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 robo… - Michel Henry

Suffering makes up the tissue of the existence, it is the place where the life becomes living, the reality and the phenomenological effectivity of this gradual change.

Christianity proceeds to overthrow the concept of reality as well as that of action. In tearing action from external Being and from the process of objectivation leading to it, Christianity situates action in its rightful place, where to do is to make an effort, take pains, suffer to the point that the suffering of this effort is changed into the joy of satisfaction. To do refers to life’s internal pathetik self-transformation and finds there its sole motivation, its unique purpose, not to mention the very milieu in which it is accomplished and is possible. So, surprising as it may seem at first glance to the naïve realism of ordinary perception, the subjective conception of action is the only one that preserves its possibility. If we consider action as an objective process similar to a natural process, to a cascade of water that makes a turbine turn, then nothing distinguishes this so-called action from some material process, and there is no longer any action, but only objective phenomena. Human acting and the effort and suffering involved are reducible to causal sequences, to “the action of gravity,” for example.

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.