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… - Michel Henry

Le marxisme est l'ensemble des contresens qui ont été faits sur Marx.

In the self-revelation of Life reality is given birth, any possible reality. […] This is why, from now on, we must reject an idea found in Hegel’s philosophy – and in its by-products such as its most tenacious expression, Marxism – before determining in turn many of the commonplaces of modern thought. This is the idea that Christianity is a flight from reality, inasmuch as it is a flight from the world. But if reality resides in Life and only in Life, this reproach disintegrates to the point of ultimately appearing as a non-sense. […] The content of Life – what it experiences – is Life itself, refers back to a more fundamental condition, to the very essence of the “Living,” to a mode of revelation whose specific phenomenality is the flesh of a pathos, pure affective material, in which any cleavage, any separation, finds itself radically excluded. It is uniquely because such is the phenomenological matter of which this revelation is made that we can say that in this revelation what reveals and what is revealed are one and the same. It is this pathetik phenomenological substance of living that defines and contains any conceivable “reality.”

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 ?