The possibility of expressing life through lines can be established, if we suppose that life is essentially -- in virtue of what makes it alive -- a … - Michel Henry

The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead, it is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are. But how can "everyone" -- that is, each individual as a living being -- know what life is, except in the respect that life knows itself and that this original knowledge of the self constitutes its own essence? Life feels and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it that would not be experienced or felt. This is because the fact of feeling oneself is really what makes one alive. Everything that has this marvelous property of feeling itself is alive, whereas everything that happens to lack it is dead. The rock, for example, does not experience itself and so it is said to be a "thing". The earth, the sea, the stars are things. Plants, trees, and vegetation are also things, unless one can detect in them a sensibility in the transcendental sense, that is to say, a capacity of experiencing itself and feeling itself which would make them living beings. This is life not in the biological sense but in the true sense -- the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else -- of what we will call subjectivity.

“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.

Quand ce qui ne sent rien et ne se sent pas soi-même, n'a ni désir ni amour, est mis au principe de l'organisation du monde, c'est le temps de la folie qui vient, car la folie a tout perdu sauf la raison.