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" "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.
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.
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The change that perverts individual subjective praxis does not simply involve its reduction to stereotypical and monotonous acts. Along with this narrowing and impoverishment that already indicate the fall of culture, another phenomenon occurs that pushes this process of enculturation to its culmination: the activity of these meaningless acts reverts to a total passivity. It is the objective device in its various organizations and uses that dictates the nature and type of what little remains for the worker to do. It is true that the capacities of the individual at work, and especially the bodily capacities, cannot be entirely abstracted. This is because Bodily-ownness (Corpspropriation) remains the hidden and inescapable foundation for the transformation of the world, in its technical age just as much as in any other age. It just so happens that the force of the Body has been replaced by the objective network of the machine, and the body is only taken into consideration to the precise degree that the device requires the intervention of the individual, however modestly. This amounts to the derisory role that is still conceded to life and its knowledge, that is to say, to culture. The most complex computer ends with a keyboard that is easier than a typewriter. The information age will be the age of idiots.
The ontological revolution occurs when action ceases to obey the prescriptions of life and it is no longer what it was at the beginning, that is, the actualization of the phenomenological potential of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, it seems that action has deserted the site that was always its own in order to take place in the world henceforth: in factories, dams, and power plants. It is now wherever there are pistons, turbines, cogs and all kinds of machines that fire away all the time. In short, it is the immense mechanical system of big industry, which can be reduced to the electromagnetic currents of supercomputers and other high-tech machines of "techno-science". This points to the crucial event of Modernity in the passage from the reign of the human to the nonhuman: action has become objective.
The relation of Life to the living is the central thesis of Christianity. Such a relation is called, from life’s viewpoint, generation, and from the living’s viewpoint, birth. It is Life that generates any conceivable living thing. But this generation of the living can be accomplished by Life only insofar as it is capable of engendering itself. A Life that is capable of engendering itself, what Christianity calls God, we are calling absolute Life – or, for reasons that will emerge later, absolute phenomenological Life. Insofar as the relation of Life to the living occurs inside God himself, it is produced as the generation of the First Living at the core of Life’s self-generation. Insofar as such a relation concerns not just God’s relationship with himself but also his relationship with man, it is produced as the generation of transcendental man at the core of God’s self-generation. […] What is generated in Life as the First Living Christianity calls the first-born Son, or the only Son, or, in Hebraic tradition, the Christ or Messiah. What is generated in Life as man, that is to say, as man himself, it calls “Son of God”. Absolute Life, as it engenders itself and, in doing so, engenders the First Living, is what Christianity calls Father.