Volume 9, 2009
Michel Henry's Radical Phenomenology
Jean-Yves Lacoste
Pages 429-454
L’objet
constitution et réduction
The article aims at providing a precise concept of the “object” as a being which appears in the field of perception without appearing to affection. Consequences follow: (a) what appears to us runs the perpetual danger of appearing only to perception, and therefore of being constituted as an object; (b) objectity belongs to most beings and is not the fruit of a constitution involving only our subjective causality; (c) what appears to us is also what we can reduce to its being ready-to-hand: technology and science begin where beings appear to us as objects; (d) the reality of objectity proves the partial legitimacy of metaphysics, and proves as well that no access to Being is possible except through the mediation of modes of being; (e) meanwhile, one has learnt to bypass the concept of “subject”: only “quasi-subjects” are available in the realm of experience.