The second mask worn in the refusal to take into consideration the cultural specificity of the tasks and the condition of the university is the argum… - Michel Henry

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.

Art opens us to a metaphysical knowledge of an entirely different nature (that 'objective' knowledge of the external world): it is a knowledge without object. Life in its ontological milieu, a life which embraces itself entirely without ever separating from itself and without been placed in front of itself like an object. We said that no path leads to life, except for life itself. One must stand within life in order to gain access to it: one must begin from life. Kandinsky just showed us the point of departure for painting -- it is an emotion, a more intense mode of life. The content of art is this emotion. The aim of art is to transmit it to others. The knowledge of art develops entirely within life; it is the proper movement of life, its movement of growth, of experiencing itself more strongly.

This is because the doing carries life as its irresistible presupposition, because there is no doing unless given to itself in life’s self-givenness, unless the work of salvation is entrusted to it. Entrusted to doing and to action, but not to any old action. If we examine the list of works of mercy, we see that is not a simple enumeration of empirical attitudes and conduct that would be beneficial to people who practice them. A hidden contrast runs through them, but not an opposition between simple precepts still removed from their achievement in practice, which is demanded as the single road that leads to life. Instead, the opposition appears on the level of the action itself. It distinguishes and contrasts two types of action – in effect, one that leads to life and the other to death.