Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it… - Michel Henry

The interpretation of man as “Son of God,” or, more precisely, as “Son within the Son,” has many weighty implications. But before we pursue them, there is one question that cannot be differed. If men are really Sons of God within Christ, how can we explain that so few of them know this and remember it? If they bear within them this divine Life in all its immensity – because there is no other Life but that, and the living can only bow before its profusion – how can we understand why they are so unhappy? In the end, it is not the tribulations visited upon them by the world that oppress them; rather, it is with themselves that they are so discontented. It is their own incapacity to achieve their desires and plans, it is their hesitations, their weakness and lack of courage, that provoke the deep malaise that accompanies them throughout their miserable existence. If they never tire of attributing the cause of their failure to circumstances or to others, it is only to fool themselves and to forget that the real cause lies within themselves. As Kierkegaard puts it: “Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be himself.” But how can one despair of this me if it is nothing less than the coming into us of God within Christ? Such despair is possible only if, one way or another, man has forgotten the splendor of his initial condition, his condition of Son of God – his condition as “Son within the Son.” It is this forgetting that we must now attempt to understand.

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.

As usual, history reverses the true order of things, the ontological order of their foundation. Kandinsky never truly asked himself what would replace the object and what painting would be able to paint from then on. Ever since a walk in the countryside around Munich where the violence of a colour perceived in the undergrowth gave rise to an intense emotion and he decided to paint what surrounded this colour -- the view of this woods -- in order to represent this emotion, he knew with a knowledge that no reflection can clarify and that no history precedes, with a knowledge that is constituted by this emotion itself, that he wanted to paint this emotion and this emotion was the only thing that he would paint thereafter. This was the content of all possible paintings: the profusion of life in himself, its intensification and exaltation.