We gaze petrified at the hieroglyphs of the invisible, as they too stand motionless or only slowly change against the background of a nocturnal sky. … - Michel Henry

The genius of the Christian ethic is to point out in the simplest of ordinary lives, accessible to all and comprehensible by all, the concrete conditions – the circumstances, as it were – in which the extraordinary event is produced by which the ego’s life will be changed into God’s. As an example, let us consider the parable of the Good Samaritan (whose good deed is terrifyingly represented by Luca Giordano in the painting in the Rouen Museum). Someone like the priest or Levite, who passes by without helping the man robbed by brigands who has been thrown down and is covered with wounds – that person now advances along the route to perdition without knowing it. By contrast, the Samaritan, setting aside his own business, all preoccupations about himself or his interests, is concerned only with the unfortunate one. Taking him to an inn, having him tended, paying for everything – in short, practicing mercy, he has done everything that could be done to “inherit eternal life” (Luke 10:25-37). If such is the metaphysical destiny of the protagonists in the parable, it is good that acts are what count.

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 It just so happens that the force of the Body has been replaced by the objective network of the machine, and the body is only taken into consideration to the precise degree that the device requires the intervention of the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.

Because it is situated in subjectivity, borne by it, and inseparable from its dynamism and emotion, every concrete object is ultimately a cosmos. The geometrical world of the Bauhaus is thus slowly transformed. The sphere is deformed, thickened, elongated and slowly balanced; it becomes a transparent jellyfish with incandescent filaments caressed by the underwater currents. In this place without heaviness, where weight changes into lightness, forms wander about without their substance -- bodies of light, glorious bodies, bodies of life. They are organic forms with clear and cold colours, all kinds of protozoa, parts of insects, outlines of foliage -- creatures from another world with another nature reveal the nature of all nature, every possible world, and consequently our own world.