Michel Henry Quotes

As for Christ, he has justified his act of healing on the Sabbath by identifying it with the original essence of acting, itself identical with the original essence of Life, that is to say, with the process of its unceasing self-generation. It is because the process of absolute Life’s self-generation does not cease, because “the Father is always at his work,” that Christ, too, does not cease working, not even on the Sabbath day; “I, too, am working.” By identifying his acting with God’s absolute acting, with the unceasing process of self-engendering of absolute Life, Christ refers to himself unequivocally and, once more, as consubstantial in his acting with the action of this process. He is the transcendental Arch-Son cogenerated in the process of self-generation of Life as the essential Ipseity, and the First Living, in which (and in the form of which) this process is alone accomplished. This is why it is given to him, as to the Father, to work – and work without cease. Life does not know rest on Sunday or Saturday – which is better for all livings, moreover.

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

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.

The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.

The community is a subterranean affective layer and each one drinks the same water at this source and at from this wellspring which he is itself -- but without knowing it, without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the Basis.

Here let us call upon the founder of modern rationalism -- Descartes. In the eyes of one of the greatest philosophers, it was sheer absurdity to claim that colour is external and that it would be spread out in the external world and belong it. If I put my hand on a wall exposed to the sun, I think, 'The wall is hot'. But that is false. To be hot means to experience heat and to experience oneself as being hot. Only what experiences itself, only life, can experience heat and know what it is to be 'hot'. The same goes with pain. I think, 'My arm is in pain'. But, as an extended outer reality, my arm would not be able to experience anything whatsoever, not even pain. In an exteriority that is outside the self and does not touch or feel itself, nothing can be experienced: no pain, no suffering and no joy.

Man’s forgetting of his condition of Son relates not only to the Concern for the world in which he constantly invests himself. As we have seen, it is the phenomenological essence of Life that makes Life what is most forgotten, the Immemorial to which no thought leads. Because Forgetting defines its phenomenological status, life is ambiguous. Life is what knows itself without knowing it. That it suddenly knows it is neither incidental nor superfluous. The knowledge by which one day life knows what since the beginning it knew without knowing it is not of a different order than the knowledge of life itself: it is a pathetik upheaval in which life feels its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection. This possibility, which is always open to life, to suddenly experience its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection, is what makes it a Becoming. But then, when and why is this emotional upheaval produced, which opens a person to his own essence? Nobody knows. The emotional opening of the person to his own essence can only be born of the will of life itself, as this rebirth that lets him suddenly experience his eternal birth. The Spirit blows where it wills.

This is why, as soon as this condition fails to appear, the imprescriptible love of others also disappears. The other is now just another person, a person as people are – hypocrites, liars, ambitious, sinful, egotistical, blind, fighting ferociously for their own advantage and prestige, no less combative toward others who oppose their projects and desires. Forgetful of their veritable condition and the other’s veritable condition, they behave toward themselves and others as mere people. Then the whole edifying morality that wishes to found itself on the mere person, on the rights of man, discovers its emptiness, its prescriptions are flouted, and the world is given over to horror and sordid exploitation, to massacres and genocides. It is not by chance that in the twentieth century the disappearance of “religious” morality has given rise not to a new morality, a “secular morality,” albeit a morality without any definite foundation, but to the downfall of any morality and to the terrifying and yet daily spectacle of that downfall.

Notre chair porte en elle le principe de sa manifestation, et cette manifestation n’est pas l’apparaître du monde. En son auto-impressionnalité pathétique, en sa chair même, donnée à soi en l’Archi-passibilité de la Vie absolue, elle révèle celle-ci qui la révèle à soi, elle est en son pathos l’Archi-révélation de la Vie, la Parousie de l’absolu. Au fond de sa Nuit, notre chair est Dieu.

If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.

The imagination brings into being what has not yet taken place in being: hitherto inexperienced tones, impressions, emotions, feelings and forces. The imagination is indeed creative, even in a radical sense that gives it a positivity that was not glimpsed by classical thought. Art's creative imagination does not give us decoys to contemplate, for example the depth of a third dimension where there was only a flat surface. It has ceased to be, according to Kant's famous definition, the faculty of representing a thing in its absence. It has become the magical power of making something real. What type of thing is it then? Where and how does the imagination bring it into existence? We have already answered this: it gives a thing life, as a modality of life. What it creates is in fact this new modality. The movement of the imagination is thus nothing other than the movement of life, its internal becoming, the tireless process of its coming into itself, an arrival in which it is felt in ever more vast, differentiated and intense experiences.

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.

To be born is not to come into the world. To be born is to come into life.

The essence of media communication is television. What media communication communicates is itself, in such a way that the form of this communication becomes its content. This is why something can only be real, if and only if it enters into this communication. What matters is the number of journalists, the number of cameras gathered around what will come into being in and through them: the event. In and through them, the event does not only derive its importance but its existence. The media world thus determines its nature. For what claims the title of an "event" and thus to exist must be such that it can be televised; it is and must be created, cut, limited by this inescapable demand whose essence we have recognized: the news (actualité). This refers to what is there now in its most extreme punctuality and superficiality -- a superficiality and punctuality derived from its ability to be televised and from being televised -- for the time that it will exist and after which it will fall into nothingness.

The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.