Affectivity has ever accomplished its work when the world rises. - Michel Henry

“During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them” (Revelation 9:6). Men debased, humiliated, despised and despising themselves, trained in school to despise themselves, to count for nothing – just particles and molecules; admiring everything lesser than themselves and execrating everything that is greater than themselves. Everything worthy of love and adoration. Men reduced to simulacra, to idols that feel nothing, to automatons. And replaced by them – by computers and robots. Men chased out of their work and their homes, pushed into corners and gutters, huddled on subway benches, sleeping in cardboard boxes. Men replaced by abstractions, by economic entities, by profits and money. Men treated mathematically, digitally, statistically, counted like animals and counting for much less.

The fact that the use of living work is reduced to almost nothing means that everything that humans once did can now be done by robots. But, the robot does not "do" anything; it is only the trigger and release on a mechanism. The only real action -- the action that exists in the feeling that one acts and that is coextensive with this feeling -- is the act of pushing a control button. From the beginning of the industrial era and as one effect of the gradual replacement of the "force of work" by natural energies, it was possible to anticipate the reduction of the activity of workers to the work of oversight. This signifies an atrophy of almost all of the subjective potentialities of the living individual and thus a malaise and growing dissatisfaction.

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.