Michel Henry citations (79 citations, Page 2)

La terre, la mer, les étoiles sont des choses. Les plantes, les arbres, les végétaux en général sont également des choses, à moins qu'on ne fasse apparaître en eux une sensibilité au sens transcendantal, c'est-à-dire cette capacité de s'éprouver soi-même et de se sentir soi-même qui ferait justement d'eux des vivants -- non plus au sens de la biologie mais au sens d'une vie véritable, laquelle est la vie phénoménologique absolue dont l'essence consiste dans le fait même de se sentir ou de s'éprouver soi-même et n'est rien d'autre --, ce que nous appellerons encore une subjectivité.
Livres sur la culture et la barbarie, La Barbarie, 1987

Michel Henry Citations

“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.”

Michel Henry

Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, 1976

“Le spectacle de la beauté qui s'incarne dans un être vivant est infiniment plus émouvant que celui de l'œuvre la plus grandiose.”

Michel Henry livre L'Amour les yeux fermés

L'Amour les yeux fermés, 1976

“La puissance du sentiment est le rassemblement édificateur, l’être saisi par soi, son embrasement, sa fulguration, est le devenir de l’être, le surgissement triomphant de la révélation. Ce qui advient, dans le triomphe de ce surgissement, dans la fulguration de la présence, dans la Parousie et, enfin, quand il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien, c’est la joie.”

Michel Henry

L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963

“Mais la joie n'a rien au sujet de quoi elle puisse être joyeuse. Loin de venir après la venue de l'être et de s'émerveiller devant lui, elle lui est consubstantielle, le fonde et le constitue.”

Michel Henry

L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963

“Aucun objet n'a jamais fait l'expérience d'être touché.”

Michel Henry

Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, 2000

“La communauté est une nappe affective souterraine et chacun boit la même eau à cette source et à ce puits qu'il est lui-même – mais sans le savoir, sans se distinguer de lui-même, de l'autre ni du Fond.”

Michel Henry

Phénoménologie matérielle, 1990

“La peinture fait l’économie du langage. C’est ce que nous enseigne la peinture abstraite et c’est ce qui lui confère sa capacité d’expression. Si en effet la couleur ne se rapporte pas aux sentiments de notre âme par une relation externe mais trouve en eux son être véritable – ce qu’elle est en tant que sensation pure, en tant qu’expérience pure – alors elle n’a pas même à traduire, à la manière d’un moyen, ce contenu abstrait de notre vie invisible, elle coïncide avec celle-ci, elle est son pathos, sa souffrance, son ennui, sa déréliction ou sa joie.”

Michel Henry

Voir l'invisible. Sur Kandinsky, 1988

“Si une communication s’instaure entre l’œuvre et le public, c’est sur le plan de la sensibilité, par les émotions et les modifications immanentes de celle-ci : elle n’a donc que faire des mots, des représentations collectives, idéologiques ou scientifiques, de leurs formulations critiques, intellectuelles, littéraires ou autres, de tout ce qu’on appelle culture. Elle est totalement indépendante de cette culture-là. C’est pourquoi elle s’adresse à l’ensemble des hommes « privés de culture », elle est populaire en ce sens premier qu’elle reconduit chaque être humain à ce qu’il porte de plus essentiel en lui : à sa capacité de sentir, de souffrir et d’aimer.”

Michel Henry

Voir l'invisible. Sur Kandinsky, 1988

“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.”

Michel Henry

Marx II. une philosophie de l'économie, 1976

“La barbarie est une énergie inemployée.”

Michel Henry

La Barbarie, 1987

“J'entends à jamais le bruit de ma naissance.”

Michel Henry

C'est moi la Vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme, 1996

“Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l'intermédiaire d'un sens est dans son essence affectivité.”

Michel Henry

L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963

“La souffrance forme le tissu de l'existence, elle est le lieu où la vie devient vivante, la réalité et l'effectivité phénoménologique de ce devenir.”

Michel Henry

L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963

“Car notre chair n'est rien d'autre que cela qui, s'éprouvant, se souffrant, se subissant et se supportant soi-même et ainsi jouissant de soi selon des impressions toujours renaissantes, se trouve, pour cette raison, susceptible de sentir le corps qui lui est extérieur, de le toucher aussi bien que d'être touché par lui. Cela donc dont le corps extérieur, le corps inerte de l'univers matériel, est par principe incapable.”

Michel Henry

Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, 2000

Michel Henry

« 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 ».
Marx II. une philosophie de l'économie, 1976

“Du spirituel dans l’art et dans la peinture en particulier, l’intitulé du premier grand travail théorique de Kandinsky, qui eut lors de sa parution en 1912 un immense retentissement, a donc une signification rigoureuse. Il porte un double jugement, sur l’époque dont Kandinsky aperçoit la profonde détresse, sur la réalité vraie des choses. Ce temps est un temps de détresse parce que, oublieux de la réalité, il s’est abandonné à l’objectivisme grandissant que promeut la science. L’aboutissement idéologique de cette pensée vouée à l’Extérieur et ainsi privée de l’Essentiel est le naturalisme dont l’art figé et vide du XIXe siècle porte le témoignage accablant. La conséquence pratique en est le matérialisme qui étend à toutes les sphères de la vie la négation de son essence véritable, se proposant ainsi comme une sorte de nihilisme concret dont le vrai nom est la mort. En présence d’une telle situation, Du spirituel dans l’art et dans la peinture en particulier propose un programme de régénération.”

Michel Henry

Livres sur la culture et la barbarie, Voir l'invisible. Sur Kandinsky, 1988

“ intériorité = invisible = vie = pathos = abstrait. Or Kandinsky appelle également abstrait les moyens de la peinture pour peu qu'ils soient saisis dans leur pureté. Dans la mesure où ils sont abstraits, couleurs et graphismes s'inscrivent eux aussi dans l'équation que nous venons de formuler et qui traduit la dimension originelle de l'Être lui-même. Ainsi venons-nous de découvrir la signification véritable du concept d'abstraction appliqué à la peinture.”

Michel Henry

Livres sur la culture et la barbarie, Voir l'invisible. Sur Kandinsky, 1988

“Qu'est-ce que la culture ? Toute culture est une culture de la vie, au double sens où la vie constitue à la fois le sujet de cette culture et son objet. C'est une action que la vie exerce sur elle-même et par laquelle elle se transforme elle-même en tant qu'elle est elle-même ce qui se transforme et ce qui est transformé. « Culture » ne désigne rien d'autre. « Culture » désigne l'auto-transformation de la vie, le mouvement par lequel elle ne cesse de se modifier soi-même afin de parvenir à des formes de réalisation et d'accomplissement plus hautes, afin de s'accroître. Mais si la vie est ce mouvement incessant de s'auto-transformer et de s'accomplir soi-même, elle est la culture même, ou du moins elle la porte inscrite en elle et voulue par elle comme cela même qu'elle est. De quelle vie parlons-nous ici ? Quelle est cette force qui ne cesse de se maintenir et de s'accroître ? En aucune façon la vie qui forme le thème de la biologie, l'objet d'une science, ces molécules et ces particules que le savant cherche à atteindre à travers ses microscopes, dont il élabore la nature par le biais de procédures multiples, afin d'en construire laborieusement un concept toujours plus adéquat mais toujours sujet à révision.”

Michel Henry

Livres sur la culture et la barbarie, La Barbarie, 1987

Michel Henry: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Michel Henry

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

“Inasmuch as the essence of community is affectivity, the community is not limited to humans alone. It includes everything that is defined in itself by the primal suffering of life and thus by the possibility of suffering. This pathos-with is the brosdest form of every conceivable community.”

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Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 133-134
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

“The task of material phenomenology is immense. It is not simply to be attached to another order of phenomena that remained neglected up to now but to rethink everything, if one can think reality. Every sphere of reality must become the object of a new analysis that goes back to its invisible dimension. And this concerns material nature as well, which is a living cosmos. Since material phenomenology implies the revival of philosophical questioning in its entirety, it offers a future to phenomenology and to philosophy itself. At the same time, it discovers a new past.”

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Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 6
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

“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 ?”

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Michel Henry

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

“The question of phenomenology, which alone confers a proper object to philosophy, is what makes it into an autonomous discipline -- the fundamental discipline of knowledge -- and not just a mere reflexion after the fact on what the other sciences have found. This question is no longer concerned with the phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears but with appearing. The invaluable contribution of historical phenomenology is to become aware of this appearing and to analyze it in and of itself. This is its theme. Again, this must not simply be the repetition of the traditional philosophical problem of consciousness or the greek aletheia. For the illusion of common sense, science and past philosophies is to understand the being of the phenomenon always as a first putting at a distance, the arrival of an Outside in which everything becomes visible, a "phenomenon", in the light of this Outside.”

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Michel Henry

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

“The media of the technological age have very different characteristics. Their content is the Insignificant, the "news."”

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Michel Henry

Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day.
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Source: Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 141

“Life confers a value on things -- they do not have any value by themselves -- inasmuch as they are suited to it and satisfy its desires. But this spontaneous evaluation by life is only possible, in turn, if life experiences itself, even through its most humble needs, as what it is and must be, as an absolute value. The fundamental values have no other content than what is implied in life's first experience of itself; they are the proper content of this life.”

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Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 97
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)

“Instead of determining the action of life, ends, norms and values are determined by it. This determination consists in the fact that one experiences oneself constantly and knows oneself at every moment. Life also knows at each instant what must be done and what is suited to it. This knowledge is no different from action. It does not precede it or "determine" it, properly speaking. It is identical to it, as the original know-how of life, as praxis and a living body. Action, as we have seen, is only the actualization of the primitive power of this phenomenological body.”

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Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 96-97
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)

“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.”

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Michel Henry

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

“Experiencing oneself as Life does is to enjoy oneself [jouir de soi]. Enjoyment does not presuppose any differences similar to those in which the world is born: it is homogeneous phenomenological material, a monolithic affective body whose phenomenality is affectivity as such. The self-revelation of Life is not a formal structure that can be conceived on the basis of “outside oneself” and in terms of its own structures, since these are bypassed, overcome while being maintained in this very bypassing. The self-revelation of life is its enjoyment, the primordial self-enjoyment that defines the essence of Living and thus of God himself. According to Christianity, God is Love. Love is nothing other than the self-revelation of God understood as in its pathetic phenomenological essence, specifically, the self-enjoyment of absolute Life. This is why the Love of God is the infinite love in which he eternally loves himself, and the revelation of God is none other than this Love.”

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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. 30

“Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature.”

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Michel Henry

“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.”

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Michel Henry

“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.”

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Michel Henry

“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.”

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Michel Henry

“This is the miracle of abstract painting: it constructs the unlimited monumentality of a work that no longer has a foothold in the visible world, that ignores its rules and does not seek anything from it, neither aid nor sanction, and that emerges with the pure force and infinite certainty of life. Withdrawn from the weight of things and from the inertial systems in which things are held and have their limited possibilities circumscribed, the work of art proceeds from the imagination. To imagine is to posit something other than what is and what is there right in front of us -- something other than the world. To imagine is to posit life.”

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Michel Henry

Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)
Source: Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 107