La souffrance forme le tissu de l'existence, elle est le lieu où la vie devient vivante, la réalité et l'effectivité phénoménologique de ce devenir. - Michel Henry

The key feature of modernity, which makes it into a barbarism of a hitherto unknown kind, is precisely to be a society lacking any culture and existing independently from it. As ordinary and common as it might seem today, this situation creates an almost untenable paradox, if it is the case that life, as self-conservation and self-growth, is itself a cultural process. This is something that all past civilizations illustrate. Barbarism is thus a sort of impossibility. If it happens nonetheless, it is never through an inexplicable dulling of the powers of life. Instead, the powers of life must be turned against themselves, in the phenomena of hate and resentment. This happens because life, in a suffering that is coextensive with its being and that it can no longer bear, attempts to get rid of itself. Barbarism cannot exist without the emergence of Evil, which is a mad but wholly intelligible desire of self-destruction. Or rather, in every state of social regression, it is possible to discover, underneath the evidence of the features of stagnation and decline, the violence of the deliberate refusal of life to be itself.

Kandinsky calls the content that painting must express, that is, our invisibility (or invisible life), 'abstract'. So, the Kandinskian equation can now be written as follows: <nowiki>Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos =</nowiki> abstract. Kandinsky also calls the means of painting 'abstract', so long as they are grasped in their purity. To the extent that they are abstract, colours and drawings are likewise inscribed in the equation formulated above, the equation which forms the original dimension of Being itself. In this respect, we have just discovered the true meaning of the concept of abstraction applied to painting.

So my flesh is not only the principle of the constitution of my objective body, it hides in it its invisible substance. Such is the strange condition of this object that we call a body : it doesn’t consist at all in the visible appearance to which we have always reduced it ; precisely in its reality it is invisible. Nobody has ever seen a man, but nobody has ever seen his body either, if by "body" we understand his real body.