It is not at all paradoxical that this popular painting would stand in total isolation today, that there would be practically no audience to view or … - Michel Henry

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.

Our flesh carries in it the principle of its manifestation, and this manifestation is not the appearing of the world. In its pathetic self-impressionality, in its very flesh, given to itself in the Arch-passibility of absolute Life, it reveals the one which reveals itself to itself, it is in its pathos the Arch-revelation of Life, the Parousia of the absolute. In the depths of its Night, our flesh is God.

To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.