In this paper, I will reflect on the place of language within Michel Henry’s phenomenology. I will claim that Michel Henry’s position provokes an architectonic problem in his conception of phenomenology and I will discuss how he tried to solve it. At the end of the essay, I will try to clarify what I believe to be the ultimate root of that problem involving language.

The aim of this paper is to offer a Henrian interpretation of the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the place of the imaginary in the perceptive life. The hypothesis is that in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Henry, the role of the imaginary in the original affective experience which the perceptive life has of its own intrinsic vulnerability can be investigated on three levels: the articulation between the absolute dimension and the egological dimension of consciousness in Sartre, the genesis of perception in the body in Merleau-Ponty, and the immanent adherence of the perceptive act to the radical suffering of its own force in Henry. From each of these three levels, the paper shows that without an imaginary in charge of bringing it back constantly to the experience of its own original vulnerability, the perceptive life is bound to lose the aff ective density of its relation to the perceived, and therefore is bound to become disincarnate.

What would be the result of reading Derrida from the standpoint of material phenomenology? And what would be the result of reading material phenomenology on the basis of the requirements of Derridean thought? These are the questions that this article endeavours to tackle by focusing on the two philosophers’ readings of Husserl’s Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time. At first strangely similar, these two readings soon display marked differences. Whereas Derrida, in his approach, is keen to demonstrate that there is never any pure presence, Michel Henry brings out an “Archi-presence” which he attempts to safeguard from any deconstruction. So perhaps material phenomenology functions as “quasi-deconstruction”, having the same relationship with Derridean thought as “negative theology” has with deconstruction.

Intuition is surely a theme of singular importance to phenomenology, and Henry writes sometimes as if intuition should receive extensive attention from phenomenologists. However, he devotes relatively little attention to the problem of intuition himself. Instead he off ers a complex critique of intuition and the central place it enjoys in phenomenological speculation. This article reconstructs Henry’s critique and raises some questions for his counterintuitive theory of intuition. While Henry cannot make a place for the traditional sort of intuition given his commitment to the primacy of life as the natural and spontaneous habitation of consciousness, an abode entirely outside the world, there nevertheless with some modification to Henry’s thinking could be a role for intuition to play in discerning the traces of life in the world.

This article shows how, starting from Schelling and Henry, one can build a radical critique of objectification and subjectification within humanities. This critique opens the way for the construction of a point of view of immanence, which is characterized by the experimentation of a constitution of affects in a process from which proceeds the subjectivity. This point of view of immanence questions the accepted attitudes in the production of social relationships and the norms that govern them, so as to increase the attention to the vulnerability of these processes and their power to transform the affects.

The question of action or praxis has not been treated in particular by Michel Henry in his works. However, this subject is present at each step of his reflexion. This article makes a synthesis on this matter, taking into account all of his works, especially the last books on Christianity (which, in our view, fulfill the phenomenology of life). Having determined the immanent dialectic of action (from the gift of the power in the generation and the in-carnation of the First Living), we can understand, following Michel Henry, the ethics of Life as the Commandment of Love. From such a perspective, the sin and the salvation can be reconnected to the native relation of the living with the Life.

This previously unpublished text of Michel Henry’s was written during the preparation of his first major work published in 1963: The Essence of Manifestation. Being devoted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this extensive text could be as well integrated in the above mentioned book, namely in the context where the author criticizes the ontological monism privileged by the strong tradition of German philosophy, from Jacob Boehme and Kant to Heidegger. Starting from the topic of self-knowledge, this text focuses on an internal division of Being, namely on the separation between consciousness and existence, an opposition that will take the form of a phenomenological distance. The author argues thus that the above mentioned German philosophical tradition is not able to grasp in its primordial nature the essence of the self, covered by the representation.

The work on the sixth Logical Investigation presents, to Husserl and moreover to transcendental phenomenology a new set of problems, questions and theoretical issues, which are deeply related to the concept of intuitive fulfilment. Here, the relation between core and halo, developed in 1908, must be integrated with the concept of horizon as a fundamental stucture of perception and every other kind of experience. The experience also became a contextual experience, essentially related and determined from a contextual situationality. More generally, each appearance consists of a whole system of appearances that are empty of content but are also potential manifestations of the same type. The state of consciousness depends upon the openness to pre-traced potentialities. The horizon, which is part of the noematic dimension described in Ideen I, begins here to presents itself as this fundamental intentional structure. The transcendental fixation of the concept of horizon therefore requires the further elaboration found in §§ 33-34, texts that specifically address the notion of “empty representations.”

In this contribution I want to sketch a phenomenology of music, expounding and expanding the philosophy of Michel Henry. In the work of Henry, several approaches to a phenomenology of music are made. The central question of the contribution is: “What do we hear when we hear music?” It is argued that there is an unbridgeable divide between the intentional sphere of the world and its sounds and what in Henry’s philosophy is understood as Life. Music is the language of Life itself and cannot be merely considered a composition of sound. Music does not imitate nor even represent the world, but is the inner movement of life itself. In this respect, Henry is close to Schopenhauer’s view on music, in which the Will is sharply contrasted to representation. However Schopenhauer’s thought needs a phenomenological elaboration in order to understand music as an immediate experience. In the article, music is compared to painting, since this is a recurring methodological theme in Henry’s thoughts on music.

The repetition of life is being examined on the basis of Henry’s analysis of life as a performance beyond habitualization as sedimentation in Husserl’s approach, as well as a difference in immanent conceptualization on the premise of the coveting organless body according to Deleuze. In contrast to this “nomadic thinking,” which always remains non-subjective, the emphasis in the original reciprocity of life and body is put on the basic transcendentality of the effective repetition of life in the bodily memorial of the radical phenomenological habitualization.

Although most interpreters admit that Husserl was not guided by an interest in aesthetics when dealing with the various issues of image consciousness, his considerations are nevertheless usually interpreted in an aesthetic key. The article intends to challenge this line of interpretation by clearly separating between the neutrality of image consciousness, on one hand, and the disinterest of the aesthetic attitude towards reality, on the other hand, as well as by reviewing the elements in Husserl’s theory that led to their association.

This study approaches the question of absolute knowledge in its mystical and phenomenological essence. Henry’s phenomenology of life, by seeking the truth in its living donation, rejoins the source of phenomenality in an invisible way. This truth which vivifies our interiority is, in its depth, a divine revelation. When we let us receive ourselves in the invisible truth of God, we are this same truth that we feel immediately in our living flesh.

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate Oskar Becker’s search for a complementarity between the paradigm of constitutional analysis put forward by Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and constructivism as a meta-mathematical position suggesting criteria for existence of the mathematical objects. At stake is the issue of the possibility of an existential analytic of “the mathematical”. In this regard, a special attention is paid to the temporality of “mathematical existence”. Th e paper invites new forms of a dialogue between phenomenology and philosophy of mathematics.

First we try to show that Henry’s philosophy of art meets Schelling’s ambition of exposing art as an organon of a philosophy of pathetic subjectivity (against the theory of imitation or reproduction). In this regard, Balzac’s novels serve as an illustration showing art to be the model of nature and not the other way round. Then Balzac’s main novel dealing with artistic creation, the Unknown Masterpiece, is interpreted using Henry’s grid, as an anticipation of Kandinsky’s abstraction.

What’s worth a philosophy which achieves a phenomenological reduction in an opposite direction of Husserl’s one? This contribution, disputing Rudolf Bernet’s accurate critiques, intends to demonstrate that Michel Henry doesn’t take a “theological turn” by investigating the Christian Logos, but chooses it as a philosophical proof of his previous researches about affectivity as rationality, which were stemming from a rigorous analysis of everyday life. According to Henry and his New Testament interpretation, truth is affectivity and life, and because there’s an “ipséité” in life, truth is a self. Yet, the Greek Logos just can’t consider the profoundness of life but the bodies, whereas the fleshy living Self generates and feels it in the fi rst and pathetic immanence.