Michel Henry: Quotes about the trip

“Certainly, Marx was atheist, "materialist", etc. But for a philosopher also, it's advisable to distinguish between what he is and what he thinks to be. The most important, this is not what Marx thought and that we ignore, but what think the texts he has written. What appears in them, in a way as obvious as exceptional in the history of philosophy, this is a metaphysics of the individual. Marx is one of the first Christian thinkers of Occident.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Marx II. Une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 445
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Marx certes était athée, « matérialiste », etc. Mais chez un philosophe aussi, il convient de distinguer ce qu’il est de ce qu’il croit être. Ce qui compte, ce n’est d’ailleurs pas ce que Marx pensait et que nous ignorons, c’est ce que pensent les textes qu’il a écrits. Ce qui paraît en eux, de façon aussi évidente qu’exceptionnelle dans l’histoire de la philosophie, c’est une métaphysique de l’individu. Marx est l’un des premiers penseurs chrétiens de l’Occident.

Way , Thinking , Appearance , History

“How capitalism finds its substance and its essence in the living work, in such a way that it comes exclusively from it, can't go without it, lives only drawing at each time its life from that of the worker, life that then becomes his own, this is what expresses in the whole work of Marx the theme of vampire. "Capitalism is dead work which, such as a vampire, animates itself only in sucking the living work and the more it pumps, the more its life is cheerful."”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Marx II. une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 435
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage ».

Drawing , Time , Dead , Animals

“Because practice is subjective, theory which is always the theory of an object, can't access to the reality of this practice, what it is in itself, but only represent it, in such a way that this representation lets out of itself the real being of practice, the effectivity of the doing. Theory does nothing.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 353
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien.

Way , Reality

“Life is given in its own way, in a completely unique way, even though this singular mode of givenness is universal. Life is given in such a way that what it gives is given to itself and that what it gives to itself is never separated from it, not in the least. In this way, what life gives is itself. Life is self-givenness in a radical and rigorous sense, in the sense that it is both life that gives and life that is given. Because it is life that gives, we can only have a share of this gift in life. No road leads to life except life itself. [...] Life is absolute subjectivity inasmuch as it experiences itself and is nothing other than that experience. It is the pure fact of experiencing itself immediately and without any distance. This is what constitutes the essence of every possible community. Again, what is shared in common is not some thing; instead, it is this original givenness as self-givenness. It is the internal experience that brings to life everything that is and makes what is alive in this experience become alive in and through it alone.”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 120
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Communication , Universe , Self-confidence , Way

“To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Question , Thinking , Way , Reality

“Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it is what makes every affect, ultimately every affection, and every thing possible. The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in view is the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself according to the how of its original phenomenalization. Life is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. For what could I know that could not appear ?”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2-3
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Appearance , Way , Sense , Life

“Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on its own. It develops in such a way that all the virtualities and potentialities within it must be actualized, for them and for what they are, for their own sake, so that everything is done that can be done, that is to say, everything that nature can become. It is a matter of making gold, going to the moon, building self-guiding and self-monitoring missiles that can decide on the moment to self-destruction – and destroy us. Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 52
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)

Madness , Nature , Life , Time

“Although it is not thought or some other form of knowledge, although it is not the truth of the world, that gives access to the Revelation of God, at least a single possibility persist, already mentioned as a simple matter of fact and now rendered unimpeachable. Access to God, understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to Him, is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so. There where God originally arrives in himself, in the phenomenalization of phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality proper – there alone is access to God. It is not that thought is lacking and so we cannot accede to the Revelation of God. Quite the contrary, it is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God – the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 27

Knowledge , God , Truth , Way

“Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that, taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. Since a word has nothing in itself that is identical or similar to what is in the thing, it could as well be united with any other thing whatever. One could use the same name for two different things or else attribute several names to the same thing. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it, in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it. Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 9

Indifference , Reality , Universe , Evil

“I do not intend to ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false,” or to establish, for example, the former hypothesis. Rather, what will be in question here is what Christianity considers as truth – what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation. We are trying to understand the form of truth that circumscribes the domain of Christianity, the milieu in which it spreads, the air that it breaths, one might say – because there are many sorts of truths, many ways of being true or false. And we are also perhaps trying to get away from the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and that, as much in and of itself as in its multiple implications, determines the world in which we live.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 1

Communication , Falseness , Understanding , Question