Life confers a value on things -- they do not have any value by themselves -- inasmuch as they are suited to it and satisfy its desires. But this spo… - Michel Henry

Let us consider a biology student who is reading a work about the genetic code. The student’s reading is the repetition through an act of her own consciousness of the complex processes of conceptualization and theorizing contained in the book, or those that are signified by the printed characters. But, in order for this reading to be possible, the student must turn the pages with her hands as she reads. The student must move her eyes in order to cover it and collect the lines of the text one after the other. When the student becomes tired, she will get up, leave the library, and take the stairs to the cafeteria where she will get some rest and something to eat and drink. The knowledge contained in the biology manual that was assimilated by the student during her reading is scientific knowledge. […] The knowledge that made possible de movements of the hands and the eyes, the act of getting up, climbing the stairs, drinking and eating, and resting is the knowledge of life.

Because our flesh is nothing but what, feeling itself, suffering itself, sustaining itself and bearing itself and so enjoying from itself according to always reborning impressions, is able, for this reason, to feel the body which is exterior to it, to touch it as well as being touched by it. What the exterior body, the lifeless body of the material universe, is by principle incapable.

Here arises a critique of the Law within Christianity, formulated with rare violence by Christ, and for which Paul finds and wonderfully explains the ultimate motivation, which relates it to the Christianity’s central thesis, which places reality within life. It is precisely because the Law is transcendent and exterior to life and perceived by life as beyond it that it is deprived of reality. And by the same token, it is deprived of what finds in life’s reality the possibility of being fulfilled: action. The Law is thus unreal and powerless. Because it unites powerlessness with unreality, the Law places the whole system organized around it (especially the people to whom it is addressed) in an untenable situation. On the one hand, it prescribes, in the form of injunctions that are perceived quite clearly and thus indubitably: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and so on. On the other hand, however, this clearly enunciated commandment (not susceptible to being used for trickery) is by itself incapable of producing the action that suits it. “Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law” (John 7:19).