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" "This is the miracle of abstract painting: it constructs the unlimited monumentality of a work that no longer has a foothold in the visible world, that ignores its rules and does not seek anything from it, neither aid nor sanction, and that emerges with the pure force and infinite certainty of life. Withdrawn from the weight of things and from the inertial systems in which things are held and have their limited possibilities circumscribed, the work of art proceeds from the imagination. To imagine is to posit something other than what is and what is there right in front of us -- something other than the world. To imagine is to posit life.
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.
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Thus the possibility of hearing the Word of Life is itself for each person and for each living Self contemporaneous with his birth and consubstantial with his condition of Son. I hear forever the sound of my birth, which is the sound of Life, the unbreakable silence in which the Word of Life does not stop speaking my own life to me, in which my own life, if I hear the word speaking within it, does not stop speaking the Word of God to me.
The radical and essential pre-destination implied in the condition of Son (identical to his Arch-generation) is what constitutes the principle of the Christian ethic, the Commandment. John perceives this Commandment in its original form, in God’s phenomenological life and identical with it. He calls it God’s love. God’s love is the first and only Commandment of the ethic. “The commandments ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9). […] The Commandment is only a Commandment of love because Life is love. Life is love because it experiences itself infinitely and eternally. Because it is Life, “God is love,” as John says (1 John 4:8). It is because God (as absolute Life) is love that he commands Love. He commands it of all the living by giving them life, by generating them in himself as his Sons, those who, feeling themselves in infinite Life’s experience of self and its eternal love, love themselves with an infinite and eternal love, loving themselves inasmuch as they are Sons and feeling themselves to be such – in the same way that they love others, inasmuch as they are themselves Sons and inasmuch as they feel themselves to be such. If the Commandment only prescribes love because the One who commands is himself love, it is because far from resulting from the Commandment, love is on the contrary the presupposition of it.
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