The poetic image results from the effort undertaken by affectivity to express itself in a language that is not originally its very own, but that holds the advantage of being communicable not only at the level of representation, but at the level of feeling as well. The image is not considered, therefore, to be a synthesis of true and false. In the process of creation, the affect is the material principle of the image as an ideal unity of syntheses. It is implied here that poetic writing is not about a content of internal aiming, previously possessed by consciousness, that is made to correspond with an element of the world, even­tually represented by means of sensible intuition. In order to illustrate this, the author interprets a poem by Nadia Tueni, showing that it is essentially about its own production.

In his novels B. E. Ellis depicts a generation of bewildered rich young people, who live the easiest of lives, in a wealthy background as one can see in everyday American shows. But they actually suffer from the excess of things, products, luxury; the result for them is that the overall meaning of life is lost. Fink’s phenomenology gives us the interpretation for this nihilistic experience. Humanity is depressed as far as the world is forgotten. Forgetting the world is even more scandalous and serious than the disregard of Being that Heidegger condemns. B. E. Ellis applies the method of reduction: he makes the epoché of the container-world. Consequently, we learn that the idea of the world is the condition for unity, coherence and direction as shows Fink’s Welt und Endlichkeit: Humanity when devoid of the totality (as a synonym for world) is absolutely devoid of meaning. The Cosmos-container comes before Being or the beings (as simple contents). World is the radical source for all data. With the arguments of Fink’s book Spiel als Weltsymbol, we may understand why Ellis’ characters strain to rebuild a world, with their new religion of trade marks and name dropping. But holy objects of consumption and luxury can’t produce an authentic world.

This paper tries to explore the legitimacy of applying the phenomenological approach to poems, novels, to all that we classify, too conveniently, under the term “literature.” Such an approach is grounded in one claim: the literary text opens up to a world that is its “thing itself”. The thing of the text is not the text as a thing, in its linguistic and formal properties, no more than the thing of the painting is the canvas coated with pigments. However, what is the status of such a “world”? Is this “opening of a world” only a metaphor? Is the world of the literary work only an imaginary one? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the limits of the structuralist claim that the object of literature is only literature as an object, that is as a linguistic construction and, secondly, to be aware of what is specific to the phenomenological account of the imaginary, in contrast with alternative accounts, such as the one grounded in the theory of speech acts and developed, among others, by Searle.

Relaying reflections from Les Mouches, Morts sans sépulture, Les mains sales and Huis-clos to some important arguments concerning death in L’Etre et le néant, the author discusses the relation between death and freedom. Criticizing Martin Heidegger’s views on Sein zum Tode, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that one’s relation to death deeply implies relations with the others, the living, but also the dead ones. The experience of death being absurd, the others are those who can make it meaningful, in the same way that I do for their own death. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom defends the original choice of the ones that I will remember and cherish, in a community that is more important than the living one: the community established beyond death.

The books of Pascal Quignard present themselves as a hunt for the invisible. The ambition that lies at their heart seems particularly compatible with a phenomenological approach. Indeed, this literary intuition – this “suspicion” in the words of Quignard – hinges on the nature and value of representation. This article tries to read the entire work of Quignard through the phenomenological lens. The elucidation of phenomenality is accomplished here through the steps of a process that leads to the very condition of vision. Once the essence of representation is established as a “predation”, the literary writing of the author reveals it as related to an absent, invisible prey. Through the successive and ascending figures of idolatry, love, art and contemplation, can then start a route to invisibility, which is a true pedagogy of seeing. This quest, conceivable as a learning process through which literature finds its ultimate aim, finally leads to a renewed understanding of the concept of representation.

The essay is an examination of two models that have been used to think what “meaning” or “sense” is. Husserl offers the first model in which there is an exchange between the sense that is made in experience and the meaning that is articulated at the linguistic or logical level. The second model is offered by Paul Ricoeur in his theory of narratives. A narrative has a link to what took place that Ricoeur calls “représentance” or “lieutenance”: the narrative configures but at the same time does justice to what took place. The fiction involved in the “as” of “such as it was” is necessary for the “such” that guarantees an adequacy between the narrative and the action or event. I expand on these two models and offer a model of meaning that I call “translatability”.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Does Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of life include an ethical and political dimension? It appears that the writings about Marx already include such aspects, especially in reference to the problem of social determinism. More generally, however, our attention must be focused on what Henry calls the transcendental genesis of politics which accounts for the lack of autonomy of the political field, just like in the case of economics. Politics may then be analyzed against that background, for instance in the writings on totalitarianism and democracy. The frame given by transcendental genesis is also tied to the fundamental opposition between barbarism and culture which pervades the axiological implications of Henry’s work. Because culture is always referring to a “culture of life,” it allows connecting life and its immanent reality with ethical/political questions.

This article presents a phenomenological perspective on the “virtual organisation” where people are obliged to work at a distance and where contact with others is limited to that of an electronic network. Drawing on Husserl, we see that when the “as-if ” presence is contrived in such a way, the organisation obstructs the life of consciousness. Furthermore, relying on Michel Henry’s writings, we explain how removing the parameter of “flesh” as a factor structuring encounters, this organizational form profoundly restricts the dynamism of the acting, subjective life.

Michel Henry recognized himself within Maine de Biran’s work, while rejecting the French spiritualistic tradition to which this one was attached. However, without occulting the great differences which separate him from this tradition, it seems that we find in Bergson’s first book, more than in Maine de Biran, the premises of an ontological dualism, such as he supported, which announces an authentic philosophy of the conscience, beyond any intentionality. In return, as if Michel Henry had emphasized a tendency already present in Time and Free Will, we could read again Bergson’s first book in the light of material phenomenology itself.

This article assumes that the Henryan concept of Archi-Ipseity is, in its internal unique structure, divided in two modalities — one potential and one actual — and that it derives from the organic concatenation of the transcendental process of the self-engendering of absolute Life. This hypothesis of an inner division of the Archi-Ipseity solves several textual ambiguities present Henry’s works, for exemple the fact that Henry’s text plays between antecedence and co-presence of hyper-power life and Archi-Ipseity: the Archi-Ipseity, although engendered by life, is simultaneously the condition and the accomplishment of this process.

This essays deals with Heidegger’s concept of “Thing”, as sketched in the 1950 lecture Das Ding.In Being and Time, Heidegger had worked out a concept of “tool”, Zeug, which vanished in later works. The Heideggerian “thing” is undeniably more than a “tool”. The author argues than beings viz. phenomena are actually given to us which oppose the logic of “thinghood” while transcending the logic of “toolhood”: Flemish painting is used as an example of phenomena which overcome the affective reality of being-in-the-world without respecting the mode of appearing proper to things. Another witness is summoned, sacramental experience: a phenomenological description of what is given to see and feel during the Eucharistic liturgy aims at showing that being-in-the-world and “being in the Fourfold” can be put into brackets in such an event, and that it must be the case for such an event to be understood.