Max Schaefer

It has been widely argued that Michel Henry dismisses the importance of the subject's worldly and intentional mode of existence in his account of the well-being of life. However, through a careful analysis of Henry's theory of life and his study of culture and barbarism, I will demonstrate that the prevailing position on this point is both correct and incorrect: (i) correct in that absolute life does not require a moral transformation of the world; and (ii) incorrect inasmuch as Henry's philosophy does not, for all that, deny that, from the perspective of human beings, the subject's existence in the world does indeed matter to the well-being of their life. In my view, Henry's work harbours the implication that, from the perspective of the subject's existence in the world, the creation of a moral world through the development of the correspondence between one's inner life and the natural world is humanity's most pressing task, to the point that his entire phenomenology is oriented toward the achievement of this end. I will highlight two of the ways in which the subject's existence is vital to life's well-being: (i) as an expression of life; and (ii) as more or less befitting of life's current needs. As part of this study, I argue that some of Henry's conclusions regarding theoretical knowledge and its part in the aforementioned correspondence between life and the natural world do not entirely agree with his own analyses and therefore need to be reformed.

This chapter highlights the impact of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis. I contend that Henry and Rank clarify the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in psychoanalysis. To begin, I draw out the implications of Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In my view, Henry’s work reveals and untangles basic inconsistencies in Freud’s views on the unconscious, affective layer of the subject’s life, and establishes that the creativity of life’s immanent movement is essential to the development of the subject’s personality and to the acquisition and alleviation of neuroses. At the same time, I maintain that, while Henry’s work acknowledges a potential role for mindfulness in the development of life’s creativity, his account is problematic. At the end of the day, Henry’s conception of life as an immanent, self-enclosed reality fails to adequately account for the relation between life (creativity) and intentionality (mindfulness). As a result, it fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness. To address these issues, I bring Henry’s insights into these matters into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference, which similarly regards affectivity and creativity as central to human life and to psychoanalysis. By doing so, what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can strengthen and weaken one another, and which always involve self-enclosure and openness towards others and the cosmos. Bearing this in mind, I maintain that mindfulness and creativity can play an important role in allowing psychoanalysis to realize its aim of improving the well-being of human beings.

This paper addresses the claim that the social orders of Western civilization operate on the basis of the law’s presumed sovereignty over life. I demonstrate how the respective works of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and French phenomenologist Michel Henry are joined in their concern over this issue, and in their shared belief that life can be made sovereign over the law through a communal life based upon habit. At the same time, I argue that their respective conceptions of this communal life are flawed, and that they would benefit from being brought into a productive dialogue with one another. More specifically, I show that Henry’s account of a Christian communal life based upon the habitual practice of love moves at least some way toward addressing Agamben’s account of a coming community that is decidedly abstract and lacking in a substantial ethic. However, I maintain that Henry’s own account of this community is founded upon a problematic conception of potentiality that would benefit from Agamben’s study of the matter. By bringing these two figures together and drawing out the lessons that can be learnt from each of them, this work provides a more concrete and substantial account of how a coming Christian community can play a role in making life sovereign over the force of the law.

This paper engages in a critical examination of Michel Henry’s (1922-2002) phenomenological study of the erotic relation. I argue that while Henry’s analysis sheds light on the nature of eros and how it might be renewed from the obscene objectivism to which it has largely been reduced in Western society today, his analysis of eros undermines his account of the phenomenological life of the subject as a radically immanent mode of appearing and calls for revision. I contend that it is by acknowledging life as a movement of transcendence toward the world that we can resolve this issue and further refine Henry’s insights into the nature of eros and how it might once again be renewed in contemporary Western civilization. I begin by laying out Henry’s account of how the forgetting of life results in a reduction of the erotic (i.e., inter-subjective) relation to a merely sexual (i.e., inter-objective) one, and how this lays the groundwork for what he regards as the destructive sadomasochistic practices of voyeurism and pornography. Following this, I outline Henry’s account of the nature and limits of the erotic relation, and I demonstrate how Henry’s work harbours the latent suggestion that the failure of eros can serve as a step toward a higher union with others in a love of God. In the closing section, I show how Henry’s analysis of the erotic relation calls for a re-conception of life as a movement of transcendence. I outline how this re-conception better accounts for the complex exchanges between the non-objectifying drives of life and the objectifying acts of consciousness, and I show how this allows us to retain some of Henry’s insights into eros and its renewal while forcing us to modify others.

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a preeminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.

This paper concerns the issue as to whether novelty plays a significant role in Husserl’s analysis of time. To address this matter, I show that horizontal and transverse intentionality constitute absolute consciousness as a process of self-differentiation, which enables the ego to anticipate its own renewal and yet to escape coinciding with this synthesising activity. I then further analyse time-constituting consciousness as a process of self-differentiation through a study of Husserl’s account of retention and protention. Addressing Husserl’s presumed neglect of protention, I demonstrate that Husserl reveals that retention and protention modify and motivate one another, and find that this provides a role for novelty within Husserl’s account of the continuity of time. I maintain that this novelty assumes two forms: one that is absolute or necessary, and another that is relative or accidental.

This article addresses the problematic relation between Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life and ethics. More specifically, it asks whether Henry’s account of the self’s transcendental birth in the immanent self-generation of life allows for a sense of individual responsibility. I begin by discussing Henry’s generation of the self and show how the historical essence of the self is structured according to the antinomy of affectivity. I then show how, for Henry, this history of life is full and yet incomplete. Accordingly, life is attracted to growth and this growth happens insofar as living beings proceed through a series of stages of despair. I develop these stages by looking at Henry’s analyses of anxiety, desire, and humility in relation to Kierkegaard. I argue that even though there is already an initial sense of responsibility at work in the earliest stirrings of anxiety, it is only in humility that the self comes to know who it truly is and how it ought to relate to others. Cet article se penche sur la relation problématique entre la phéno-ménologie de la vie et l’éthique de Michel Henry. Plus spécifiquement, nous nous demandons si l’explication de la naissance trans-cendantale du soi dans l’auto-génération immanente de la vie que propose Henry permet de rendre compte d’un sens de la responsabilité personnelle. Nous débutons avec une analyse de la génération du soi chez Henry et montrons comment l’essence historique du soi est structurée selon l’antinomie de l’affectivité. Nous montrons en-suite comment, pour Henry, cette histoire du soi est pleine bien qu’incomplète. En conséquence, la vie est attirée par la croissance, et cette croissance se produit dans la mesure où les êtres vivants passent à travers une série de stades du désespoir. Nous dévelop-pons ces divers stades en nous tournant vers les analyses que fait Henry de l’angoisse, du désir, et de l’humilité en relation avec Kierkegaard. Nous soutenons que même s’il y a déjà un sens initial de la responsabilité à l’oeuvre dans le premier éveil de l’angoisse, c’est seulement en atteignant le stade de l’humilité que le soi en vient à savoir qui il est vraiment et comment il doit se rapporter aux autres.