place Lévinas’s thoughts of death and surprising future, which seem to be radically opposed to the peaceful immanence exposed in Michel Henry’s phenomenology. However, we think also that these thoughts do not really explain the novelty of the surprising future ; indeed, does not the position or the supposition of any transcendence abolish that actual experience of the absolute novelty, which must be rather realized in the surprising present ?

23Alain David

24Being, in the philosophical tradition, lets understand that wisdom means serenity. Nevertheless by insisting on the murder of life and understanding thougth ultimately as the way to pay attention to this murder, as the very remembrance also for the suffering of life - this kind of suffering that we can discover in the « blue books » of the first part of the Capital of Marx - the work of Michel Henry does not remain strictly inside of the frame of ontology, but may stay very close to Levinas, even if the words used by both philosophers sound quite different. The following article tries to justify this intuition.

25Blandine Lagrut

26How do Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion interpret the « fourth principle » of phenomenology : « every type of reduction is a type of donation » ? What are the points of agreement and differences between the two authors ? If reduction has long been identified with a process of abstraction, a regression to the purest and, paradoxically, the least real, is it possible, phenomenologically speaking, to conceive of a reduction that does not entail a subtraction but rather an augmentation, a reduction that is a donation ? While for JLM reduction to donation permits the establishment of a descending typology based on the « saturated phenomenon », for Michel Henry, radical reduction gives absolutely and gives nothing other than itself. In this article a conceptual genealogy of the notion of « radical reduction » is proposed, which refers to two other reductions, Galilean reduction and eidetic reduction.

27Claudio Tarditi

28The question of the possible relationship between Phenomenology and Ontology is a basic problem for all the phenomenological models of thought wich has tried to carry on the husserlian works. In particular, this problematic theme constitues the breacking point of the collaboration between Husserl and Heidegger : could Phenomenology become the method of Ontology, as Heidegger affirms in his Being and Time ? This question seems to arise again in the relationship between the Jean-Luc Marion’s and Michel Henry’s perspectives. The task of this essay is to clarify the relation between the destitution of Ontology by Marion and the ontological horizon of Manifestation by Michel Henry.

29Wojciech Starziniski

30This article focuses on the problem of generosity in Michel Henry’s thought. At a first glance it seems that this concept, as it was worked out firstly by Descartes, is absent in Michel Henry’s philosophy. However, it was Jean-Luc Marion, as the result of his analysis of Michel Henry’s interpretation of Descartes, who stressed the analogy between the Michel Henry’s autoaffective ego and Cartesian generosity. Nonetheless, a further investigation of these two concepts puts some doubts on this similarity. The main one results from the fact that affectivity proper to Cartesian generosity is due to an astonishment, following in its turn the acts of good will directed to other egos. This means that in Descartes the « generous » subject cannot be restricted to an immanent sphere of experienced life but, on the contrary, needs an intersubjective dimension, being the space of its action as well as the preliminary condition of its ethical and affective achievement.

31Rolf Kühn

32By placing the « aisthetic » of pure phenomenological life in the « self-feeling » of this life itself, that knowledge is purely immanent and practical in a specific sense, that is to say, as an « auto-épreuve » in an Henryan way. Therefore, according to this phenomenological eidetic, is given the transcendental fact that every individual life is, from its own origin, an « aesthetic » life too. By « aisthetic », we mean that true life, the only pure phenomenological life, is always simultaneously « ipseical » and aesthetic — in short, a flawless impressionability which makes possible all « world » from this grounded unity of the self-feeling.

33Frédéric Seyler

34Radical phenomenology understands life as immanent and transcendental affectivity. But to what extent can a philosophical discourse be held on a reality that, being immanent, is principally inaccessible to intentionality ? As radical phenomenology relies on certainty opposed to evidence, it can be shown that both the possibility and the practical, i. e. ethical, effectiveness of its discourse are ultimately rooted in life’s self-revelation and that Michel Henry’s works may then be understood as a possible mediation towards the recognition of life.

35Peter Gaitsch

36If we place emphasis on the antagonism between the traditional account on phenomenology based on intentionality and transcendence and the new phenomenology of life and immanence elaborated by Michel Henry, the gap in contemporary phenomenological discourse seems to be irreconcilable. Therefore, my paper presents the ancient idea of phenomenological ontology, concerned with the question of the sense of being, as the essential common framework for the debate. I evaluate the methodological contribution of Michel Henry’s work to phenomenological ontology, suggesting that his phenomenology doesn’t really bring about the downfall of traditional phenomenology but rather a broadening and differentiation within the analysis of the sense of being, which could lead us to a compatible plurality of « phenomenalities ».

37Francesco Paolo de Sanctis

38This contribution will examine the concept of « fondement » in Michel Henry. The expression, already endorsed by the « historical » phenomenology in 1929, remains little know to the critique, although it is of great importance in the Michel Henry’s path. It has been quickly theorized, it has become briefly « programmatic », and subsequently it has been used to describe the relationship between appearing and being. The argument developed here is intended to qualify its most important significance (the « fondation »), trying to clear the ground of ambiguity of a purely referential meaning, or an « operative » meaning : both are impossible. In the third part, it is shown in outline a new solution, through the concept of « effond(r)ement ».

39Carla Canullo

40Telling that Michel Henry’s phenomenology is a phenomenology of experience and immanence doesn’t add nothing new to the philosopher’s thought, because these are the two terms through which this philosophy has been most often defined. However, this union is not in the least accidental, because on the opposite it is an oxymoron and the article tries to understand the heuristic capacity. An oxymoron, which is the complex union of a polarity of opposites whose antinomian irreducible dissolve in a higher union.

41Claudia-Cristina Serban

42The « modal » description of life in Michel Henry’s work gravitates around three major terms : actuality, potentiality and impossibility. If life doesn’t objectively appear in the world, it is not because it lacks reality or efficiency : self-affection provides the crucial figure and proof of life’s actuality, seen as an ever self-accomplishing potentiality. From this perspective, possibility and reality overcome their classical, rigid opposition. Nevertheless, life as potentiality implies the primacy of a certain impossibility : life’s impossibility to part from itself, or its passivity. Is this impossibility another name for life’s finitude, or can it also characterize absolute Life itself ?

43Grégori Jean

44The aim of this paper is to highlight the results of first research work on a set of unpublished texts of the young Michel Henry about « experience of others ». By focusing on a series of notes written in the immediate post-war period, it particularly emphasizes the originality of this early meditations about intersubjectivity, but also examines their relation with later texts.

45Tegu Joe

46In his analysis on the phenomenology of Husserl, Franck demonstrates that the flesh cannot be embodied, if it is defined as « pure auto-affection ». This work expands on this thesis and attempts to examine the phenomenology of Michel Henry. The central question is : how can Michel Henry explain an embodiment of flesh to the extent that he defines the flesh as pure auto-affection. Furthermore, its solution leads us to another difficult problem : the uni-multiplicity of the flesh, which renders the embodiment problem even more insoluble. However, this uni-multiplicity in the life, which is frequently interpreted as « mystery », is the point where the phenomenology of Michel Henry starts. This work will reveal this « mystery » more clearly.

47Beat Michel

48The idea of self affection is possibly the most fundamental single concept in Michel Henry’s material phenomenology. This paper investigates the question of a possible internal structure of self affection. To do so we start from a paragraph in Husserl’s Ideen II where he posits a structure with two poles, nature and mind, and between these two, body and soul. Our argument is that the concept of world, in the sense of the correlate to an inter-subjective intentionality, needs to be added to this schema on the side of the mind pole. We then relate the so obtained structure to the equally husserlian concept of monad. We argue that the mind should be located on the surface of the monad whereas the opposite pole nature should logically occupy the centre of the monad. This leads to the idea of a purely subjective materiality as suggested by the term of material phenomenology. Finally self-affection is interpreted as affection, the source of which is in the centre of the monad.

49Patrice Guillamaud

50I have developed three ideas. The first concerns the henryan concept of the identical nature of immanence and transcendence, immanence being just the inversion of transcendence. The second concerns the idea according to which the essence of renunciation, as a relativization of a longing for the absolute, requires the restoring of transcendance into immanence as soon as the problem is posed. If life is synonymous with renunciation and if immanence is an authentic concrete structure, on the one hand there is an essential process which is a constituent part of immanence and, on the other hand, this very immanence is an internal ecstasy. The third point concerns the idea according to which, without Michel Henry’s discovery of the absoluteness of immanence being misrepresented, renunciation requires the restoring of another transcendence as an absoluteness which is irreductible to immanence as well the problematization of immanental as a co-existence or an absolute absence of distance between the two absolute entites which immanence and transcendence represent.

51Simon Brunfaut

52The aim of this paper is to show the importance of Kafka in Michel Henry’s phenomenology. If the importance of the writer is apparently clear, however it has not been explain in its entirety. So, in this paper, we will not try to collect every quotes of Kafka in Michel Henry’s book as Jad Hatem already done it, we will only try to explain the impact of it on two different level. Firstly, we will show that Michel Henry has a particular way of reading authors like Kafka and try to present us a certain pathetic « art of reading ». Secondly, we will approach the possibility that Kafka influence the way of reading Michel Henry himself and how his text should be read.

53Jérémy Lambert

54L’Amour, les yeux fermés evokes the progressive decline of the city of Aliahova, utopia whose beauty is admired by all. First plagued by a handful of men advocating an egalitarian ideology, Aliahova quickly falls into the hands of a totalitarian regime. Wishing to make a clean sweep of a so-called dictatorial past, the new government puts a policy of destruction of works of art in place that will cause a de facto death of the city. Indeed, town of Memory, Aliahova is defined by the relationship she forges with its artistic past : the art draws on the breathing of the city inasmuch as it is essential in the building of its current identity. Because it is « representation of life » (Michel Henry, B), art participates in the development of the living. The systematic destruction of the art therefore can only lead to violence and destruction of that utopia. This is the meaning of the testimony of the narrator, but also the one of Michel Henry whose publication of this novel reveals the deep anguish to a contemporary society that breaks with its own roots.

55Pascale Tabet

56This approach aims to study painting, artistic creation in general, from the phenomenology of life as it was developed by Michel Henry. The issue is crucial because painting poses problems to philosophy - in particular phenomenology - and its limits. In the natural attitude, add paint is visible in profile. However in the Michel Henryian phenomenological attitude, painting is not represented as an external object, a model that already exists, but it is a return to an internal, non-ecstatic invisible reality. This reality, according to Michel Henry, is life, this « dimension of radical immanence » which is never a visible object for itself, but a test and an increase of itself. In this sense, the artwork becomes the mode of accomplishing the future of life, its eternal movement, its passage from the Suffering to the Joy... So art leads us to the essence of our invisible lives, hence the unity between the artistic work and power in our lives. This is why aesthetic experience precedes any intentional purpose and any attempt to conceptualize our part. The phenomenology of the invisible in art is compared with that of Jean-Luc Marion, for whom the invisibility is in itself the structure of the visible. In this sense, the painting emerges of the invisible, and the artwork is therefore imposes itself as counter-intentionalism in the heart of the horizon of the donation. This upheaval of the explicit purpose of art that we try to elucidate, by emphasizing the phenomenological essence of the invisible artistic creation, which reveals the excesses of the truth about itself, which overwhelms and saturates any attempt to seize the outside.

57Matthieu Dubois

58In contrast with the tradition in literature studies, which conceive performativity as the expression of conventions, Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life, in connection with discoveries in other fields, allows to consider an « act » that is inherent to the creation and to the reception of a work. This aesthetics’ power in art is based on the « emotion-matter » of its content and forms, which is incorporated both by the creator and the receiving subject in a pathetic way. So, this performativity involves the responsibility of the creator to its work and establishes the stake of a transmutation, by art, from a suffering of life into an enjoying of it.

59Michel Arcens

60It would appear that no two pieces of what is known as « jazz music » are the same. Yet they all stem from the same two fundamental principles called « improvisation » and « feeling ». Improvisation, however, is anything but an act of chance or simplicity. It is a total incarnation of oneself ; it is quite simply the way one feels, before becoming the expresssion of this feeling. This should help us to understand that when jazz is played and listenend to, it is in fact life itself. As if life and music were inseperable. It is with this observation in mind that the follwing article will attempt to analyse the philospohical points of view expressed by Michel Henry and jazz musicians. If we accept the statement made by Michel Henry in the text entitled « Phenomenology of Life III », the role of music has always been to express life. It can be argued that jazz if a most exceptional vector of such expression.

61Davide Zordan

62The theory of art sketched by Michel Henry and inspired by his reading of Kandinsky seems convey this admission that, in art, the duplicity of appearance does not take place in an unbending opposition between life and world, between pathos and representation, but in a space of possible exchanges, due to the power of the imagination. Not only the imagination allows the appearance in the world of something that the world does not know anything about, but it creates, as an expression of the auto-affection of life, the possibility itself of the appearance of phenomena. Thanks to the imagination, we are not condemned to exile from ourselves, in a world in which everything comes into sight except the only things that really count : life and its pathos.

63Jérôme de Gramont

64Our life can be played out by the unique event of going from pain to happiness. We need to oppose the phenomenology of existence (between life and death — M. Heidegger) to the phenomenology of life, as in eternal life (Michel Henry). These are two possible interpretations of sum ; sum moribundus/I can hear the noise of my birth. Anyhow, the only thing happening to human beings is to be born, or rather reborn. It can be tedious even though happy. In that sense, our whole history will not be enough but that is the only one we have.

65Jean-François Lavigne

66Conceiving the link between incarnation and historicity means understanding human condition as a coherent unity. Can Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life really account for all the aspects and dimensions of this condition of ours ? The phenomenological analysis of being born shows that birth is not reducible to transcendental birth. Hence a re-examination of Michel Henry’s criticism of Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness, which enhances the cumulative structure of subjective life. The result is to put forth a new concept of flesh, and to point out several shortcomings in Michel Henry’s immanentistic version of Christianity.

67Hugues Dusausoit

68Is a philosophy of life possible ? Michel Henry attempts several times to answer this question. The solution should lie in Marx’s claim that « thought is a way of life ». Nevertheless, this solution does not take into account the fact that, according to his own reading of Marx, this particular way of life has been condemned as inauthentic. The question can be raised again when Michel Henry tries to define the « internal structure » of life. Within Michel Henry’s work, all determinations of life are grounded in the impossibility of the subject’s taking the slightest distance from himself. This supposes that the subject tries to take such a distance ; however, this attempt at distancing is precisely what Michel Henry shows to be the characteristic of nihilism. Therefore, here again a strange complicity seems to appear between the philosophy of life and the negation of life.

69Michaël Staudigl

70This paper explores the practical significance of Michel Henry’s « material phenomenology ». It starts with a delineation of Henry’s fundamental philosophical intuition, i. e., his insight that transcendental affectivity is the most primordial mode of revelation of our selfhood, but also of the world and our relations to others. The author argues that this Henryan « counter reduction » suspends all traditional parameters of onto(theo)logical individuation in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of its transcendental corporeality, i. e., in terms of our « affective flesh ». The development of this « metaphysics of the individual » is the anchoring point of Henry’s « practical philosophy » as he developed it ― under shifting accents ― throughout his oeuvre. This paper focuses on his reflections on Culture and Barbarism and on the crisis of the political and seeks to clarify their most important insights by relating them to his late, i. e., Christological account of Life and (inter) subjective self-realization.

71Sébastien Laoureux

72To which extent can Michel Henry’s Marx intervene in the contemporary debates on the renewal of interest in critical theory ? This text tackles the question starting from two kind of themes : the role of the « critical theorist » and the possibility of collective action. Concerning the first theme, Michel Henry denounces naive faith in the need for science to advance the practice and throw light on the « scientific truth » to individuals who are living in the illusion of ignorance. The motivation of an awakening emerges from the lives of individuals. Concerning the possibility of collective action, this text tries to show that, according to Michel Henry, it can never emerge due to a predisposed ideological horizon. It is the example put forth by Marx and taken up again by Michel Henry of the « small-holding peasants » which allows to the extent possible to illustrate the consequences of such a representation.

73Benoît Kanabus

74The originality of the Michel Henry’s approach to ideology is to articulate two seemingly contradictory points of view : ideology is at the same time unreal and real. Ideology is unreal when it forgets its vital motivation and becomes a formal structure under which can be subsumed all the ideas which, in the history, dominate and enslave the people. Ideology is real when it is aware of its genesis and expresses the practical relationship which individuals engage with the world and share in history. The aim of this contribution is to study the link between ideology and the process of subjectivation of individuals, i. e. the movement by which individuals become actors of their own history. This is to show that ideology, as reiteration of the deep will of life, takes part in the process of transformation of the historical subjectivity by releasing the attention wich is captive of the representational and generalizing contents of consciousness to return it towards the power of creativity of the life.

75Eric Faÿ

76In a world where what is objective is true, rational and real, Michel Henry’s phenomenology offers a new perspective which locates what is true, reasonable and real, in affective and active life. This raises a first issue : organizing and managing human work should be then the act of community linked by the invisible bonds of active and affective life. Furthermore, Michel Henry invites us to reconnect the organization and management of human work with Life’s incarnation where Life gives itself to everyone and thus grounds a common life. « Suspense » suggests one way where individuals preoccupied by their objectives are taken out of the truth of the world to the truth of Life. Then, through open deliberation, they are enabled to build a world shaped by its Desire.

77Olivier Ducharme

78At two occasions Michel Henry describes the existence of a cultural affectivity. Unfortunately, he reduces immediately this cultural affectivity in favour of a transcendental affectivity. We would describe in this article the link between these two categories of the affectivity in order to demonstrate the essential part of the cultural affectivity in the existence of the subject.

79François-Régis Puyou

80This chapter explores the possibilities offered to individuals involved in contemporary firms to preserve the necessary conditions for collective living praxis to happen. Our objective is to better understand the prerequisites for living praxis to emerge in spite of close profit monitoring and the massive use of information technologies in social relationships. The empirical support to the chapter comes from a field study conducted in a large airport retailer. Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life and Rapahël Gély’s recent work on « roles » support our argument that the existence of business functions gives the individuals an opportunity to embody « characters » and create spaces where living interactions can take place.

81Christophe Dejours

82In the phenomenology of life, work has a role which importance is generally underestimated. Between the subjective body and the world there is room for « corpspropriation ». In the fisrt part of the article this concept is put to the test of clinics and psychodynamics of work. In the second part are discussed the implications of « corpspropriation » on collective work and the living together.

83Florinda Martins et alii

84Dans son œuvre Phénoménologie Matérielle, Michel Henry montre que ce qui le sépare de Husserl est la possibilité d’une phénoménologie où la matière du phénomène, ce qui se révèle, coïncide avec le « comment » elle se révèle à elle-même. De cette façon la matière n’est pas en fonction d’une forme qui la révèle, mais elle se révèle elle-même dans la forme qui effectivement la phénoménalise. Cette phénoménalité reçoit chaque fois, dans nos travaux de recherche autour de la Philosophie de la Médecine, une application immédiate aux phénomènes de la souffrance : la matière de la souffrance, en tant que la souffrance elle-même, ouvre un nouveau champ de recherches aux rapports entre philosophie et psychisme. Cependant, cette phénoménalité de la souffrance, en ce qui concerne les phénomènes de la douleur, renvoie immédiatement à la vie du corps, un corps doué de sens, d’organes, qui se révèle à nous comme douleur. C’est ainsi que la phénoménologie de la douleur ouvre les ressources apportées par la phénoménologie matérielle à d’autres recherches : comme dans la douleur, toute souffrance est souffrance d’une vie, celle du corps vivant, qui se révèle comme tel. Le chemin vers cette vie pressentie en toute douleur et en toute souffrance est le chemin en direction de la compréhension des enjeux de la vie en nous à partir de ses propres symptômes. La matière du symptôme est la conscience pure de la vie en tant que besoin et appel. C’est en tant que symptômes que les phénomènes de la vie peuvent être régulateurs de notre activité personnelle et communautaire. Ainsi la phénoménologie de la douleur s’ouvre, elle aussi, aux recherches concernant des phénomènes politiques, éducatifs et religieux comme ceux dont ce texte rend compte.

85Karl Hefty

86The question posed by Michel Henry at the outset and pursued with rigor through his last writings, « I wanted to know who I was », leads from the determination of life as the essence of manifestation to the generation of the Son in Life as the First Living. Many commentators refuse to follow Michel Henry to the end of this path, resting content to continue only half-way, not recognizing in the latter writings the continued development of this question posed at the outset, and indeed the answer to this question. « I am a son of God ». The hesitation is shared by theologians skeptical of the role of immanence in Michel Henry’s philosophy. But these doubts cannot be assuaged without posing another question : How should we understand the place of God in Michel Henry’s philosophy ?

87Chris Hackett

88The articulation of a fundamental ontology of incarnate subjectivity breathes new life into the otherwise dead letter of tradition. In the conclusion to Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, Henry makes appeal to Rimbaud’s dogmatic statement : « Our bodies will be judged ». If for Rimbaud this statement is an exclamation of the finally dead magic of human language, for Henry it is rather the first step of a new beginning which for Rimbaud remained only an impossible dream : the re-grounding of the cultural patrimony and the rediscovery of its life. By calling into question the otherwise unquestioned relation between finitude and corporeity, Henry brings new unity to the Western tradition, even to the point of a renewed correlation between dogma and philosophy : both of which, alone it seems, affirm the infinite significance of the body.

89Joaquim Hernandez-Dispaux

90Through this article we show the influence of Claude Tresmontant’s thought on Michel Henry’s concept of « Parole du Christ ». We want to underline that this idea is probably a way to criticise the hemreneutical approach of the Scriptures in an hermeneutical way as it has been done by Paul Ricœur. Our paper is divided in three main parts. We first pay attention to the theses of the « Hebrew Christ » with special care to the critical remarks of Pierre Grelot according to this text. Then we show the gap between the Bible as poem and the theory of the heterogeneity of parols. At last, we try to explain how the Bible should be considered as « paroles du Christ ».

91Antoine Vidalin

92The phenomenology of life, by the radical reduction, is able to consider the human act in its carnal and immanent process, and in its unbreakable bond with the absolute Life. Ethics is consequently an ethics of life, commanded by the absolute Life in its auto-donation. How these results can shed new light upon the question of the genesis of evil and the formation of the ill deeds ? Considering the unity of the intention and of the action in the immanent life, it is therefore possible to understand the origin of their goodness or naughtiness : in the adhesion to the absolute Life, or in the illusion by which the ego believes that he is the origin of his powers. In this late case, we can consider how such an origin impacts upon the development of the action, both in the immanent life and in the world, according to the duplicity of the manifestation. We shall therefore enlighten, following an eidetic necessity, the formation of the main ill deeds : idolatry and covetousness, lie, stealing, incest, adultery and murder.

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