Given Life:

The Phenomenology of

Michelle Rebidoux

Faculty of Religious Studies

McGill University, Montreal

August, 2007

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of

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Abstract Ill

Resume IV

Acknowledgments V

Abbreviations VI

Introduction 1

1 — (En)countering Heidegger 5 1.1— Heidegger's Critique: and beingness 6 1.2 — Descartes' Beginning: Videor 12 1.3 — Heidegger's Hesitation: Ereignis andAbgrund 23 1.4 — A Counter-Tradition: Life and the Unconscious 29

2 — Phenomenology and Givenness 46 2.1 —Husserl's "Principle of Principles": Gegebenheit 47 2.2 — Givenness as First Philosophy: Marion's 'saturated phenomenality' 58 2.3 —- The Transcendental Ego: Ideal Essence vs. Auto-affection 73

3 — Material Phenomenology 82 3.1 — Subjectivity and Objectivity: The Three Bodies 83 3.2 — Given Life: Passivity, Appropriation, and the Absolute 95 3.3 — The Problem of Forgetfulness: 'Impropriation' 107

4 — The Problem of Return 121 4.1 — Henry's Christianity: An Onto-theo-egology? 123 4.2 — The Problem of Language: The Word of Essence 138 4.3 — Henry's : 'Disimpropriation' and Action 152 II

5 — Phenomenology and 'the Call' 160 5.1—Marion's Critique: The'Pure Call' 162 5.2 — Levinas' Prophecy: 'The Other' and Diachrony 172

Conclusion: Loving in the Mystery 186

Bibliography 191 1 — Primary Sources — Writings by Michel Henry 191 2 — Secondary Sources 193 3 — Other Sources 199 Ill

Abstract

This study looks at the phenomenological work of 20th century French thinker Michel Henry (1922-2002). Not yet widely known to an English audience, his work has recently been attracting a growing readership among students of phenomenology as well as among those interested in the so-called 'return of religion' since the last quarter of the 20l century. For those interested in the of the phenomenological method to this return of religion, one of the main issues is how phenomenology itself is being (re)defined and expanded to address new modes of phenomenality, including what has been called by Henry and others 'invisible phenomenality'. Building upon a key insight of Husserl as established in his famous "principle of principles", Henry seeks to articulate this 'invisible' phenomenality—largely in response to the work of Heidegger—as the core of fundamental ontology. This study carefully considers the unfolding of this 'new phenomenology' in Henry's work in its various dimensions: in its situatedness within the Western philosophical tradition, especially in its relation to Heidegger's critique of onto-; in its dialogue with classic of the subject and its interior life; in its relation to the question of language and the problem of representation; with regards to ethics, the problem of intersubjectivity and contemporary philosophies of 'otherness'; and finally, in terms of its possible contribution to theological thinking today. Throughout a discussion of these dimensions of his work, certain implicit aspects of Henry's thinking will be made more clear by reading them through the work of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, whose own work is admittedly heavily indebted to Henry, and whose own articulation and extension of Husserl's "principle of principles" plays a crucial role. IV

Resume

Cette etude porte sur l'oeuvre phenomenologique du penseur francais Michel Henry (1922-2002). Pas encore tres connue dans les pays anglophones, son oeuvre a recemment attire l'attention d'un nombre croissant d'etudiants et etudiantes interesses a la phenomenologie ainsi que d'autres preoccupes par un certain 'retour du religieux' depuis le milieu des annees 70. Pour quiconque s'interesse au rapport entre methode phenomenologique et retour du religieux, une des questions majeures concerne la (re)definition de la phenomenologie et son ouverture a de nouveaux modes de phenomenalite, incluant ce que Henry et d'autres ont appele 'phenomenalite invisible'. A partir de la vision centrale de Husserl proposee dans son celebre "principe des principes", Henry cherche a articuler cette phenomenalite invisible en grande partie en reponse a Heidegger et comme le coeur meme de l'ontologie fondamentale. La presente etude considere attentivement le developpement, par Henry, de cette 'nouvelle phenomenalite' dans ses diverses dimensions: sa position au sein de la tradition philosophique occidentale, particulierement sa relation avec la critique de l'onto- theologie par Heidegger; son dialogue avec les philosophies classiques du sujet et de la vie interieure; sa relation avec la question du langage et le probleme de la representation; son rapport a l'ethique, au probleme de l'intersubjectivite, et aux philosophies contemporaines de F'alterite'; et finalement sa contribution eventuelle a la theologie aujourd'hui. La discussion de ces divers aspects de son oeuvre font que certains d'entre eux sont plus facilement comprehensibles grace a la lecture du phenomenologiste contemporain Jean-Luc Marion dont l'oeuvre est consideree a bon droit comme largement influencee par Henry, et dont 1'articulation et le developpement du "principe des principes" de Husserl jouent un role capital. V

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Maurice Boutin who, as my supervisor for my doctoral candidacy as well as for this study in particular, has provided over many months numerous critical suggestions on matters of content, keen insights into problems of translation and interpretation, and who has spent many hours of his time carefully reading and editing the writing to allow for greater clarity of expression. His support and encouragement is and has been much appreciated.

I wish to thank my student colleagues and other professors in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University who have also been a wonderful support to me in terms of their friendship, shared inspiration, and guidance, both in the academic community at large (such as at conferences) and in the very intimate community which we enjoy in the Birks building, the Faculty's home.

I wish to thank Sharon Rebidoux, my mother, for not caring what I studied except that it would lead me in a direction which could help me to begin to form, to clarify, and ultimately to fulfill my life's dreams.

Finally, I wish to thank my spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy, through whose blessings and inner guidance I first received myself as one called to seek and discover , and through whose force of providential unfolding I first stumbled upon phenomenology as the appropriate method and language in which to begin to do so in the academic context. VI

Abbreviations*

AlTr— E. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 1999.

BaT— M. Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962.

BeGi — J.-L. Marion, Being Given, 2002.

BMECS — M. Eckhart, Breakthrough: 's Creation Spirituality in New Translation, 1980.

CPfE — M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), 1999.

ENTO — E. Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, 1998.

EsM— M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 1973.

GA — M. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (GA Vol. 7, 1954; GA Vol. 14, 2007; GA Vol. 65, 1989)

GeP — M. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 1985.

IaD — J.-L. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 2001.

IAT— M. Henry, I Am the Truth, 2003.

Id I— E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, 1982.

InEx — J.-L. Marion, In Excess, 2002.

InPC — M. Henry, Incarnation: line philosophic de la chair, 2000.

MHIBB — M. O'Sullivan, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief, 2006.

MPaL — M. Henry, "Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language)", 1999.

NTR — E. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 1990.

OBBE — E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 1998. VII

OFPh — J.-L. Marion, "The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness", 1999.

OHY— W. Hankey, One Hundred Years ofNeo-Platonism in France, 2006.

OWL — M. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 1971.

PdV— M. Henry, Phenomenologie de la vie (Tome IV), 2004.

PUT—M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, , 1971.

PPB — M. Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, 1975.

PTTFD — D. Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: the French Debate, 2000.

ReGi — J.-L. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 1998.

RPPvFMP — N. Depraz, "The Return of Phenomenology in Recent French Moral Philosophy", 2002.

SaPh — J.-L. Marion, "The Saturated Phenomenon", 2000.

TTFP —- D. Janicaud, "The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology", 2000.

Tal — E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969.

WtP — F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1968.

* See also Bibliography, pp. 195-204. — Other abbreviations in Siegfried M. Schwertner, International Glossary of Abbreviations for Theology and Related Subjects (2n ed.). Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992. 1

Introduction

On July 7, 2002, the French newspaper Le Monde described Michel Henry (1922-2002) in their obituary to him as "without doubt one of the most important French in the second half of the twentieth century". Though never without its fair share of criticism, his work has been widely known and followed closely for many years in

France, as well as, among some of his closer intellectual disciples, in Germany1 and Italy.

Only recently, however (more or less since the turn into the new millennium), has his work started to attract attention from an English audience. Unfortunately, most of his later works, as well as a number of his middle works, including his four novels, remain untranslated. Secondary literature, too, while abundant in French, German, and Italian, has been generally sparse in English until recently. In 1999, the journal Continental

Philosophy Review dedicated an entire issue to Henry's thought ; among the increasing number of articles appearing since then, the first full-length book on Henry in English was just published in September of last year.3 In March of 2007, a conference dedicated entirely to the thought of Henry was hosted by the British Society for Phenomenology at

St. Hilda's College, Oxford. Other such books and conferences are no doubt on the way.

1 Most notably Rolf Kiihn, whose translations of Henry's works effectively introduced the to the German-speaking world. 2 Continental Philosophy Review 32/3 (1999), edited by Anthony J. Steinbock. 3 Michael O'Sullivan, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 2

Besides a parallel growth in English of studies of Edmund Husserl4—of whom Henry is poignantly critical, yet from whom his thought draws much as the founder the phenomenological method in the 20th century—Michel Henry himself is also a powerful and provocative thinker of a single thought—a thought which, in the context of the widespread popularity and even dominance of the emphasis on 'otherness' in the late 20th

- early 21st centuries, poses a unique challenge to philosophy today, and to phenomenology in particular to which it falls to unfold this challenge.

The single thought is what Henry calls "la subjectivity clandestine". The challenge is a thinking of subjectivity in its bondedness to fundamental ontology beyond both traditional philosophies of Modernity dependent upon a perspective of ekstatic representation and contemporary philosophies of 'otherness' which to a certain extent remain reactive to the tradition. To a very great extent, Henry remains indebted to the work of Husserl and especially whose critique of the tradition made possible Henry's articulation of such a subjectivity as a more originary mode of phenomenality than ekstatic representation. This study will, in its first two chapters, focus heavily on Henry's indebtedness to, but also break from, these two significant predecessors of his work. It will also, specifically in chapter 2, introduce Husserl's key concept of 'givenness' and its influence on Henry by reading it through the work of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion. As Marion's own work is deeply influenced both by Husserl and by Henry, a reading of the crucial role of 'givenness' in phenomenology today through its explicit articulation by Marion helps to shed light on

Henry's often only implicit, yet core dependence upon it, especially in those instances

4 Continental Philosophy Review is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, a significant publisher of Husserl Studies. 3 his work is subject to harsh criticisms. In chapter three, that dependence will be brought out at length in its tense relationship to Henry's articulation of a fundamental ontology. In chapter 4, the specific aporia that arises in, and the various criticisms aimed at, Henry's work will be investigated.

It should be pointed out that Henry employs a number of technical terms in his work which are in many cases quite different in meaning from their traditional usage.

Where necessary throughout this study, such terms will be defined in distinction from their traditional meanings, and they will always be employed with only the technical senses as herein defined. In addition, it is important to note that a number of terms in their technical senses are interchangeable for Henry. I shall make free use of such interchanges in what follows, but in introducing any new term I shall always relate it back in its meaning to terms previously employed. The primary reason for this interchangeability in Henry's work is the lengthy period of time over which numerous works on a variety of topics were written by him which were nevertheless all dependent upon one core theme: namely, his single thought of la subjectivite clandestine. On account of such a singular focus, Henry's work unfolds over the years with a great continuity. I do not, therefore, approach his thinking chronologically. However, I do address, specifically in chapter 4, a certain Christian 'conversion' in his very late thought.

This conversion, however, does less to alter his core thought than to justify it and to address the central aporia that opens in his thinking through a specific articulation of

Christ. A large part of the discussion of chapter 4 will turn on to what extent this

'conversion' either solves the aporia or exposes Henry's thinking in its dependence upon a theological postulate. Finally, in chapter 5, Marion's own criticism of Henry and possible resources gleaned from Levinas' ethical vision of 'the other' will be explored. Such gleanings will help to address the question of what Henry's special contribution might be to —a particular dimension of Henry's work as of yet almost entirely unnoticed in

English scholarship on him.5 Yet Henry's primary interest is and remains to the end a phenomenology of la subjectivite clandestine, and that in relation to a fundamental ontology. To what extent this singular focus on "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two'" can be reconciled with his theological insights remains to be seen. Perhaps it is precisely the very possibility of such a reconciliation which Marion has in mind when he speaks of the profundity of Henry's thinking, which harbours within itself "une possibilite encore a peine apercue".7

5 For a notable example of the exploration of this dimension of Henry's work in French, see Antoine Vidalin, La parole de la vie: La phenomenologie de Michel Henry et I'intelligence chretienne des Ecritures. Saint-Geosmes, France: Editions Parole et Silence, 2006. 6 The Essence of Manifestation (trans. Girard Etzkorn). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p. 6. J.-L. Marion, "Avant-Propos", in M. Henry, Phenomenologie de la vie. Tomes 3 & 4. : Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, p. 8. 5

Chapter 1

(En)countering Heidegger

The phenomenological context in which Henry finds himself already as a young philosopher in the late 1940's is one thoroughly soaked with the thought and the critique of Western onto-theology of Heidegger. Henry came into relationship with Heidegger already with an intense interest in the question of subjectivity, shaped to a great extent by his experiences during the second world war.1 After graduating with a Master's dissertation on Spinoza in 1943 from the Ecole Normale Superieure where he studied literature and philosophy, Henry followed the example of his older brother and joined the

French Resistance, the "Pericles" division, essentially a group of young intellectuals. As a member of this division, Henry carried out secret missions gathering intelligence in

Lyon against the agents of Klaus Barbie, the famous "Butcher of Lyon". His codename on these missions was "Kant", because he had room to carry only one book in his bag and that was The Critique of Pure Reason. Influenced both by the clandestine nature of these missions, and by the fact that, as he saw it, Kant simply had no real ontology of subjectivity, Henry began to think seriously during this time about 'subjective life'—in other words, about that singular thought that would be his own throughout his life's work: "/a subjectivite clandestine", as he called it. With this thought, he came to the very beginning of thinking itself, to the condition of the possibility of that which was for him

1 See interview with Anne Henry, "Vivre avec Michel Henry", in Auto-Donation: Entretiens et conferences. Paris: Beauchesne, 2004, pp. 237-67. 6 thought's essence and effective reality. That essence he characterizes variously throughout his writings as affectivity, life—even soul. More than twenty years after the war Henry would write: "We would like to reflect upon a traditional metaphysical concept, the concept of 'soul', and we would like to ask ourselves if, for us who philosophize today, such a concept can still have a meaning."2

1.1 Heidegger's Critique: Being and beingness

For us who philosophize today. For Henry, that means for us who philosophize after

Heidegger's 'destruktiorf of Western onto-theology. Shortly following the war, Henry, along with two of his friends, Henri Biraud and Jean Beaufret, had the opportunity to pay a visit to Heidegger while he was in exile in the mountains in Muggenbrunn, where they reportedly discoursed together for over three hours on the banks of a nearby river. Deeply interested in Heidegger's thinking, and without doubt crucially influenced by

Heidegger's destruktion, Henry nevertheless later came to reject Heidegger's thought as falling short of articulating any other mode of phenomenality than the classical one— namely, phenomenality articulated as ekstasis, a term which would become notwithstanding a key concept for Henry in distinction from which he would unfold his own thinking. Henry therewith began doctoral work on the philosophy of the French thinker , in which he first attempted to develop a philosophy of subjectivity on the basis of pre-ekstatic, or pre-intentional affectivity. This work, entitled

2 M. Henry, "Does the Concept 'soul' Mean Anything?": Philosophy Today 13/2-4 (Summer 1969): pp. 94-114. 7

Philosophie et phenomenologie du corps3, was not published until after the work to which it then gave birth, the magnum opus of Henry's philosophy, L 'Essence de la manifestation*, a work of over 900 pages in which he articulates, negatively, his attack on what he calls 'ontological monism'—that is, the belief that there is only one mode of phenomenality, namely, that of ekstasis, from which in his not even Heidegger is exempt—and, positively, ontological monism's true and hidden source, the condition of its very possibility, its very ground, its essence—in other words, that singular thought, '7a subjectivite clandestine"—the mode of phenomenality which he describes painstakingly, in distinction from ekstasis, as auto-affective revelation, or pathetik phenomenality. This thought, nowhere to be found in Heidegger as far as Henry is concerned, is in fact, for

Henry, the true ground of all that Heidegger himself thought but never himself found.

Yet Henry remained ever indebted to the profound influence on him of

Heidegger's work, even though there were other, more 'pertinent' thinkers in the of Western thought to whom he looked for guidance. Maine de Biran, but also Descartes,

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Schelling, Husserl, and perhaps especially Meister

Echkart (along less strictly philosophical lines) provided each in their own way significant building blocks for the development of Henry's philosophy of 'life', or pathetik phenomenality. But such a philosophy of life as Henry delivers in an effort to arrive at the common essence hidden but, as he sees it, at play in these predecessors' work, would never have achieved acute phenomenological articulation without the crucial understanding of phenomenality which Heidegger first brought to light in its

3 Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. — Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (trans. Girard Etzkorn). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. 4 Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, two volumes. — The Essence of Manifestation (trans. Girard Etzkorn). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. 8 pervasiveness as ekstasis. Following Heidegger's lead, therefore, Henry goes back to the

Greeks for the original meaning of the 'phenomenon', and for the way the understanding of phenomenality had unfolded since that time. The "phenomenon", for the Greeks, is

"what shows itself by coming into the light"—"from the verb phainesthai, which carries within it the root phaphos, which means light."5 That which shows itself in the light appears, it is present, it is a presence, a being. Its coming into the light, its "upsurgence in physis"6, is a revelation of itself—or, to use more strictly Heideggerian terms, an unconcealing of itself—in the openness of Being; in the "light of the world", Henry would say—that is, in the ekstasis of an horizon. To that extent, for the Greeks, phenomenology and ontology go hand in hand—as indeed they should at heart.

Nevertheless, Heidegger warns that what shows itself is not Being per se, but in their beingness. His critique of ontology as beginning with the Greeks basically consists in the uncovering of this early Western privileging of presence in the light—that is, of beingness—to the point of negating anything else. As Heidegger sees it, the Greeks understood Being less in terms of unconcealment (alethia)—that is, the coming-to- presence out of concealment of beings—than they understood beings in their coming-to- presence from out of concealment, standing out specifically in their radiance as beings and offering themselves in the truth of their Being—as beings. In other words, what was primarily wondrous to the Greeks was less the coming-to-presence itself, the upsurgence in physis, than precisely the beings which had (in fact always already) upsurged. Indeed,

5 M. Henry, I Am the Truth; Towards a Philosophy of Christianity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 14. 5 M. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (trans. Douglas Brick). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985, p. 88. — Henry refers here to Heidegger's discussion of the Greek concept of phenomenality in the latter's Nietzsche volumes, especially volume 1, chapter 22, on Plato's concept of mimesis in relation to the idea. 9 for Heidegger, that very wondrousness was what inevitably wove the first covering over, the first forgetfulness of Being as coming-to-presence out of concealment. No longer

Being itself, thought in the way in which unconcealment maintained always some root worthy of question in concealment, but rather beings' full disclosure in the openness of

Being—as though a negation of concealment altogether—came to be defined as Being in general, Being as beings' ground. For Heidegger, Greek thinking "experiences and posits the truth of beings, without inquiring into truth as such, because what is unhidden in it, a being as a being, necessarily overpowers everything and uses up the nothing, taking it in or destroying it completely as the 'not' and the 'against'."7

One of the main reasons for the occurrence of this privileging, or for the securing of it, is, as Henry points out, the role that the idea plays with regards to this upsurgence in later Greek thought: the Platonic idea which also, as a "consequence of the physis on the one hand", "proposes itself to man, opening him to its light and through that light to being", such that, on the other hand, it is at the same time that which "gives man access to beings". On the one hand, the idea itself upsurges in physis to and within, or through, human being—and on the other, it allows at the same time for the possibility of the upsurgence of everything else to, within, or through human being. But in fact, Henry argues, the unique relation between these two properties of the idea is (perhaps inevitably) strained. Henry writes that. . .

. . . this second property tends to veil the first. Because the idea opens an access to beings for man, thus determining itself as those beings' a priori condition of possibility, it presents itself as the source of their appearance, which nevertheless resides in physis. It is no longer the upsurge of beings in physis that founds their

7 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: 10

placing on view: it is now the placing on view that makes the upsurge possible. {GeP 88-89)

Phenomenality is thus defined from this very early period in the West as ekstasis, the throwing out before (ob-ject), or exteriorization of Being as beings in the light—that is to say, in the light of the idea. The interesting thing, however, is that this upsurgence, this unconcealment of beings in the light, while "detached from its foundation so that it begins to float freely before man's gaze" as an ekstasis, doesn't actually find its explicitly founding principle in that gaze until Descartes—that is, until the transformation of the

Platonic idea into the Cartesian perceptio, into the "I represent" all things, thereby becoming master of them in their being (or rather, in their beingness). (GeP 89)

Now for both Heidegger and Henry, this actually changes nothing with regards to the question of Being in its truth, i.e. in terms of unconcealment as such. Or, if it changes anything, it rather makes that question even more problematic than ever, by making it precisely not problematic at all—that is, by covering it over doubly: firstly, in the original privileging and the securing of the privileging of presence in the light of the idea, which privileging negates that of Being which withdraws in the event of the upsurgence (thus, defining Being as strictly beingness), and secondly, in the assumption of man to mastery over phenomenality in and through the power of representation, which culminates, as far as Heidegger is concerned, in Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and the triumph of the will-to-power, most poignantly in its expression as modern . In this way, the "destining of Being" is such, for Heidegger, that Being sends or gives itself

(es gibf) in its epochal coming-to-presence in—and indeed as—Western history, from its

Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 125. 11 beginning with the Greeks up to its fulfillment in late Modernity, summed up in the thought of Nietzsche and embodied in modern technology as nihilism.

By nihilism, Heidegger understands the forgetting or the covering over (and to that extent a forgetting of even this forgetting) of the question of Being in its original truth as physis, and as the withdrawal that attends such upsurgence. Such a double forgetting leads Heidegger, already in the opening to Being and Time, to state the necessity of re-posing the question of Being in the face of contemporary claims (doubly forgetful) that Being is the "most universal" concept, "indefinable", yet "self-evident" and thus not or no longer requiring investigation.8 Precisely such a forgetting, such a covering over, such a history of—indeed, as—nihilism, Henry refers to, under the profound influence of Heidegger, as "ontological monism": the view that there is only one mode of phenomenality, namely, presence in the light—be that presence even (and perhaps especially) ideal presence and that light precisely the light of reason, or, in more phenomenological terms, the light of , the horizon of ekstasis. The double covering over, moreover, Henry refers to as "barbarism"—a state that humanity has arrived at, as he sees it, under the rule of modern technology.9

Thus for both Henry and Heidegger, something has been lost, and then of course further lost with the entry into Modernity—namely, the question of Being in its truth. To that extent, nihilism, ontological monism, while deepening, nevertheless remain, for both

Heidegger and Henry, continuous in Western history. As Henry says, nothing really

8 Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). San Francisco: Harper & Publishers, 1962, fl. 9 See M. Henry, La Barbarie. Paris: Grasset, 1987. (2nd edition: Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001). See also O' Sullivan, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief, chapter 4; and James G. Hart, "A Phenomenological Theory and Critique of Culture: A Reading of Michel Henry's La Barbarie": Continental Philosophy Review 32/3 (1999): 255-70. 12 changes in the "shift from the ancient and medieval philosophy of Being to the modern philosophy of consciousness [which] is generally interpreted as one of the great breakthroughs in Western thought. However, such a shift changes nothing in the definition of the thing as phenomenon but on the contrary carries it to the absolute level.

. . . [For] consciousness is nothing other than this relation to the object. . . than this manifestation that consists in the fact of being placed before. . . " (IAT 15-17). That is to say, consciousness is nothing other than the "self-exteriorization of the externality of the

'outside' which we call world" (IAT 17)—nothing other than ekstasis itself, Precisely what ontological monism fails to understand, however, says Henry, is that in speaking of this self-exteriorization of consciousness, the being of the ego in which it functions is itself always already assumed—indeed, it is itself posited ekstatically. What is needed is ultimately to "bring to light the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two. However, classical philosophy has never raised such a bond to the status of a problem, and reason tries to escape the paradox" (EsM 6). Thus the continuity of ontological monism, of nihilism, in the West.

1.2 Descartes' Beginning: Videor

Continuity, yes—on the one hand. On the other hand, however—and herein lies the seeds of Henry's ultimate departure from Heidegger's path of thinking—there have also been distinct ruptures of that continuity throughout Western history. According to Henry, a particularly decisive one is to be found in Descartes, despite the unquestionable force of the Cartesian perceptio. For it was Descartes who accomplished the radical phenomenological reduction to the cogito which initiated the epistemological turn into 13

Modernity—a turn which, according to Henry, did not consist strictly speaking in an act of representation. Indeed, Henry takes Heidegger to task for interpreting Descartes'

"I think, therefore I am" as rather entailing a self-representation—something along the lines of "I represent myself, therefore I am".10 To interpret Descartes in this way is precisely to miss, in what Henry calls 'beginning Cartesianism', the crucial distinction between videre and videor—between seeing (taken more or less in a representing sense) and seeming.

According to Henry, what is at issue for Descartes is the problem of certainty. Of what can he be certain? Nothing in the world, of course—which consequently falls under the power of Descartes' phenomenological reduction. What is left? He himself? But what if he is deceived? Still, there necessarily exists some thing who thinks—or, as Henry reads it, to whom it seems—that he exists. But what is "thought" here? For Henry, it is seeming, "a primal upwelling of phenomenality", an absolutely interior self-seeming of existence, a "self-presenting self-sensing" (GeP 26), a "self-affection", "the mute immanence of its first being-to-self, in the affectivity of pure self-sensing" (GeP 33).

Descartes himself says in the second of his Meditations—a theme that he will take up again in The Passions of the Soul, to which Henry also refers frequently:

Finally, I am the one who senses or who takes note of bodily things as if through the senses. For example, I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. These are false, since I am asleep. But I certainly seem to see, hear, and feel. This cannot be

10 See Heidegger's discussion of Descartes in chapters 15-18 of volume 4 of his Nietzsche (trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi). San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987. 14

false: properly speaking, this is what is called 'sensing' in me. But this is, to speak precisely, nothing other than thinking.11

The word 'finally' here refers to the fact that Descartes has just finished enumerating a number of attributes which, as a thinking thing, he is. The preceding few lines to the above passage run as follows:

Are any of these attributes distinct from my thought? What can be said to be separate from myself? For it is so obvious that it is I who doubt, I who understand, I who will, that there is nothing through which it could be more evidently explicated. But indeed I am also the same one who imagines; for although perhaps as I supposed before, no imagined thing would be wholly true, the very power of imagining does really exist, and constitutes a part of my thought.

The interesting thing in the whole passage is the somewhat ambiguous sense—indeed, dual sense—in which the word 'thought' is used. On the one hand, imagination, the power of imagining (an active, representing power) constitutes part of the author's thought; and along with that, understanding, doubting, willing (in a certain sense), have also an active representing aspect to them. On the other hand, 'sensing' is nothing else than thinking as well: it may also have a representing aspect to it, but it primarily is—and in sleeping especially—a matter of the passive reception of the semblance of impressions, or rather simply of the reception of impressions, since that is first and foremost what to seem means, namely, to be impressional. It is this 'to seem', then, which Henry describes as at bottom self-sensing, and which necessarily implies existence. For if I seem to see a

11 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980, p. 64, my emphasis. 15 light, there must be someone to whom it seems iyideor) that a light is seen (videre) by him. And if I know that I exist because I doubt, understand, will, imagine-—it is because there must be someone (me) to whom it seems that I am doing such things. Thus the T always discovers itself first as a 'me', in self-seeming, in originary self-impressionality— in ipseity—and only afterwards is able to open within itself the ekstasis of representation by way of which doubt (including self-doubt), understanding (including self- understanding), willing or imagination (of self or anything else), and even sensing of anything else (including the body), is made possible. This originary self-impressionality is for Henry—and for Descartes, in Henry's version of 'beginning Cartesianism'— precisely the pre-ekstatic effective reality ('life') upon which any possible ekstasis is founded. It is a mode of phenomenality distinctly different from ekstasis, rupturing ontological monism in its sudden appearance, in its sudden 'revelation' in Descartes' thought.

But there is also that other Descartes—the Descartes of, as Henry calls it,

'constituted Cartesianism'. It is precisely the character of 'constituted Cartesianism' which leads Heidegger to place Descartes squarely in the position of ushering in the doubling of the covering over of the question of the truth of Being. If the certainty of

Being is established strictly by the power of representation—"I represent myself, therefore I am" (and therefore all other things are, too, in being represented by me)—then the original sense of phenomenality as a coming-to-presence, as an upsurgence in physis, is entirely lost. And yet it is precisely this original sense of coming-to-presence which needs to be recalled (recollected) in order to rethink (or rather, to truly think for the first time) the nature of Being's withdrawal, the way in which such unconcealment always 16 maintains some root worthy of questioning in concealment. Why is there anything, rather than nothing? is Heidegger's concern—not simply: What is there? And indeed,

'beginning Cartesianism', according to Henry—which to that extent justifies Heidegger's critique—slips almost immediately from its beginnings into its constituted form, which asks only the second question. This slippage is directly related to the ambiguous, or dual, sense of what 'thought' is for Descartes. For Henry,

The fundamental phenomenological dissociation of videor and videre is the indispensable theoretical preliminary to the classical debate concerning what 'thought' means in Descartes' philosophy. As is well known, the second Meditation gives two definitions of the concept of thought—one by essence, the other by the enumeration of modes [i.e. doubting, understanding, willing, imagining, sensing] . . . The first definition should make the second superfluous [except to the extent that sensing, further elaborated by Descartes as seeming (videor), implies essence, as discussed above]. Concerning our most essential being, Descartes. . . from the start. . . aims at the constitution of an eidetic, restricting it to a phenomenological essence and what is more to the essence of phenomenality itself. (GeP 31)

For Henry, insofar as 'constituted Cartesianism', from as early as the third

Meditation, focuses more on the modes than on the essence (and at that in such a way that it is the ekstatic quality of those modes which suggests itself), the blurring of the distinction between videor and videre becomes inevitable—and along with that, the distinction between ekstasis and that other, precisely originary mode of phenomenality, namely, self-affection, or 'life'. For Henry, in the end 'beginning Cartesianism' fails because the essence, as videor, is an abrupt rupture in ekstatic phenomenality which takes place in the course of Descartes' radical phenomenological reduction of the world, but which almost as abruptly slips into obscurity. According to Henry, it slips into obscurity 17 precisely on account of Descartes' faltering gaze: "when Descartes is confronted with the blinding intuition that affectivity constitutes appearance's first coming into itself (the original self-affection wherein appearance appears to itself and wells up in its own phenomenality's appearance), his gaze falters" (GeP 44). The impression of the essence leaves as it were an after-taste in his thinking. But insofar as it ceases for him in that after-taste to be a spontaneous "welling up", it remains albeit an essence, but persists in obscurity-—it remains "laced with ontological impotence" (GeP 53). What is left to

Descartes now is to re-present to himself in an ekstasis what has "withdrawn" from him as an effective vision. Therefore, representation steps forward in Descartes' emphasis on

"clear and distinct ideas", as precisely the potency, the effectiveness, to replace the now impotence of the spontaneous upwelling which has been lost to him.12

Taken primarily in its form as 'constituted Cartesianism', it is quite true—Henry would admit in concession to Heidegger—that Descartes' ushering in of Modernity changes nothing in the history of nihilism, or ontological monism, except to the extent that it deepens the forgetfulness of, by covering over doubly, the question of the truth of

Being. In its form as 'beginning Cartesianism', however, which, according to Henry,

Heidegger completely misses, a great rupture of that history occurs: a new mode of phenomenality is introduced. But such a rupture is not entirely new: it was already there in Meister Eckhart, from whose thought Henry draws heavily; and, of course, also in

Augustine (whom Henry surprisingly hardly ever mentions), whose argument for the

"Descartes gave the concept of consciousness its ontologically radical significance, in which the concept designates appearance considered in itself—not just some thing but the principle of every thing, the original manifestation in which everything that can exist comes to be a phenomenon and so into being for us. Descartes introduced the concept of consciousness at such a depth, however, that its primal importance could not be preserved or truly perceived, not even 18 certainty of his own existence based on the fact of the felt immediacy of the perception of his being alive13 pre-dates Descartes' argument by nearly thirteen centuries. Also, the whole tradition of 'apophatic' theology already breaks with phenomenality in its ekstatic mode. But what Henry seeks is precisely a positive articulation of phenomenality in its originary mode, in its phenomenological effectiveness. Meister Eckhart, as far as Henry is concerned, certainly does deliver that; but he delivers it in his own way—a way which is distinctly theologically (and for that matter pastorally) oriented. However, his articulation of the soul as an affective ipseity is a decisive insight for Henry, since it establishes the essence upon which anything like an ekstatic horizon could be founded.14

Yet it takes 'beginning Cartesianism', argues Henry, to articulate that essence in strictly Modern terms: that is, in terms of "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two'" (EsM 6). The logic behind Henry's emphasis on Descartes' thought as being pivotal with regards to the possibilities of phenomenality in Western history runs basically as follows: as 'constituted

Cartesianism', Descartes' thought changes little essentially speaking, but it does weave the second covering over of the question of Being in its truth as unconcealment, and this fact itself is not without some pivotal practical force; as 'beginning Cartesianism', however, it opens a possibility of phenomenality unknown even to the Greeks, and in such a way that the entwined relation between ontology and phenomenology is exposed when taken up again by contemporary phenomenology, which claimed to develop it fully—not even, I would say, by Descartes himself." (GeP 6) 13 See Book XV, Chapter 4 of Augustine, The (trans. Edmund Hill). New York: New City Press, 1991. 14 See Henry's treatment of Eckhart in The Essence of Manifestation, chapters 39 and 40. — Of course, Eckhart's teaching on the con-substantiality of the soul with God was unquestionably immensely influential in Henry's development and description of pathetik phenomenality. On Henry's relationship to Eckhart and to Neo-platonic thought in general see #4.1 below. 19 in the precisely radical originariness of this entwinement. For if the Platonic idea, as itself an upsurgence in physis, at the same time gives human being access to all beings, it goes unnoticed in Greek thinking that this idea is first and foremost already given to someone whose own mode of self-appearance never becomes a question. Or, if it does, the answer given is articulated already at this point in an ekstasis: namely, as nous, as rational soul, as a metaphysical entity never itself revealed (i.e. made phenomenologically effective) in the potency of its immediate reality. In other words, the first covering over of the question of Being in its truth by the Greeks—this covering over consisting precisely of the privileging of the property of the idea as giving human being access to beings over its property of arising out of physis as well—denies thought the possibility of questioning precisely what the nature of this physis really is with regards to the being to whom the idea is given.

For just this reason Heidegger, in re-raising the question of Being in its truth, privileges Dasein, the being for whom Being is a concern, as the specific being through whom such a questioning could be carried out. As far as Henry is concerned, this methodological privileging of Dasein by Heidegger is indeed necessary. But Heidegger misses, according to Henry, the pivotal contribution made by Descartes in 'beginning

Cartesianism', and as such ends up defining Dasein nowhere originarily enough. In

'beginning Cartesianism', in Descartes' notion of videor, what we have, for Henry, is the revelation of the very possibility of all phenomenality everywhere: the givenness of self- impressionality to—indeed, as-—an ipseity capable (its capacity consisting in the idea) of opening within itself—or from within itself, out of itself, out before itself—an ekstatic horizon, in the light of which all beings are phenomenalized. In other words, the human 20 being is in his essence given to himself as the foundation of all phenomenality. This does not mean, of course, that the world has no reality apart from human being, as though it were a mere projection of his imagination or illusion and would simply not exist at all without him. Rather, it means that its reality is made phenomenologically effective only through human being as the only being whose own reality is made phenomenologically effective to himself as an ipseity, in the 'pure stuff, as it were, of self-seeming: "a primal upwelling of phenomenality" {GeP 26), "the affectivity of pure self-sensing" (GeP 33).

This 'pure stuff, pure impressionality, is moreover for Henry the pure stuff—the essence—of all phenomenality, including at its heart the ekstatic phenomenality of the world. For nothing can be ekstatically re-presented unless it is (always already) presented impressionally in/as the pure stuff of seeming; and of course, no seeming is possible without one (i.e. an ipseity whose own essence is self-seeming) to whom it seems.

It is precisely 'beginning Cartesianism', then, which provides Henry's thinking, epistemologically speaking, with something other than an onto-theological foundation— or, at least, other than what might be charged with being onto-theologically dependent

(which for Henry, in any case, comes down to the same thing as ekstatic representation).15 According to Henry, there are two continuous streams flowing through

,5 What is at issue for Henry is not whether Eckhart or Augustine speak about the soul (as an ipseity) in relation to God, but whether they still give ontology qua meta-physics priority over epistemology in speaking of the soul and of God. If they do, then that would mean that they did not have the true vision in its full phenomenological effectiveness of the entwined relation between ontology and phenomenology, which would constitute their being onto-theologians in Heidegger's sense of the term. On the other hand, their works, in their mystical and often apophatic turns, suggest an awareness, even an undergoing, of originary givenness or relation whose effective reality inspires as it were the name of God in a moment of the soul's pre-ekstatic affectivity. Consider Augustine's questioning in his Confessions: "What is it that I love when I love my God?" The givenness to itself of ipseity in Henry's as well as in Descartes' thought is in that sense not unsimilar to some pre-Modern articulations of it. The Modern epistemological deepening of the articulation would thus have to do with the precise relation of this pre-ekstatic givenness to itself of the soul to the givenness to it of other beings—the 'pure stuff of all 21

Western history from its beginning with the Greeks: the first is the same continuity to which Heidegger himself attests, that of nihilism—in Henry's terms, ontological monism—which is in each case only deepened by the turn into Modernity. The other stream is one which Heidegger himself did not see in its phenomenological positivity, but only in its withdrawal, namely, the effective essence and condition of the possibility of all ekstasis.16 This latter subterranean stream also does not radically change, but is deepened with the turn into Modernity. And yet, on the other hand, such a deepening has enormous implications for Western philosophical history, since for the first time it radically allows for the possibility of developing a philosophy of subjective life which can claim the status of being a fundamental ontology.

There are times in Modern history when that stream travels so completely underground that not even a hint of it is ever caught. This is what occurs, argues Henry, when it passes through—or rather, deeply beneath—Konigsberg. Kant simply had—or so thought the young philosophically-minded Resistant of the Pericles division—no real ontology of subjectivity, since all phenomena, for Kant, must be arrived at through an intuition which is determined by the a priori categories of knowledge. Such categories, however, cannot finally turn upon themselves to establish their own unity. Kant's

"transcendental unity of apperception" must and does remain an abstract metaphysical seeming, the stuff of "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two" (EsM 6)—and along with that, the capacity for re-presenting not only the soul (who self-seems), but also all beings (who seem to the soul), and perhaps also 'God'. At this point, however, the question of how or even if at all 'God' 'seems' for Henry, in this precise sense of the 'pure stuff of seeming, cannot be discussed. More on this in chapters 3 and 4, where this issue is precisely at the heart of many of the criticisms of Henry's work, as well as at the heart of my reading of Henry through the work of Jean-Luc Marion. 16 In terms of its Greek beginning: For Henry, this second stream actually first appears in its phenomenological effectiveness in the Logos theology of John—although it reaches maturity, that is, in terms of its full phenomenological possibilities, only with 'beginning Cartesianism'. 22 postulate. As Henry writes: "in a metaphysics of representivity that cannot represent

. . .the condition of being-represented (i.e. the act of posing and representing itself), that condition (i.e. pure thought's T) necessarily escapes the phenomenality it forever founds" (GeP 119). What would be required for such a condition to be represented would be an intuition. But any intuition of such a condition is necessarily lacking because it is impossible on account of the system's inherent structure. Since Kant never admits the possibility of any originary impressionality which would be pre-intuitional, the subject remains a pure abstraction. "This is the ineluctable destiny of every ecstatic ontology that recognizes impressions as phenomena only in intuition: to be immediately deprived of impression's inner essence, as self-impression and ipseity, and simultaneously to be deprived of the original bond that on the basis of its essence unites that impression to a

'self" {GeP 117). Kant, in other words, fits nicely into the tradition of 'constituted

Cartesianism' which claims that 'I exist' because 'I represent myself—a claim in fact precarious and ever weakening in its heart because of its foundationless character. Kant himself was well aware of this inevitable paradox; but he could not himself resolve it. For as soon as representation is admitted as the establisher of being, one would either have to rest with an abstraction as one's final ground, or open an infinite regress of ekstatic horizons—which of course is no less of an abstraction in the end; in fact, it is even more so. One might just as well stop with the first regress, which is in fact what Kant did. 23

1.3 Heidegger's Hesitation: Ereignis and Abgrund

Two combined currents of philosophical thinking fascinated Henry after his experience in the Resistance of "/a subjectivite clandestine'", and after his meeting in Muggenbrunn with Heidegger: the Modern philosophy of the subject, and the tradition of phenomenality conceived as ekstasis. The second ultimately makes the resolution of the paradoxes of the first impossible—or rather, it itself spins the paradoxes of the first.

Henry took it as his own philosophical task to dissolve these paradoxes. Heidegger's work, as far as Henry was concerned, did not help much along these lines. Certainly it laid out the field; certainly it articulated with great profundity the stakes involved. But

Being and Time remained thoroughly committed to the philosophy of ekstasis, and

Heidegger's work after 'the turn' ('Kehre') remained committed to the mystery of

Being's withdrawal, to the Abgrund, the ungrounded ground, the ground which

'hesitates' and whose hesitation claims the subject in his core as well. It is uncertain to what extent Henry would have been familiar with Heidegger's work after Being and Time at the time of their meeting in 1947. Henry does, however, address to a limited extent some of Heidegger's writings from the 1930's and 40's by the time of his L 'Essence de la

Manifestation, first published in 1963; and in his Genealogy of Psychoanalysis17, Henry takes seriously into account Heidegger's late writings on Being and Ereignis. But Henry assumes a continuity, from Being and Time onwards, between all of the texts of

Heidegger to which he refers. He sees no distinct turning, and he struggles at great length with Heidegger's continuous dependence upon ekstasis for his unfolding of Dasein in its relation to Being. That Dasein itself is nothing but ekstasis—more exactly: that Dasein is 24

"ekstatische Instdndigkeif,n, that the subject becomes rather the event of ekstasis itself, or even, the advent of ekstasis, be that event or advent a 'resolute' one or one claimed and initiated by Being—all this doesn't solve anything for Henry, since the source of that claim can only be—at best—a hesitating ground, ineffective, ontologically impotent, indeed no ground at all.

Might this not have been precisely Henry's 'clandestine' thought concerning

Dasein during those hours in Muggenbrunn, a good twenty years after the publication of

Being and Time, and nine years after Heidegger's completion of his Beitrdge zur

Philosophie (vom Ereignis)! Although this latter work was not published until 1989

(thirteen years after Heidegger's death—he himself withheld its publication throughout his life19), it is decisively in his Beitrdge—in English, Contributions to Philosophy (From

Enowning)—in which Heidegger begins to develop his articulation of Being as Ereignis, variously translated as the event of appropriation, or enowning of Dasein to Being. As in

Being and Time, in his Contributions Dasein is still that being for whom Being is a concern. What is accentuated, however, is the way in which the very nature of that concern itself is shaped by Being, which not only comes to presence in unconcealment, but also withholds itself, indeed refuses itself—and whose refusal occurs within unconcealment and thus makes Dasein appear. That is, in refusing itself it does so not

17 Published originally in 1985 as Genealogie de la psychoanalyse: Le commencement perdu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 18 See M. Boutin, Relationalitat als Verstehensprinzip bei Rudolf Bultmann [series «Beitrage zur evangelischen Theologie», vol. 67]. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1974, pp. 33 & 51-4. 19 Riidiger Safranski argues, based on remarks which Heidegger made in the context of his Nietzsche lectures (on which he was working at the same time as his Contributions) concerning Nietzsche's own withholding of some of his greatest insights on account of a lack of a place for their unfolding, that Heidegger himself also "evidently did not think the time to publish [his Contributions] had yet come." See Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (trans. Ewald Osers). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 306. 25 simply as a withheld 'presence', but precisely, paradoxically, in giving itself as a 'present absence' (or 'opening', or 'emptiness', what Heidegger here calls 'ab-ground') to be kept safe by Dasein. Even, it should perhaps be said: to be kept safe as 'Da-sem'.

In his Contributions, in fact, it would seem that Dasein is by definition precisely not capable of the kind of fallenness which Heidegger describes in Being and Time—that is, that it is no longer a matter of a mere modification of the basic mode of Being of

Dasein that is fallenness—but rather that Da-sein is already, for Heidegger, firmly established on the other side of authenticity, on the other side, that is, of the "essential transformation of the human from 'rational animal' (animal rationale) to Da-sein"

(CPfE 3). The Contributions casts the human, as Da-sein, in the genitive case. Gone is any of Being and Time's 'accusative' call or talk of conscience here. Da-sein is still thrown, of course, and it is still given to itself in that thrownness (in the dative case)—but less precisely as being given over to itself as being given over to itself only in being given over to Being. Da-sein is who it is only in being given over to Being—otherwise it is not

Da-sein per se, but only a 'rational animal'. Da-sein itself is just this enownment. And it is this genitive casting—or perhaps one might say, this "dative-genitive" casting—of

Da-sein which constitutes Da-sein's proper selfhood. In other words, Da-sein is ekstasis; ekstasis is Da-sein, as the event/advent of Being, as Ereignis.

For Heidegger, Being as Ereignis of withdrawal/unconcealment is a "suspended structure", the "suspended structure of appropriation."21 It is ab-ground, or grounded in

20 In German, the word Da can mean either 'there' or 'here'. The resonance of both meanings at once should no doubt be heard in appreciating the sense of 'being-w-the-world' as an ekstasis. This double resonance has always been a part of Heidegger's employment of the word. However, the English translators of Heidegger's Beitrage note that in this text Heidegger most often hyphenates the Da of Dasein, even italicizing the Da (t/here), in order to invoke the intimacy of 26 ab-ground (Abgrund), which presents itself as an absence, an emptiness, as the 'Open'.

Ab-ground is. . .

self-sheltering-concealing in the manner of not-granting the ground. However, not-granting is not nothing but rather an outstanding originary manner of letting be unfulfilled, empty—thus an outstanding manner of enopening. . . Yet ab- ground as a way for the ground to be is not a mere self-refusing as simply pulling back and going away, ^6-ground is ab-ground. By refusing itself, ground brings into the open in an outstanding manner, namely into the initial openness of that emptiness, which is thus a definite one. Insofar as ground also and precisely still grounds in ab-ground and yet does not actually ground, it stands in hesitation. Ab-ground is the hesitating refusal of ground. In the refusal, originary emptiness opens, originary clearing occurs; but the clearing is at the same time such that the hesitating manifests in it.22

This clearing, this openness, this emptiness, is not precisely empty, as a sheer negation, for Heidegger. It is "not a mere self-refusing as simply pulling back and going away", not an 'absent presence'. It is rather a 'present absence', quite full, quite pregnant, in fact—in the sense of the fullness and the pregnancy of letting be, of letting be precisely full of time, or of being the fullness of time. Heidegger writes:

Fullness is pregnant with the originary 'not'; making full is not^e^ and no longer gifting, both in counter-resonance, refused in the very hesitating. . . Enowning [Ereignis] as the hesitating refusal and therein the fullness of 'time', the the relation of the "opening" of a world to enowning. See the translators' forward to Heidegger, Contributions, pp. xxxiv-xxxv. 21 Heidegger, Identity and Difference. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 38. — The edition includes the original German text in which "schwebendenden Bau des Ereignisses" appears on page 102. The publication of Beitrdge being withheld during Heidegger's lifetime, Identity and Difference is the text to which Henry refers when discussing Heidegger's thinking on Ereignis. 27

mightiness of the fruit and the greatness of the gifting—but in the truth as clearing for the self-sheltering. (CPfE §146, 189)

The emphasis on time in this fullness, on the "not yet and no longer gifting", is coincident with Heidegger's constant articulation of Dasein as temporality. Dasein never ceases to be, for Heidegger, that being for whom Being is an issue; it is inherently futurity, and as such, a being with a past as well. The 'space' of the clearing is thus a 'space-time', or rather 'time-space', as Heidegger calls it, insisting that space should not be thought in separation from time. The expression 'time-space' in the Contributions is more or less interchangeable with the 'Open', with the Da of Da-sein, and with its opening of a world projecting itself in its futurity. Such projection (Ent-wurf) is the 'response' of Da-sein to its originary thrownness (Ge-worfenheii). In this response, provenance occurs for Da-sein as nearness, so that time is not objectified in terms of past, present, and future.

Yet, hesitating—that is to say, maintaining, as unconcealment, always some root worthy of questioning in concealment—what, asks Henry, ultimately holds the Open open? Or better, how does the Open first come to be an opening in the first place? In other words, what is the ground of, as the effective ontological power underlying, ekstasis? Here Henry sees Heidegger doing his best to hold at bay the initiative that the ego has in 'constituted Cartesianism' (the only Cartesianism known to Heidegger)— namely, the initiative of opening the horizon in representation, of "throw[ing] before itself and bringing] the horizon of representability back to itself; "but whether the initiative comes back to being or to man in the throw of ek-sistence, the phenomenality

22 CPfE §242, 265. — I am grateful to Maurice Boutin for pointing out to me inaccuracies in the English translation of this passage. The above translation is a modified translation based on his suggestions. 28 that it pro-jects or by which it is thrown", says Henry, "is the same. It is the light of ek- stasis" {GeP 100). The question for Henry is ultimately not one of initiative, but rather the mode of phenomenality. Heidegger thinks no other mode of phenomenality than ekstasis which, as Being's initiative and not Dasein's, is also maintained, Henry contends, with a root always outside Dasein's conceptual grasp in concealment—and thus its ground is ab-ground, is hesitating. Any attempt to make that ground explicit would thus no doubt be an improper initiative on the part of Dasein—that is, an onto-theological project, or even an onto-theo-egological one, which would cover over the question of the truth of Being. But for Henry, the question of initiative is of only secondary importance, and in fact presents no antagonism between Dasein and Being23, but rather a unity between them, if the effective power or ground of the opening of the ekstasis is thought in terms of the videor, the originary seeming, or self-sensing of'beginning Cartesianism'.

A mode of phenomenality which is purely immanent in its upwelling-coming-into-itself, it nevertheless grounds ekstasis; it is the condition of the possibility of all throwing- before itself of an ekstatic horizon. What hesitates, therefore, for Henry, is not ground, but only Heidegger himself, the thinker of Being, since he entirely misses the essential discovery of 'beginning Cartesianism', the videor, self-sensing—ipseity—and that it can be seen as a "philosophy of radical subjectivity and life" {GeP 52), an entirely different

23 Actually, there is no antagonism between Dasein and being for Heidegger either. See especially §§ 134, 135 and 197 of Contributions, to which unfortunately Henry did not have access at the time of his writing The Genealogy. No such excuse can be made, however, for Henry's similarly reductive reading of Heidegger in his 1996 work C'est moi la verite, seven years after the publication of Beitrage. I shall not here belabour the point. It is without question that Henry reads Heidegger reductively, and a demonstration of the extent to which he does so would be a separate work. I have only intended here to present Henry's reading of Heidegger as it is so as to elucidate a major interlocutionary position (be it truly Heidegger's or not) in a sustained struggle with which Henry articulates his own thinking. — I am indebted to Maurice Boutin for drawing my attention to above noted passages in Contributions. 29 and more originary mode of phenomenality than ekstasis, and as such also the secure and effective ground of a fundamental ontology.

1.4 A Counter-Tradition: Life and the Unconscious

For Henry, a renewed thinking on subjectivity after Heidegger's critique fixes as the main phenomenological task to articulate a non-ekstatic, or rather j!?re-ekstatic, mode of phenomenality which is ontologically effective—that is, which can serve as a fundamental ontology without falling into the ekstasis of an onto-theological, or onto- theo-egological projection. For Henry, 'beginning Cartesianism', in discovering the upwelling-coming-into-itself of self-sensing as ipseity, conceives of such a pre-ekstatic mode. But Descartes himself was unable ultimately to hold on to such a vision in order to articulate it further—that is to say, in order to articulate it from out of'it, in order for his articulation to be 'consubstantial', as it were, with its effectivity. Nevertheless, Henry is convinced that as a philosophy of radical subjectivity and life, 'beginning Cartesianism' provides a real breakthrough for Western thought.

Of course, in the Western tradition other figures also stumbled upon that subterranean stream of the philosophy of radical life, each in their own way. These figures came, according to Henry, from outside the tradition of strict phenomenological undertaking—-Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for example, and Freud, all of whom (along with Descartes and Heidegger's misinterpretation of 'beginning Cartesianism') Henry takes up in his Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche especially, according to Henry, are true to 'beginning Cartesianism' in their thinking of life as a certain notion of affectivity which they directly relate, as a pre-ekstatic mode of 30 phenomenality, to the body. This is seen especially in Nietzsche, in whom the direct relation of this pre-ekstatic mode with the body casts it in its characterization as power, or, more specifically, as will: 'will-to-power'.

For Schopenhauer, will also plays a pivotal role, namely as 'will-to-life'— yet in such a way that will is, as in Nietzsche, in some way power also. However, such power ends up, paradoxically, as a radical weffectivity. First of all, it is necessary to point out that Schopenhauer distinguishes between the objective, physical body which is identifiable in an ekstatic representation in the world, from the 'body' as infinite will: interiorly immanent, it is radically in-itself, pre-ekstatic; the objective body—indeed, all objective bodies, since this infinite will is not individual—is merely its expression or outer appearance. Specifically in its obscure expression as objective bodies, will is will- to-life. But as this pre-ekstatic 'body', it is not merely biological life, but rather infinite life, infinite expression which the will wills, and which it always already in some sense is, albeit obscurely so, as it were. Nevertheless, this will's 'infinitude' in willing infinite life and willing it infinitely, does not finally entail its effectivity; in fact, the obscurity of its effectivity in the world of objective bodies ultimately resides, for Schopenhauer, in precisely its ontological /^effectivity. But why, then, if it is power in itself, is will ultimately as ineffectivity? According to Schopenhauer, it is because it depends upon an ekstasis (representation) in order to come fully into itself as what it is (will-to-life), precisely by coming into itself as what it wills (life). In separating itself from itself in the representation of itself as life (which it wills), it has to go outside of itself as power—so that it can no longer draw from itself the power for its being, and it is therefore ineffective. Since it necessarily represents itself by virtue of its own essence as will-to- 31 life—since it requires representation for the fulfillment of its will to life—it also inevitably no longer truly lives (since it becomes powerless) once it has done so. In other words, it is inherently ineffective precisely because it depends upon representation in order to perpetually come into itself as what it is and what it wills. Thus it is not that the will is ineffective only because in some sense it is curtailed by its finite expression as the world of objective bodies; rather, the world of objective bodies is first what it is because it is as the self-separated—indeed, self-abandoned—expression of an ontologically ineffective, albeit infinite, will. Its reality is thus inherently as an unreality. Henry comments:

. . .life never stops attaining itself, posing itself in being. It is infinite reiteration. But what it attains each time, what it unceasingly poses as itself, as its own being, is a lack consubstantial with itself. Life is reality, but a reality essentially constituted by its lack of reality, eternally pursuing and lacking reality. For since there is no reality except as a lack of reality, no reality can fill that lack. All it can do is infinitely repeat it. (GeP 135)

According to Henry, infinitely repeating itself as lack, Schopenhauer's reality in the end suffers from the same ultimate ontological impotence which afflicted Descartes' cogito—or rather, from an even graver impotence. It is not merely that the originary essence wells up for a moment and then fades in its distinctness under a faltering gaze, so that an ekstatic re-presentation of it is all that remains possible; it is rather that that essence never even wells up into full phenomenality. From the start it is obscure, it is ineffective in itself—as pure lack—so that it inherently requires the opening of an ekstasis for its fulfillment as what it is (namely, will-to-life), precisely through the fulfillment of what it wills. In other words, Schopenhauer's pre-ekstatic will coming into 32

itself by going outside of itself is an 'eternal return' of sorts, but an eternal return of

unreality, or empty reality, of reality as ontological lack or ineffectivity. It is a

"hungry reality". Hence Schopenhauer's pessimism. But actually, Henry claims that

Schopenhauer's pessimism, his whole philosophy of lack, is ultimately rooted in the fact

that he problematically allows the will's ontological import to slip constantly into a

merely ontic concern: for as a 'will-to-life', the infinite will is forever getting mixed up

with the ontic condition of need of the objective body; and it does so precisely because the will requires an ekstasis—i.e. requires the objective body—to come into itself as what

it is by coming into itself as what it wills. But coming into itself as such, will inevitably meets with a lack of fulfillment in itself because it goes outside of its own power in doing

so; infinitely reiterated, that lack ends up serving, in a somewhat circular fashion in

Schopenhauer's philosophy, as its very essence, as ground.

Yet—and this is the point for Henry which makes Schopenhauer finally a truly interesting philosopher of life, although an extremely bad ontologist—original will is still phenomenologically effective enough to make itself felt (as an affection: i.e. as 'hunger') as an obscurity which underlies and makes all ekstasis possible. What emerges here as the central problem for Henry in Schopenhauer's philosophy of life is the fact that will, while obscurely envisioned in the body - precisely by way of an affection - as radically pre-ekstatic and serving as the ground of all ekstasis, never fully arrives at phenomenality except by way of an ekstasis, i.e. in a representation of itself as life. But according to

Henry, it arrives to itself and thus is already living and already a living will (even though obscurely) first and foremost in and as an affection, i.e. as 'hungry'. Henry writes that 33

one cannot simply affirm that life is hungry, constantly active will. . . It must first be shown how will, for example, belongs to life, how it is alive. Self-affection. .. constitutes life's essence in will or in any other determination containing that original essence. In radical opposition to the ontic and pre-critical concept of life as will, it is therefore necessary to pose the ontological concept in virtue of which that will is something instead of nothing, in the immanence of the primordial that makes it a living will. (GeP 164)

On the one hand, since the will's phenomenality in its ekstasis as the objective body is already preceded by the affection of that very will itself in its pre-ekstatic, ontologically obscure mode, Schopenhauer stands, it seems, safely outside of Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, since it is not will as represented, but will in its precisely pre-ekstatic obscurity which ultimately founds being. To that extent, Schopenhauer, along with

'beginning Cartesianism', does indeed envision a pre-ekstatic foundation for being. But on the other hand, Schopenhauer does not—and here he falls seriously short of

'beginning Cartesianism' in Henry's opinion—raise that foundation into its full phenomenality—that is, into a precisely pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenality—but only allows it to speak 'obscurely' in an affection (hunger) which is immediately circled back upon itself in the service of an ekstasis which represents that foundation as ontologically ineffective.

For Henry, the very fact that will's obscure pre-ekstatic affectivity in and as its

'hunger' is ultimately the phenomenological basis of its ekstatic ontological representation should have been a clue for Schopenhauer. For hunger is an affection of the same order as the originary impressionality which founds the cogito as ipseity in the videor: that is, if I am hungry—indeed, if infinite will itself is hungry—then it is also 34

necessarily so that there is someone to whom it seems that I am hungry, namely, a 'me'.

Schopenhauer completely misses this distinction, however because for him originary

infinite will cannot be individualized in essence; it can never be an ipseity, only ever a

general obscurity. Thus Schopenhauer's ontology comes up short, for Henry, not because

he is in the end an onto-theologist, but rather because he is simply not a rigorous enough phenomenologist—since he misses the videor, and as such never discovers ipseity. At the

same time, however, he is immediately inspired by the originary impressionality of

affection (however obscurely and 'hungrily') to make of that which is the pre-ekstatic,

ontologically the ground. As such, according to Henry, Schopenhauer makes an

important contribution to the philosophy of life in the West in the context of Heidegger's critique—even if he, as ontologically pessimistic, never actually himself achieves a clear vision of just what he has offered.

For Henry, it takes Nietzsche—who himself often called Schopenhauer

"Master"—to make that primordial will, as will-to-power, ontologically a highly effective one. For Nietzsche's "noble ones" are precisely those individual selves, each an ipseity, in which life as will-to-power ever comes into itself, ever becomes itself, in superabundance. Such a coming into itself is Nietzsche's teaching of the eternal return of the Same (that is, of absolute Life) in the suffering and the joy of a Dionysian excess of self: "that primal passion of being's suffering as ipseity's essence" (GeP 264). Unlike

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche perceives very distinctly life's essence—or rather, life as essence—in and as affectivity. The individual is thus central in Nietzsche's philosophy; but for him "The thou is older than the I"24, and those who could genuinely say T do not

F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part I, section "On the Love of Neighbour". — Following Nietzsche Max Scheler states: "The 'thou' is the most basic existential category of 35 yet exist. Whereas for Henry, such an individuality already touches, indeed is rooted in, the ontological dimension of absolute Life. As Henry writes:

The sense of nobility, the feeling of being a Self founded on oneself, and thus independent and different from every other, is merely the formulation of the original essence of ipseity and life if it is true that self-sufficiency has its ontological foundation in self-affection and exhausts itself in and refers back to self-affection. {GeP 265)

To that extent, will-to-power is, for Nietzsche, already power, already an ontological effectiveness.25 Moreover, in being such an effectiveness and precisely the pre-ekstatic ground of all ekstasis, will-to-power does not abandon its representations to ultimate emptiness and lack of reality as does Schopenhauer's will-to-life which—already in some sense life, yet only obscurely so—seeks life outside of itself in a representation, losing its very life in doing so. On the contrary, says Henry, Nietzsche's will-to-power exalts and cherishes its representations—its perspectival truths—precisely by virtue of the fact that they are for it its values—whose precondition as 'highest value' is life's coming into itself in ipseity, the 'high-noon' of Nietzsche's thinking. "Nietzsche's thought is solar",

Henry writes, "and as such is easily misunderstood if one fails to note that its brightness does not ultimately proceed from or reside in its [ekstatic] light. At its most intense, as sunlight, it shines forth only as revealed to itself in that invisible dimension of revelation: life" {GeP 270). It is for this reason, Henry claims, that Heidegger ends up getting human thinking" (M. Scheler, Problems of a of Knowledge. London, Boston & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, vii + 239 p.; p. 71. — German 1926, pp. 53-54 of M. Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Der Neue-Geist Verlag, xi + 565 p.). 25 Distinctly in the 'noble ones' it is already power. But in fact, it is always already power in the ones who are 'sick' as well. Nietzsche brilliantly shows the way in which the life that is sick 36

Nietzsche entirely wrong—-just as he entirely misses the import of the videor of

'beginning Cartesianism'. For Heidegger interprets the will-to-power not as already power, in the sense of the pre-ekstatic self-affection of life, but rather in terms of representation. Will-to-power means, for Heidegger, the will-to-represent, the establishment of value through an act of 'aiming at', through an act of representation— a "will-to-Greek-light", as it were. But "[t]he essence of Nietzsche's 'value' is. . .the essence of life, not that of representation, the representation of a value being merely the representation of a preexisting and presupposed value and not its explanation"

(GeP 276). For Henry, Heidegger twists Nietzsche's thought in order to fit him into— indeed, in order to make of his thought the completion of—Western history as the unfolding of nihilism: in order to place Nietzsche, that is, both nearest to and finally furthest from the question of the truth of Being.

Of course, Nietzsche, too, is concerned with nihilism: "Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?"26 But here he understands nihilism differently than does Heidegger. Heidegger understands nihilism in terms of the forgetting of the question of the truth of Being, to the point of forgetting even this forgetting, of covering over even the covering over of the original wonder of the coming- to-presence in the light of beings out of concealment (see #1.3). Nietzsche, on the other hand, thinks nihilism in two other distinct, although closely related, senses. The first sense is what Nietzsche portrays as the whole world-denying history of Western thinking as shaped by Christian (Neo-)Platonism, the tradition of the assertion that this world, the functions (powerfully) in resentiment and in the redirected expressions of life's energies which resentiment realizes—for instance, in piety and asceticism. 26 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale). New York: Vintage Books, 1968, §1, p. 7. 37 world of 'appearances'—of presence as immanence as opposed to 'ideal' presence as other-worldly 'transcendence'—is in fact not true presence at all; rather, it is only appearance, it has no true Being (understood only as beingness). The true presence (that is to say, Being understood only as beingness) lies elsewhere. Where? In other-worldly

'transcendence', of course. But in fact, the tradition, as Nietzsche argues, says different things at different times concerning this 'transcendence'.27 Finally, in late Modernity, it even denies it—and thus reigns in late 19th century Western Europe. As far as

Nietzsche is concerned, however, positivism, too, if not world-denying, is yet terribly sick—and it is this that leads to the second, more pivotal sense in which Nietzsche thinks nihilism: namely, that the highest values devalue themselves, that suddenly—and no one knows how or why—"God is dead", and neither has anything come, nor does anybody want anything or anyone to come to replace God.

For Nietzsche, it is precisely in this uncanny "twilight of the idols" that a new path must be made for a higher form of life in this world: the overman. However,

Nietzsche's articulation of the dynamics of that new life in the overman—a dynamics which is itself ultimately, according to Heidegger, a metaphysics—places him, for

Heidegger, further from the question of Being in its truth than the tradition has ever been.

For here the world as will-to-power—indeed, the overman himself as the will-to-power, as the commanding, yes-saying, and masterfully, rapturously self-willed embodiment of it—wills its own truth (as a stability, as a value) for the sole purpose of the enhancing- becoming of life. But first, before willing anything 'specific'—or rather, in and through willing anything specific—it would be necessary to will this enhancing-becoming (as a

27 See, for example, Nietzsche's classic "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth", in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (trans. R.J. Hollingdale). London: Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 38 stability, as a value) itself, as the new highest value, as the highest value properly and intimately of the overman: "To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power" (WtP §617, 330). In other words, Nietzsche's will-to-power is in some sense the will-to-represent itself as such, as its own highest value as enhancing- becoming life; it is the representation of itself as life.

It is in this sense that, for Heidegger, Nietzsche is both nearest and furthest from the question of Being. He is nearest because he uncovers the covering over of the covering over by a re-posing of the question of the truth of Being through an investigation into the devaluation of the highest values hitherto, and he renders what had long been doubly concealed once again only singly so. Yet he is furthest at the same time because, although raising anew the question of Being, he provides an answer which ultimately not only blocks entirely but even devalues, as it were, the questioning itself.

Being maintains itself, as eternal return, only as an 'as if, a willed representation of the overman's highest value of enhancing-becoming life—Nietzsche's 'new god', as it were, being merely the expression of a maximal state of the will-to-power itself. It redoubles the covering over, in other words, but this time as a distinct act of will—namely, as the will to will in a maximal state, as precisely a willed valuation, rather than as forgetfulness. This is for Heidegger the deepest form of nihilism, a nihilism bringing to an end the possibilities of radiant coming-to-presence of Being in the epochal destining of Being which has been Western history.

According to Henry, however, Nietzsche's nihilism is only such because

Heidegger totally fails to grasp that for Nietzsche enhancing-becoming life is precisely not a representation, but an originary affectivity. It is pre-ekstatic, and the representation

50-51. 39 of it as the highest value—the will to "impose upon becoming the character of being"—is

"merely the representation of a preexisting and presupposed value and not its explanation" (GeP 276). If such an imposition of the character of being upon becoming is, as Nietzsche says, the "supreme will to power", it is precisely because the eternal return of this enhancing-becoming of life, as eternal coming-into-itself of ipseity, as "that primal passion of being's suffering as ipseity's essence" (GeP 264), is already felt, is already power. It is the condition for the possibility of its explanation. And it is as value precisely for that reason alone: because, as Nietzsche says, '"the good'. . . that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded. . . felt and established themselves and their actions as good", and "the 'well-born' felt themselves to be 'happy'."28 One must still very seriously pose the question here, however, as to whether or not these

"well-born nobles"—indeed, Nietzsche himself—are yet the overman.

In fact, they are not. Henry himself admits that in the end Nietzsche's conception of life—the phenomenality of that maximal state of the will-to-power—-remains in part hidden in shadow. Of course, the "high noon" of Nietzsche's philosophy, that "invisible dimension of revelation", presumably affords no shadows; but in fact, it reabsorbs the potentiality of all shadows back into its own depth, precisely there where it finds no actual foundation: its own most abyssal thought (the eternal return) is ultimately that by which both Zarathustra (temporarily) and Nietzsche himself (permanently) are drawn under. In other words, Nietzsche seeks to replace the dead God of Western metaphysics with the overman as the maximal state of the will-to-power, as enhancing-becoming life.

28 GeP 248. — Henry, here quoting Nietzsche, has put together two separate quotes from On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ. Hollingdale). New York: Random House, 1989, First Essay, Sections 2 and 10 respectively. With regards to the first quote, there is a 40

In order to do so, in order to be able to take up oneself that site of the divine as the overman (for the overman is necessarily always an individual in the first person, is always an ipseity), one must embody it fully. As Jean-Luc Marion says in his own discussion of Nietzsche in The Idol and Distance: "Only an I can say the Yes in which

Dionysius is performed and experienced, and only a body can ensure that 7."29 That is to say, one must incarnate the overman's Fes-saying to all things, his Yes which precisely is the condition for the possibility of world, life here coming into itself as ipseity being the essence and foundation of all ekstasis, to use Henry's vocabulary. As the essence and foundation of all ekstasis, the overman's embodiment of life is also the support and justification of ekstasis—and along with that, the justification, the 'valuator' of everything that comes to presence in that ekstatic light. Thus it is that with life's coming into itself eternally, all things, too—including "this spider and this moonlight among the trees"30—return eternally, precisely in the valuation which is inseparable from life's valuation of itself as enhancing-becoming life, as the maximal state of the will-to-power, as the very body of the overman.

Nietzsche, although he assuredly called himself Dionysius, was not ultimately such a body. Indeed, Marion argues that in fact, Nietzsche's insight into the inescapably abyssal necessity of being such a body, coupled with his ultimate incapacity to assume such foundational corporeality (that is, corporeality), was the very thing that plunged the philosopher of 'high-noon' into his final darkness: mistake in the referencing (section 3 instead of section 2 is cited as the source). Also, in this first quote, the emphasis is Henry's. In the second quote, the emphasis is Nietzsche's own. 29 J.-L. Marion, The Idol and Distance (trans. Thomas A. Carlson). New York: Fordham University Press, 2001, p. 51. 41

To collapse within this plunge into darkness amounts to passing abruptly and definitively, without return, to the nodal point where the will to power valuates all being without exception, to the point of seeing them in a world—to the point of letting oneself be sucked in by the site of the god, suddenly. {IaD 54)

As Marion points out, in the very site of the god, Nietzsche found that "no one was coming" to him—no Yes, no new god, no friend, no Amen, no "berakha that unites God and man from the bottom of the abyss" (IaD 58)—which coming alone could ensure

Nietzsche's complete incarnation of the foundation of all being. Marion writes:

[I]n the Nietzschean text [there is] only the half-presence of the one who must still come. The half-personal names [i.e. Dionysius foremostly, but also Zarathustra, Ariadne31, even "the Crucified"32] accumulate on the body and the face of Friedrich Nietzsche, as in order to baptize him and invest him with the will to power that must supremely evaluate the world. Because the 'new friends' do not come, because only Friedrich Nietzsche risks taking their place at the last minute, because he finally himself could not do it—he founders in the darkness.33

F. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom (trans. Thomas Common). New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1987, p. 271. — The phrase is from the aphorism entitled The Heaviest Burden, in which the eternal return is proposed by a demon in the midst of one's "loneliest loneliness". 31 See Nietzsche, The Dithyrambs of Dionysius (trans. RJ. Hollingdale). London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1984. 32 See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Random House, 1989. Nietzsche finishes Ecce Homo with the line: "Have I been understood?—Dionysius versus the Crucified." 33 IaD 59. — Marion's main argument is that Nietzsche sought to replace Christ (who in the end, Nietzsche says, didn't love—i.e. didn't say Yes—enough) with his own 7e5-saying as the overman. But because "no one was coming" to him in his plunge into the darkness, his "death" was only a "half-death", and that precisely because he only half incarnated what he needed to incarnate in life: namely, says Marion, a relationship with the divine which precisely opens a distance from the divine at the same time. Nietzsche's conception of the divine is expressive of only a will to identification, indeed to appropriation of the divine—and to that extent Nietzsche remains a metaphysician, not to mention an idolater. 42

No Yes, no new god, no friend, no Amen, no berakha. For Henry, that would mean: no revelation of a pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenality, invisible in any ekstatic light. In other words: no pre-ekstatic light; rather, only a pre-ekstatic darkness, albeit a disturbingly affective one. For Henry, Nietzsche also ultimately goes the way of both

Descartes (in 'constituted Cartesianism') and Schopenhauer: the phenomenality of a pre- ekstatic ipseity which founds all ekstasis in the end remains obscure, hidden in shadows, veiled by a darkness in which no light—and by necessity no ekstatic light—truly shines.

Fundamental phenomenological ontology fails—and all three, Descartes, Schopenhauer,

Nietzsche, remain metaphysicians. In all three cases, of course, the affect of such a pre- ekstatic darkness is indeed truly felt—in the latter two corporally, while in Descartes as the aftertaste of a faltered vision of the cogito of SQlf-seeming (yideor). It is pursued by all three, each in his own way—although all three employ some form of ekstatic representation. And in the end, none succeeds in securing that 'invisible' phenomenality at the heart of the search—because securing it is precisely a form of appropriation by an ekstatic conceptionality, thereby rendering it visible in the light of the world, which is precisely impossible. Henry's discussion of these three thinkers seeks to them, on the one hand, in the thread of their common discovery of pre-ekstatic phenomenality (no matter how obscurely in each one it is realized)—and on the other hand, in their common ultimate ransom of that phenomenality to representation, or at least, to ineffectivity.

Or to. . .—here Henry finally gets to the thought to which he had been heading all along —the unconscious. According to Henry, in Freud, a similar discovery of the pre- ekstatic 'realm' of things takes place. Such a realm, however, as the unconscious, is less a

Namely, in his writing of The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, in which Henry's extensive discussion of Descartes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all leading up to Freud, occurs. 43 sheer metaphysical supposition (although one might think it would be, in some sense, since it is a realm of total night), than a functional postulation35 based upon real psychological phenomena, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, psychic disturbances. All these, Henry argues, are real affectivities, or affections of consciousness, and thus precisely preconscious, pre-ekstatic in their origin. The unconscious, as a total night, thus no effective phenomenality in itself, is the strict other of consciousness and conscious representation. It is, for Freud, on account of such affections of consciousness, a realm of unconscious representations. For Henry, this "slippage" (GeP 299) takes place due to what he sees as the "two major errors of Freudianism": namely, 1) the characterization of memories as latent or repressed representations, "as if these representations were formed or existed as actual representational contents, independent of the act that forms them. . . as if the structure of ek-stasis could be unfolded without also phenomenalizing its constitutive phenomenality" (GeP 298-99); and 2) the reduction of unconscious drives to their "psychical representations", that is, to the ideas which represent them; as Freud himself says, "[i]f the instinct did not attach itself to an idea. . . we could know nothing about it." The goal of psychoanalysis in dealing with both cases is "becoming-conscious". This means for Freud, "becoming-represented", making all unconscious representations (i.e. memories) consciously represented ones, as well as bringing all mental processes (the drives' psychic representative processes) to a sufficient end (if necessary through sublimation) so that nothing gets repressed. According to

Henry, this slippage, and consequently this goal, completely abandons and finally denies the very essence by virtue of which Freud had his original insight—namely, the reality of

35 In that sense, Freud was a physician first—or rather, a psycho-physician—and a philosopher or metaphysician only secondarily. 44 the pre-ekstatic 'realm', and above all its potency, or effectivity in manifesting itself in the way that it does in consciousness, through dreams, disturbances, and the like.

Of course, Freud himself was in some measure aware of this abandonment, and there is unquestionably that other Freud who "stands before the abyss where all power dissimulates its essence—namely, the original impossibility of its being objected as an object" {GeP 322). Such is the Freud who, philosophically interested in the work of

Descartes, of Schopenhauer, of Nietzsche, takes inspiration from Freud the physician in order to critique such works and precisely the classic co-relation of the unconscious with ineffectivity and weakness. On the contrary, that other Freud's is "the attempt to establish the existence of the unconscious based on its power (the power to determine not only representation but behavior itself, not merely pathological behavior). . . the affirmation of an 'efficient unconscious'." {GeP 322)

The insights of that other Freud, along with crucial insights from the other thinkers as discussed above, are taken by Henry as his clues in unfolding a subterranean current of thinking in Western history, which not only escapes Heidegger's massive destruktion of onto-theology (or onto-theo-egology), but even promises to ground the

"hesitating abground" of the later Heidegger. To fulfill that promise, the clues brought forth here have to be phenomenologically elaborated upon; in particular, the 'how' of the phenomenalization of the pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenality has to be sorted out and explicitly articulated. Affectivity has, of course, already distinctly emerged as the key to the inquiry to be pursued. But how does affectivity itself appear? Is it a matter of seeming, of feeling, or something else? How does it give itself to us in phenomenality?

And how can it be articulated phenomenologically in order to serve also as fundamental

As quoted in GeP 299. Henry cites his reference as Freud, "The Unconscious", SE 14, 177. 45 ontology? Such are the foundational questions upon which Henry builds his entire thought.

By the time of his writing of The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (French original,

1985), Henry had already begun to answer these questions. It is not quite as if he is simply following the clues which he brings up in his discussions of Descartes,

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is rather as though, knowing beforehand what he seeks, he uncovers what he finds there as a part of his on-going dialogue with and critique of Heidegger and of what he sees as being Heidegger's own skewed and overly narrow readings of the tradition. In contrast to Heidegger, Henry wishes primarily to disclose a certain counter-tradition in the West—the essence of which he himself had already articulated in L'Essence de la manifestation (1963), as well as his Philosophic et phenomenologie du corps (1965) upon which the French thinker Maine de Biran was the greatest influence. Nevertheless, that counter-tradition—and this is Henry's main point— never attains to full (i.e. pre-ekstatic) phenomenological status; rather, it either gets immediately reduced to an ekstatic representation, for example, in 'constituted

Cartesianism', or it gets mixed up with or in some sense folded into one, or it falls back into obscurity entirely. Whereas Henry's own life's work is very committed to bringing to full and explicit light (though necessarily a different light than the light of Greek thought) precisely this non-ekstatic mode of appearance—this invisible phenomenality. 46

Chapter 2

Phenomenology and Givenness

Henry's explicit and rigorous engagement with the father of the phenomenological method in the early 20th century, , did not take place in his writings until

1990 in his Phenomenologie materielle1, and then in the first part of his Incarnation:

Une philosophie de la chair2. Yet it is no doubt befitting to say that Husserl had been there methodologically for Henry right from the start—certainly through Heidegger, with whom Henry unquestionably had a lifelong philosophical conversation and even debate.

As we saw in chapter one, this debate was twofold: first, Henry contested Heidegger's reduction of Western philosophical history to onto-theology and he countered Heidegger by digging up the waters of a subterranean stream (especially in Modernity, but certainly before then too, for example in Meister Eckhart) which attempted—although mostly failed—or at least gestured towards the possibility of a pre-ekstatic phenomenality; and second, he encountered and wrestled vigorously with Heidegger's own phenomenological thinking, and especially the deep but ultimately 'hesitating' thought of Ereignis of the later Heidegger. Throughout the lifelong course of this debate, there was always Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological method, and the first one, before Heidegger himself, to assert explicitly and to make the principle of a precise science, the fact that the proper

1 Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Not yet translated into English. 2 Paris: Seuil, 2000. Not yet translated into English. 47 object of phenomenology is not what appears, but the very how of that appearing. In other words, the proper object of phenomenology is phenomenality, appearing as such, the very essence and foundation of all that appears—the very condition for the possibility of 'world'. Only on the basis of this science—namely, the science of the appearing of what appears—can all other worldly sciences, especially the human sciences, be shown to be possible, according to Husserl. Such was Husserl's primary project: determining the foundational science of all sciences which, as he saw it in the early 20 century, were precisely undergoing a foundations crisis.

2.1 Husserl's "Principle of Principles": Gegebenheit

The early Husserl was in some sense deeply in conversation with Kant. All phenomena, for Kant, must be arrived at through an intuition determined by the a priori categories of knowledge, such categories being the formal conditions of all experience—i.e. of all appearance (see #1.2). The 'thing-in-itself, however, the thing apart from these conditions, simply cannot be spoken of, since it could never become a phenomenon for

3 Actually, this distinction was lost when figures like Gerardus van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade placed phenomenology in the explicit service of the study of religion. Phenomenology of religion became, in their hands and in the hands of their followers, little more than a hermeneutics of belief in which different kinds of religious phenomena were investigated from the perspective of the believer—without, however, inquiring into the very possibility of such phenomena, that is, without inquiring into their phenomenality as such. As Jeffrey Kosky argues, such phenomenology of religion "lacked the ability to critically examine the foundations of its method. It was unable to justify its naive acceptance of the believer's own account of religious phenomena, and its drift towards meant that it could not treat problems in the study of religion beyond a mere description of what it could only point to. Consequently, the phenomenology of religion became something like an anthropological typology, creating categories into which it placed various religious phenomena. What this phenomenology of religion could not address were fundamental questions, questions pertaining to its very possibility." (J. Koskey, Translator's Preface to Part II, in et al., Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000, p. 111.) 48 us. Of course, experience in the world, i.e. contact with things, serves to awaken these categories. To that extent, our knowledge is synthetic (here Kant argues against the rational idealism of Leibniz): one cannot simply derive the world in its being from such categories, but the categories themselves both determine and are awakened as such by their contact with the world. The world at once awakens the categories and is determined by them. In fact, we are required to say this, and in some sense to hold fast to the idea of a 'thing-in-itself (of a ' world-in-itself) which awakens and simultaneously allows (or even suffers) the categories to determine it—even though we could never possibly say anything about it in-itself, since our categorical knowledge of it is all that we could ever have. Otherwise the world would be nothing else than a mere projection of these categories, constituted wholly ideally—which is precisely the position that Kant, in responding to Leibniz, tries to avoid.

For Husserl, such indeterminacy—the status of the 'thing-in-itself, the relation of the awakening and the determining—is problematic: Kant failed utterly to deal adequately with this relation of 'both at once', or rather, he simply failed to deal adequately with the problem of appearing, of phenomenality as such. For one thing, the

'thing-in-itself, although we can't say anything about it, nevertheless must be assumed as part of the naive 'natural attitude' in order to avoid rational idealism. For another thing, the 'how' of appearing, even the responsibility for the appearing as such of all phenomena, is given over to categories which are themselves never phenomena; or if they appear in some sense at all, it is not clear how they do, and in any case certainly their functioning as a unity cannot appear, since the categories are entirely unable to turn themselves upon themselves in the unity of their functioning in order to phenomenalize 49 that unity. Still further, the glaring onto logical aporia in which this functioning unity of the categories ends up makes precarious as well the ontological status of the world which phenomenologically depends upon that unity. Obviously, this ontologically and epistemologically problematic situation needs to be remedied. As Henry points out,

Husserl's three brilliant breakthrough phenomenological theses go straight to the heart of this matter.

The first one—"So much appearing, so much being"—generally tries to solve the problem of the ontological status of the world: no longer need we distinguish between a thing 'in itself and its appearance to us as a phenomenon through the awakening of the determining power of the categories. Indeed, we do not need to posit any mysterious

'thing-in-itself at all. Rather, a thing is as it appears, its being is—or is at least already made evident in—its appearing. That is, its being lies precisely in the very fact of its immediate appearing—in its phenomenality as such. We may mistake phenomena, of course, for things which they are perhaps not, a piece of rope for a snake, for example, or an hallucination for a physical object. But even if we do so, something still is about which we have this mistaken intention. In other words, the impression of it is originary and is above all certain: its impressionality, its seeming (like Descartes' videor), as its phenomenality, announces to us its being. "La phenomenologie est d'abord attentive a la puissance de cette corelation", says Henry.

Que quelque chose. . . m'apparaisse, il se trouve etre du meme coup. Apparaitre, c'est etre par la meme. Qu'il s'agisse d'une simple image qui traverse mon esprit, d'une signification vide comme celle d'un mot (du mot chien en l'absence de tout chien reel), d'une pure hallucination, aussi longtemps que je m'en tiens a l'apparition effective, a ce qui apparait tel qu'il apparait, je ne puis me tromper. 50

L'apparition d'une image—que quelque chose lui corresponde ou non dans la realite—est absolument certaine. (InPC 42)

Now the interesting thing about this first breakthrough thesis of Husserl, the attention that it gives to "la puissance de cette corelation" (between being and appearance), is the way in which it subordinates ontology (or at least a certain understanding of it) to phenomenology—or, if not subordinates, then intimately and originally connects them. In connecting them, Husserl is concerned ultimately with the problem of ontology as based either in speculative metaphysics, or in the 'natural attitude', the naive belief in the existence of the world with such and such a structural reality, upon which both the natural and the human sciences depend, without questioning how such a natural attitude is itself possible. Husserl wishes to discover the nature of the phenomenality, the nature of the appearing itself, by way of which everything that appears in the world does so, so that something like a 'natural attitude' can first and foremost be sustained. In other words, one goes back, in Husserl's method, from the

'what' of the appearance to the 'how' of the appearing as such, in order that a new light, a more originary light, might be shed on the 'what' and sustain all questioning after it, thus serving crucially as the justifying foundation of such questioning. Phenomenology, in that sense, is in essence both one with a general ontology4, and the foundation for the various regional sciences, natural as well as human, which delineate the horizon of all beings.

"[C]'est parce que l'apparaitre deploie son regne que l'etre deploie le sien, en sorte qu'ils semblent n'avoir qu'une seule et meme essence." (InPC 42) 51

In relation to this first thesis—"So much appearing, so much being"—we thus have the second of Husserl's breakthrough theses, namely: "To the things themselves!"5

We do have access to the things themselves, and no longer the 'things-in-themselves', for they are not enclosed in themselves precisely because of this intimate and originary oneness of the essence of appearance and of being, on account of the intimate and originary relation between phenomenology and general ontology. The thing itself, in this sense, is its pure appearing, and this so that the way to it—which is precisely the phenomenological method itself in its reduction or bracketing, i.e. its epoche, of both metaphysical speculation as well as the 'natural attitude' in order to arrive at pure appearing—is paradoxically the very same in its fulfillment as the way from it, in that the

'how' of the thing's appearing, in the certainty of its impressionality, establishes its being. In other words, for Henry, Husserl's thesis—"To the things themselves!"—renders the object as phenomenon in its pure appearing identical to the phenomenological method itself in its fulfillment. Henry even asks: "Qu'est-il besoin d'une methode pour aller a l'apparaitre et le connaitre, si c'est l'apparaitre qui vient vers nous et se fait connaitre de lui-meme?" (InPC 45)

Actually, such a questioning indicates that Husserl's first two breakthrough theses in fact accomplish nothing, or else very little, phenomenologically on their own. Their particular force rests upon an answer to the following pressing concern to which the identification of method and appearance gives rise: namely, what exactly constitutes, phenomenologically speaking, this "coming towards us" of the appearance? This leads us

5 Since Husserl, this thesis has often functioned as a popular slogan, the phenomenological battle cry, as it were, taken up by those employing the method anywhere and everywhere. 52 directly to the third of Husserl's breakthrough theses—Husserl's famous "principle of principles".

In §24 of Ideas I, Husserl says the following: "every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition".6 In fact—and this is no doubt why this statement is called Husserl's "principle of principles"—this claim justifies and completes the first two of Husserl's breakthrough theses. Here Husserl is certainly in direct conversation with

Kant. The formal (categorical) conditions of experience (i.e. intuitions of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, along with the primary concepts of space and time) in their functioning unity determine, for Kant, the possibility of phenomenality, indeed, the legitimacy, the 'right'7 of all phenomena to appear. Such a unity of intuitions and concepts make up the power of knowing—that is, reason. However, there is no way for reason to get behind that unity in order to itself appear according to its own conditions of experience. This is why reason must and does remain, for Kant, an abstracted, metaphysical postulate.

Husserl's method of reduction, the epoche, brackets such a metaphysical assumption out of the picture. Concerning the world in its appearance, which depends upon such an assumption, we have the following: "As much appearing, as much being".

We have access to the things themselves immediately. But how? Because, simply, things are given to us: "every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition" {Id I 44). In other words, the aporia that Kant's epistemology finally arrives to—the moment at which, as Henry so poignantly says, "the rich developments of the

E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (trans. F. Kersten). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982, p. 44. Husserl's italics. 53

Analytic end up, like a torrent that suddenly dries up, lost in the desert of the

Dialectic"8—is with one stroke dissolved by Husserl's phenomenological decision concerning precisely the nature of the 'right' of phenomena to appear. Whereas for Kant, such a 'right' to phenomenality of any phenomena rests squarely in reason, for Husserl, who formulates this breakthrough decision as the cornerstone or "principle of principles" of his method, the originary presentation of things—that is, the givenness of things—-in impressionality is an absolute certainty. Phenomenology is—or at least is intended by

Husserl to be—an eidetic science; its intuitions are quite vivid impressions, perhaps mistakable regionally speaking (that is, in terms of the 'whatness' of their content in a regional science), but never in the least mistakable in terms of their phenomenality as such, that is, in terms of their 'givenness', in terms of a general ontology.

It should be pointed out here that Husserl's answer concerning this "coming towards us" of the appearance—namely, the 'givenness' of things in originary impressionality—although a breakthrough principle, is not ultimately a decisive answer for him. Jean-Luc Marion argues that Husserl qualifies his own "principle of principles".

Herein lies the whole problem of the relation of originary intuition to intentionality. The entire quote from Husserl runs as follows;

. . . every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition. . . everything originarily (so to speak, in its "personal" actuality) offered to us in

7 The idea of the 'right' of phenomena to appear is developed by Jean-Luc Marion in "The Saturated Phenomenon", in Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate. 8 M. Henry, "The Critique of the Subject", in Who Comes After the Subject? (eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy). New York & London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 157-66; pp. 158-59. 54

"intuition " is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.

So for Husserl, originary givenness has limits. What might these limits be? Of course, they concern intentionality, consciousness, in the sense that whatever appears, or whatever gives itself, is only able to give itself and appear to consciousness. In other words, an ambiguity is involved in the relation between the originary se/f-givenness of the thing to us in (or as an) intuition, and the intentional grasp of it or, as Husserl says, the lived-experience of it: "We cannot too sharply stress the equivocation that allows us to characterize as a phenomenon not only the lived-experience in which the appearing of the object consists. . . but also the object appearing as such."10 Such an ambiguity is what led Husserl throughout his life to continue formulating and re-formulating the problem of phenomenality through several articulations of the distinction between the two sides of the phenomenon in a number of paired terms, such as intention/intuition, signification/fulfillment, noema/noesis. Both sides of each of these pairs of terms in some way involve impressionality; but the struggle which Husserl undertook with such terms, documenting the evolution of his thought on the problem of impressionality, sustainedly emphasizes intentionality, at times even to the point of a radical subordination of

9 Id I 44 — Marion draws attention to this quote (in SaPh 180). The English translator of Marion's article, Thomas A. Carlson, alters the original English translation of Husserl by F. Kersten in order to more accurately capture the sense of Marion's own French rendering. The quote appears there as follows: ". . . every originarily donating intuition is a source of right for cognition, . . . everything that offers itself to us originarily in 'intuition' is to be taken quite simply as it gives itself out to be, but also only within the limits in which it is given there" (Marion's emphasis). Marion typically translates Husserl's Gegebenheit (in English givenness) as donation, carrying the sense of both 'givenness' as well as 'gift', which ultimately plays deeply into Marion's theological interests. The use of 'donating' above rather than Kersten's 'presentive' also avoids any connotations of 'presence' which would be subject to critique, for example from Heidegger, as well as from Derrida's deconstructive approach. 55 givenness to intentionality. Such an emphasis unquestionably ends up overly flavouring

Husserl's work as a science of consciousness (in Henry's judgment, as a science of the various ekstases that consciousness is), rather than of givenness per se, which in any case

Husserl himself would not have denied.

In this sense, Henry's question as quoted above—"Qu'est-il besoin d'une methode pour aller a l'apparaitre et le connaitre, si c'est l'apparaitre qui vient vers nous et se fait connaitre de lui-meme?"—-rhetorically addresses its concern immediately to

Husserl's sustained emphasis on intentionality which renders the givenness of things, originary impressionality, subordinate to that intentionality, and thus subordinate to the science of consciousness which Husserl's phenomenological method meticulously and tirelessly unfolds. What Henry demands of Husserl in general is a more rigorous focus upon this "coming towards us" in the appearing of that which appears, an emphasis on the givenness which serves as the constant phenomenological correlate of all intentional determinations: "[I]l faut dire en quoi consiste cet apparaitre, comment il apparait et ainsi comment il fait apparaitre en lui tout ce a quoi il donne d'apparaitre" (InPC 50). Husserl does not respond to this demand to Henry's satisfaction. While in one sense, his

"principle of principles" does relate to the phenomenological concept of a thing's givenness in (or as) impressionality, he nevertheless immediately qualifies such givenness by relating it to intentionality in such a way that the former is always subordinated to the latter. In the end, impressionality is always the impressionality of a specifically characterized intending—that is to say, ekstatic—consciousness. Lost is the interestingly "personal actuality" in which a thing gives itself to us. Indeed, Husserl's

10 As quoted in SaPh, fn. 10, 185. The quotation is taken by Marion from Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, V, §2 (ed. Niemeyer). Tubingen, 1901, p. 349. 56

phenomenological project in Ideas I very quickly degenerates into an exhausting, if not

exhaustive, investigation of the formal intricacies of the ekstatic reign—as Henry says,

into a.. .

description systematique des divers types d'intentionnalites ou d'intuitions, de toutes les manieres de faire voir dont dispose la conscience et avec lesquelles elle coincide: perception, imagination, intentionnalites signifiantes comrae celles qui forment les significations vehiculees par les mots du langage, intuitions des 'essences', intuition categoriale qui apporte a l'evidence les objets ideaux comme les rapports logique, etc. (InPC 52)

In this degeneration lies Husserl's abandonment, according to Henry, of his real

phenomenological breakthrough, his "principle of principles". For all of such intricacies

of consciousness have in common for Husserl the ekstatic structure—the structure of

phenomenality by way of which the phenomenalization of phenomena consists in a "se jetfant] hors de soi en se depassant vers ce qui se trouve des lors pose devant son

regard' (InPC 50). As Henry points out, "To the things themselves", to that extent,

means for Husserl precisely this "se jetant hors de soi", this ekstatic intentionality:

"L'intentionnalite est ce faire voir qui revele un objet" (InPC 51). Astonishingly, a

complete reversal in meaning is effected from the way in which, read before Husserl's

own qualification of his "principle of principles", this second breakthrough thesis ("To

the things themselves") might have been understood: that is, as in some sense not even

required, as Henry suggests with his question: "Qu'est-il besoin d'une methode. . . ?"

Unless the phenomenological method is restricted to the preliminary work of bracketing

out metaphysical speculation and the naive 'natural attitude', so as to make oneself, as it

were, ready to receive the givenness alone controlling the 'right' of phenomena to appear. 57

But then again, isn't the receiving, too, part of the method, in fact the very heart and fulfillment of the method, that phenomenology is? Indeed, it is, and it must be so, insofar as it must be possible, ultimately, to describe the givenness which is received in its very effectivity (and received by whom or what, one might further ask). For Husserl, that effectivity lies ultimately in the various characterizations of intentionality, all of which open an ekstatic structure in which or into which this givenness might be received—but also which ends up already pre-determining and subordinating it to intentionality. Henry, on the other hand, argues that givenness in its effectivity is always already lost with the opening of such a structure. He is interested, instead, in an investigation of a pre-ekstatic reception of givenness, which in his own work unfolds as affectivity. But Henry also distinguishes between a "strong" affection and a "weak" affection (more on this in #2.3 and #3.2). Such a distinction plays a large part in addressing the ambiguity of the method which is here a matter of concern. This ambiguity haunted Heidegger as well, who also struggled with the relation between the second and third of Husserl's breakthrough theses. Heidegger finally ended up declaring in 1968, in the first two sentences of Uber das Zeitverstandnis in der Phanomenologie and im Denken der Seinsfrage: "Being and

Time states that we should understand and carry out phenomenology not in its reality, but in its possibility. The genuine maxim of phenomenology is not the 'principle of all principles', but the maxim: 'to the things themselves!'"11

1' "In Sein und Zeit steht, daB wir Phanomenologie nicht in ihrer Wirklichkeit, sondern in ihrer M5glichkeit verstehen und nachvollziehen mtlssen. Die eigentliche Maxime der Phanomenologie ist nicht das 'Prinzip aller Prinzipien', sondern die Maxime 'Zur Sache selbst!'" (GA 14, 147; see alsoG^ 14, 54; 99; 101-02). 58

2.2 Givenness as First Philosophy: Marion's 'saturated phenomenality'

Both Henry and Marion, each in their own way, attempt to explicitly unfold Husserl's essential phenomenological insight—namely, 'givenness'. They both do so by articulating a mode of phenomenality beyond—or rather prior to—ekstasis. Such a mode, moreover, as both of them claim, is precisely invisible in the light of an ekstatic horizon: it is, as it were, an invisible phenomenality. Nevertheless, far from becoming itself a metaphysical postulate—or being just meaningless, since it is obviously in some sense a contradiction in terms—it must be articulated phenomenologically: just how is it that such an invisibility constitutes a phenomenality at all? It is not merely a matter of stepping back from the traditional privileging of 'seeing' in Western thought, in favour of some other mode—for example, hearing, or touching. All such ways of encounter with an object may yet yield visibility in the sense that the thing's appearing, its phenomenality, is defined by the ekstatic structure of intentionality.12 In this case, the intentional subject, through the particular sense placed in the service of the intentional consciousness, has mastery over the appearance of the thing, and the lived experience of the thing is an intentional appropriation of it in a concept. On the other hand, all such ways of encounter—like touching, hearing, seeing—may equally yield 'invisible' phenomenalities in the sense that the lived experience of the thing would not be an ekstatically structured appropriation but rather an affection by it prior to appropriation.

The issue consists in articulating the way in which such affection prior to conceptual appropriation, i.e. prior to intentionality, phenomenalizes itself.

12 It is, in fact, this very sense of visibility which has been privileged by the Western tradition, and not just seeing with the eyes. In the West, 'seeing' has meant primarily grasping 59

The key is provided by Husserl's "principle of principles": givenness. In his rigorous phenomenological thinking, Marion13 distinguishes between what 'shows' itself in visibility (that is, in an ekstatic structure) and what gives itself prior to any visibility, prior to any showing of itself in the structure of an ekstasis. In making such a distinction,

Marion takes his cue from Heidegger, who first established that a phenomenon is defined

"as what shows itself in itself and starting from itself: '. . . that which-is-shown-in- itself ."14 But Marion claims that ultimately Heidegger "left largely undetermined the means by which the self at work in what shows itself can be thought" (InEx 30). So he proposes an answer: namely, that "a phenomenon only shows itself to the extent that it first gives itself—all that which shows itself must, in order to reach that point, first give itself (InEx 30). The proper task of phenomenology, therefore, is the epoche or carrying out of a reduction to pure givenness, the bracketing entirely of not just metaphysical speculative ideas and the natural attitude, but of all intentionality as well—thus going beyond Husserl's "science of consciousness"—along with the epoche of the entire structure of ekstasis—thus going beyond, too, Heidegger's 'existential reduction' to

Dasein, which itself remains an ekstatic structure as precisely the being claimed by Being as the site of the opening of an ekstatic horizon (see #1.3). "As much reduction, so much givenness!" This is Marion's own phenomenological battle-cry. However, it still remains to be articulated how this pure givenness of things phenomenalizes itself invisibly. conceptually, getting one's head around some thing (be it a material or ideal object is no matter)—to wit, knowing it, which knowing has been taken as adequate to the thing's being. 13 Marion's treatment of, and phenomenological work built upon, Husserl's concept of givenness, is examined in the rest of this section, because it sheds light upon Henry's own thinking by which Marion himself has been greatly influenced. The quote is from Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002, p. 30. Marion refers here to Heidegger's articulation of Husserl's 60

Marion's main work on Husserl comes in Reduction and Givenness15 in which he begins to lay out his own unique phenomenological position. He argues that the metaphysics of Modernity has always privileged phenomena which allow for perfect certainty concerning their appearance. Mathematical or logical formulations are privileged, and worldly, objective phenomena are oriented towards them as an ideal by way of which the latter would be measured. Something like a religious phenomenon, at the other extreme—anything that is undeterminable by the Kantian categories of reason

(by the formal conditions of experience, in other words)—would not count as a phenomenon at all. In some sense, that is, a religious experience, a certain affectivity arising from religious belief, might be subjectively phenomenalized—as an experienced passion, for instance. But a religious passion itself has, strictly speaking, no object proper. All such things must be forthwith assigned to the realm of faith, or otherwise moral or practical reason; they are not appearing phenomena, according to the definition of the possibility of phenomenality articulated in Kant's system. But what if, queries

Marion, we turn the whole articulation on its head? Beginning with Husserl's breakthrough principle of givenness, Marion asks what would happen if we assume the

"principle of principles" as "the showing-itself-in-itself. See Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie and Robinson). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 54. 15 Specifically, Marion employs Husserl's "principle of principles" for his own purposes and in such a way as to privilege the 'givenness' side of the relation, which he then expands upon with his articulation of a form of phenomenality which he calls "saturated". Already in his 1989 publication Reduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phenomenologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France {Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, 1998), Marion explores this theme in some depth and attempts to draw out possibilities of the phenomenological method which Husserl himself experimented with but did not completely unfold. Precisely these possibilities of the method are taken up by Marion as the core of his own phenomenological thinking, which he unfolds in the trilogy beginning with Reduction et donation (1989), followed by Etant donne: Essai d'une phenomenologie de la donation, 1997 {Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, 2002.) and De Sureroit: Etudes sur les phenomenes satures, 2001. {In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, 2002). 61 possibility that an originarily donating intuition might, in fact, in its intuitive givenness give itself more than our determining intentions of it can handle, without yet failing to appear.

Assuming such a possibility, Marion unfolds a schematization of three different kinds, or rather measures, of phenomena: 'poor', 'common-law', and 'saturated' phenomena.16 'Poor' phenomena are those, like mathematical or logical propositions, about which we can have such ideal certainty precisely because in their intuitive givenness they very easily and without contradiction fulfill our equally very poor or bare intentions concerning them. As to objective or 'worldly' phenomena—what Marion calls 'common-law' phenomena—we can make mistakes. Either our intentions over- determine such phenomena so that we 'get by', as it were, with a general lack or shortage of intuitive givenness of things in comparison with the significations we hold concerning them, or further evidence is given as a further degree of intuitive givenness from the things themselves, which leads us to alter our intentions about them. In a sense, there is a constant struggle taking place in the case of common-law phenomena between the intention that we have of the thing and the co-related originarily giving intuition. In such cases, it is still best to perform the phenomenological reduction in order to intuit further evidence—that is to say, in order to be more open to the thing's originary givenness.

Finally, with 'saturated' phenomena, the originary givenness or intuition is of such a degree that it exceeds any organizing concept we might attempt to place upon it, and thus subverts and decenters our intention. Any synthesis of meaning, if synthesis must indeed be, "is accomplished without and contrary to the I, as a passive synthesis, coming from 62 the nonobject itself, which imposes its arising and its moment on and before all active intentionality of the I" (BeGi 226). For Marion, precisely herein lies the justification for the assumption of the possibility of such a phenomenon: in giving itself it first phenomenalizes itself in the affectivity of the subject's decentering, bound to an invisible, because undeterminable, pole to which the subject is oriented by that pole itself. Such an affectivity is for Marion not a mere passion which can itself be constituted phenomenologically as such. The affectivity itself is less the phenomenon than the decentered subject's enduring, or undergoing, of that which gives itself in/as an excess of intuition and which paradoxically remains invisible in affecting—or, to be more precise,

/zetero-affecting—the subject presented to himself therein as unable to secure an intentional mastery over the intuition. Furthermore, such an affectivity "establishes the truth of all phenomenality [through the saturated phenomenon] because it marks, more than any other phenomenon, the givenness from which it comes." {BeGi 227)

Thus, Marion turns the traditional metaphysical articulation of phenomena, which favours 'poor' phenomena for their certainty, on its head. Starting out from givenness, one must now no longer ask why saturated phenomena constitute an exception to the norm, but rather how common-law and poor phenomena yield a shortage of, or in any case very little, intuition—-and especially in the case of common-law phenomena, whether this shortage has to do with a pre- or over-determination of things in intention which limits (or rather seems to limit, because we are not sensitive to) the invisible phenomenalization of their givenness. For necessarily, as Marion points out, all that which shows itself also originarily gives itself. But not all that gives itself shows itself;

161 will be drawing in what follows from Marion's Being Given, §23, which later text elaborates in more detail the argument begun in Marion's essay "The Saturated Phenomenon", in PTTFD, 63 instead, much of what gives itself phenomenalizes itself invisibly, and we have to make ourselves sensitive to that phenomenalization through the phenomenological reduction.

Marion's project, as he defines it, is to.. .

think the common-law phenomenon, and through it the poor phenomenon, on the basis of the paradigm of the saturated phenomenon, of which the former two offer only weakened variants, and from which they derive by progressive extenuation. For the saturated phenomenon does not give itself abnormally, making an exception to the definition of phenomenality; to the contrary, its ownmost property is to render thinkable the measure of manifestation in terms of givenness and to recover it in its common-law variety, indeed in the poor phenomenon. What metaphysics rules out as an exception (the saturated phenomenon), phenomenology takes here for its norm—every phenomenon shows itself in the measure (or the lack of measure) to which it gives itself. To be sure, not all phenomena get classified as saturated phenomena, but all saturated phenomena accomplish the one and only paradigm of phenomenality. Better, they alone enable it to be illustrated. (Bed 227)

Now on the basis of such an articulation of the expansion of the horizons of the phenomenological method by way of a redefinition of the possibility of phenomenality itself—here reformulated as originary givenness—it is interesting to consider in what way a simple, 'common-law' phenomenon might actually come to be encountered on the basis of its givenness—i.e. reveal itself—as more saturated than at first one would imagine it to be. Indeed, there can be "a banality to the saturated phenomena." There are banal saturated phenomena.17 What is significant is the way in which the intuitive givenness of the thing overflows our intention of it. Of course, if we radically reduce our pp. 176-216. 64

(pre-)intentions of things, givenness will be able to affect us all the more, and so much the more will the so-called common-law phenomenon come to be encountered as saturated. "As much reduction, so much givenness!" This constant theme throughout

Being Given is Marion's own phenomenological battle-cry. And yet how does this subverting and decentering of our intentions affect us? What is the nature of this affectivity which is, as passivity, bound to an indeterminable pole?

An answer to these questions may be looked for by approaching it from the following angle. A thing gives itself in intuition, and I do, of course, have an intention of it in seeing it. But isn't an intention in some measure always already a foreseeing, a covering over with an ideational structure, and as such a ceasing to receive the thing in the immediacy of its givenness to my consciousness? Along with Husserl, let us then perform a certain reduction, bracket out this 'foreseeing', and attempt with Marion to phenomenologically articulate the immediacy itself. As immediacy, the givenness of things hetero-affects consciousness in what might be called a succession of immanences that arrive to me unexpectedly, as though from some unknown region, in an

"unpredictable landing", to use Marion's expression. The emphasis is always on the immediate self-giving, on givenness—or rather, on a sort of "becoming-immanence" to me of what is given. Intentionality, intentional experience, on the other hand, substantiates that becoming-immanence in gathering it up and appropriating it in a determination, in an intention, and as such allows a specific object to appear (i.e. to

'show' itself). In other words, appropriation, intentionality, settles the vigilance of the

17 Marion said this in response to a question from the audience concerning the necessarily radical nature of the saturated phenomenon at a conference at which he presented at New School University in New York, in April 2004, and which I attended. 65 hetero-affectivity, the incessant rousingness of it, into the ekstatic structure which opens before itself, or which is itself the horizon of manifest being.

Marion speaks to this tension between givenness and intentionality in his discussion of consciousness as above all a 'screen' upon which the givenness of things impacts itself. Despite their giving of themselves, things are unable to show themselves in manifestation except by way of this impact, this "unpredictable landing", which consciousness, in appropriating it to itself, absorbs. However, what consciousness absorbs in an intention is less a matter of the foreseeing of any object than a reception of its intuitive givenness. As a becoming-immanence, this givenness is the unpredictable landing and its absorption by consciousness in an intention—but an intention which is precisely the appropriate intention for that landing: the called-for intention, required and impressed upon consciousness, is called forth from consciousness by the thing itself in its givenness. In unpredictable landing is imposed, therefore, upon consciousness an anamorphosis or alteration of the consciousness "substituted for the centrifugal intentionality coming from me—a point of view come from another place, which imposes on me its angle of vision" (InEx 117). That is, consciousness here absorbs givenness in being itself, in a sense, absorbed by givenness. As Marion says:

This given gives itself to me because it imposes itself, summons me, and determines me—in short, because I am not the author of it. The given deserves its name on account of its being a fait accompli, such as it befalls me. In this way it is distinguished from every foreseen, synthesized, and constituted object, since it comes over me as an event.18

J.-L. Marion, "The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness": Critical Inquiry (Summer 1999): 784-800; p. 796. 66

As a rather poignant example of such an "impact-imposition" event (albeit a humorous, if not altogether ridiculous one), I offer the following. Recently I participated in the preparation of a meal cooked for approximately 1000 people. My assigned task was the washing of vegetables: first the zucchinis, then cucumbers, then a few other things. The zucchinis were hard, and I established very quickly an efficient rhythm of very firm wiping of them under running water. I then placed each clean zucchini in a tub with one hand while reaching with the other for another unwashed one. Immediately bringing my two hands together again in a renewed firm wiping motion, I washed each new zucchini under the water. When after some time I had finally emptied the several small crates of zucchinis to be washed, immediately the last was replaced, by another of the participants there, with a similar small crate of cucumbers; as well, another clean tub for the freshly washed cucumbers to be placed in was set directly near to me. Thus my rhythm of reaching and wiping was not in the least interrupted. I took up the first cucumber just as though it were yet another zucchini. My intention, however (as though it were a zucchini, although I "knew" it was not), was plainly inappropriate. The impact upon my consciousness—coming from the cucumber itself—was, one might say, an unpredictable landing, an unexpected arrival effecting at once an anamorphosis in me. In complete surprise, I intuited a very distinctly plaintive impression—distinctly plaintive, as though the cucumber itself might have said: "I am not a zucchini, I am a cucumber!"

In other words: "You can't treat me that way!"—for it was a lot softer than the zucchini and I was wiping it quite hard. And there I stood, for a few seconds, a new me: surprised in being encountered, in being baldly presented with, precisely the haecceity, the "just- this-thing-and-no-other-ncss"—in its 'personal actuality'' {Id I 44)—of the cucumber. It 67 imposed upon me, that is, a view of it from another place—an anamorphosis which unpredictably came to me in the impact upon my consciousness of the cucumber's excessive self-givenness to me. Indeed, there is a banality to the saturated phenomenon.

There are banal saturated phenomena. And such an example, ridiculous as it may seem, yet offers a perfect illustration of the way in which the so-called common-law phenomenon can be retrieved in its originary givenness according to the truth of all phenomenality as defined by Marion on the basis of the paradigm of the saturated phenomenon.

Let us go further here. We have pointed to the way in which, in an encounter with the givenness of the thing, an anamorphosis is effected which allows for the absorption of the thing's givenness in an intention—but precisely an intention which is called forth by, and thus appropriate to, the thing itself. Consciousness itself might be spoken of as being rendered by the anamorphosis in the dative case: given to itself as a new 'me' whose point of view has come to it from another place. Yet consciousness, ever inclined to its stance in the 'natural attitude', absorbs this new 'me' as much as it absorbs the impact of the givenness—very much as part and parcel of the givenness. For example, within only a second of having been encountered, in the baldness of its "personal actuality", by the cucumber, I was able to say in the nominative case, the anamorphosis nevertheless affectively still fresh: "I just saw this cucumber's need." Within a second again, however, a further appropriation: "I just saw this cucumber reveal to me its need." In other words, appropriating, or absorbing, even the affectivity of the anamorphosis itself, I no longer encountered the cucumber in its need at all, but submitted rather what I had just 68 established as experience to a detached phenomenological analysis.19 For phenomenology, then, there is a constant play and a tension and even a struggle involved, between the /zetero-affectivity—indeed, the hetero-effectivity—of the anamorphosis and the awto-affectivity of consciousness' re-establishment of itself as a constituting T.

Let us accede Marion's point: that saturated phenomena, in their originary givenness, accomplish the one and only paradigm of phenomenality. Givenness— donation, Gegebenheit—makes phenomenality itself possible. As Marion points out, everything that shows itself must indeed first give itself—but not all that gives itself is finally able to show itself in the end (InEx 30 ff). Why not? Because to a great extent we do cover over and limit—we cut short—such givenness in determining intentions; we foresee things. Moreover, we resettle ourselves into our typical and natural intentional stances quite quickly after having been affected, such as in the case of the cucumber above. On some level, which perhaps escapes our notice, so accustomed to it we are in our everyday lives, phenomenality, the phenomenal world, is a constant play of such affectivities of intuitive givenness and resettlements into intentionality. But it is also—it cannot be forgotten—a constant play of hetero-effectivity and resettlement. Quite literally, we become something more when we appropriate our affectedness in the unpredictable landing of a thing's givenness. We learn in wondering over things—we grow—and the horizons of our world expand. Our consciousness expands—and with that, the capacity for ever greater expansion. The more often we are willing and able to prudently curtail our own pre-determinations of things and attempt to open ourselves to such intuitive givenness in ever greater degrees—in other words, to perform the phenomenological

19 As Martin Buber might have said: I no longer encountered the cucumber as a 'thou', but only once again as an 'it'. See M. Buber, I and Thou (trans. Ronald Gregor Smith). New York: Charles 69 reduction as rigorously and completely as possible—the more expansive and capable of further expansion we ourselves become. To that extent, the degree of saturation of a phenomenon depends not only on the degree of originary givenness, but also on the degree to which we ourselves can open ourselves to that givenness. The more we can open ourselves, no doubt the more saturated even the meagerest or common of phenomena—the most banal of phenomena—seem to become. It would seem, then, that the very purpose of the phenomenological reduction as a methodology is to get phenomena, to get things in their intuitive self-givenness, to appear in ever greater intensive magnitudes. Yet more than that, phenomenology is interested in phenomenality as such. The reduction leads us first and foremost to givenness as such—in whatever measure or degree.

Now according to Marion, the unforeseen arrival, the unpredictable landing—by which consciousness is ever given to itself as a new 'me' inasmuch as, and as much as, it is given the self of the phenomenon—always appears as a posteriori, i.e. not in terms of the "supposedly a priori conditions of experience and its objects" (OFPh 796). Yet for

Marion, pure givenness which phenomenalizes itself a posteriori in the affectivity of the subject's "sur-prise" yields an absolute certainty of phenomenalization; as such it establishes itself as the foundation of all phenomenalization and here presents itself as

'first philosophy'. It does so paradoxically because its authority lies in its dependence upon the a posteriori. Indeed, Marion argues that the figures of first philosophy in the

Western metaphysical tradition—Being/substance, first cause, the transcendental impersonal (i.e. the ego cogito thought not in terms of 'beginning' but rather of

'constituted' Cartesianism), all figures holding the status of the a priori—have each in

Scribner's Sons, 1958. 70 their turn had their aporias and have, to say the least, been dismantled by Heidegger's critique of onto-theology and of onto-theo-egology. In fact, 'first philosophy' today may even seem irrelevant and out of date, if not downright impertinent. But Marion points out that "first philosophy" is still "fraught with stakes, as real as they are symbolic, and still occasions polemical and passionate debate" (OFPh 784). He himself is not outside of that debate nor, one might add, without passion. For Marion, the goal of first philosophy, as it has always been, is to provide a foundation for all regional philosophies and sciences— and furthermore, as has been its aspiration specifically in Modernity, to establish the absolute certainty of that foundation. Husserl's "principle of principles" always did promote the phenomenological method as an eidetic science—and as such, as a foundational science. Marion not only fully supports this promotion but takes it even further by fleshing out on the side of givenness aspects of the breakthrough principle which Husserl, in his own over-emphasis upon intentionality, left undeveloped. Indeed, intentionality is first and foremost only able to do its job because of givenness.

One further question remains to be addressed: does not the "event" (OFPh 796) of givenness—phenomenologically saturated as a decentering of the subject and as affectivity which is as passivity, rather than as an active intending—demand a reckoning as to who or what in the end it is that performs the reduction? How could the subject who has suddenly become so decentered, is bound to an indeterminable pole, and finds herself or is presented to herself as unable to secure intentional mastery over an intuitive excess—how could such a subject carry out intentionally a phenomenological reduction?

Or does the reduction come always prior to such a decentering? Does it yield, as it were, such a decentering—or rather only the possibility of the opening to, or 'clearing' or 71

'space' for, such a decentering, such a binding to an invisible pole? Obviously, this goes

right back to Henry's own question which he posed to Husserl (see #2.1): "Qu'est-il besoin d'une methode. . . ?" (InPC 45)

Of course, where common-law phenomena are concerned, it is possible to pay

attention and reduce the extent to which we over-determine or foresee them in

determining them; such intentionality on our part limits or seems to limit, by covering

over, their givenness. Through such a reduction, we may indeed succeed in intuiting a

richer givenness of the thing, of truly heeding givenness as such. But on the other hand, there is an indubitable sense in which things do irreducibly give themselves in their

'personal actuality' {Id 144), as Husserl says, in differing degrees, despite our best efforts

not to foresee or over-determine them. Some phenomena, in other words, seem to require the utmost needfulness towards them on our part—and in that sense they would require of us to perform the reduction lest we easily and at once cover over with an intention about them what little and poor measure of intuitive givenness we encounter from them. Then

again, some phenomena—such as for Levinas, the face of the other, or for Paul on the

road to Damascus, the Risen Christ—require no such reduction at all, for they are in fact,

as it were, violent forms of revelation: they immediately give themselves in such a degree which radically overflows our intentions of them, imposing an anamorphosis on us as

subjects, and without our ever being able to foresee such an event. No amount of reduction can, it would seem, bring such a revelation about by way of its own activity.

Indeed, there is even a paradox in the reductive attempt itself: namely, that the reduction seeks, very much as an a priori guiding its phenomenological search, that which can only ever arrive to us unpredictably from elsewhere and as an a posteriori. 72

Perhaps reduction can prepare one for such a revelation, make one open to it—that is, ensuring that such revelation is not forthwith covered over or shut out by an insensitive foreseeing, over-determining concept—but it can never guarantee it. To that extent, "As much reduction, so much givenness" is, if still a battle cry at all, yet one which Marion must and does continuously struggle with, especially throughout his book Being Given, the second of the three major books comprising the trilogy of his main phenomenological writings. Even at the end of his Reduction and Givenness (the first book), he already hints at such a struggle when he writes that the reduction "properly speaking is not, because the call [i.e. the givenness which institutes the anamorphosis] that exercises it nevertheless rigorously no longer issues from the horizon of Being, but from the pure form of the call"

(ReGi 204). It surprises the recipient—or, more precisely, the one Marion calls

/ 'interloque (the one addressed), and an anamorphosis takes place, or rather is imposed on Vinterloque, which determines him or her as a 'new me' in an imposed appropriate relation to the indeterminable pole which binds by orienting Vinterloque towards itself.

This 'new me' is, more properly speaking, perhaps a 'me' for the first time. It is a 'me' to the extent that the subject is cast here originarily in the dative case. That is, the call is only capable of giving to the subject a 'new me' in, first and foremost, giving to the subject to be a me, to be Vinterloque—which in its intentionality, in its ekstasis, it had not yet been. The intentional consciousness serving as the site of an ekstatic horizon is only ever as an T. 73

2.3 The Transcendental Ego: Ideal Essence vs. Auto-affection

There is a wonderful sense in which Marion's treatment of Husserl's principle of givenness evokes the early Greek notion of the upsurgence of physis, bringing forth beings from out of concealment into the light, as Heidegger says. The anamorphosis described by Marion as the subject's decentering, receiving the proper intention from the upsurgence itself in an unpredictable landing on the screen of consciousness, suggests the upsurgence of the 'idea' as well (see #1.1). For Marion, 'first philosophy' looked at in this way revisits the earliest Greek figure of phenomenality and phenomenalization of being. The question now arises in what precisely this 'screen' of consciousness consists.

Does it, too, arise in physis1? Can it be said to be given as well? And if so, how? And how is it related, if at all, to the subject's being given as a 'me' in the dative case? In what way might Husserl's principle of givenness as developed by Marion contribute positively and creatively in resolving the earlier aporias of the classic philosophy of subjectivity of

Modernity? How might it, as Henry might ask, address the question of "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two"? (EsM6)

Marion's own explicit thinking on subjectivity goes hand in hand with his phenomenological thinking on what he refers to as the 'pure call' (more on this in #5.1).

Keeping Marion's treatment of givenness always in mind, let us return now to Henry's own struggle with Husserl, especially in the context of the development of a philosophy of subjectivity which would be inseparable from a general phenomenological ontology.

What I refer to here is Husserl's thinking on the Transcendental Ego—a thinking which, as Henry says, takes seriously "the paradox which binds consciousness, whose meaning is to attain the universal [i.e. general ontology], to the singular reality of the ego, of this 74 ego which consciousness apprehends with apodictic evidence, an ego which always belongs to it" (EsM 6). First philosophy as a general ontology is inseparable from a philosophy of subjectivity—as indeed, Descartes himself definitively established. But how does such an inseparability play itself out in Husserl's thought? What does Henry take from Husserl on this key issue, and at what point does he think Husserl does not advance far enough?

Let us return briefly to what was already said above (in #2.1) regarding Husserl's

"principle of principles": namely, that the articulation of givenness places squarely on the side of the thing in its givenness the 'right' of phenomena to appear. Phenomenality starts out from, is initiated from, the thing in its givenness—or rather, it starts out from givenness per se, 'givenness' being here the 20th century phenomenological version of the Greek upsurgence in physis. This upsurgence, this givenness is always co-relate to a consciousness to which it appears. Thus Husserl articulates the necessity for, and expounds a science of, consciousness in the ekstatic structure of which originary givenness opens up into an horizon of manifest being. Privileging the ekstatic side of the equation, Husserl fails to ask how this ekstatic structure defining consciousness might be given to itself in the same 'pure stuff of all givenness as are other things. Thus, he loses sight of the intimate connection between general ontology and the philosophy of subjectivity in that connection's phenomenological effectiveness. What he ends up doing is reducing the philosophy of subjectivity itself to a regional science. In doing so he allows his general ontology as well to let slip the original priority that his breakthrough principle of givenness held. 75

Of course, Husserl struggled with this slippage and was not without awareness as to the difficulty of the matter. He was not unaware that the exteriority of ekstasis in some sense nihilates the effective force (indeed the very flesh) of immediate impressionality as an originary givenness. As Henry says, "[d]ans le hors de soi de l'apparaitre du monde

. . . aucune impression n'advient jamais" (InPC 74). For example, Husserl's meditations on the three intentional horizons of temporal consciousness—namely, protention, consciousness of the now, and retention—reraise the question of immediate impressionality in its immanence20 with great force. Here Husserl becomes, as Henry points out, acutely aware of the nihilating power of ekstasis, since he admits that in protention and retention, ruled by intentionality, no reality, no impressionality, is actually immediately given. The consciousness of the present, on the other hand, is quite different—and here Husserl withdraws the subordination of originary givenness to intentionality. For either the present is always already retained in consciousness as past in

In phenomenology, the terms 'immanence' and 'transcendence' have technical meanings which are in many ways quite contrary to the meanings traditionally given to these words which more or less depend on a Judeo-Christian worldview. In Husserl, 'transcendence' is sometimes used in a more traditional sense, referring to 'metaphysical' or 'other-worldly' concerns which have to be bracketed out; but it is also used in the same sense of basically any idea or concept of the world that we have in the natural attitude, and which is not based in immediate intuition. However, because of Husserl's privileging of intentionality, it is inevitable that 'transcendence' comes also to mean the sejetant hors of consciousness, whereby an ekstatic horizon or 'world' is opened. It is in this sense especially that 'transcendence' is used by both Heidegger and Henry. This is why Henry persists in demanding of Husserl to say in what precisely consists originary impressionality. For if intentionality opens an ekstatic horizon in the se jetant hors of consciousness, it does so by transcending the immanence of immediate impressionality which it then mediately places before itself in intention, consequently nihilating impressionality's self- effectiveness. 'Immanence', in this sense, refers generally (even in Husserl) to what is given in immediate intuition, or immediate impressionality —which would require, according to Henry, a more distinct privileging of the 'givenness' side of the relation than Husserl himself affords. This too differs from the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of immanence, which has rather to do (rather naively, Husserl would say) with the 'this-worldly' orientation of the natural attitude. Further, 'transcendence' is to be distinguished from the 'transcendental', which refers in both Husserl and Henry to the foundation and condition of possibility of all transcendence, such as in 76 any intention which would attempt to grasp it in an ekstatic horizon, so that it exists in itself only as an ideal point separating protention from retention, or else the present of

Being's flux simply does not exist in intentionality, but rather gives itself prior to intentionality, and in fact makes intentionality itself possible. Surprisingly, it is the latter position which Husserl finally arrives to in what Henry calls "un extraordinaire renversement. . . dans le texte des Legons": "ce n 'est plus la conscience de maintenant qui donne I 'impression reelle, c 'est I 'impression reelle qui donne le maintenanf (InPC

78). Henry quotes Husserl: "un maintenant se constitue par une impression''' (Henry's emphasis), and "[a] proprement parler l'instant present lui-meme doit etre defini par la sensation originaire".21 For Husserl, at least in Henry's words, the problem again becomes here one of describing rigorously phenomenologically in what precisely such sensation originaire consists.

For Husserl, things give themselves in intuition as originary impressions, and moreover, strictly immanently, in the present, in the 'now', very much founding time in founding the possibility of the protention and retention of 'now moments' of consciousness, since "un maintenant se constitue par une impression". Being is thus a flux of 'now moments, of scattered impressionistic immanences held together synthetically by the protention and retention activities of the intending consciousness. To that extent, intentional consciousness does indeed serve to open 'world' for Husserl, and his science of consciousness is most interested in the wide variety of subtle ways in which it does so. But here, the same old struggle between pairs of terms arises again (see

Husserl's conception of the Transcendental Ego (more on this below), or Henry's conception of ipseity as radical immanence, since it is wholly and immediately effective auto-impressionality. InPC 78. — Henry quotes here from the French text of the Lecons, pp. 152 and 88 respectively. 77

#2.1). Is impressionality the object itself, is it that which gives itself in intuition to consciousness—or is it the conscious lived experience of the object?

Actually, for Henry, the question itself is misguided. No doubt this very misguidedness impels and fuels the ongoing struggle in Husserl's thought which again and again returns to the same reliance upon the subordination to intentionality of his own breakthrough concept of givenness. 'Lived experience' in Husserl's thought gets articulated by him precisely as intentionality, and specifically as retention in his discussion of time consciousness. The impression is a lived experience in being retained by intentional consciousness. But isn't this too precipitate a move? One might ask: for its part, should not 'lived experience' not at once be cast into a retention—-should it not not at once be opposed to intuitive givenness as an intention—but rather be investigated in the very intuitive immanence which is its own? What Henry is ultimately looking for in

Husserl is a description of originary givenness as pre-intentional affectivity. If originary givenness as impressionality remains vague and indistinct for Husserl, it is precisely because he fails to discover the distinct, pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenality which

Henry's whole project tries to articulate. As such, Husserl ends up too quickly casting the lived experience of the impression in a retention of it by intentional consciousness, and again and again he is well aware of the fact that he does this—so that he is impelled at each turn of the investigation to struggle on. It is this problem and this awareness, then, which leads Husserl in the course of the evolution of his thinking to his conception of the

Transcendental Ego.

To cast impressionality as lived experience at once into a retention of intentional consciousness is, equally at once, to miss for whom it is that such impressionality is 78 experienced; it is to miss the one who lives the experience, the one for whom the experience is living—it is to miss the living one. Husserl's famous eidetic reduction

(reduction to essences) as applied to the whole world sets out precisely to find this one.

Following Descartes in his path of radical doubt (or, in phenomenological terms, radical epoche), Husserl seeks the living one on the basis of whom the whole world opens into an ekstatic horizon and who is, as it were, the first appearance, the first phenomenon, prior to any horizon. This living one is, for Husserl, the one who subsists beneath, as the base of, the flux of the impressionistic immanences or innumerable moments of 'now' consciousness which get synthesized by consciousness in retention into a meaningful horizon—one might say, in Marion's terms, by the 'screen'. If there were not such a base, if there were not this effective foundation, then such a synthesis in consciousness would not even be possible. This foundation is for Husserl precisely the Transcendental Ego.

But herein lies a problem—namely, how does this foundation itself appear to itself?

Certainly it must appear, for if it did not, it would be little more than a metaphysical proposition, little more than Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, although cast in more phenomenological terms. Does it, then, have a special mode of intuitive givenness of its own? Or does it appear only in and through its moments of 'now' consciousness?

And if the latter, then how might the endless succession of such 'now' moments be gathered into a unity?

Henry's answer to this problem, very briefly (more on this in #3.1 and #3.2), is that it appears as an affectivity—in somewhat the same way in which things appear in their givenness, and yet differently, in that the "primal upwelling of phenomenality" is an absolutely interior (and thus absolutely immanent) self-seeming of existence, or what 79

Henry refers to as the 'auto-affection' of life. Here, a distinction is made by Henry between what he calls a 'strong' affection and a 'weak' affection. A weak affection is a pre-ekstatic form of phenomenality in which lived experiences of things in their givenness, the lived experience of givenness per se, affects consciousness—or rather, it is the affection of the self by itself in its lived experience of itself experiencing things. Such a weak affection is made up in part by a 'hetero-affection', i.e. an affection whose content originates outside the self, and in part by a 'self-affection' in which the self lives and appropriates its experience to itself. A strong affection, on the other hand—auto- affection—has always already occurred, has always already unfolded as an event of effective givenness, behind and within every such affection as a lived experience. For

Henry, lived experience is possible only on the basis of the phenomenality of auto- affection, the self-seeming to itself of existence, the effectivity of the affectivity of pure self-sensing. This affectivity of pure self-sensing is a 'transcendental' reality, an absolute immanence consubstantial with its phenomenal effectiveness as an ipseity.

Transcendental ipseity is, for Henry, self-given to itself, even self-generative of itself, in its givenness as an absolute. That the anamorphosis gives to the subject to be a 'new me', as Marion says, is possible for Henry only on the basis of the fact that the auto-affection of life always already gives itself to be a 'me', an ipseity, appropriating which it is capable of becoming an T and opening an ekstatic horizon. In short, the mode of phenomenality of things in their givenness and the mode of the Transcendental Ego is the same for Henry—namely, pre-ekstatic affectivity which serves as the foundational essence of all ekstasis (despite the distinction he does make between a strong and a weak sort of affection within that mode). As for the problem of the unity of 'now' moments, 80 the matter is put quite differently by him: the problem of time in Henry is largely a problem of articulating the "primal upwelling" as eternal (more on this in #3.2 and #4.1).

But what about Husserl? How does Husserl arrive at the Transcendental Ego? For

Henry, not in any way which remains true to his original breakthrough principle of givenness. In the end, Husserl wavers and falls back upon a certain idealistic move in order to solve the problem of the unity of successive 'now' moments of pre-ekstatic impressionality. He arrives at the Transcendental Ego by way of a two-step reduction which—unfortunately, according to Henry—precludes the possibility of apprehending the special mode of phenomenality which such an Ego is, as ipseity, precisely because it moves too much towards abstraction: first, he reduces all impressions to their essences

(all blues to the essence of blue, for example), which essences, or 'forms' of essences, he then reduces further to the essence of all essences, namely the Transcendental Ego which makes all such essences possible. It is this second reduction which, for Henry, is phenomenologically problematic as a foundation. Of course, in Husserl's defense, one might argue that this idealistic essence of all essences does indeed appear in its own way and is not a mere abstraction with no phenomenological justification. Henry admits, for example, that such an essence of all essences is seen by Husserl "dans une vision de degre superieur: une vision intellectuelle, dont l'objet n'est plus une existence contingente mais une structure rationnelle" (InPC 112). However, such a manner of appearing concerns a very specific regional ontology, that of ideal essences, and to that extent, by definition it would still depend upon an ekstasis. One would still have to ask oneself for whom this 'idea' of the Transcendental Ego appears as such. But Husserl does not answer this question. From the start, the very reason he makes this idealistic move— 81 feels he has to make it—is for Henry because he fails to discover immediately the special mode of phenomenality, affectivity, which the Transcendental Ego truly has precisely as ipseity. Finally there is no singular, particular ipseity in Husserl—since all particulars are interpreted by him as impressions of the world reducible to the essence of all essences, and as such having no ultimate importance in themselves. To that extent, Henry claims that Husserl is as bad as Heidegger in missing the crucial insight of 'beginning

Cartesianism' (the videor) and, as in 'constituted Cartesianism', opening an "interior ekstasis", an interior intentional horizon, to intentionally posit through an idealistic abstraction what Husserl all along indistinctly felt was truly there at the foundation of things.

This is the same old story already seen in Henry's reading of 'constituted

Cartesianism', in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud—-namely, that same subterranean current flowing through the history of Western thinking, secretly grounding it, according to Henry, but never fully phenomenalizing itself; or when it tries to do so, it is only half or even less truly appearing in allowing itself to be phenomenalized in an ekstasis by way of which it inevitably gets covered over again, and in which its effectivity of appearance dissipates. For both Henry's and Marion's own phenomenological undertakings after

Husserl, the question now becomes the following: how does one unfold the deep phenomenological possibilities inherent in Husserl's breakthrough "principle of principles" which Husserl himself never did unfold? What are these possibilities? And what is their precise relation to ekstatic phenomenality? We have already seen to some extent how Marion attempts to answer these questions. We turn now closely to the work of Henry. 82

Chapter 3

Material Phenomenology

To find the key to a foundational phenomenological ontology in its inseparability from a philosophy of subjectivity: this is precisely the goal and the very heart of Henry's whole life's work. The key, in some sense, already consists of the link between ontology and subjectivity, the articulation of which as affectivity is its core. To that extent, Henry is very much a Modern thinker. At the same time, however, he is highly critical of much of the work done by those considered the first and among the greatest of the Moderns:

Descartes (in terms of 'constituted Cartesianism') and Kant. As mentioned earlier,

Henry's great interest in the philosophy of subjectivity and subjective life began for him as a member of the Pericles division of the French Resistance, in which position he carried out clandestine missions gathering intelligence in Lyon. All the while carrying

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his back sac, it would seem that during this time, the secret nature of his true identity—and no doubt his hidden feelings as well—on these missions conducted him to his thinking on subjective life over against Kant's metaphysical postulation as to the unity of the categories. Perhaps at this point he was not yet fully in a position to cast his wealth of experience into a philosophical vocabulary capable of effectively countering Kant (who simply had no real ontology of the subject, as Henry pointed out) along with the whole Western tradition of ekstatic representation of being. That vocabulary was to come to him soon enough—namely, after the war, at least in part through Heidegger along the banks of a nearby river where Henry and two friends 83 reportedly discoursed with him for over three hours (see #1.1). It is interesting to speculate that among the many things they might have discussed there, including

Heidegger's 'destruktion' of the history of Western ontology, it would have been a propos for them also to have mentioned Heraclitus' river "into which one cannot step twice".1 Both Heidegger and Henry would have been interested in the unchanging nature of the bank on which they sat; but at the same time, each of them would have been careful not to speak of it in the 'ekstatic' way as had been instituted as the classical mode of phenomenality by Greek ontology, and which underpinned the entire Western tradition.

3.1 Subjectivity and Objectivity: The Three Bodies

Despite the unquestionably profound influence which Heidegger had upon the young

Henry, very early on the budding thinker rejected Heidegger's thought as falling short of articulating any other mode of phenomenality than the classical one (see #1.1). "Za subjectivite clandestine" was already Henry's main preoccupation at this time, as it would be throughout his life, and as Heidegger couldn't provide for him the path of thinking he was looking for, beyond the merely preparatory task of the destruktion2, he

Heidegger had not yet at this point given his Heraclitus seminar, which he gave along with Eugene Fink in the academic year 1966-67 at the University of Freiburg. But in the years during which he wrote some of his most succinct works deconstructing the Western tradition, he already had Heraclitus and the Pre-socratics generally very keenly in mind. See the index of names and eras in Western thought with reference to Heidegger's writings after Being and Time (1927), in Hildegard Feick, Index zu Heideggers 'Sein und Zeit'. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968 [2nd ed.], pp. 116-124. 2 See e.g. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, par. 6 = GA 2 (1977), 27-36; see also GA 59 (1993), 29-41, and GA 9 (1976), 3-5. — At least for Heidegger, 'destruktion' is not just a "childish pretense" ("A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer", in M. Heidegger, On the Way to Lnaguage (1971) = GA 12 (1985), 79-146; 104 and also 117 & 121, 123, 126,137); 'destruktion' 84 turned with great interest to the philosophy of the French thinker Maine de Biran, on whom he began doctoral work very shortly after his meeting with Heidegger. It was in his work on de Biran, later published as Philosophie etphenomenologie du corps, that Henry first attempted to develop a philosophy of subjectivity on the basis of affectivity.

Maine de Biran (1766-1824) was a thinker who suffered a severe lack of any significant philosophical reputation in his own lifetime, due to the laborious nature of his style—in particular, his tendency to use traditional philosophical terms with entirely new meanings—and also to the fact that his most characteristic works were all published posthumously. In the early period of his thought de Biran's primary interest was psychological, or rather, a sort of phenomenological psychology dealing with perception and the highly passive nature of impressionality which he characterized as affectivity. For this reason he has been labelled a sensualist. He later moved into a more intellectualist phase and began emphasizing conscious experience as the expression of an active and striving power of the embodied self.3 Henry, along with others of his day in France, would undoubtedly have seen a close connection between de Biran's thinking and

Husserl's thinking on intentionality, as well as the phenomenological psychology of

Husserl's own mentor, Franz Brentano. It was inevitable that anyone with even a meager knowledge of the work of de Biran at this time would have pointed out similarities in is rather the very core of tradition as transmission (Heidegger then calls it Uberlieferung), which is for Heidegger the opposite of tradition as repetition then referred to by him as Tradition (see e.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965 [2nd ed.], 158- 61 & 180). The former—i.e. transmission—is meant also by Jacques Derrida's 'deconstruction' as opposed to tradition aas mere repetition, for instance in terms of 'commentary'. This is something simply ignored even by so-called 'critical' thinkers. 3 Very late in his life, de Biran took up an interest in and theosophy. While such interests are not entirely outside of Henry's own scope of interests, only the first two stages of de Biran's thought—the sensualist and intellectualist stages—greatly influenced him; or at least it is 85 their thinking, and even would have been proud to point to de Biran as one of France's own great philosophers clearly thinking along the same lines as the Germans, and doing it nearly a century earlier. Henry, for his part, took up the same interest in de Biran and even ultimately used it against Heidegger. But de Biran, too, Henry argues, had his shortcomings: most notably in his 'intellectualist' stage, he too fell back upon ekstatic intentionality as the foundation of manifest being, thus compromising, according to

Henry, the original insights of his 'sensualist' stage concerning impressionality and affectivity.

Henry's Philosophie etphenomenologie du corps basically focuses on the nature of that interior life of the subject upon which he had been thinking since the war. That interior life is, for Henry—as it was for de Biran and for Husserl as well—lived in the

"subjective body", sometimes also referred to by Henry as the "organic body". The study of this body involves, for instance, a study of movement and sense perception, the unity of our senses, the problem of knowledge, habit and memory, and desire and intentionality, among other things of this sort—in a word, all such things of an 'interior' sort which constitute the powers of the subjective body and establish it as a centre of orientation opening upon an ekstatic horizon. But, of course, it knows itself pre- ekstatically in that orientation. It experiences itself as a power centre, as an 'I can', an insight of both de Biran and Husserl4. Moreover, the spatial localization of those powers in the ekstatic horizon upon which it opens is what allows it to distinguish and to claim only the first two stages to which Henry refers and struggles with in his own early writings on de Biran. 4 See for instance section 2 of chapter 3 ("The Constitution of Psychic Reality Through the Body") in Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. 86 for itself an 'objective' body. That is, it gives it the right to call this body its own, rather than encountering it as an anonymous object among many others within the horizon. As

Henry says, "something intervenes in the constitution of our objective body which did not intervene in the constitution of other objects, something which confers on the objective body this characteristic in virtue of which it presents itself to us as having an interior"

(PPB 132-33)—i.e. of being related to the subjective body in a very particular way.

It is important to point out here that, being of an 'interior' sort, such powers— indeed, the subjective body in its totality—have a specific mode of phenomenality, a phenomenality invisible in the light of any ekstatic structure. The question is thus for

Henry one of how to study such a body with both its interior reality and non-ekstatic mode of phenomenalization. We are back again here to Henry's ever sustained emphasis on affectivity, which emphasis seeks to resolve definitively the old problem of the infinite regress of ekstatic horizons (see #1.2). How is a phenomenological psychology even possible if the precise things taken as the focus of the study do not show themselves in an objective light? Wouldn't their true mode of phenomenality be completely misunderstood if they were forced to show themselves—if psychology, for example, were to be undertaken along the same lines as the 'outer', objective sciences?5 For Husserl, this would have been a particularly pressing problem, since the humans sciences of sociology, anthropology, and psychology had flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and had, with that flourishing, more or less reduced the human being, and especially his inner life, to a mere object among other objects in the world. Husserl's focus upon

If not undertaken phenomenologically, the human science of psychology, though technically speaking not studying anything 'visible' in the 'outer' world, nevertheless objectifies the 'inner life' in such a way as to render it 'visible' in an ekstatic structure. In other words, it opens an 87 intentionality and the unfolding of his science of consciousness as the foundation of regional sciences (both human and natural sciences) constituted his own attempt to articulate the interior life of subjectivity which stood behind such objectifications, and which ultimately made such objectifications possible. It was also a pivotal influence for

Heidegger's own focus upon and articulation of Dasein's being-in-the-world.

If the task of phenomenology was, thus, in its beginnings to provide a foundation for all regional sciences by questioning precisely how it is that things—indeed the world itself—appear by questioning concerning phenomenality as such, then it was necessary to question also the power in which (if not entirely by way of which) this appearance gives itself. Thus a distinction had to be made between the 'objective body' studied by the human and the natural sciences, and the 'subjective body' or the 'organic body' and its invisible interior life, that is, the body which pre-ekstatically understands and lives itself as capacity and as intending centre of orientation. Part of the method of phenomenology then becomes the unfolding of a description of this 'subjective body' without making it into just another object on the ekstatic horizon—that is, without confusing its specific mode of phenomenality with that of the 'objective body'.

Husserl and Heidegger (and Henry, too, for that matter) certainly felt that phenomenology—indeed, that phenomenologists—had the distinct ethical duty to guide the development of the regional sciences so as to recall them to the question of the phenomenality as such of that which they undertake to study. Generally, such a question does not arise as a concern for regional sciences themselves, since a study of the objective body from within the domain of a regional science would not generally concern

'interior ekstatic horizon', and as such misses the truly characteristic mode of phenomenality of the inner life. 88 itself with any reduction of the assumptions of the 'natural attitude'. Now the natural attitude, first of all, takes for granted that the objective body simply exists; it doesn't question the specific nature of its appearing, that is, its phenomenality as such, the how of its appearing, let alone the why. Rather, the objective body in the natural attitude is treated in its being as a being always already present at hand, it can be measured, it can be characterized, and even be manipulated genetically with today's advanced technology.

Were one to cut it into pieces or delve deeply into it to expose its inmost parts, or magnify its minutest atoms, it would still be this object very much present at hand. This is so because its essence, argues Henry, does not lie in its minutest atoms or even in its genetic code. Rather, its essence lies precisely in that which cannot be measured or magnified, in that which is invisible to the measurements of science and its tools: namely, its life, the life which is the 'subjective body' and which pre-ekstatically knows itself in affectivity. Only a phenomenological inquiry, says Henry, can recall it to that life.

Yet such a pre-ekstatic knowledge, albeit obscure, is already possessed by the natural attitude, and even guides and inspires its science in some sense; this is evidenced by the fact that a regional inquiry such as psychology which seeks to examine such a life and its powers is cultivated and carried out. Of course, psychology as a regional science aspires to make its obscure knowledge into a certain one. But unless it is specifically phenomenologically oriented, and guided by the questioning of phenomenality as such, then it ever attempts to throw out before itself—or within itself, in an 'interior' ekstatic purview—that which necessarily, according to Henry, resists and escapes such an horizon, so that only a distorted view of that life—in many ways a mere metaphysical postulate—is what 'appears'. Such a metaphysical postulate is the very thing which has 89 primarily fueled the so-called postmodern critique of the Modern subject, based only on ekstatic representations of the subject.6 It is also one of the products of the basic modus operandi of ontological monism—a world-view, argues Henry, which has led to the contemporary state of cultural barbarism which has entirely lost touch with the interior subjective life in its truth—i.e. in its effective mode ofphenomenality.

Henry's 1987 work La Barbarie, in many ways one of the most caustic and indeed most polemical pieces of writing in his oeuvre, critiques such cultural barbarism in the various forms in which it has unfolded in late 20l century Western society. In this work he pits modern science—in fact unchanged, as Henry argues, in its essential orientation since Galileo—against "culture", which for him denotes the liberated expression of the deep energies of life, of the subjective body, within human existence.

"Every culture is the liberation of an energy, the forms of this culture are the concrete modes of this liberation.'"1 Modern science, contrariwise, and especially the human sciences, due to their "double representing" of life, only serve to repress this energy: first they represent life in an empty and repressive representation because they miss its essential mode of phenomenality characterized as affectivity; next, their representations are predetermined and restricted according to the rules of the in the service of the Galilean-inspired "project of knowledge"—a knowledge of course conceived of as an ekstatic objectification for its own sake, and therefore not any longer knowledge but only a "project of knowledge" for whose sake all such science

6 Henry and Marion themselves are no less critics of the Modern subject based on ekstatic representations. Each in their own way they offer alternatives to such representations—rather than, at the other extreme, harbouring a certain cynical anti-Modern nihilism which critiques the Modern figure of the subject, while on principle disallowing for the possibility of any alternative. 7 Henry's italics. — La Barbarie is a work as yet untranslated. Here I have quoted from Michael O'Sullivan's English translation of a longer passage in MHIBB, p. 151. 90 endeavours. Such a science has entirely broken with and denounced its own fullest possibility and essence precisely because it has failed to address—or worse, has refused to allow itself to be guided by—the question of phenomenality as such. Objectivity becomes something which, as a throwing of things before itself and opposing them to itself and having (or at least presuming to have) complete mastery over them, yields only flat images and idols. Indeed, the advances in 20th century technology only serve to reinforce the illusion of mastery over things. Such objective science feels, legitimizes, and even celebrates its activities in the belief that it is truly progressing in its mastery, while in fact it is at heart, says Henry, deeply anxious and even suffering from a profound ennui, so that it ever and again seeks only 'the new', a new mastery, a new legitimation, for fear that its own bankruptcy will be otherwise exposed.8 All the while, the life which otherwise should be seen as existing and expressing itself as the essence of all its inquiries, and for whose sake such inquiries should ultimately be carried out, remains unfathomed. Thus it finds itself ever and again goaded on in its work, yet truly called to no future, blind in the limitations of its own questionings, and more or less always in desperate pursuit of 'knowledge' which in the end serves nothing more than its own project of 'progress' in order to avoid looking at itself.

For Henry, objective science's avoidance of itself in its deep essence, this anxiety and profound ennui, is evidenced most notably in our modern 'media culture'—a royal carnival of dazzling images and idols of life's objectification and devaluation. Such indeed is the inevitable repercussion and calamity of 'project of knowledge'-oriented science, and it is the deep and deeply indubitable expression of an almost total repression

8 See M. Heidegger, "Aletheia (Heraklit, Fragment 16)", 1954; in GA 7, 263-88; particularly 276- 80. See also M. Boutin, "Le penser comme dette", in Le don et la dette (ed. M.M. Olivetti). 91 of the effective energies of life under such a science's reign. In a very late work, Henry briefly returns to the problem of cultural barbarism and engages the issue of this ennui in even greater polemical tones (because now with an added religious fervour9) than in La

Barbarie—this time with reference to contemporary society's fascination (if not obsession) with virtual reality machines. Casting such machines in the comparative guise of the image of the beast given breath in the Apocalypse of John (Revelation 13:15),

Henry puts his charge: "This is the marvel—virtual reality—that is going to seduce the inhabitants of the earth, the work of false prophets and false messiahs. They will make extraordinary machines that will do everything that men and women do so as to make them believe that they are just machines themselves"

For Henry, this calamity of contemporary society—this barbarism of objective,

'project of knowledge'-oriented science, this reduction of human beings to simulacra, to idols, to images that feel nothing, to invalid and bankrupt beings—is not the final word on the 'objective body', which for Henry in no way has to appear—and in fact, strictly speaking, it cannot appear in the fullness of its givenness—in an empty representation.

On the contrary, when the regional sciences do not merely predetermine their results in the service of the 'project of knowledge', when indeed they allow themselves to be

Padua: CEDAM, 2004, pp. 453-65. 9 The question of the relation of Henry's phenomenology of life to religion and to theology (which deeply flavours his polemic in his later works) will be addressed further below in this chapter and throughout chapter 4. 10 IAT 274. Henry's italics. Henry continues: "In the simulator, but also everywhere such a metaphysical situation is produced: everywhere a man or a woman is only an object, a dead thing, a network of neurons, a bundle of natural processes. . . Men debased, humiliated, despised and despising themselves, trained in school to despise themselves, to count for nothing—just particles and molecules. . . Men reduced to simulacra, to idols that feel nothing, to automatons. . . Men replaced by abstractions, by economic entities, by profits and money. Men treated mathematically, digitally, statistically, counted like animals and counting for much less. . . Dazed men, devoted to specters and spectacles that always expose their own invalidity and bankruptcy 92 guided in their pursuits by a fundamental phenomenological ontology which enlightens them as to their own foundation, then the 'objective body' can be studied in such a way that it is life itself, the interior life of the 'subjective body', which opens the structure of the ekstasis while maintaining always its rootedness in its essence, that is, in affectivity.

For it is the life of the subjective body itself—the 'I can', the power or centre of orientation—which throws before itself the things which originally affect it in impressionality. In going outside of itself in this way, however—i.e. by throwing out before itself that which it opposes to itself in obj edification—it nevertheless remains close to itself in the lived experience of its givenness to itself in affectivity. Such is a

"real" objectification, as Henry says, because it is pregnant with the fullness of its originary givenness, "as if it was life itself that entered into the objectivity and brought itself before itself, giving itself to itself in and through this objectivity"11.

Both Husserl's and Maine de Biran's analyses of the body (of the hand, for example, which is the outer objectification of a subjective capacity), as well as

Heidegger's investigations of Dasein's being-in-the-world (through analyses, for example, of Zuhandenheit)—all such 'objedifications' would be, in Henry's view, "real" objedifications of the objective body and other objects in the fullness of their givenness.

They are real obj edifications because they carry out analyses which maintain phenomenologically their essential rootedness in the pathetik materiality, as Henry calls it , of the subjective body and its goals. The "organs" of the subjective body—its

. . . Men whose responsibility and dignity have no definite site anymore. Men who in the general degradation will envy the animals. Men will want to die—but not Life." (IAT274-75) 11 From Michael O'Sullivan's English translation of a passage from Henry's La Barbarie, in MHIBB,p. 149. 12 The term "pathetik" is fast becoming the accepted English coinage for the translation of Henry's French pathetique, since the English word "pathetic" does not carry the same sense as 93 capacities, powers, intentions-—reflect themselves in the objective body's formal expression and in the tools that it makes, in the way it "organ-izes" its world; the concrete cultural forms that it produces unfold as outer expressions of the deep energies of its inner life.13

To that extent, the mode of phenomenality called "ekstasis" by Henry is not ultimately that which he wants philosophically to contest. Rather, it is ontological monism that he wants to contest, i.e. the point of view that there is only one mode of phenomenality, namely ekstasis, as well as the 'project of knowledge'-oriented science that has inevitably arisen out of this mistaken view. For if the only mode of phenomenality is ekstasis, then the problem of the regress of ekstatic horizons is immediately introduced whenever the question of the foundation is posed. One arrives then, either at a mere metaphysical postulate for a foundation for those horizons, as in the French. The French, especially in Henry's usage of it, amounts to the sense of its Greek root, meaning subject to feeling, capable of feeling something, and denoting a passive receptivity— even, an undergoing or enduring of that which affects it. 13 This core interest in developing a pre-ekstatic, pathetik phenomenality, the relation between the 'subjective body' as an affective power and the real 'objective body' which is as the ekstatic expression of the self s affective organs, and furthermore the relation between these two bodies and the natural world, led Henry to an interest in the work of the young Marx. Henry's main contention with Marxism, which as a movement, he argues, is not at all Marx' own philosophy, is that it totally fails to take into account Marx' early philosophical writings on the nature of material reality and human experience and praxis. Henry argues that Marxism as a movement focuses pretty much entirely on Marx's later political writings which not only unfortunately are silent about the real nature of human praxis (since it is simply assumed by Marx in them), but also in many instances are concessions made to specific political situations or persons, especially Friedrich Engels. Henry writes in the introduction to his Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality (pp. 1-2): "Marxism is the interrelated set of misinterpretations that have been given concerning Marx . . . Certainly, Marxism claims to speak in the name of Marx. What characterizes it, however, is that, since it is directed essentially toward political action and its attendant problems, Marxism has retained of the original work only what might stimulate this action and, in the urgency of a given situation, make it more effective." He further argues that in Engels' preface to the second German edition of the Communist Manifesto (written in the spring of 1883, after Marx' death), Marx' so-called "fundamental position" is over-simplistically summarized on the basis of a political text alone. But the political texts, Henry says, "do not contain their principle of intelligibility in themselves, the concepts they develop are not the basic concepts, and their basis is neither expressed in these texts nor even indicated therein". 94

Kant and in Modernity generally, or else the regional sciences eschew (indeed, must eschew) the question of the foundation altogether (Heidegger's "double forgetfulness" of

Being (see #1.1)), being guided in their questioning only by the dictates and predetermined conceptions of their own individual 'projects of knowledge', and thus issuing nothing but empty representations, says Henry, precisely because that is just what they already started out with—idols and dead images. They could produce nothing, no fullness, no real life, without a seed.

For Henry, there are then two bodies intimately connected, and each with its own specific mode of phenomenality: one, the 'objective body', measurable, visible in the ekstatic light, thrown out before the other in a representation and thus opposed to the other, while yet being at the same time that other's outer expression and manifestation; the other, the 'subjective body', organic centre of capacity and orientation, invisible in the ekstatic light, known to itself truly, i.e. in the effectivity of its mode of phenomenalization, only pre-ekstatically in affectivity, in the revelation of affectivity which constitutes its pathetik phenomenality. Against ontological monism, in other words, Henry proposes a sort of qualified ontological duality—qualified because such a duality has nothing to do with traditional Cartesian dualism of mind and body, nor with

Greek dualism of spirit or soul and matter articulated wholly within an ekstatic horizon.

Rather, Henry's duality concerns precisely modes of phenomenalization, and insofar as

Henry's is, or aspires to be, a fundamental phenomenological ontology, the two basic modes of phenomenalization denote two basic modes of Being. However, Henry is careful not to make 'Being' sound as though it were some third thing underlying the two modes, but stresses the way in which one mode, more originary than the other, is in fact 95 the ground of the other in such a way that they are truly inseparable. To that extent, the revelation of affectivity already contains within it the revelation of the possibility of the ekstatic structure itself, and is therefore a double revelation. But how does such a double revelation work? Actually, the question cannot be adequately answered without articulating a distinction not merely between the visible and the invisible modes of phenomenality, but within the invisible itself—between the 'subjective body' and a third body, the 'absolute body' (which Henry also sometimes calls the 'transcendental body'14), the heart of and the key to Henry's entire thinking of "/a subjectivite clandestine''.

3.2 Given Life: Passivity, Appropriation, and the Absolute

Henry discusses these "three bodies"—the objective, the subjective/organic and the absolute/transcendental bodies—most explicitly in Chapter IV of his Philosophie et phenomenologie du corps. But to talk merely of "three bodies" is misleading. It is more elucidative to discuss here three relations. But why three relations, and what are they?

They are, namely, the relation between the objective and the subjective body (see #3.1), that between the subjective and the absolute body, and that of the absolute body with itself which gives for the very possibility of the other two bodies and their relations. The importance of focusing on these relations is that it brings out the fact that the bodies are in reality quite inseparable from one another. One of the common criticisms of Henry is that he doesn't explicitly enough articulate these relations in his discussion of the three bodies. Jean Racette, for example, charges Henry with a certain Platonism, as well as

14 The 'transcendental' here is to be distinguished from the 'transcendent' (see #2.3, n. 20). 96

Cartesianism, claiming that Henry more or less finally falls back upon the traditional ekstatically characterized categories of body and soul which he has otherwise taken such pains to refute.15 In another article (thirty years after Racette's), Dan Zahavi asks how it is that an absolute subjectivity (as self-sufficient as Henry describes it) can even be in possession of a bodily exteriority at all.16 In fact, Henry does discuss throughout his work—albeit often in a more implicit way—the relation between these bodies. Most important is his concept of the "double revelation", articulated implicitly as early as his

L 'Essence de la manifestation. But in what precisely does this double revelation consist and what does it reveal? The primary thing that it reveals is the essence of manifestation itself—i.e. pathetik phenomenality as affectivity. We discussed such pathetik phenomenality already partially (see #3.1) relative to the invisible life of the 'subjective body'. But in fact the 'subjective body' is already the revelation of the surpassing of itself of life as revealed in auto-affection. Such self-surpassing defines its relation to the absolute body (more on this further below). In order to clarify this, let us recall here Jean-

Luc Marion's articulation of givenness and hetero-affectivity (see #2.2).

The givenness of things, according to Marion in his articulation of the anamorphosis, hetero-affects the subjective body; or rather, the hetero-affection itself of the subjective body is givenness, is originary impressionality. The truly interesting thing here is the way in which the subjective body in the anamorphosis receives givenness as a lived experience in receiving itself anew. On the one hand, the passivity of reception of givenness by the subjective body constitutes the anamorphosis; but on the other hand, in

15 See J. Racette, "Michel Henry's Philosophy of the Body" (trans. Robert Lechner): Philosophy Today 13/2-4 (Summer 1969): 83-94. This article is one of the earliest articles on Henry's work in English. 97 the same moment of givenness, in the same 'revelation', Henry would say, the subjective body (inherently a power, a centre of orientation as 'I can'), surpasses itself—i.e. it transcends itself by appropriating itself anew in becoming the new self imposed on it. In other words, in order for the anamorphosis to be consummate, the new 'me' thus imposed upon the self has to be appropriated; the self has to realize this new 'me' as precisely who it itself is. It is me who is given to myself as this 'me'. This new 'me' is me. When it realizes who this 'me' is, which realization constitutes an appropriation, it realizes also that the thing which had affected it and imposed the anamorphosis upon it is not alien to itself, but is in some sense united with it. In what way? In that the originary impressionality, as that which the givenness of the thing is, becomes in being appropriated in the anamorphosis part and parcel of the 'pathetik stuff, the affective flesh11,.as Henry will say, of the newly realized subjective body which is this new 'me'.

But in fact, this 'uniting' with otherness in the appropriative movement of self- surpassing already presupposes, for Henry, a 'self-unity', a self-appropriation, as it were.

But what does this mean? We shall have to recall here Henry's distinction between a weak and a strong affection (see #2.3). For Henry, the affection of the self by a thing in its givenness constitutes a weak affection. Such an affection is always constituted in part by a 'transcendent' content—denoting that the affection comes from outside the self (see

#2.3, n. 20)—and in part by the self s appropriation of the content as a lived experience.

16 See D. Zahavi, "Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible": Continental Philosophy Review 32/3 (1999): pp. 223-40. 17 'Flesh' is a term that Henry uses primarily in his later, Christian writings. This is not to say that the latter are no longer phenomenological, but rather that Henry does a rigorous phenomenological reading of a certain characterization of Christian belief, especially as articulated in the Gospel of John. And yet Henry's basic idea remains the same: affectivity still gives itself in revelation and is still considered the very 'substance'—-and thus Henry's 'material phenomenology'—of essential effective reality. 98

Yet such an affection is possible only on the basis of a strong affection, an awto-affection, a givenness of self to self which serves as the weak affection's ground. The self,

"affected by what affects it. . . is, in this determination of affection, affected by itself. In other words, all affection, for Henry, "presupposes the ontological dimension of auto- affection and of affectivity" (EsM 502). It might be helpful to recall here Henry's emphasis on Descartes' videor: the original self-impressionality, or self-seeming at the heart and as the foundation of all seeming, of all hetero-affection (see #2.2). This originary "upwelling" of self-presence to itself in ipseity is, as Henry calls it, "life". The self is originally given to itself as life to be a living one—and it is only as a living one that it would then be capable of being affected by that which is other to itself. The givenness to itself of itself as life in the pathetik materiality, this 'pure stuff, of its livingness—that is, the auto-affection which first gives it to be a living self—is its absolute body. The absolute body is the revelation of affectivity in its originary phenomenological effectiveness. As Henry says, "[a]ffectivity is the essence of auto- affection, not its theoretical or speculative possibility but its concrete [i.e. its effective] one." (EsM462)

We can now make explicit not only the precise relation between the absolute body and the subjective body, but also how this relation is itself grounded in the relation of the absolute body with itself, and further, how the latter gives for the possibility of objectivity—and thus what this relation has to do with Henry's 'double revelation'. Auto- affection is, above all, a relation. It is a relation, however, which is twofold. This twofoldness parallels—and is in some sense identical with—the twofoldness of the

'double revelation'. The first 'fold' of this double revelation concerns the self which 99 affects itself and as such receives itself in the givenness of itself to itself a posteriori—as though it were itself somehow the hidden, immemorial 'other' to itself: "The 'already' of the Being-already-given-to-itself of feeling has to do with its phenomenological effectiveness and determines it. . . in such a way that it has a content and appears as already overflowed with it, even though such a content is identical to it" (EsM All). To that extent, the self is already originally given to itself in the dative case, as a 'me', in passivity—before it has actively appropriated itself as an T. It surprises itself, it undergoes itself; indeed, it suffers itself—-but not as though an anamorphosis is imposed upon it from some other place, as in hetero-affectivity; it is rather as though a morphe, the

'form' of ipseity itself—-albeit an infinite form, since it is not defined by the finitude of an ekstatic horizon—were given to it for the first time: given to itself, and given above all to be a self. It is for this reason—namely, this givenness to itself as a self a posteriori—that

Henry refers to the specific mode of phenomenality which affectivity is as a revelation.

Indeed, such revelation constitutes, in the passivity of the being-given-to-itself-to-be-a- self the relation of the absolute body with itself.

This brings us to the second 'fold' of the twofoldness of the relation and of the

'double revelation' that auto-affection is. Insofar as in revelation the self is originarily given to itself to be a self it must appropriate itself as such a self in order to become so.

However, it is only able to appropriate itself because the revelation is essentially twofold: that is, it reveals not only the self s givenness to itself to be a self, but also the very possibility of its being so. That possibility lies precisely in the appropriative structure in which it is given to itself to surpass itself in its passivity towards its self-possession as an

T. But insofar as the very movement of surpassing is by definition an action which the 100 self in its pure passivity cannot undertake, the revelation which reveals the possibility of such a movement must necessarily be itself the accomplishment of it. In other words, it is given to itself to be a self, and that 'being a self has already been effectively accomplished for it and given over to it.1* Such an appropriative accomplishment, then, constitutes the relation between the absolute body and the subjective body—the latter in its organic character being the terminus of the originary movement flowing out from the

'double revelation'. That is to say, in the double revelation, the absolute body becomes a subjective body, or organic body—it becomes a centre of orientation for itself, a situated self, as Henry says, and a powerful self, defined as the T can'.

Herein lies as well the question of the relation between the subjective body and objectivity. As an appropriative accomplishment, such situatedness is in its essence itself an ekstatic structure—or rather, the ekstatic structure is in its essence always already appropriative, always already a situatedness. Such situatedness, as the terminus of the originary movement, opens the transcendent horizon in which the organic powers find their own terminus in their spatial localization within the body and are limited to that spatiality by their contact with and resistance by things. In this way it distinguishes itself in its objective body from other human bodies and other objects in the ekstatic horizon, since its objective body is precisely the outermost terminus of the continuous movement and expression of life which begins originarily in the relation of the absolute body with itself, and which immediately self-surpasses itself in its passivity in the appropriative structure of the 'double revelation'. As such, it establishes within itself the very openness of the structure of transcendence which allows for the possibility of the "throwing out

18 Here, Henry seems heavily influenced by the later Heidegger. But he would still argue that Heidegger never got to the full (i.e. effective) revelation of the structure in its totality, pointedly in 101

before itself. . . " in representation. As it ever surpasses itself in that very throwing

precisely to be the self for whom the affective content of that throw is given, the

anamorphosis imposed upon the self in hetero-affectivity (in the resistance that it

encounters in the world) is always already grounded in the accomplishment of self-

surpassing which constitutes the appropriative structure. In this sense, the self "maintains

itself close to itself even in its movement out towards an ekstatic horizon. In fact, this

"maintaining close to self is the very condition and foundation of the ekstatic horizon.

Henry writes:

The maintaining close to self of the act of transcendence in the original receptivity wherein transcendence receives itself, discovers its Being, masters itself, controls itself, coheres with self in the unity which makes it to be, to be what it is and what permits it to act, the original affection of transcendence. . . the auto-affection of transcendence. . . is the condition and the foundation of every ontological affection by the world as of every affection by a being. (EsM 461)

This "original receptivity wherein transcendence receives itself. . . " is precisely

the second 'fold' of the twofoldness of the relation and of the 'double revelation' that

auto-affection is—the fact that it reveals not only the self s givenness to itself to be a self,

but as well the very possibility and accomplishment of its being so, namely, the

appropriative or transcendent structure. Such is "the internal structure of the original

mode of revelation of movement in its ontological identity with the possibility for this

movement remaining near itself in its accomplishment and, consequently, as constituting

this very possibility''' {EsM 268). "Immanence is the original mode according to which

is accomplished the revelation of transcendence itself, and hence the original essence terms of the self s radical self-givenness to itself in its essential passivity. 102 of revelation" (EsM 227). This original self-reception of transcendence and this

"maintaining close to self of the act of transcendence" in that original reception make it possible for the self to undertake—in a properly phenomenological way—an obj edification of whatever has affected it, as if it is "life itself that entered into the objectivity and brought itself before itself, giving itself to itself in and through this objectivity" (MHIBB 149)—this being, as discussed previously (see #3.1), the proper form of objectification which avoids cultural barbarism.

"Given Life"—the first part of the title of this section, as well as the proper title of this study as a whole—is meant to evoke a certain understanding of Henry's work as read through the thought of Jean-Luc Marion, especially Marion's critique of and expansion upon Husserl's breakthrough "principle of principles" (see #2.1 and #2.2). As applied to

Henry's thinking, there are three distinct and yet intertwined senses in which the title could be taken. The first sense suggests what we have finally arrived at concerning the question of the relations between the three bodies, especially the relation between the subjective and absolute body and of the absolute body with itself: the self in affectivity is given life, given to itself to be a self, to be a living one. But there are two other senses in which the phrase can be taken. The second sense, which necessarily follows from the first, has this meaning: given life, the self is, as a self, incapable of escaping from itself.

Bound to itself as a self, since it is precisely its pathetik flesh which makes it to be a self, it is like a condemned man to whom has been given a life sentence. In other words, phenomenologically speaking, the self is in the dative case—and yet, it is at the same time in the accusative. 103

The originary pathos of the undergoing or suffering itself of the self is a theme to which Henry gives a considerable amount of attention. Such a suffering is the essential characterization of the radical passivity and impotence in which the self is originally given to itself and receives itself. It cannot not receive itself—for it does not even exist to oppose the givenness prior to being given life. Indeed, the classic adolescent rebellious rejection of the obligation of gratitude towards one's parents—

"I didn't ask to be born!"—is quite fitting here. For puerile as it may seem, such a refusal is at some level always an expression of the very existential agony of having to be—as

Henry says, of "the anxiety of the Self to be a Self. . . this Self that he is without being able to avoid or escape this condition" {IAT 200). For Henry, the existential and the ontological here coincide: the suffering of having to be is in fact an essential affective tonality of the ontological structure revealed as life. Henry writes:

The essence of affectivity resides in suffering and is constituted by it. In suffering, feeling experiences itself in its absolute passivity with regard to self, in its impotence at changing itself, it experiences itself and has the experience of self as irremediably handed over to itself in order to be what it is, as loaded forever with the weight of its own Being. Being delivered over to self, being loaded forever with the weight of its own Being, the heaviness of the tonality included in its original situation and constituting I, is therefore what feeling experiences when it experiences itself, when it is what it is. . .In suffering as the self-suffering of self resides and is discovered as its original and fundamental mode, consubstantial with its essence and posited by it, the suffering of Being. {EsM 65%)

"The suffering of Being" is an interesting phrase here. It could mean, on the one hand, the self-suffering of the self "loaded forever with the weight of its own Being", in which case it suffers Being. To that extent, to suffer self, to suffer life, and to suffer Being all 104 mean the same thing—since the fundamental mode of phenomenality is, as affectivity, the very life, or livingness, of a living self as an ipseity. Again, it could mean that those who are, necessarily suffer, i.e. in the suffering that goes along with Being as an essential affective tonality of the ontological structure revealed as life, and precisely because life, or livingness, is a fundamental mode of phenomenality. In other words, the second meaning is already contained in the first.

A third meaning, however, introduces us to a certain dimension of Henry's thought which has not yet been discussed in this study.19 Namely, that—because of the coincidence, that is, consubstantiality of the self as an ipseity and affectivity as a fundamental mode of phenomenality—as the self suffers, so Being itself suffers. To that extent, the phrase "the suffering of Being" could mean also the suffering which belongs to Being, the suffering proper to Being itself—the suffering that Being itself suffers in and as this self in each individual case. For Henry, Being—indeed, 'Life', absolute

Life—comes into itself, grasps itself, begets itself—in each case in and as this individual self. It begets itself, engenders itself—and suffers, as it were, self-birthing pangs.20 Such birthing pangs, says Henry, are the self s "being-crushed-against-itself (IAT 149), the self s "embracing" of itself in the self-grasping as self of Absolute Life.21 Henry writes:

This dimension of Henry's thought is the very sore point for the majority of Henry's critics, who take him to be just another onto-theologian, even onto-theo-egologist, making a pretense of doing rigorous phenomenology (more on this in #4.1). 20 The theme of the self-begetting or self-engendering of absolute Life is taken up by Henry especially in his late work I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, for instance in IAT 11: "Birth does not consist of a succession of livings, in each of whom life is presupposed, but rather consists in the coming of each living into life out of Life itself. Nor can birth be understood except on the basis of this Life and its own essence—on the basis of Life's self- generation as its self-revelation in the essential Ipseity of the First Living." 21 It is as if here Henry wishes to evocatively suggest the unbearable intensive magnitude (being- crushed-upon-itself) of the event-point of the revelation in which the infinite makes fmitude possible. Absolute Life in each case reveals itself—an individual ipseity—both in the self s givenness to be a self and as the very possibility and accomplishment of its being so. In fact, 105

The Self self-affects itself only inasmuch as absolute Life is self-affected in this Self. It is Life, in its self-giving, which gives the Self to itself. It is Life, in its self- revelation, that reveals the Self to itself. It is Life, in its pathetik embrace, that gives to the Self the possibility of pathetically embracing itself and of being a Self. (IAT 107)

Indeed, if the individual self in each case cannot not be a self, it is because Being itself, as absolute Life, cannot not be a Living One. For this very reason, however, suffering is only one of two original affective tonalities "co-constitutive of life's self-revelation" (IAT

200). The other affective tonality (and in some sense the consummate one) is joy:

It is only in experiencing oneself in the "suffer oneself that the life of the living Self comes into itself, such that suffering is veritably a path and a way. It is the test that life must pass so that, in and through that test, it attains itself and comes into itself in that coming that is the essence of any life, the process of its self- revelation. . . But to suffer is not a way of a path in the sense in which we usually understand it; . . ."to suffer" dwells inside "to rejoice" as that which leads to joy inasmuch as it dwells within it, as its internal and permanent condition. (IAT 200- 01)

In other words, absolute Life as the fundamental ontological reality is as the pure affective self-enjoyment of itself in the eternal process of the suffering coming-into-itself and grasping itself as a self in each individual ipseity.22 Such a process constitutes its self- insofar as each ipseity is—in the pure internal structure of its immanence to self of its self- presence—prior to any ekstatic horizon, thus each ipseity is likewise infinite in itself. 22 In the context of a discussion of Henry's reading of Descartes' cogito, Marion interprets this originary revelation of self to itself—here described as the coming-into-itself, indeed, generation of itself in itself in joy, and self-enjoyment of itself of Life in that generation—as an originary "generosity", or se\f-gifting. See J.-L. Marion, "Generosity and Phenomenology: Remarks on Michel Henry's Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito" (trans. Stephen Voss), in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes (ed. Stephen Voss). New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 52-74. 106 revelation, the pure affective 'substance' of which, in the effectivity of its affection, is its ontological reality. And that is to say, of course, also its universal reality. Henry's phenomenological ontology claims the status of 'first philosophy'.

This, then, brings us to the third sense of the expression "Given Life" specifically in its phenomenologically problematic nature. The third sense concerns the problem of the precise relation between phenomenology and ontology. In the givenness to itself of self as ipseity, i.e. as a living one in auto-affection, the self is originally given to itself by itself in the dative case—a posteriori. Nevertheless, such auto-affection in its livingness—in its effectivity and thus precisely in its concreteness—is, for Henry, the very 'substance' of essential reality. This is why Henry refers to his specific phenomenological approach as 'material phenomenology'. For such 'substance' constitutes for Henry the internal ontological structure of immanence constituting the mode of phenomenality which he articulates ceaselessly throughout his writings as that mode (at best known only obscurely in the Western tradition) upon which all transcendence (i.e. the phenomenality articulated as ekstasis and central to that tradition) is founded. As such a foundational ontological structure, affectivity is an a priori, and thus universal, structure. All life is absolute, and necessarily universal, Life. But insofar as that Life is given in auto-affection, the a priori and the a posteriori coincide.

"Given life", then, means that 'life'—or absolute Life as the originary structure of immanence—is 'the given'. Life being the given—indeed, the 'Given'—there can be selves given to themselves in the individuality of their living ipseity. 'Life' gives for there to be living ones. But, of course, herein lies the leap in Henry's thinking which is at the heart of many of the criticisms of Henry's thought, charging him with various 107 forms of onto-theological—or onto-theo-egological—commitments. What is the phenomenological justification, such criticisms ask, of making such an ontological leap from the phenomenality of the individual self in its always-already-being-given-to-itself- as-a-self (that is, in its dativity), to absolute Life in its nominativity grasping itself in the ipseity that is this individual self? For this suggests that Life is not only the given, as well as the givee, but also, ultimately, the giver—indeed, the 'Giver'. It casts the originary nature of the individual self as a being-given-to-itself (in the dative) rather into the genitive case which underlies and founds the dative, consubstantial in its affective concreteness with absolute Life itself. But it does so, such criticisms argue, without truly establishing this so-called absolute Life phenomenologically as anything other than the ground for this individual living ipseity. Its nominativity is assumed, in other words, in order to support the genetive into which the originarily dative self has been cast. To that extent, the problem of absolute Life's phenomenological justification is the same problem, for Henry, as the problem of transcendental solipsism (more on this in #4.1).

3.3 The Problem of Forgetfulness: 'Impropriation'23

One of the issues introduced earlier (in chapter 2) is the question of the precise role of the phenomenological method for Henry. It was said there that, specifically regarding the transcendent object and in reference to Husserl's breakthrough principle of givenness, insofar as "c'est l'apparaitre qui vient vers nous et se fait connaitre de lui-meme", there would really be no need of a method to go towards the thing. This lack of the necessity of a method is especially poignant when one thinks, concerning Marion's 'saturated 108 phenomenality' (see #2.2), of the functioning of the anamorphosis and the new point of view imposed upon consciousness, overflowing its categorical determinations of things and calling into question its authority, that is, its intentional mastery over things. But

Marion himself says that his own motto—"As much reduction, so much givenness"— should be our guide—and Heidegger no less rigorously articulates his own (existential) reduction to Dasein. In other words, in the spirit of the original understanding of Husserl who sought with the development of the method to 'bracket out' the assumptions of the

'natural attitude' as well as all metaphysical speculations and imaginings, in addition to discovering a firm ground for all regional sciences, it seems that the phenomenological tradition has ever more or less maintained a dual character. On the one hand, there is something that it seeks: namely, certainty, a ground, or at the very least some kind of irrefutable final givenness—un fait accomplit, as Marion says. On the other hand, its very seeking is plagued by assumptions which obscure its quest and which for the most part lead it to precipitate and 'improper' conclusions. Such assumptions must be bracketed out, reduced, and 'consciousness' stripped of its assumptions in order to be in a more primordial relation with that which is sought.

But here a whole host of paradoxes suggest themselves. For one thing, how does phenomenology ultimately know what it seeks without metaphysical speculation? Is its search born of some kind of original wonder which, to that extent, already partially reveals the direction in which the answer lies? Next, how does it proceed? Does it

'intuit'—or is it perhaps 'called' in such and such a direction? In which case, would it also become clear to it what obstacles lie in its path that first must be removed to go

The coinage is mine, not Henry's, and simply refers to an 'improper' form of self- appropriation, as discussed in this section. 109

forward? And how does it know what constitutes the effective removal of these obstacles

unless and until it discovers or encounters what lies beyond them? Furthermore, when it

at long last does encounter something, how would the immediately impressional

phenomenological content of that encounter relate to the generally obscure content that

guided it when it sought for it in anticipation? Or does it perhaps have to bracket out that

anticipated content as well? Is phenomenology merely nothing more than an awkward

flailing about in the dark? Or is there in fact some indubitable sense of its being 'called'?

At least for Heidegger, Marion, and Henry too, there is indeed some kind of

'call'—although articulated differently by each one, and even, especially in Heidegger's

case, articulated differently in different periods of his life and thinking. Furthermore, this

call—especially for Heidegger and Henry, but less so for Marion24—discloses something

definitive to man: namely, that he has forgotten something. For Heidegger, of course, this

forgetting involves the covering over of the question of Being in its truth—i.e. the

question of the how of the phenomenalization of beings in their beingness, and not

merely concerning the whatness of their beingness. Of course, the covering over of

even this covering over, the 'double forgetfulness' of the question of Being, whereby

Being is no longer considered even worthy of questioning, constitutes for Heidegger the

completion of the nihilism inherent in the Western tradition. For this reason, it is

necessary for Heidegger—heeding the "call of conscience" (which gets articulated almost

24 Marion is generally suspicious of the idea that something has been 'forgotten', for the content of such forgetting sounds a little too much like a Platonic (i.e. an onto-theological) content at heart. Instead, he develops the notion of the 'pure call' without attempting to gesture towards what might be that call's source or origin (and which might thus define its content). More on this in #5.1. 5 Husserl, too, speaks of the forgetfulness of the 'natural attitude', the everyday comportment of simply taking for granted the being of the world and of the self, and not questioning concerning the how of their phenomenalization. 110 exclusively as the "call of Being" after Being and Time26)—to reraise the question of

Being and to investigate it through the existential analytic of Dasein as that being for whom its being is a concern, and thus for whom Being is a concern, is "wondrous", and is a problem. As Heidegger says to conclude "The Question Concerning Technology": "For questioning is the piety of thinking."27

There is an interesting sense in which Heidegger's analytic displays the dual character of the phenomenological method. First of all, it is called to something, by something, and it responds to the call in such a way that the various obstacles (i.e. preconceptions or assumptions) that stand in the way of its path become clear to it. It then develops a methodology of reduction—an existential reduction—to remove those obstacles. Along these lines, much of the work done by Heidegger in Being and Time emphasizes—especially in its earliest sections—precisely how Dasein should not be understood, i.e. how Dasein has been improperly understood in the tradition's forgetfulness—indeed, in the tradition as forgetfulness. Such obstacles removed, then— or at least, being removed at ever subtler and subtler levels, since the task of Being and

Time and even much of his later writings consists, as Heidegger says, primarily in the work of preparation for the quest(ion)ing—the quest(ion)ing itself would seem to require

(that is, call for) an unfolding and a listening progressing in deeply heuristic tones. So for

Heidegger, there is on the one hand what is sought, and on the other, there is the reduction. But necessarily leading the whole heuristic operation at all times—if a mere reversion to onto-theological commitmentism is to be avoided—is 'the call'.

26 See M. Boutin, "Le penser comme dette", in Le don et la dette, (ed. M.M. Olivetti), pp. 461-63. 27 M. Heidegger, "The Questioning Concerning Technology", in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (trans. William Lovitt). New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 35. German original: "Denn das Fragen ist die Frommigkeit des Denkens" (GA 7, 36). Ill

For Henry, too, there is such a call. But the young Henry on the river's banks in

Muggenbrunn already felt, it seems, that Heidegger was not quite listening heedfully enough. Where (the later) Heidegger hesitated concerning the ground (see #1.3), Henry definitively (or so he claims) found it—namely, in the revelation of the essence of manifestation as affectivity. Of course, one interesting and precisely crucial thing that

Henry did retain from Heidegger is the fact that there is something in the very structure of

Being itself which withdraws, and so gives for the forgetfulness of Being. For Henry, this has to do with the articulation of the essence as a pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenalization. As the essence and foundational mode of phenomenality grounding the ekstatic structure itself, affectivity in its internal structural concreteness cannot show itself in the world—it cannot appear in the light of an ekstatic horizon. In the ekstatic light, it is precisely invisible. It is to be characterized as the 'withdrawing', the 'hidden', the 'absent'—even as that having an inherent 'modesty'.

That the original essence of presence maintains itself outside the world and is in principle absent from it is what constitutes its modesty. . . Because modesty is rooted in the internal structure of the essence and is identical to it, it is not a fortuitous determination, for example, a psychological determination, which may or may not exist at a given moment in history. Modesty is rather the very foundation of all conceivable existence, its internal possibility, its essence. (EsM 381)

Here, Henry makes use of the traditional notion of 'presence' (more or less coincident with manifestation), and speaks of the essence of that 'presence' as being absent from the manifestation that is the world. Any attempt to establish that essence as itself a presence within an ekstatic horizon (be it especially an ideal horizon) would clearly fall once more 112 into the domain of the project of onto-theology. But unlike Heidegger—who spoke instead of an hesitation, an (en)quivering "present absence", the fullness and pregnancy of Abgrund, in order to suggest essence in its "gifting withdrawal" (see #1.3), Henry's claim is rather that the essence of presence can indeed reveal itself without hesitating, that it can be known in certainty, and that it is indeed ground. It is just that such an essence necessarily reveals itself—for that is the core implication of the concept of

'revelation'—on its own terms and of its own accord. It reveals itself in affectivity, outside of any ekstatic horizon, invisible in the light of the world. If it is known at all, then it is with a different sort of knowledge, a more originary, pre-ekstatic knowledge—a knowledge consubstantial, as Henry says, with the self in its givenness to itself as an ipseity, an upwelling "self-feeling": a revelation.

How, then, does one forget? For Henry, the problem of forgetfulness is structurally tied up with this hiddenness or modesty of the essence. It is also tied up with the fact that the revelation is twofold: the self, given to itself to be a self in both its possibility and its accomplishment as that self (that is, in the revelation of the appropriative structure along with the revelation of the self in its essential passivity),

"throws out before itself. . . " in representation. What a precarious moment this is indeed!

For everything here turns on whether or not, in that throw, the self maintains itself close to itself in receiving itself in its act of transcendence—that is, whether or not it preserves the crushing grasp of the effectiveness of its essential passivity in the midst of its self- surpassing. But what determines whether or not such a knowledge here preserves itself?

What determines in the movement of that throw at what point the self in the enthused power of its ekstasy throws too far—at what point, as it were, its foot comes off its 113 ground? At what point it 'impropriates'' itself—an earth detached from its sun28, claiming itself as its own foundation? At what point it forgets that it is (of) Life?

It comes, then, as no surprise that Heidegger would hesitate before such a precariousness. Such is the ekstatic structure which Dasein is in the end; that's what makes it Da-sein, for without such an ekstatic opening the self is not situated. Of course, in the pure passivity of its givenness of itself to itself, i.e. its 'transcendentality'29 (missed by Heidegger, according to Henry), it is (strictly speaking) unsituated and in-itself outside the categorizations of the ekstatic horizon. And yet we only speak loosely when we put up a conceptual wall between the two modes of phenomenality. For the revelation is

'double'. The self always already accomplishes itself as a self, and as such already exists as the possibility and openness of an horizon—without its essence being any less effective or at all hesitating for that fact. Indeed, such an effectiveness is precisely how it is able to maintain itself close to itself in the 'throw'— cleaving to its essence which anchors it fast in its original affective Life and drawing its power from it.

For both Henry and Heidegger, we are faced with a situation in which such forgetting has already taken place. Dasein, it seems—and this was Heidegger's big struggle—is fallen. On the one hand, such a fallenness precisely as forgetfulness is historical—that is, based in the unfolding of the possibilities of the Western tradition's birth out of Greek phenomenality. Henry would not deny that. On the other hand, such a forgetfulness is a structural likelihood, if not an inevitability, of Being itself—precisely

28 As Nietzsche writes concerning the death of God: "What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns?. . . " See F. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom (trans. Thomas Common). New York: Frederick Ungar Pubishing Co., 1987, §125, p. 168. 114 because in its essence it hides, and precisely because it is so very easy for the self not to maintain itself close to itself in its 'throw'. But does this mean, then, that such forgetfulness has ultimately been a matter of contingency? It is difficult to say. For if we take such forgetfulness, or fallenness, as a structurally unavoidable inevitability, and then further look for an irrefutable structural necessity for it, we very quickly enter a realm of questioning which appeals to metaphysics. Heidegger knew this, of course, since such a questioning pertains immediately to the problem of Being in its hiddenness. But, in fact, neither Heidegger nor Henry ever made such a structurally necessary link between the hiddenness of Being and forgetfulness. For Heidegger, of course, ultimately, the forgetfulness of Being is in some sense Being's own forgetfulness, an inevitability of one of its destinings (Western history). But Heidegger could never quite answer the question as to why Being destines in its destinings the specific things that it does, what precisely it was about to destine next, when and in what way the harvests and seeds of the previous destining would be taken up and carried forward into the new. We simply do not see well enough, as Heidegger says, we are perhaps not future enough, to see how the new destining is destined from out of the last one.

As for Henry, who never speaks in the language of destinings at all, it was quite clear what 'seed' in the Western tradition has simply been forgotten and which would have to be taken up and indeed made the very basis of any attempt to overcome the cultural barbarism of the position characterized by him as ontological monism. Of course, for Henry, such a seed was in any case already the very basis and essence of the Western tradition (indeed, of all traditions, since it is a universal and absolute structure for

29 The 'transcendental' here—an absolute immanence of self-presence, the internal ontological structure of auto-affection—is to be distinguished from the 'transcendent', which is the self- 115

Henry30), although without its ever being radically discovered in its own light. As for a reason for the forgetfulness of the seed, however, Henry's answer largely focuses on two aspects of it.31 First, the very structural possibility of it, which is itself twofold: 1) the essence does not show itself in the ekstatic light; it is inherently modest; and, since the essence hides, 2) the illusion of the self-sufficient ego is possible. That is, the self, being appropriated to itself as a self—and further given to itself as a self with powers and as a centre of orientation, as 'I can'—'impropriates'' itself (see above, n. 22) in egoistically claiming itself in its powers and central orientation as grounded only in itself—as though it itself were the very source and foundation of them.

Of course, such a possibility still does not imply any structural necessity for such an egoistic illusion. If there were such a structural necessity, then there would ultimately be no way of overcoming forgetfulness—nor could such forgetfulness even be recognized as a problem from the start, except, it seems, by metaphysical speculation.

Furthermore, such an illusion is in the end not even totally illusory for Henry: "Once given to itself, the ego is really in possession of itself and each of these powers, able to exercise them: it is really free. In making the ego a living person, Life has not made a pseudo-person. It does not take back with one hand what it has given with the other" (IAT

141). In other words, for Henry, it is not the ego per se in its freedom of movement and surpassing movement out opening an horizon. (See #2.3, n. 20) 30 Henry's complete and utter failure to consider the insights of other cultures' philosophies regarding the essence as he defines it—especially the philosophies of the Self of classical India and some of its modern articulations—is simply astonishing. His very late claim that "among religious beliefs more than two thousand years old, not to mention superstitions, Christianity is today the only belief that instructs man about himself (IAT 134) is ridiculously irresponsible in its lack of information. 31 See IAT, chap. 8. — For an excellent treatment of Henry's discussion of forgetfulness, see Anthony Steinbock, "The Problem of Forgetfulness in Michel Henry": Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 271-302. 116 activity and central orientation which is definitively problematic, but only the illusion of the ego's radical, ontological self-sufficiency—so that a certain "maintaining close to itself of the ego with Life, a certain recollection of Life by the ego in its outgoing activities, is part of the overcoming of forgetfulness.

The second aspect of forgetfulness as discussed by Henry is a particular existential outgrowth from such a system of egoism: namely, the care structure. Dasein, as that being for whom its being is a concern—and thus the only being able to raise the question of Being in its truth—in its concern in each case for its ontic possibilities, tends to become completely absorbed in that concern and, in the attempt to master those possibilities by egoistic action, loses sight of the ontological question of its existence altogether. To that extent, it becomes wholly "outward looking" and solicitous in all its activities, and it recognizes beings only in their beingness, and even, the more absorbed in its concerns it becomes, only in relation to its own ends. It also tends to value action and progress towards it ends above all else—and because of this, it misunderstands passivity as the radical powerlessness and failure of the self, rather than as the very condition for the possibility of its action and power. Moreover, its strong futural projection of itself, and especially the existential anxiety that it suffers on account of its concerns, often obscures its own feelings of itself as an affected ego in the truth of its appropriative structure which opens the ekstasis within itself. One could think here of

Heidegger's distinction between authentic-resolute and inauthentic-irresolute Dasein which simply "awaits itself in time". In its desperation, inauthentic-irresolute Dasein ends

Or perhaps by a 'pure call' a la Marion (more on this in #5.1), which in any case still would not be able to solve the problem of overcoming forgetfulness. 117 up referring everything and everybody only to its anxious concerns for its own projected being:

Not content just with attributing everything it does to itself, it even poses itself as the unique goal of all its actions, caring for things, other people, and itself only with itself in view. So it is in its very action and each of its acts that it has lost the essence of action. . . In the action of the ego as action, supposedly issuing from itself and aimed only at itself, the very essence of absolute Life is ruled out. {IAT 168)

In such a situation, the ego in its own truth as the expression of the appropriative structure (i.e. the second 'fold' of the twofold revelation of auto-affection) is no longer even possible. It may be true that absolute Life has given with one hand to the ego its life and its freedom and power and has not taken back with the other. But actually, in the irresoluteness of such a situation, in the ego's "self-abandonment", the ego itself has already given itself and its freedom and its power away to the world, and lost itself in its truth and effectivity, as well as its relation to absolute Life. Thus a bankruptcy and an emptiness. According to Henry, this is precisely the situation of 'double forgetfulness' ruling the modern era in which the ego is "no more than a phantom, an illusion. From this dissolution results one of the most characteristic traits of modern thought: an extremely serious challenge to man himself, his devaluation and reduction to what subsists when one no longer knows what makes him a man—to wit, an ego and a me."33 Here, of course, the "ego" refers to the second 'fold' of the revelation in auto-affection, the ego in

• IAT 150. Henry continues by referring to "the modes of this theoretical murder from Kant to Heidegger and, on a more superficial level, by Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism, and various human sciences, not to mention the specific to our own era". 118 the truth of its expression as an appropriative structure; and Henry's "me" refers to the first 'fold', that is, to the self given to itself in its passivity (in the dative/accusative case).

How, then, does one overcome this forgetfulness? According to Henry, by

realizing in revelation the essence, and the self s passivity and self-givenness to itself in that essence, upon which all ekstasis is founded. But here we are back at the same

quandary with which we started this section: the very question of the dual character of the phenomenological method itself. On the one hand, something is sought: namely, in this

case, the essence. On the other hand, there is the necessity of bracketing out, reducing, the obstacles which obscure the path to that essence. But what is that path? And

furthermore, how is Henry himself so completely certain as to in what that essence

consists—unless he has in some sense already encountered it in its effectivity? Is this, then, the very subjectivite clandestine of the young aspiring philosopher and critic of

Kant of the French Resistance carrying out secret missions in Lyon? It is undoubtedly crucial to any consideration of Henry's work to acknowledge that this subjectivite clandestine is the cornerstone upon which he builds his whole edifice of thought.

Precisely because he begins with such a nucleus, he can then go on to say—with regards to the problem of overcoming forgetfulness, and with phenomenological justification in his eyes—that even in the absence of a full revelation, one is ever and again called back to one's essence as a self in the self s givenness to itself by the essence itself—that is, by absolute Life. Yet for Henry, such a recollection does not imply any form of dualism which is just another form of ontological monism in the end—in which the 'soul' or the

'spirit' are cast (albeit ideally) in terms no less ekstatic than is the body and the outer life. 119

Let us assume for the moment that the essence as Henry has defined it has been definitively phenomenologically established by him.34 There is still one major problem, of which Henry himself is fully aware, which here presents itself. If one is called by it— necessarily, because it is one's own essence—a certain turning away from the world and towards the essence 'within' needs to occur. Now the essence auto-affects itself, and in so doing affects the ego as well. However, in forgetfulness, the ego imagines itself to be the source of its own powers and orientation. As such, it experiences this affection as though it came from something other than itself—other than itself and yet paradoxically within itself. To that extent, it is hetero-affected by the essence in a similar fashion to the way in which it is hetero-affected by things in the world. It experiences the affection by the essence, in other words, in only a weak affection—since the revelation of the essence in a strong affection, in the passivity of its givenness to itself, is here concealed from it (see

#3.2). For this very reason, the ego that self-surpasses itself in appropriating itself to itself in this weak affection—which more or less determines it in an anamorphosis, namely, as one who has been called—opens an ekstasis and throws out—or rather, throws in— before itself in a representation the (obscurely felt) and beckoning essence which has called it, such an ekstasis being paradoxically opened by the ego interiorly, and the essence posited therein ideally. But the problem is that the essence does not let itself be seen in the ekstatic light—it likes to hide.

How, then, does phenomenology proceed? According to Henry, a "critical transformation" is required. For even if, through the methodology of the reduction,

34 Of course, such a definitive phenomenological establishment is very seriously contested by a number of Henry's critics (more in #4.1, #4.2, and #5.1). Here, it is simply assumed in order to discuss a particular structural problem of the 'return' to the essence with regards to the overcoming of forgetfulness. 120 phenomenology gets rid of the naive assumption of the natural attitude that the essence simply exists, as though it were just like any other object in the world (albeit an interior, or ideal object), and even if it gets at the root of the very power to open an ekstatic horizon (be it interior or otherwise), and even further if it begins to understand how the essence calls to consciousness, as it were immemortally, and even learns to heed that call prior to any such ekstatic opening—nevertheless, it can only ever proceed negatively, both reducing its own intentional projections of that which it seeks and even denouncing its very power for such projection. According to Henry, In order for it to proceed positively, phenomenology must undergo "this critical transformation. . . to a phenomenology whose phenomenality is Life and no longer the world" (IAT 85). How this transformation comes about, however—by what power it is effected—is ultimately the very problem of phenomenology as a method. It is also the sore point for many of

Henry's critics. We now turn to this problem in more depth, and to these criticisms of

Henry. 121

Chapter 4

The Problem of Return

If forgetfulness holds sway, then the task set before phenomenology is one of remembering. If that which is to be remembered, however, is already articulated as the essence grounding all ekstasis, then the task unfolds as a sort of 'negative phenomenology' (i.e. reduction) which allows for the possibility of 'return' to that grounding essence in its effective reality. Such 'allowance' for the possibility" of return does not mean that it would actively (through an active negation) bring it about. For if the revelation consists (at least in its first and ultimately nuclear fold) in the effective concreteness of the pure passivity of being given to oneself, then the essence necessarily must give itself by its own power, and as it were on its own accord. But as already pointed out (see #3.3), to speak in such a way suggests that the essence is experienced as

'other' to the one who searches for it. And yet, without the givenness of absolute Life in its effectivity—without the feeling of the 'gift' of absolute Life—such an 'othering', and indeed alienation, from the essence is inevitable. To that extent, the path of 'return' leads only to an aporia: "You cannot get there from here", such a paradoxical situation seems to say.

In a certain sense, Henry seems to suffer the same fate as Augustine: that is, seeing the truth in its essence (or rather, the essence in its truth) but unable to truly live 122 there. In fact, there is perpetually a tension in Henry's writings between what appears to be two distinct paths: namely, the path from absolute Life to livings in their givenness to themselves as individual ipseities, and the path from livings (that is to say, egos) in the forgetfulness of their essence back to absolute Life. In actuality, of course, there is only one path—and this because the very affective 'substance', the affective flesh of livings, is consubstantial with absolute Life. At the same time, however—on account of precisely the asymmetry of the relation between absolute Life and each living—the single path can be traveled only in one direction (so that if one does attempt to travel it in the 'improper' direction, it appears like a completely different and particularly aporia-strewn path which no doubt can never succeed). Henry writes:

It is not that there are two trajectories, one leading from Life to the livings. . . and the other leading from each living to Life. . . These two trajectories are congruent: there is but a single gate, a single Arch, a unique Rapture in which Life blazes forth. . . But the intersection of these two pathways under the Arch where Life radiates—the pathway that leads from Life to the living and the one that leads the living to Life—does not produce a reciprocity between these two terms, between Life and the living. . . The relation between the Ipseity of absolute Life and the me of each living implies no reciprocity of this kind: the path cannot be traveled in both directions. (IAT128-29)

Of course, the "Arch" here is the "Son"—that is, Christ. As Augustine's own Neo- platonic quest ends in his conversion to Christ, so, it seems, does Henry's. This, then, raises certain complications, and many criticisms, with regards to Henry's methodology.

The fact that there are seemingly two paths which are precisely unreciprocal is for Henry a serious methodological aporia. But insofar as phenomenology, at least for Henry,

11 See Augustine's "A Neo-platonic Quest" (Book VII), in Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick). 123 claims the status of being a fundamental ontology at the same time, method and content are inseparable. If the former suffers from certain paradoxes and aporias, so does the latter. How, then, does Henry propose to solve this problem? Namely, by undertaking a

"phenomenology" of Christ.

4.1 Henry's Christianity: An Onto-theo-egology?

In 1990, French phenomenologist and historian of philosophy Dominique Janicaud undertook, in cooperation with UNESCO, to write a review of French philosophy from

1975 up to the present day at that time. What resulted was published in 1991 under the title Le tournant theologique de la phenomenologie frangaise and was nothing short of an all out accusation of French phenomenologists of abandoning, by introducing a certain

"phenomenology of the invisible" into their thinking, Husserl's pivotal "principle of principles". In 1992, a response in the form of an anthology bearing the title

Phenomenologie et theologie* was published collectively by a number of those thinkers, including among them Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, whom Janicaud had severely chastised a year earlier. These two works together, then—that is, Janicaud's 1991 work and the 1992 collective response—were translated into English and published as a single volume in 2000 under the title Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": The French

Debate*. Janicaud's critique of Henry in that work basically charges him with promoting

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. D. Janicaud, Le tournant theologique de la phenomenologie frangaise. Paris: Editions de l'Eclat, 1991. 3 Phenomenology et theologie (co-authors Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chretien, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Paul Ricoeur). Paris: Criterion, 1992. 4 New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. — The volume is divided into two parts. Part I comprises the English translation of (with translator Bernard G. Prusak's introduction to) 124 not a truly phenomenological pathetik structure consubstantial with ontological absoluteness, but only a conceptually tautological interiority, a form of metaphysical essentialism. He writes: "Henry supplies his work with all the appearances (and titles) of phenomenology in order to achieve the most fantastic restoration of essentialism. . . By means of the originary, he instills himself in the essential, autonomizes it, even celebrates it. . . Henry authorizes himself, from the investigation of a (determined) eidos, to go back to a purely auto-referential foundation" (PTTFD 73). He transforms "precise, limited, clarifying [phenomenological] procedures" into incantations "gesturing towards invisibility" (PTTFD 86). "[W]e cannot help but object that it is a question, here, of a fantastic metaphysical essentialism autopromoting itself."5

Moreover, continues Janicaud, the determined eidos which Henry sets up as the alpha and omega of his thinking is one which he borrows from Meister Eckhart—and this is part of what Janicaud refers to as French phenomenology's "theological turn".6 Indeed,

Janicaud's work, entitled The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. Part II comprises the collective response to Janicaud, Phenomenology and Theology, consisting of individual articles by Ricoeur, Chretien, Marion, and Henry, an introduction by Courtine, and a preface by the translator of Part II, Jeffrey L. Kosky. No doubt, this publication in English played a considerable role in introducing Henry to a wider English audience. 5 pfffE) 75 — Janicaud is not wrong concerning the highly incantatory nature of Henry's writing. It is as if "Life", "absolute Life", has become for Henry a sort of conceptual mantra, already half revealing its effectiveness, and the repeated utterance of which would lead to the phenomenologist's (in this case, Henry's) complete realization and embodiment of it. Indeed, were all conceptually repetitive content to be removed from Henry's massive L'Essence de la manifestation (over 900 pages in the original French), it would be considerably shorter. However, Janicaud is not completely accurate in his claim that Henry's thinking is tautological. He totally misses the import that the concept of givenness has for Henry (in its relation to the essential passivity of the self, to the always-already-being-given-to-itselfas- a-self), and he privileges the intentionality aspect of Husserl's "principle of principles". Missing such an emphasis on givenness, it is inevitable that Janicaud ends up interpreting Henry as though he spoke of the essence in its revelation as Life only in the nominative. If Henry did so, then in fact Janicaud would be right: Henry's would be merely a tautological metaphysical essentialism. 6 But, of course, this is a different critique altogether: it concerns not any charge of tautological essentialism, but Henry's precise relation to theology, or for that matter, metaphysics. This is unquestionably the stronger of Janicaud's two critiques. 125

Henry makes extensive use of Eckhart in his early L 'Essence de la manifestation, and his articulation of the originary absolute is in fact not at all unsimilar to Eckhart's, with regards specifically to the latter's confession of the immanence to the soul of divine revelation—an immanence so intimate that the soul at once knows itself to be of one essence with God. To know itself here, however, is, for both Eckhart and Henry, not in any way an ekstasis of knowing, an intentionality; it is rather an immediate feeling of itself in the givenness to itself as a self in absolute Life which takes place as a radical passivity. Such knowledge, to that extent, confesses absolute Life; it does not represent it.

It confesses it in the immediate affection of the "always-already-being-given-to-itself-as- a-self", the intensive excess or "overflow" (EsM All), the "upwelling", "the blazing up of its Being" (EsM 474)—or in Eckhart's terms, the "simplicity and nakedness of being"7.

As Eckhart says: "God leads the spirit into the desert and solitude of himself where he is pure unity and gushes up only within himself. This spirit no longer has a why." (BMECS

355)

Of course for Eckhart, as Henry points out, "the understanding of the ultimate ontological structures which constitute the essence of reality is not the prima facie goal. . . He is interested only in the care of souls. . . and [the soul's] possible union with

God" (EsM 309). But it is clear from Eckhart's teaching—and this is what Henry himself primarily takes from him—that "the relation to the absolute depends on the nature of the absolute and its internal structure or rather it is identical to them; the existentiell union of man with God is possible only on the basis of their ontological unity''' (EsM 309). Now that structure of unity Henry articulates phenomenologically as affectivity, as auto-

Meister Eckhart, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation (translation with introduction and commentaries by Matthew Fox). Garden City, New York: 126 affection, constituting the foundational mode of phenomenality which Henry calls revelation and in which the soul, or the self, is founded consubstantially with the absolute. In Eckhart's more pastorally oriented terms, such consubstantiality constitutes the birth of God in the soul in the soul's union with God. God gives birth, that is, begets himself in the soul, labouring in the soul's depths to bring himself forth there as on a

"maternity bed" (BMECS 357). This birth is only possible for Eckhart because the soul is the image of God. "Creatures in whom God's image does not exist do not become receptive to [this birth], for the soul's image belongs especially to this eternal birth, which quite uniquely especially takes places within the soul, and is accomplished by the

Father in the soul's foundation and its most spiritual place" (BMECS 252). To that extent, a soul created in this image rises into the Godhead through this birth and participates in it essentially—that is to say, it is begotten there. "The Father generates in his only begotten

Son whatever he has and whatever he is—the depth of divine being and divine nature.

This is what the Son 'hears' from the Father; this is what he has made known to us so that we may be the same only begotten Son" (BMECS 357). Thus for Eckhart, createdness is no obstacle to ultimately sharing in God's essence. In fact, the soul was created by God as it was for this express purpose: that in one's birth into the Godhead, through God's begetting of himself in the soul's foundation, one is reborn as the Son. Of course, Henry, too, speaks of such a begottenness; but in his distinctly fundamental ontological concerns, he goes even further than Eckhart does in the tenets of his pastoral exhortations:

For man to be the Son means, for him, as for the Arch-Son [i.e. Christ], that he is not created. . .This is the meaning of the thesis that 'God created man in his image': that he gave man his own essence. He did not give it to him as one gives

Doubleday, 1980, p. 467. 127

an object to someone, like a gift passing from one hand to another. He gave him his own essence in the sense that. . . God gave man the living condition, the happiness of experiencing himself in this experiencing of self that is [self- engendering] Life. (IAT 103)

To that extent, Eckhart might be said to offer a sort of pastorally oriented phenomenology of redemption, as a perfection and divinization of the soul—while for Henry, such a divinity is in fact established right from the beginning, so that redemption would consist rather in the overcoming of our forgetfulness of it as our essential ground.

Another distinct point of contact between Eckhart and Henry concerns their specific relations to Neo-platonism. For Eckhart, the soul "rises into the Godhead"—in some sense seemingly leaving the world behind. But actually, although this has undoubtedly been the traditional interpretation of Eckhart's work, Eckhart also very clearly (which only stands to reason, being as pastorally oriented as he was) links this union of the soul with God back to the world.8 Eckhart says:

It is a characteristic of this birth [i.e. the begottenness of God in the soul] always to take the lead with new light. ... In this birth God infuses himself into the soul with light in such a way that the light becomes so abounding in the soul's being and foundation that it pushes out and overflows into the powers as well as into the external person. (BMECS 252)

8 Matthew Fox, in his introduction and commentaries on Eckhart's sermons (Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation), fervently argues against the traditional interpretation of Eckhart's works. In his arrangement of this personally selected collection of Eckhart's sermons, he focuses on four "stages" of Eckhart's articulation of the soul's relation with God. The volume is divided into four parts whose sermons, Fox argues, reflect these stages. The stages are: creation (of the soul as well as all things) by God; the soul's "letting go" of its attachment to the world in order to prepare for its return to God; the soul's rebirth in God; and finally, the new creation, in the form of the redeemed soul's overflowing compassion for the world and work for justice for the world of suffering beings. This final stage is also described by Eckhart as the soul's marriage to God in which it produces much fruit while 128

This overflow "into the powers as well as into the external person" seems distinctly reminiscent of Henry's articulation of the revelation of the essence to the self in affectivity as structurally double (see #3.2), such that the opening of an ekstasis founding the world, while nevertheless maintaining itself close to itself in its essence in doing so, is an inherent part of the self s relation with that essence (that is, with God). Such an overflow constitutes the continuity of relationship from the absolute/transcendental, to the subject/organic, and through to the objective body, and beyond the objective body in the self s reception and intentional relation to the other objects in the world. It is an overflow which constitutes the self s very being-in-the-world as such, but in such a way that that being-in-the-world maintains itself grounded in its essence (which, as Henry argues,

Heidegger completely missed). Indeed, Eckhart even goes so far as to say that "God is nowhere as much as he is in the soul. . . and the soul means the world."9

Now Wayne Hankey argues that Henry's particular use of Eckhart—especially his concept of the soul's union with God, but also the ways in which he goes beyond Eckhart in his ontological concerns, namely, in his emphasis on the double revelation and on '''the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two" {EsM 6)—places him squarely in line with a certain revival of Neo-platonism in

France in the 20th century. Typical of this revival—and indeed, archetypical of Neo- platonism itself—is its emphasis on the 'One' as being ineffable, irreducible to any ekstatically articulated concept of Being; this particular emphasis Henry picks up in his yet remaining a virgin (since it is God Himself who works in the soul and through the soul to produce it). As quoted from Eckhart on the back cover of Fox's book. No page reference is given there for this quote, and I was unable to find it in the body of the book itself. 129 employment of Husserl's principle of givenness and the "always-already-being-given-to- itself-as-a self of the self in absolute Life. This revival is specifically a Christian Neo- platonism, says Hankey, and it

. . . depends on the radical difference of the Absolute and Nous. This difference allows God to be both the external source of knowledge beyond reduction to objective conception and also the internal constitution of the subject so that it does not succumb to its own self-objectification. The Principle is altogether beyond grasp and representation, and therefore metaphysics is impossible, but it is also the immediacy of my life, and therefore experience is the life of Divinity.10

Such avoidance not only of speaking of God in onto-theological terms, but also of the self-objectification of the subject would have been a very high priority among these revivalists. It is a concern which distinctly characterizes their brand of Neo-platonism as belonging to the 20th century—i.e. under the profound influence of Nietzsche's critique, as well as, for those of them who had written a little later, like Henry and Marion, that of

Heidegger. Under Nietzsche's influence not only was "God" (i.e. the God of the Greco-

Latin tradition) dead, but life in the "material" world (which, of course, could no longer be characterized as being merely an "apparent" world11) demanded new meaning. Under

Heidegger's influence (for whom also the God of onto-theology is dead, or at least put

W. Hankey, One Hundred Years of Neoplatonism in France: A Brief Philosophical History. Leuven: Peeters, 2006, p. 215. This work is the second part of a two-part volume published by Peeters and titled only by the two titles of the two independent (albeit thematically interconnected) works, with a "followed by" placed between them. The first work in the volume is Levinas and the Greek Heritage, by Jean-Marc Narbonne. 11 See Nietzsche's "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth", in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, pp. 50-51. Nietzsche says: "The 'real world'—an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer—an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!. . . Plato blushes for shame. . . We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The 130 quite critically behind12), precisely what that new meaning would be was being investigated on the basis of Dasein's being-in-the-world, of Dasein's being as the being for whom its being is a concern, and whose being constitutes the very openness of the ekstatic horizon in which world per se is at all possible. To that extent, the revivalists' particular casting of Neo-platonism has both archetypically vertical as well as 20' century-inspired horizontal concerns. They are interested, says Hankey, "[i]n attempting to overcome modern objectifying rationality", in "endeavour[ing] an immediate relation between an unknowable Absolute, on the one hand, and life, the sensuous, the corporeal and material existence, on the other." (OHY 231)

It is just such an interest which inspires Henry to move (at first glance disconnectedly) among thinkers and topics as diverse as Eckhart at the one extreme, and

Marx and Marxism at the other, with a whole range of fascinating explorations and critiques (and even literary musings13) in between. Indeed, Henry, who is distinctly a thinker of a single thought—la subjectivite clandestine—thinks it remarkably as widely as possible. On the other hand, this same interest with both its vertical and horizontal concerns leads Henry into the precise phenomenological difficulties (the paradox and aporia as discussed in #3.3) which causes Janicaud to charge him with a "theological turn". Without doubt, Henry does undergo, as did Augustine, in the course of his explorations a certain conversion to Christianity—or at least a conversion to Christ, for apparent world perhaps?. . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!. . . end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT Zarathustra." 12 One of the most oft-quoted of Eckhart's utterances in the 20th century has been "I pray God to rid me of God"—for which reason a number of 20th century thinkers, including Heidegger himself, have returned to and drawn from his work. 13 In addition to his voluminous philosophical writings, Henry is also the author of four novels- one of which (L 'Amour les yeux fermes, published by Gallimard in 1976) was awarded the prix Renaudot. 131 his unique interpretation of the truth of Christianity is based on Christ's sayings alone, along with John's Logos theology, with the exception of a few of the more 'affective' testimonies of Paul. Through his "phenomenology of Christ" Henry attempts to solve the phenomenological difficulties mentioned earlier.

Those difficulties, we recall, concerned a certain leap in Henry's thinking from the livingness of the individual ipseity to the universality of absolute Life. We asked:

What is the phenomenological justification of making this ontological leap from the phenomenality of the individual self in its always-already-being-given-to-itself-as-a-self

(i.e. in its dativity), to absolute Life in its nominativity grasping itself in the ipseity that is this individual self (see #3.2)? Of course, "absolute Life in its nominativity" here implies fundamental ontology, but precisely as metaphysics. The reason for this concerns two interrelated difficulties arising for the phenomenological method. First, in the immediate dativity of the self s being given to itself as a self, and in its appropriation of itself in the second 'fold' of the 'double revelation' (i.e. the appropriative, ekstatic structure), the self experiences itself singularly, as a unique ipseity. There is no strictly phenomenological justification, therefore, for assuming the existence of any other ipseity like to one's self.

The individual self in the internal ontological structure of its self-presence to self is inherently solipsistic. As Dan Zahavi argues, Henry "never presents us with a convincing explanation of how a subjectivity essentially characterized by such a complete self- presence can simultaneously. . . be capable of recognizing other subjects."14 The only access we have to other ipseities (and this was Husserl's problem as well) is through analogy. But analogy itself always maintains itself within a certain metaphysics—and it

14 D. Zahavi, "Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible": Continental Philosophy Review 32/3 (1999): 223-40; pp. 232-3. 132 is a distinctly metaphysical leap that Henry makes if, by analogy, he merely projects and posits the existence of an absolute Life which gives for all ipseities to be selves.

Henry, however, does not merely "project and posit" the existence of such an absolute Life; his contention is that he arrives at the idea phenomenologically as "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two'" (EsM 6). But the precise phenomenological articulation of such a source as auto- affection cannot solve the problem of solipsism. In order to do so (and this constitutes the second methodological difficulty), what is required is a further phenomenological articulation which Henry himself, for very obvious reasons, cannot provide: namely, an articulation, rigorously phenomenological in nature, of the simultaneous coming-into- itself and grasping itself as a self of absolute Life in and as multiple ipseities. But how can this be accomplished? In fact, it cannot—or at least, if it can in some way, Henry himself did not discover the vision which could afford it. To that extent, absolute Life (as supposedly the absolute and transcendental source of multiple ipseities) comes off sounding like nothing more than an abstract metaphysical postulation. And this is exactly what some of Henry's critics charge him with. Antonio Calcagno, for example, argues that "there is no transcendental condition called life. . . 'life' is merely an abstraction made by the understanding to describe what is common to us all but which is not a real thing."15 For Henry, however, life not only is a real 'thing', but it is also and primarily the

15 A. Calcagnio, "The Incarnation, Michel Henry, and the Possibility of an Husserlian-inspired Transcendental Life": HeyJ XLV (2004), p. 291. Of course, one might duly wonder here just what Calcagno has in mind by "that which is common to us all" if no real thing exists to which it refers. For Henry, that which is common to us all—even if posited only through analogy—is the pathetik 'stuff, the affective flesh constituting the internal structure of the auto-affection in which the self is given to itself and grasps itself as a self in and as ipseity. At the very least it refers, for Henry, to the subjective body, the body of organs which, as a centre of orientation and powers, knows itself in the 'I can'. Unless Calcagno is a materialist who professes only a purely 133 foundation of all things. The problem lies in the phenomenological articulation of absolute Life grasping itself in and as multiples selves. Thus Henry's conversion to

Christ. Henry's undertaking of a "phenomenology of Christ as the "Arch-Ipseity" is his attempt, in his very late writings, to solve this problem.

Henry's late 'Christian' writings clearly begin in 1988 with the paper at the 24th

International Conference on Hermeneutics in Rome, in which he appeals to "a radical phenomenology" deemed necessary by him for situating the thorny issue of theodicy.16 In his papers at the 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th and 30th International Conferences on Hermeneutics in Rome (held in 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 and 2000), Henry deals with issues showing a kind of conflation of phenomenology with the Christian outlook in order to radicalize both phenomenology and Christian thinking regarding topics like "Acheminement vers la question de Dieu: Preuve de l'etre ou epreuve de la vie" (1990), "La parole de Dieu; Une approche phemonenologique" (1992), "Qu'est-ce qu'une revelation?" (1994), "Ethique et religion dans une phenomenologie de la vie" (1996), and "L'experience d'autrui:

Phenomenologie et theologie" (2000). In 1996, Henry published his C'est moi la verite:

Pour une philosophie du christianisme—a topic already announced in the concluding paragraph of his paper of 1990 "Acheminement vers la question de Dieu [...]".17 This

'objective' reality, he has to admit the reality of at least this powerful and self-oriented inner subjective life. 16 "Theodicee dans la perspective d'une phenomenology radicale", in Teodicea Oggi? (ed. Marco M. Olivetti). Padua, Italy: CEDAM; pp. 383-93. 17 "Nous avons tente de montrer que l'acces a Dieu consiste dans sa revelation, c'est-a-dire dans sa propre vie et ainsi dans la notre pour autant que nous sommes jetes dans notre vie par Peternelle venue de la vie en soi. Acceder a Dieu dans la vie veut dire acceder a lui de la facon dont la vie accede a soi, hors monde [sic], dans son pathos, selon la loi de celui-ci, la loi de l'epreuve de soi qui est souffrance et joie. Car s'eprouver soi-meme c'est souffrir ce qu'on est et ainsi en jouir. Dans la souffrance de ce que nous sommes, nous jouissons de l'essence de la vie et ainsi de Dieu lui-meme. C'est pourquoi on dit que les epreuves de la vie sont la voie qui conduit a Dieu, parce que la verite qui fraye cette voie, la Revelation, l'Archi-Revelation, est un pathos, parce qu'elle est la Vie. Dieu n'est pas un etre tel que je ne puisse en concevoir de plus grand ou 134 work was followed by Incarnation: line philosophie de la chair (2000) and Paroles du

Christ (2002). While C'est moi takes up again Henry's critique of Heidegger and the general tradition of ontological monism with special concern for the problem of forgetfulness, Incarnation: line philosophie de la chair (2000) followed by Paroles du

Christ (2002) again deeply engages Husserl and the problem of impressionality. These three studies hold in common the attempt to develop an explicit phenomenology of Christ inspired by John's Logos theology on the basis of the utterances of Jesus, especially

Jesus' 'I Am' utterances. They unfold as their central concern a sustained interpretation of the figure of Christ and of the relation of this figure to the Self which is human being.

That relation is as follows: we are in our essence, and have always been, each individually begotten—as a "son within the Son"—within the archetypally pathetik structure, the 'Arch-Ipseity' which Christ is. The auto-affection of absolute Life in its self-generation as a Self constitutes the eternal relation between the Father and the Son.

The Father and the Son are to that extent consubstantial (in auto-affection) because they are co-eternal in the process of the self-begetting of absolute Life as a Self in the Arch-

Ipseity. But there is always some sense—and herein lies Henry's Neo-platonism—in which the Father is eternally shrouded in the mystery of His self-gifting of Himself to de meilleur, ou encore un etre tel que nous ne puissions le penser - il est plutot celui qui dit: 'Je suis la Voie, la Verite et la Vie'". (531) Heavily relying on Eckahrt in the same paper Henry asks for instance: "[...] comment la vie pourrait-elle faire vivre quoi que ce soit sinon par son operation propre, en tant qu'elle est la vie?" (527) "[...] dans Pexteriorite il n'y a jamais aucun Soi, il n'y a done jamais aucune exteriorite. La question est done: qu'est cette essence commune a l'ame et a Dieu, qu'est-ce que la vie? La vie s'eprouve elle-meme immediatement, sans distance - sans que se creuse l'ecart d'aucun Dehors, la transcendance d'aucun monde. Toute vie est par essence acosmique. Mais la premiere dehiscence, la premiere ek-stase d'un horizon, l'incessante mise a distance d'un soi-disant Present, c'est le temps au sens ou on l'entend. Excluant de soi toute temporalisation extatique, la vie est par essence eternelle. Acosmique, eternelle, la vie semble n'avoir rien a faire avec ceux que nous appelons les vivants, qui naissent et meurent dans le temps du monde. En de tells vivants et pour que nous puissions seulement les penser, nous 135

Himself as the Arch-Ipseity in and as the Son. One might speak, then, of an 'originary otherness', or original difference within absolute Life itself, constituting it in its original essence as the affective 'substance', the pure affective materiality, of its always-already- being-given-to-itself as the Arch-Ipseity in radical passivity. On the other hand, the

Father and the Son are in some sense co-equal for Henry. For despite his emphasis on givenness in the relation of the Son-as-Arch-Ipseity to the Father-as-absolute-Life, this relation is above all an eternal process of Life's begetting-of-itself, or coming-into-itself and grasping itself in the Arch-Ipseity. It is this process, then, which for Henry constitutes the nominative foundation of his ontology.18 Furthermore—just to complete

Henry's 'Trinity'—while Henry never himself speaks of the Spirit, it would not be too much of a stretch to consider this 'third Person' as the second 'fold' itself of the double revelation which gives, in the appropriative structure in which absolute Life grasps itself

(i.e. the love between the Father and the Son), the possibility of opening up before itself an ekstatic horizon—an "Arch-Horizon", as it were, as the possibility of any and all horizons (i.e. the ontological structure of transcendence in its situatedness grounded in the immanence of absolute Life's self-givenness to itself).

Now the individual selves are each uniquely begotten within the Arch-Ipseity as

"sons within the Son". This is what Christ means, says Henry, when he speaks his T Am' utterances—especially "before Abraham was, I Am" (John 8:58), "I am the gate of the sheepfold" (John 10:7), and "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the objectivons l'essence de la vie, mais dans l'essence interieure de la vie il n'y a rien de ce qui appartient a cette objectivation ou a ses conditions". (527-28) 8 No doubt it is the keen (albeit narrow) attention which Janicaud pays to this particular aspect of Henry's thought which leads him to charge Henry with thinking tautologically. 136

Father except through Me" (John 14:6).19 In their original begottenness, Christ "led Life to the living by first leading it to itself in him, in and through his essential Ipseity—and then by making a gift of this ipseity to any living being so that, within that ipseity, each of them becomes possible as a living Self (IAT 128). In other words, we are first born, first begotten, first given to ourselves as selves in the Arch-Ipseity which is Christ. To that extent, Christ is the Alpha—and also the Omega, for Henry, in that we are called and led back to him in the context of our forgetfulness, back to absolute Life itself, through the gate of the sheepfold which this Arch-Ipseity is.

But now here comes Henry's most crucial point: it is in the pure affective materiality of the Arch-Ipseity which consists the continuity of materiality, of affective

'substance', of affective flesh, between all individual ipseities. "In my flesh I am given to myself, but I am not my own flesh. My flesh, my living flesh, is Christ's."

[T]he gate of the sheepfold, which according to this strange parable provides access to the place where the sheep graze—thus founding the transcendental Ipseity from which each me, being connected to itself and growing in itself, draws the possibility of being a me—this gate provides access to all transcendental living me's, not to only one of them, to the one I am myself. ... [In fact] it is impossible to come to someone, to reach someone, except through Christ, through the original Ipseity that connects that person to himself, making him a Self, the me that he is. It is impossible to touch flesh except through this original Flesh, which in its essential Ipseity gives this flesh the ability to feel itself and experience itself, allows it to be flesh. It is impossible to touch this flesh without touching the other flesh that has made it flesh. It is impossible to strike someone without striking Christ. And it is Christ who says: "Whatever you

1 Although French translations of this Biblical passage generally have "Je suis le chemin, la verite, et la vie", Henry writes it for his own purposes—in order to accentuate the self-givenness to itself of absolute Life in the dative/accusative case—as "C'est moi la voie, la verite, et la vie". 137

did for one for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40). {IAT166-67, my emphasis)

In other words, Henry attempts to solve the problem of transcendental solipsism by appealing to the continuity of the affective flesh of all individual ipseities in the affective

Flesh of the Arch-Ipseity that is Christ. Christ is the 'All-in-All'. He is infinite affective flesh, the archetypally pathetik structure. As such, he is absolute Life in its self-givenness which gives (itself) for there to be, and which grasps and experiences and suffers and enjoys itself in and as, multiple ipseities. But certainly one must ask here: has Henry really rigorously phenomenologically established this core ontological content? In fact, there are three 'contents' here. The first concerns Christ himself—Christ in himself as the

Son—who is eternally begotten by the Father as the Arch-Ipseity in the process through which absolute Life in the mysterious gifting of itself comes into itself and thus becomes a Living One. Taken purely in itself, this is obviously point blank a theological assertion.

Henry simply cannot establish a. phenomenology of Christ in himself as begotten in such a process. Henry himself admits that the asymmetry of the relation between the Arch-

Ipseity and any individual 'me' "marks the infinite distance that separates Christ from other people. .. God could just as well live eternally in his Son and the latter in the Father without any other living ever coming to Life" {IAT 129). In other words, "the path cannot be traveled in both directions". {IAT 129)

The second 'content' concerns Christ as the Arch-Ipseity through whom absolute

Life begets individual ipseities, albeit not eternally, and grasps and experiences and suffers and enjoys itself in and as these multiple ipseities. Overcoming forgetfulness, one is led back to the gate in which it is revealed to 'me' that "I am not my own flesh", that 138

"my flesh, my living flesh, is Christ's" (IAT 116)—keeping in mind, of course, that

'flesh' for Henry is not the visible stuff of the objective body, but rather the 'pure stuff, the invisible pathetik substance of affectivity running continuously throughout and underlying the relational movement from the absolute through to the objective body (see

#3.2). The third 'content', then, concerns the fact that this flesh is continuous with the invisible pathetik substance of all other ipseities. Precisely this second and third contents are potentially and would have to be rigorously phenomenologically established in order to solve the problem of transcendental solipsism as well as (at the very least making steps towards) solving the interrelated problem of the onto-theological articulation of absolute

Life. Henry's material phenomenology would have to establish the precise phenomenological content of the revelation of other ipseities to the ipseity that is this

'me' in the continuity of my affective flesh in absolute Life with that of other ipseities.

What is required here, what is called for, is a phenomenology of the 'All-in-All' from the inside out—i.e. from within the phenomenologically effective non-ekstatic revelatory light shining on the inside. As for Henry's first 'content', however, there is no sense in denying that at least on one count he is utterly guilty as charged by Janicaud: he has taken a "theological turn". That turn consists, at the very least, in his articulation of the process of absolute Life's eternal begetting of itself in and as the Son, as the Arch-Ipseity—an onto-theological leap dependent on the Logos theology of John.

4.2 The Problem of Language: The Word of Essence

For the time being, we shall grant Henry's institution of Christ as the Arch-Ipseity in order to explore in what consists the relation of this institution to the problem of 139 forgetfulness and, interconnectedly, to the problem of language. Phenomenology has two aspects: namely, that which it seeks, and its method of bracketing, or reduction (see

#3.3). Yet insofar as that which it seeks does not show itself in the ekstatic light, and yet gives itself in affectivity, it becomes necessary to bracket out any ekstatic conceptions and articulations of the content of its search. Such reduction proceeds, for Henry, by responding to 'the call' of absolute Life. But how is such call heeded and what does it say?

The theme of the call explicitly enters into Henry's work only in his late,

Christian writings. It is not as if such a theme was not in some sense, in a very implicit way, also there in his earlier writings; for example, his treatment of the "subterranean stream", as we have called it, running through the thinking of the likes of Descartes,

Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche among others (see 1.4), already witnesses to the way in which, according to Henry, Life as the essence makes itself (albeit obscurely) felt even in the context of our forgetfulness. Because our own essence is absolute Life, we are called to it as though to our own immemorial origin. There is certainly no small opportunity for reading into Henry a (Neo-)Platonic theory of recollection. But Henry ultimately is a

Christian Neo-platonist, and at that, one of a distinctly 20th century sort, as Hankey argues (see #4.1). Responding to the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger, he is concerned not only with a relation with an ineffable Absolute, but also with sensuous, ekstatic existence. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the Incarnation of the essence, as the

Arch-Ipseity, would play such a significant role for him. And it is on the basis of this

Incarnation that Henry, in his later writings, would elaborate a theory of the call and undertake a phenomenology of language. 140

The call for Henry is the call of absolute Life, but we can heed it the most directly through Scripture—and particularly in the 'I Am' sayings of Jesus. Let us recall here

Henry's idea of the "maintaining close to itself of the essence in the opening before itself of an ekstasis, and the way in which such "maintaining close" gives for "real"

(rather than empty) objectifications (see #3.2). This very "maintaining close to itself is the relation of the Son to the Father from out of the intimacy of which Christ speaks of himself by throwing out before himself his very self in a representational horizon.

Furthermore, insofar as his very self is at the same time the Arch-Ipseity, he throws out before himself on that horizon absolute Life itself. This is how the Son reveals the Father, and how the Father reveals himself in the Son. In fact, for Henry, Jesus is in a sense the phenomenologist par excellence. In Jesus' 'I Am' sayings, he finds what one might call wholly, perfectly effective speech-acts. In being uttered precisely by Jesus who is "one with the Father" (i.e. with absolute Life), in the rigor of the correspondence between the phenomenological method and its object—that is, in being spoken self-referentially (i.e. ekstatically) and yet from the immediacy of the revelation itself—the utterance T Am' is the ultimate phenomenological utterance. Such an utterance not only immediately reveals absolute Life's self-givenness to itself in its self-generation (such givenness being emphasized by Henry in titling his book C'est moi la verite instead of Je suis. . .), but it also manifests Life as 'auto-referentiality' (and thus '/ Am') within an ekstatic horizon which it itself opens and indeed which it is. As such, it maintains itself close to itself and so self-appropriates itself as such without falling into a forgetfulness of its essence. And this is how in the same revelation, in the 'double revelation' (see #3.2), it reveals absolute

Life in the passivity of its self-givenness, as well as its capacity, as Life's own power, for 141 ekstatic intentionality—a capacity and effectiveness which, in Jesus, yet remains founded in that passivity. As Jesus says, "the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the

Father do" (John 5:19). For Henry, the 'truth' of the ekstatic mode of phenomenality is here finally explicitly made to be seen in its groundedness in the absolute Truth of revelation as Henry defines it.

Through Jesus' 'I Am' sayings, therefore, absolute Life gives access to itself. It does so, firstly, in the sense that Scripture awakens one to the call of one's own true essence which is absolute Life. For Henry, we are always already in some way called by our essence as the very life which we are, and in and as which absolute Life has always already uniquely grasped itself. For from out of life itself, argues Henry, the Word of Life says within each living who hears it, that living's own living—a living which, in its state of forgetfulness, each living yet somehow "knows without knowing it" (IAT 232), as though from out of the Immemorial. In fact, absolute Life experiences itself as called— given, though forgotten in its original givenness—by itself within each individual 'me'.

And it responds to itself, in that same moment, within each individual 'me', as one intimately interlocuted from the very immemorial depths of its ipseity. For unlike the call that is the world's word—enabling the individual who says T in the nominative case to either respond to or not respond to the call—the call of absolute Life and the response of individual life are for Henry the same moment. He writes: "Because the Hearing in which

I hear the Word of Life is my own life engendered in absolute Life's self-engendering, this Hearing has no freedom at all with respect to what it hears" {IAT 221). Nevertheless, outside of Scripture, outside of Life's revelation in Christ which reveals itself precisely in auto-referentiality, we are in such a state in our forgetfulness that we are generally only 142 ever able to hear this call as though from out of an impenetrable obscurity—so that it remains ultimately ineffective for us.

But even further than this, Christ's 'I Am' sayings, secondly, reveal the very possibility of phenomenology itself—and that, indeed, in the face of the aporia which inherently plagues it. In fact, it is because in the 'I Am' sayings absolute Life gives access to itself that phenomenology, finding therein its essence, first finds itself to be at all possible. Jesus' 'I-am' sayings, in other words, not only reveal in their immediacy (i.e. in speaking from the revelation) the condition for the possibility of all phenomenality, they also manifest in their effectiveness (i.e. in speaking ecstatically of the, revelation) the very condition for the possibility of phenomenology as a method of ontological inquiry.

The issue now becomes for the phenomenologist to learn to speak (in) the language of

Christ—that is, both at the same time of and from the 'double revelation' itself. In many ways, this is exactly what Henry claims to accomplish—for instance, when he states:

"Because the Hearing in which I hear the Word of Life is my own life engendered in absolute Life's self-engendering, this Hearing has no freedom at all with respect to what it hears" (IAT227). In other words, just as Jesus does only what he sees the Father doing, even so Henry says—or claims to say—only what he hears absolute Life saying to him, and indeed through him.

Henry is not the first phenomenological thinker to claim that he was being spoken through in some way—or at least the first to aspire to such a speaking. Heidegger, too— and perhaps above all—was already endeavouring such a language in the years leading up to the time of his meeting with Henry (see #1.1). Nor was Henry the first to articulate

20 Here again one might point out Henry's astonishing lack of information concerning classical philosophies of the Self developed over centuries in India. 143 an intimate link between language and phenomenology; Heidegger had already outlined such a link in the famous §7 of his Being and Time, in which language—or rather, logos—is a "letting-something-be-seen", a letting "that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself (BaT 56 & 58). This letting-be- seen Heidegger distinguishes from a 'covering over', of which logos is also capable—but only on the basis of the former; only because truth is first and foremost a matter of phenomenality as such is falsehood at all possible. Henry points out in his reading of this section of Being and Time that. . .

solely because phenomenality blazes the path by which things and phenomena advent to an encounter with us in order to offer themselves to our apprehension, because they show themselves to us, we can speak of them, name them, refer ourselves to them in this nomination, describe them, produce on their subject the many predications out of which our knowledge and our discourse are simultaneously composed. . . But not only must the things be able to show themselves to us (the things to which these propositions refer), but also these propositions themselves must be able to show themselves, and they can do this only in a monstration proper to language, a monstration which constitutes its originary essence, its Logos. The primitive Saying is never therefore on the side of what is said, that is, on the side of what is shown; it is what shows.21

This "primitive Saying" Heidegger pursued resolutely—even piously—-in his work after Being and Time—his most concerted effort prior to his meeting with Henry resulting in his Beitrage. The English translators of this work argue that this text should be considered as the second (after Being and Time) and final magnum opus of

Heidegger's oeuvre, for the reason that in it Heidegger more sustainedly than in any other

21 M. Henry, "Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language)" (trans. Leonard Lawlor): Continental Philosophy Review 32/3 (1999): 343-65; pp. 344-45. 144 work after "the turn" {die Kehre) eschews the language of metaphysics and attempts to develop, or rather to allow to be developed through him, from "Enowning" itself (see

#1.3), a new language of Being. Heidegger himself says about such a new language in his introduction:

It is no longer a case of talking 'about' something and representing something objective, but rather of being owned over into enowning. . . Thus the proper title says: From Enowning. And that is not saying that a report is being given on or about enowning. Rather, the proper title indicates a thinking-saying which is en- owned by enowning and belongs to be-ing and to be-ing's word.22

CPfE 3, original in GA Vol. 65, translation modified. — I am indebted to Maurice Boutin for his insight concerning the difficulty of translating this passage, as indeed the title of the work itself. The German term translated as "about" in this passage is iiber, while "From Enowning" is, of course, Vom Ereignis. In German, to speak iiber something entails a subject-object relation concerning the thing spoken about. Vom Ereignis, for Heidegger, does not entail a speaking about the event of enowning, but rather a speaking which is of it, belonging to it—that is, the way in which Dasein is, in_ Ereignis, owned over to itself in being owned over to Being. With this belonging in mind—a belonging which implies no 'possession''—it would have been more accurate to translate the title as Of Enowning instead of From Enowning. In English, however, the expression Of Enowning very easily could be taken to mean that enowning is the matter to be discussed, as there is very little distinction in colloquial English between speaking about something and speaking of something. It is likely that as a concession to English idiom, the translators chose the expression From Enowning to indicate that for Heidegger the speaking comes from the belonging to Ereignis as an event, although it does not speak of'iX in a subject- object relation to it. As the translators themselves say: "Rather than merely referring to enowning as a topic ('on' or 'of enowning), the vom here is to be understood as indicative of a thinking that is enowned by being, being as enowning. Thus: from Enowning" {CPfE, xxii). The fact that the belonging is already implied in the translation of Ereignis as "enowning"—rather than as "event" or "appropriation" as which it is sometimes translated, for example in Identity and Difference— compensates for the loss in the inaccuracy of translation of the vom as "from". But one other major disadvantage of this choice is that it suggests that the speaking comes from out of Ereignis—in the way a gift might come out of a box from which it is essentially separable, or the way in which a letter, in being mailed from one city to another, is separated from the city of its origin. This sense, of course, misses the radicality of the belonging which Heidegger wishes to stress—and for that matter it would simply be grammatically incorrect, since the movement from out of, or even the movement from, would have been written as "Aus dem", not "Vom", in the original German. — With regards to the hyphenation in the word "be-ing", the translators intend to indicate where Heidegger in the original writes Seyn in order to distinguish it from Sein, which latter the translators simply render as "being". As early as his Beitrdge, and throughout his later work, Heidegger distinguishes between Sein, which he understands as the traditional onto- theological concept of Being as beingness, and Seyn, an older spelling of Sein which he used to indicate the matter for questioning concerning the truth of beings. 145

For Heidegger, a thinker-sayer on a philosophical/phenomenological path who attempts to make precisely the leap into enowning23—the necessity for a 'leap' here betraying once more the paradox of the phenomenological method itself—the rich and suggesting power of language plays a crucial role. Without question, Heidegger's new language in the Contributions digs deep into this potential fecundity: it is excruciatingly thick—so much so, in fact, that Rudiger Safranski, Heidegger's biographer, argues that by it "Heidegger wishes to be 'transported' beyond himself, and that Heidegger writes this "single document of philosophical Eros.. . with a delirium of concepts and a litany of sentences. The Contributions are a laboratory for the invention of a new way of speaking about God. They are a diary in which Heidegger records his experiments to discover whether it is possible to create a religion without a positive doctrine."24 Despite its thickness, Heidegger always intended this new language to be a speaking of/from the emptiness/fullness of Ereignis as if in a sort of "breathless openness"—from the "Open" in its "enquivering" advent, as it were. "Enquivering" is an expression used frequently by

Heidegger in Contributions suggesting the fecundity, or pregnancy, of Dasein's being enowned by Being, and in that very enownment being owned over to itself. In Henry's language, the "enquivering" might be said to indicate the original auto-affection of absolute Life stirring—albeit still partially obscurely—within Dasein. It is in fact, for

23 On the "leap" see Contributions, Part IV. 24 See R. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 308. — For that matter, Brian Elliot argues that Heidegger's entire body of thought, from the very beginning, and never wavering, is oriented towards a nontheological articulation of (in order to more "faithfully" preserve) a "basic experience analogous to that indicated by the Christian doctrine of divine grace", and this is in part the reason for the general difficulty of Heidegger's idiom. See B. Elliot, "Reduced Phenomena and Unreserved Debts in Marion's Reading of Heidegger", in Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, pp. 87-97; p. 88. 146

Heidegger, the very voice of 'the call' in its vibration, as well as that vibration by way of which Dasein belongs to Being. But it is also "self-sheltering-concealing":

Enownment in its turning [Kehre] is made up neither solely of the call nor solely of the belongingness, is in neither of the two and yet resonates deeply in both. And the enquivering of this resonance in the turning of enowning is the most hidden essential sway of be-ing. This sheltering-concealing needs the deepest clearing: Be-ing "needs" Da-sein. (CPfE, §217, 240)

For hesitating refusal is the hint by which Da-sein—that is the steadfastness of the sheltering that lights up—is beckoned; and that is the resonance of the turning between 'the call' and belongingness, en-ownment, be-ing itself. (CPfE, §242, 265)

For Heidegger, language is an inherent part both of this call and this belongingness. "[LJanguage is the most delicate and thus the most susceptible vibration holding everything within the suspended structure of appropriation"25—i.e. the structure of enowning. Heidegger pursued this vibration vigilantly after Being and Time, and it does reveal itself much less thickly, much more 'delicately', in his later writings, especially his dialogue with a Japanese interlocutor which took place during the latter's visit to Heidegger in the late 1950's.26 In this dialogue, Heidegger questions the Japanese as to whether, in his own language, there is any specific word or phrase which names what Heidegger wishes to call 'language' [die Sprache]. The response is that, yes, there is, but the visitor hesitates to immediately voice it. The fear, of course, is that the name, the word for it, if not spoken from language, but only spoken about language, will in the

25 • M. Heidegger, Identity and Difference (trans. Joan Stambaugh). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. 38. 147 end not name language at all but only a distortion of it. And since Heidegger, naturally, understands the other's concern very deeply, he does not press him on it. Instead, the two men carry on in discussing a wide variety of other topics, all of which ever circle back around to the one same as of yet unanswered concern—which concern at least three times comes to explicitness and yet remains unanswered (indeed, for a full 22 pages!) on account of the visitor's reserve. Finally the answer is offered—and even then with

"hesitating refusal" (see chapter 1): Koto ba [Koto: the "breathlike advent of the stillness of delight"; ba: flower petals]. (OWL 42)

Now even though Heidegger does privilege the spoken word over writing, we have to understand the dialogue and appreciate its brilliance as a piece of literature (for clearly the piece is not a word for word transcript of the dialogue, but rather a rewriting by Heidegger of what came to pass in the meeting between the two men). For him, language as the "house of Being"27 sets up and holds in its openness the Open, the clearing—the very possibility of the ekstatic horizon. To that extent, both speech, as the

"sounding out of phonemes", and writing are secondary with regard to a more originary sounding of language to which he refers as the "peal of stillness". This peal, says

Heidegger, is as a "Saying" in that it is language itself that speaks therein—"Language speaks as the peal of stillness"2*—so that the main point is precisely this delicate way in which language itself is brought to speak in the written text. For the text attempts subtly to (re-)capture and re-sound the way in which—in the unfolding course of the dialogue,

26 M. Heidegger, "A Dialogue on Language: between a Japanese and an Inquirer", On the Way to Language (trans. Peter D. Hertz). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971. 27 See M. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" (trans. Frank A. Capuzzi), in Pathmarks (ed. William McNeill). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 239-76. 28 See M. Heidegger, "Language", in Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter). New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971, p. 207. 148 and particularly in those 22 hesitating pages—there took place between the two men, by way of the "delicate" (delicate as flower petals) and "susceptible vibration" of language, the intimate building together of—or rather, the intimate leaping together into—the suspended structure of appropriation {Ereignis) itself. For Heidegger, only such a structure can truly receive the name of language and with the utmost care preserve it in, keep, and set language itself forth into the Open. According to Heidegger, this is precisely what phenomenology must do when it questions concerning language—and when in doing so, it necessarily questions concerning Da-sein as well. He writes:

To discuss language, to place it, means to bring to its place of being not so much language as ourselves: our own gathering into the appropriation [i.e. the enowning]. . . To reflect on language thus demands that we enter into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen—or also fail to happen—that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. (PLTl90-91)

Henry's critique of Heidegger concerning this articulation of language is predictable; it is the same in essence as what we have already seen: that Heidegger does not truly go on to say positively in what this 'nature', in what the advent of Ereignis of/from which language itself speaks, consists: "one has to explain what this advent is, this phenomenalization of the pure phenomenality which defines conjointly the object of phenomenology and the ultimate foundation of every possible language" (MPaL 345).

Heidegger's language, says Henry, is ultimately—and this is because Dasein is itself the event of ekstasis whose ground hesitates—"the language of the world' (MPaL, 349). The basic character of this language is its incapacity to produce the reality of/from which it 149 speaks—its incapacity to produce the Open in its openness. What holds the Open open?,

Henry asks. We have seen the import of his posing of this question to Heidegger before

(see #1.3). Henry's answer is equally predictable: the revelation of, indeed as, absolute

Life in the givenness to itself of itself in auto-affectivity. "Pathos designates the mode of phenomenalization according to which life phenomenalizes in its originary self- revelation. . . In this pathos, the 'how' of revelation becomes its content; its Wie is a

Was" (MPaL 353). Precisely because its Wie is a Was—that is, precisely because the revelation of absolute Life is as a givenness to itself to be a Self—this Self as the Arch-

Ipseity is as its Logos. "We see then in complete rigor what the Logos, what the Speech of life is. To the impotence of the world, which is incapable of positing the reality of which it speaks. . . the Speech of life opposes its hyper-potency, that of generating the reality of which it speaks" (MPaL 353-54). This opposition, however, is not to be understood as an opposition in the strict sense in which the two terms are logically equal or depend upon one another. Rather, the relationship between the two kinds of language—that of the world and that of absolute Life—is an asymmetrical one for Henry, in the same way that the mode of phenomenality known as ekstasis is founded upon that mode which is the revelation of absolute Life. In fact, the two languages are_ the two modes. Together they constitute what has been discussed as the 'double revelation' (see

#3.2).

What then, for Henry, is the fate of the phenomenological method in all of this?

To some extent, phenomenology always "comes too late", as he says, as it only ever

"exercises in complete lucidity the power to think apres coup, to meditate on life (this power that we have also received)" (MPaL 364). In other words, we are always already 150

given to ourselves to be a self—a posteriori: "always already life is given to us by giving

us to ourselves in the pathos of its Speech" (MPaL 364). This, of course, is our

phenomenology, the world's phenomenology undertaken in our state of forgetfulness: at

best apophatic in its endeavours, it paradoxically seeks the very condition by way of

which it carries out its search and yet is unable to bring it about by its own powers. There

is, however, that other phenomenologist, according to Henry: the phenomenologist par

excellence, Christ, the Arch-Ipseity himself, the Word of essence become flesh, who

speaks both languages—that of the world and that of absolute Life—at the same time.29

Henry's most extensive discussion on the way in which these two languages intertwine in Christ's utterances is undertaken in his Paroles du Christ (2002), foreshadowed ten years before in Henry's paper "La parole de Dieu: Une approche phenomenologique" (1992), with special reference (critical) to Heidegger and (highly positive) to Eckhart. See for instance 161-62: "La parole de Dieu assurement presente avec la parole du monde un trait commun, elle est phenomenologique de part en part. C'est pourquoi le dire de la parole divine est une revelation. Mais comment revele la parole divine, quelle sorte d'apparaitre delivre-t-elle et ainsi que nous dit-elle, c'est la question cruciale qui est celle de la phenomenologie - d'une phenomenologie qui se comprendrait elle-meme—et peut-etre aussi celle de la theologie, d'une theologie qui se comprendrait elle-meme—non point comme discours sur Dieu mais comme la parole de Dieu lui- meme [sic]. Or la parole de Dieu revele, parle, en tant que la Vie. La Vie, c'est-a-dire le Verbe originel, est l'Archi-Revelation en tant qu'une auto-revelation, en tant qu'une auto-affection. C'est-a-dire que la vie revele de telle facon que ce qu'elle revele, c'est elle-meme et rien d'autre. Elle affecte de telle facon que le contenu de son affection, c'est elle-meme et rien d'autre. A la difference de la parole du monde qui detourne d'elle-meme et parle toujours d'autre chose, d'autre chose qui dans cette parole se trouve deporte hors de soi, dejete, prive de sa propre realite, reduit a une image, a un contenu, opaque et vide—la Parole de la Vie donne la vie. Parole de Vie parce que son Logos est la Vie, a savoir 1'auto-donation, la jouissance de soi". See also Henry's paper "Qu'est-ce qu'une revelation?" (1994), for instance 52: "Revelation il n'y a et il ne peut y avoir que si le mode de donation extatique dans l'au-dehors d'un monde cede la place a un mode de phenomenalisation de la phenomenalite si radicalement different qu'il n'est pas un eclat de la lumiere du premier qui penetre la matiere phenomenologique du second, de telle facon qu'alors en effet, heterogene au premier mode d'apparaitre, le second se donne comme une revelation. Oil trouve-t-on quelque chose comme une revelation? Peut-on citer un exemple? — Nous en citerons un, et peut-etre deux. L'exemple cite sera celui d'un home nomme Jesus et qui pretend accomplir une double revelation: d'une part se reveler comme le Christ, d'autre part et du meme coup reveler Dieu. C'est cette double revelation dont je voudrais elucider les conditions phenom^nologiques". — "Toute revelation posant que Dieu revelerait ceci ou cela qui ne serait pas lui-meme, est puerilite et blaspheme" (53). -— "Comment la vie vient-elle en soi? Dans le proces sans fin par lequel elle se jette en soi, s'ecrase contre soi, s'eprouve soi-meme, jouit de soi, produisant sans cesse sa propre essence pour autant que celle-ci consiste dans cette jouissance de soi et s'epuise en elle. Ainsi la vie 151

// is his very speaking the Language of absolute Life—indeed, his very being as such a

Speech, that is, as the Logos—and his referring to himself in such a Speaking—/. e. in

Life's auto-referentiality consubstantial with its self-revelation in auto-affectivity—which

constitutes the ultimate possibility and fulfillment, the Alpha and the Omega of phenomenology. In other words, Christ, as the Arch-Ipseity, justifies all our

phenomenological undertakings.

Herein lies a problem, however. Henry's phenomenology undoubtedly slips into a

form of onto-theology as soon as he makes the ontological leap (see #3.2) from the

phenomenality of the individual self in its always-already-being-given-to-itself-as-a-self

(that is, in its dativity), to absolute Life in its nominativity as an eternal process of self-

generation as the Arch-Ipseity in and through whom it generates and grasps itself in and

as the individual self. But this Arch-Ipseity is not, nor could it be, phenomenologically

demonstrated in itself—except in the language of absolute Life itself, which Henry claims

(and this is a theological testimony) that Christ himself speaks. Because we hear this

Speech that Christ speaks, argues Henry, and because we are called by it, we are justified

in aiming for a return to our original condition as sons within the Son through the

overcoming of our forgetfulness precisely by making such a leap. But doesn 't this just

beg the question? Of course it does. Henry is an onto-theologist in his ultimate claim.

s'engendre-t-elle constamment elle-meme. [...] La vie est un auto-mouvement s'auto-eprouvant dans son mouvement meme, de telle facon que de ce mouvement s'auto-eprouvant rien ne se detache jamais, rien ne glisse hors de lui, hors de ce mouvement s'auto-eprouvant. Tel est le proces d'auto-generation de la vie. Ce proce d'auto-generation en tant que proces s'auto- eprouvant est un proces d'auto-revelation, celui de la vie, le proces de la revelation de Dieu" (54). — "La disqualification du pouvoir de monstration propre au monde au profit d'un mode de Revelation qui ne lui doit rien et qui est seul capable de reveler le Verbe, etant d'ailleurs le propre mode de revelation du Verbe comme auto-revelation de la Vie, c'est ce que dit la Parole qui introduit au christianisme au prix, il est vrai, d'un renversement complet des presupposes qui vont guider la pensee occidentale". (56) 152

However, there is a certain possibility (see #4.1) which stills needs to be explored— namely, the possibility of undertaking an investigation of the precise phenomenological content of the revelation of other ipseities to the ipseity that is this 'me' in the continuity of my affective flesh in absolute Life with that of other ipseities (more on this in #5.2 and the conclusion). Let us now turn to a discussion of Henry's ethics in its application to the problem of the forgetfulness of our essential condition as "sons within the Son".

4.3 Henry's Ethics: 'Disimpropriation' and Action

Henry is rather a phenomenologist with distinct onto-theological leanings than an ethicist as such. Of the array of his writings—dealing with topics as various as phenomenology,

Marx and Marxism, psychoanalysis, art, Christianity (all of which topics branch out from his single thought of la subjectivite clandestine)—there is not a single work that one could point to which might be called a work of ethics proper. Even his 1987 work of cultural criticism, La Barbarie—despite, or perhaps because of, its polemical moralistic tones—is more of a critique of the cultural repercussions of ontological monism than it is the articulation of an ethical system or vision. If there is an 'ethics' at all operative in

Henry's work, as pointed out by Natalie Depraz, it lies implicitly in the "absolute right of life in general. Life is the sole condition of possibility of any action or thought."30

Rather than an explicit ethical system, what unfolds in Henry's work is a certain

"philosophy of action" (already in EsM chapters 68 & 69), connected to the problem of

'real' objectification and the "maintaining close to itself of the self in life (see #3.2).

N. Depraz, "The Return of Phenomenology in Recent French Moral Philosophy", in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook (eds. John J. Drummond and 153

This philosophy of action is itself intimately tied up with the problem of the return—i.e. the problem of how to overcome the forgetfulness of the essence and along with that, how to realize authentic action in relation to the passivity of the self in its givenness to itself as a self in absolute Life. However, this how of overcoming forgetfulness is not something that Henry is truly able to unfold in The Essence of Manifestation; indeed, he did not and he could not arrive at any articulation of it until his 'conversion' in I Am the

Truth. The reason for this is quite clear. As already mentioned (in #3.3 and #4.1), such an overcoming is incapable of proceeding by way of the opening of an 'interior' ekstasis which would seek to return to the essence as to a represented object. Such a method is inherently non-phenomenological in that it simply posits the essence as a metaphysical ideal goal; it merely reiterates, for Henry, the 'impropriation' of the ego which improperly grounds itself and its powers of appropriation in itself. It seeks—as did

Augustine in his vain attempt to repeat his ascent to the Neo-platonic 'One' by way of his own powers—to storm the gates of heaven, as it were, or to enter the essence without passing through the gate, through the Arch-Ipseity, Christ—in the manner of thieves and robbers: "I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber" (John 10:1; as quoted by Henry, IAT

118). In other words, 'impropriation' of the essence is not only not possible, but any attempt at it is deeply unethical.

How, then, does one overcome forgetfulness? Through 'faith' in Christ, one supposes. Yes, but many who have faith in Christ have not overcome their forgetfulness.

One main reason for this is that there is a certain "luxury" of inaction and passivity that

Lester Embree). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 517-32; p. 524. 154 faith will sometimes allow itself—giving up an unethical search for an ideal in the comfort and assured knowledge that such a return will ultimately be secured for them by

Christ himself. But such inaction and passivity is not, for Henry, the true passivity; it is not the passivity of being given to oneself (in the dative case) as a self in absolute Life. It is not the passivity of the 'double revelation' in which, in its second 'fold' (see #3.2), an ekstasis is made possible in which the self, accomplished as a self in a true appropriation of itself, is born as a living one. Rather, the passivity that faith—indeed, still in its forgetfulness—sometimes allows itself actually blocks the possibility of return. The reason it does so is that it suppresses the deep living energies of the essence, of absolute

Life itself, which otherwise seek to extend and to express themselves in the individual ipseity. To that extent, for Henry, action is necessary. One must act in order to overcome one's forgetfulness. The question now becomes—and this is the closest one gets to pinpointing a positive ethics in Henry's work: what kind of action? Henry's answer:

"acts of mercy".

Now Henry's prescription of undertaking acts of mercy is not ultimately a matter of ethics per se, in terms of an orientation towards 'the other': "it is neither the neighbour nor the mercy with which we should treat him that explains the way of acting required by the Christian ethic" (IAT 168). Rather, it is a matter of bringing about the ego's

'disimpropriation' of itself and its powers. To that extent, paradoxically, the remedy for overcoming the forgetting of the self in its givenness to itself in absolute Life is precisely also a forgetting of sorts, but of an altogether different kind—namely, the 'impropriative' ego's forgetting of its solicitous self-concern, or the dissolution of the care structure (see

#3.3). The ego, Dasein, quite literally has to forget itself as a being for whom its being is

31 Henry develops this idea in chapters 9 and 10 of I Am the Truth. 155

a concern. It has to forget all of its impropriative ego's concerns. It has to no longer be

this impropriative ego. Indeed, the very fact that it has concerns about its being at all is

itself only a symptom of the impropriative attempt of (despite the impossibility of)

grounding itself and its powers in its own being. It becomes concupiscent, as it were—on

account of its radical existential anxiety over the preservation of itself in its being—while

all the while it "knows without knowing" that it simply cannot so preserve itself, so that

it grasps desperately after many things. Moreover, even after it comes to the dazzling

realization that its 'true life' cannot be preserved by way of worldly things, yet if it

impropriatively attempts to return to its own essence by its own powers—through 'acts of

righteousness', for example, or be it even ascetic and "mystically" other-worldly in

orientation—it is no less concupiscent in its being. Its action still constitutes merely a

'weak affection' (IAT 106-7), a self-affection of the pathetik flesh in which, because

unself-generating in itself, it thirsts and hungers and grasps after precisely the effectivity

of its essence as after an ideal object which it would possess and over which it would

have intentional mastery in order to secure itself in its being. Indeed, this tendency to

concupiscence of the ego in its existential desperation which causes it to grasp after its

own essence as after an object is precisely why Henry promotes acts of mercy:

Only the work of mercy practices the forgetting of self in which, all interest for the Self (right down to the idea of what we call a self or a me) now removed, no obstacle is now posed to the unfurling of life in this Self extended to its original essence. {IA T \ 70)

Now this unfurling of life in the Self is what is most significant for Henry: a releasing

and expressive extension of the heretofore suppressed energy and power—or rather 156

"hyper-power", as he calls it—of absolute Life in and through the individual ipseity.

Such a release amounts to a distinct transmutation in the being which itself constitutes the overcoming of the forgetting of the self in its essence. Henry writes:

In works of mercy—and this is why they are "works "—a decisive transmutation takes place by which the ego's power is extended to the hyper-power of absolute Life in which it is given to itself. In such a transmutation, the ego forgets itself, so that in and through this forgetting an essential Ipseity is revealed—not its own Self but precisely what gives this self to itself by making it a Self, absolute Life's self-giving in the Ipseity of which this life gives itself. It is no longer me who acts, it is the Arch-Son who acts in me. And this is because "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). {IAT169)

According to Henry, once this decisive transmutation has occurred, forgetfulness of the essence has been overcome—and with its overcoming, not just "acts of mercy", but in fact all action becomes true action, since all action is seen as being carried out by the hyper-power of absolute Life in and through the individual self. The individual self in this case, like Paul, becomes something of a witness to a hyper-power working through him—a power which is not rooted in and does not originate from his own ego, but rather precedes him and even gives him to himself as (the possibility of) such an ego. This is what it means, for Henry, to do the Father's Will: "To do the Heavenly Father's Will is to let the relation to the self that joins the singular Self to itself be accomplished, just like the relation to itself of absolute Life—for the living man it is to let life be accomplished in himself like the very Life of God" {IAT 166). The ego, to that extent, no longer

'impropriative' of itself and its powers, becomes authentically appropriative—that is to say, on the basis of the second fold of the double revelation in which the givenness to itself as a self is also at the same time an accomplishment of the self in a self- 157

appropriation (see #3.2). In other words, it lets absolute Life live in and through itself as

a self and in this way it truly lives—but it lives as precisely a witness and a servant,

indeed as a son, and not a mere puppet: "[i]n making the ego a living person, Life has not

made a pseudo-person. It does not take back with one hand what it has given with the

other" (IAT 141). Such an ego, then, is reborn into its true essence—and any action

undertaken by absolute Life in and through such an ego is a true action.

One final thing needs to be discussed here, and that is the implication of such a

rebirth for the writing of a work of phenomenology. One who has overcome his

forgetfulness would be capable of such an undertaking as a true action—and thus would

be a true phenomenologist. This is what Henry himself has ceaselessly aspired to—if he

has not in fact claimed that he has achieved it. But how would such a writing be

undertaken? As said above (in #4.2), Christ's 'I Am' sayings reveal for Henry the very

possibility of phenomenology itself—because in the 'I Am' sayings absolute Life gives

access to itself in its essential mode of phenomenality, and it gives such access to itself

auto-referentially. In other words, it paradoxically opens an ekstasis by way of which to

refer to itself—it might even be said in some sense, by way of which to signify itself.

However, in such an opening, it nevertheless maintains itself close to itself in its essence,

so that it truly speaks of itself and on the basis of itself as essence, and not merely about

itself. Now according to Henry, the one reading Scripture must have ears to hear. The one

who truly hears, hears the invisible revelation of absolute Life which takes place behind

such an ekstasis and which is in fact the very condition of its self-signification. The one who does not truly hear, however, looks for and expects to see this signified made manifest in the light of the world. But insofar as he does not see and indeed cannot see it 158

manifest in the world's light, he therefore assumes the pronouncement to be false, and

assumes no such access to anything at all to be given. Or else, if he hears partially and

does indeed assume it to be true, but speaks about it 'impropriatively', i.e. only in the

world's light, then he himself falsifies it in the se jetant hors de soi which fails to

maintain itself close to itself, thus producing only an empty representation, to wit, an idol.

But again, the one truly hearing the words of the Word who is the eternally

begotten Logos in their essence invisibly revealed—this one is awakened, Henry

contends, to the originary effectivity of the essence by which one had indeed, in some

sense, always already been called (albeit obscurely), insofar as in essence one always is

and always has been given to oneself in absolute Life. This one, then, learns to speak in

the same way—that is, learns to allow oneself to be spoken in and through by absolute

Life, just as is Christ. How? Through acts of mercy—i.e. through 'disimpropriation'—so

that one overcomes completely one's forgetfulness. To that extent, the phenomenologist,

by truly overcoming his or her forgetfulness and learning to speak and to be spoken in

and through in just this way, could indeed 'produce' a 'true' work of phenomenology—

an auto-phenomenology, as it were, carried out by the hyper-power of absolute Life itself,

and necessarily standing beyond any critique of it as a mere onto-theology. For Henry,

such is a 'true' work of phenomenology, i.e., as he states in 1992, "a phenomenology that

would understand itself—and perhaps also a theology that would understand itself—not just as a discourse about God but as the word of God himself'32; such a phenomenology

would undoubtedly take on the status of Scripture itself—in that the phenomenologist

32 Emphasis mine. — "[. . .] une phenomenologie qui se comprendrait elle-meme—et peut-etre aussi celle de la theologie, d'une theologie qui se comprendrait elle-meme—non point comme discours sur Dieu mais comme la parole de Dieu lui-meme." 159 could truly only 'Say' what absolute Life itself says in and through him. "Forever do I hear the noise of my birth", and

[t]he noise of my birth is the noise of life, the infrangible silence in which the Speech of Life constantly tells me about my own life, in which my own life—if I understand the Speech which speaks in its—constantly tells me the Speech of Life. (MPaL 356)

It goes without saying that only "those with the ears to hear" would be able to appreciate it as such a Saying. 160

Chapter 5

Phenomenology and 'the Call'

Michel Henry is a thinker of a single thought: la subjectivite clandestine. The basic contours of this thought never change for him: from the first to the last of his works he articulates this thought as affectivity, revelation, a pre-ekstatic mode of phenomenality which for him constitutes the "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego at the source of the two" (EsM6). To that extent, he alleges, from the first to the last of his works, to be writing a fundamental ontology—or at least, in his less strictly phenomenological writings, to be unfolding the implications of one. As Henry knows well, the complex and aporia-strewn fabric of the relation between ontology and phenomenology makes such a writing, such a thinking, difficult. Overall, there is a fairly circular, question-begging character to Henry's thinking on account of such a difficulty.

In his earlier work, he is clearly interested in unfolding an articulation of affectivity grounding the phenomenalization of all being. He points out where and at what times in the tradition such a uniting ground has surfaced (albeit obscurely and always subsiding again), why and how it can get covered over or forgotten, and even in what direction culture travels and how it can return when this forgetting occurs.

From the start, however, there is always the problem, phenomenologically, of the leap from the individual ipseity to absolute Life, as well as what actually amounts to the same problem, the problem of transcendental solipsism. Any claim in this early work that 161 we are simply called to make this leap—on account of the fact that in our essence we are none other than absolute Life grasping itself in and as the ipseity that we are—is clearly a circular begging of the question. Thus Henry's 'conversion'. Suddenly Christ is introduced, as the Arch-Ipseity, to mediate ontologically between the individual ipseity and absolute Life, as well as between the individual ipseity and other ipseities. The call now comes through Scripture and resonates even more clearly in Christ's speech, which is the Speech of absolute Life itself. So clearly does it resonate, according to Henry, that one is ultimately incapable of hearing otherwise. But insofar as the relation between absolute Life and the Arch-Ipseity is itself still established only through a leap—through the onto-theological nomination of the process of eternal self-begetting of Life in and as the Arch-Ipseity—the same circular, question-begging character remains.

How can this situation be remedied? For one thing, we can look more closely at the possibility of a stricter phenomenological articulation of the revelation of a certain

'qualified otherness' at work in Henry's description of the transmutation which reveals the proper relation of the individual ipseity to the Arch-Ipseity: "It is no longer me who acts, it is the Arch-Son who acts in me" (IAT 169). To that extent, the call unfolds into the revelation of a sustained, unobjectifiable, although affectively witnessable, encounter.

It opens the inherent solipsism of the ipseity to a sort of 'intelligibility' of 'the other' which is not intentional and which remains affecting in a degree which cannot be resettled in an 'impropriation' of the ego—and yet which, for Henry, in terms of the 'pure stuff of affectivity, is paradoxically substantially continuous with the ego as an ipseity.

Most pertinent for a rigorous phenomenological investigation would, then, be the precise relation between this 'continuity' and this 'intelligibility' (more on this in #5.2 and the 162 conclusion). One way of approaching such an investigation is by first considering what

Henry's thinking might fruitfully borrow from seminal thinkers of 'otherness' in the phenomenological tradition. In #5.2 we will look at the work of the most prominent thinker of 'the other' in the late 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas. First, however, we shall consider Jean-Luc Marion's critique of Henry based on his articulation of the 'pure call'.

5.1 Marion's Critique: The 'Pure Call'

Despite the fact that Jean-Luc Marion has written very little explicitly on the work of

Michel Henry, it is without question that the latter has been a profound and enduring influence on the former's thinking.1 Indeed, Marion—already far more widely translated and well-known among his English audience than is Henry—confesses that, as a young student in philosophy in the late 1960's, Henry's 1963 L'Essence de la manifestation just

"fell from his hands".2 In fact, Marion's whole reading of Husserl's "principle of principles" and his privileging of its aspect of givenness over intentionality is drawn in some measure from Henry—although he himself articulates it much more explicitly than

Henry does. Marion's most major phenomenological work, Being Given, is throughout peppered with notes referring crucial phenomenological concepts to the significant

Among Marion's writings either on Henry or explicitly influenced by Henry which are translated into English are: "Generosity and Phenomenology: Remarks on Michel Henry's Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito", in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes; Being Given, pp. 231-32, in addition to a number of key concepts of Marion referring to the thought of Henry in notes scattered throughout; and Chapter 4 of In Excess. 2 As quoted in N. Depraz, RPRFMP 521. — Part of the reason for Marion's astonishment was likely due, as Depraz suggests, to the extremely modest size of Henry's audience even in French in the 1960's. Marion, it seems, just stumbled upon Henry and his seminal thought of la subjectivite clandestine as though upon an unclaimed jewel. 163 accomplishments of his predecessor. Of Marion's own principle, "As much reduction, so much givenness", he says: "I introduced this formulation in the conclusion of Reduction et donation. It goes without saying that I would not dare elevate it to the rank of principle of phenomenology if Michel Henry had not validated it in his commentary[3l . . In fact, one could also refer to Michel Henry himself if one wanted to acknowledge the principial role of givenness" (BeGi 330, n. 14). Finally, in his "Avant-Propos" to Henry's posthumously published Phenomenologie de la Vie (Tome IV), Marion encourages among a wide audience of Henry's readers the "reception d'une oeuvre qui appartient, sans aucun doute, a l'histoire de la phenomenologie, parce qu'elle en recele une possibilite encore a peine apercue". (PdV 8)

Despite such high praise, Marion is well aware of the onto-theological leap that

Henry has taken, and he critiques him for it. This is not to say that Marion himself is without a fair share of critics charging him with similar undertakings. In fact, he is a distinctly Christian thinker whose early works especially constitute significant theological contributions, and his 1982 work, Dieu sans I'etre4, is already widely regarded as a classic. He continues to publish numerous articles in journals and chapters in books, as well as speaking at and inspiring conferences, which evidence the wealth of his knowledge in the areas of patristics, the history of philosophy (especially Descartes studies), and even aesthetics. Marion is best known, however, for his rigor as a phenomenologist—he is above all a phenomenologist, as he himself has consistently

See Henry, "Quatres principes de la phenomenologie": Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 1 (January-March 1991): 3-26. 4 Paris: Fayard, 1982. — God Without Being (trans. Thomas A. Carlson). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 164 argued since the publication of Etant donne {Being Given) in 1997. Unlike Henry— whose phenomenology, ontology, and ultimately theology, are all inextricably intertwined—Marion in some sense holds theology and phenomenology at arm's length from one another, and his establishment of phenomenology in its articulation as givenness as 'first philosophy' he undertakes without the question of Being. True, at times he employs phenomenological principles in the context of a Christian hermeneutic; but those principles themselves, he argues, are rigorously phenomenological, in light of his own articulation of 'givenness', and depend on no theological or metaphysical ground: "Let us repeat that by revelation we here intend a strictly phenomenological concept: an appearance that is purely of itself and starting from itself, that does not subject its possibility to any preliminary determination." (SaPh 215)

Earlier we discussed the way in which the paradigm of the saturated phenomenon establishes the truth of all phenomenality as defined by Marion on the basis of the principle of givenness (see #2.2). On this basis, even the most banal of phenomena, which in the 'natural attitude' we would simply immediately determine or predetermine in an intentional concept, give themselves to us in such a way as to arrive to consciousness in an unpredictable landing, imposing upon us their own points of view, and calling forth from us an intention which is precisely the appropriate intention for the

'personal actuality' {Id I, 44) in which they gives themselves. We also discussed there the way in which the new 'me' which accomplishes this intention is able to—and in fact must—very quickly re-appropriate itself as an T, so that the intention might become its own—more precisely, so that it might become an intention in which the thing shows itself to consciousness. To that extent, there is always a tension, a sort of give-and-take, 165 between pure givenness in the truth of its phenomenality and the consciousness to whom it gives itself (even and especially in its performance of the reduction). We further translated, as it were, this thinking of Marion's into Henry's terms, namely, by distinguishing between a strong affection and a weak affection in Henry's thought, and by discussing the way in which the appropriation of the 'self of the phenomenon as a lived experience (which is in fact none other than the weak affection constituting the appropriation of the self of itself as this new 'me') already presupposes, as its condition and essence, the strong affection of the self in its always-already-being-given-to-itself in absolute Life (see #2.3).

One further thing discussed, albeit very briefly (in #2.2), needs to be elaborated upon here—namely, Marion's discussion of degrees of givenness whose originary difference is no doubt part of what makes up the full 'personal actuality'—the self-—of each thing. Marion tries to think this 'self in its 'haecceity'. What he discovers in this thinking is that there is an indubitable sense in which things do irreducibly give themselves in differing degrees, despite our best efforts not to foresee or over-determine them. Some phenomena are 'poor' in their degree of givenness—while others are

'common-law', and these latter may or may not become saturated for us, depending on the extent to which they give themselves even apart from how completely we perform the reduction. The example of the cucumber is a good example of how a common-law phenomenon can become saturated—even without, in that instance, any conscious attempt on my part to perform any reduction at all.5 Furthermore, even among those

5 See #2.2. — On the other hand, as any would-be 'nature mystic' has likely experienced, no doubt more than once, one can sit hours in concentration in front of a tree or a lake or a flower attempting to commune with the thing's 'soul', and still see nothing in the end but a tree or a lake or a flower utterly and somehow inexplicably closed in upon itself. 166 phenomena counted as saturated, there are degrees of saturation. Some saturated phenomena, as with the cucumber, impose by their unpredictable landing an anamorphosis on consciousness; but then they very quickly allow the new 'me' imposed to be appropriated by consciousness as an T, their own selves being delimited or determined in this appropriation as the subject's lived experience. On the other hand, there are saturated phenomena, argues Marion, which are always saturated, which never allow consciousness to appropriate their haecceity as a lived experience of the T. To that extent, they never allow consciousness to appropriate to itself this new 'me'—so that it precisely remains a 'me', remains given to itself in the dative case with the effectivity of the reality of this 'me' coming from some other place. In other words, such a degree of saturation constitutes the subject's decentering; it constitutes its non-groundedness in itself as an ego.

One of the most privileged examples, albeit not the only and certainly not the ultimate example, of such a saturated phenomenon—and here Marion takes his inspiration from Levinas—is the face. Marion's appreciation of the face's inherently saturated phenomenality is different from, and yet it does not exclude, Levinas' ethical concerns; Marion would in fact argue that his articulation encounters the face more originarily than does Levinas' ethical concerns. The reason why for Marion a face is inherently saturated is that, as an infant, it is by way of a face that one is for the first time called to be a 'me' with a name. One is called into the human community in the face. One becomes a 'me' by way of the community which addresses one:

None amongst mortals has ever lived for an instant without having received a call and being disclosed as interlocuted by facticity. Or, which strictly comes back to 167

the same thing, no mortal has ever lived for an instant without discovering itself to be preceded by a call or appeal that was already there.6

For Marion, such a call is deeply tied up phenomenologically with a certain

'philosophy of birth'—not just physical birth, but the birth into language, into human community, into 'world'. Always already given to itself as a 'me' in the dative case, the source of the call in such a birth is, strictly speaking, immemorial. As such, the 'pure caW is not simply reducible to a face; rather, it comes from beyond the face—as it were, through the face, but it can be encountered otherwise. In its ultimate form, the 'pure call' is not even any longer encountered through Being because it is indeterminable in its origin, and in its givenness it is quite capable of entirely intuitively saturating any and all horizons, which do and must remain horizons of Being. Paul on his way to Damascus, for example (Acts 9:3-9), encountered just such a 'pure call' so richly that—no matter what attempts are made after the fact to secure this revelation theologically, whether in Being or otherwise—nevertheless the anamorphosis imposed upon him in that moment only returned to him those horizons of Being after three full days, and at that completely altered. During those three full days, however, Paul was 'pure interloque'. In this state of being 'purely called', it is impossible to establish a determinate pole by which l'interloque is claimed. For the beckoning pole that the (source of the) call is for Marion, is not an 'immovable'—and because it is not an immovable, neither is l'interloque. That is, l'interloque is decentered because it is not able to appropriate to itself and to hold in

J.-L. Marion, "The Final Appeal of the Subject", in Deconstructive Subjectivities (eds. Simon Critchley and Peter Dews). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 185-204; p. 197. 168 place the excessive givenness of the (source of the) call—either in an onto-theological concept by which the call may be (unsuccessfully) determined, or even in the absolute, solipsistic affection of the flesh in the depths of which Henry establishes absolute Life and in which the appropriation consists in a pure self-grasping of self in suffering and joy-

In this lies Marion's critique of Henry's leap into onto-theology. Marion's phenomenology of saturation is at heart—as is Henry's phenomenology of life—a phenomenology of 'birth'—a phenomenology of the a posteriori 'me-ness' of the self called to be a self and given to itself as a self in that call which precisely precedes its birth. To that extent, and logically, the source of that call is phenomenologically inaccessible. The sole problem for Marion with regards to Henry is that he illegitimately names that call's source and tries to ground it in the solipsistic affection of his own flesh's depths. The effect that this naming has, according to Marion, is to reduce the 'me' in the immediacy of its givenness to itself to a derived figure of it only. He writes:

Who or what claims the interloque^ If we mention here God, the other, moral conscience, auto-affection, figures of difference, Being itself, etc., this only enables us to name the difficulty, not to solve it: as a matter of fact the interloque would become in all cases a derivative and regional agency. ..7

On the other hand, Henry distinction between the individual ipseity always already given to itself in passivity and absolute Life which ends up being defined onto- theologically suggests that his phenomenological understanding of the flesh is already precisely open to the (possibility of the) 'pure call'. If we were to set aside for the 169 moment Henry's onto-theological leap and closely read this very givenness in passivity through Marion's articulation of the 'pure call', we can at least grant that such a givenness in passivity is a being given life to the extent that 'life' is simply to be defined as, and can be terminologically interchangeable with, the 'me' in the livingness of its ipseity, i.e. of its givenness to itself as a self. In other words, we accept the first of the three senses of the expression "given life" (see #3.2) above. But what about the second which entails precisely an accusation! Given life, the self is, as a self, incapable of escaping from itself; bound to itself as a self, since it is precisely its pathetik flesh which makes it to be a self, it is like a condemned man to whom has been given a life sentence.

This second sense follows necessarily from the first (see #3.2), but only if the third sense is already assumed—namely, that it is absolute Life itself, grasping itself in all individual ipseities, which is 'the Given'. To that extent, the individual self in each case cannot not be a self precisely because Being itself, as absolute Life, cannot not be a Living One in and as each individual ipseity. Moreover, this 'condemnatory' and (almost) unbearable situation of necessity has a further really astonishing tonality: the accusation not only charges the self with the burden of the self—in its suffering having to be—but further charges it, precisely because it is consubstantial in its ipseity with absolute Life itself, with the paradoxical presumption of itself conspiring with absolute Life to be—as if in some immemorial past it did indeed pre-sume to ask to be born, pre-sume a separate, discreet birth.8

7 J.-L. Marion, "L'Interloque, in Who Comes After the Subject? (eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy). New York & London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 236-45; p. 244. 8 Overtones of this affective tonality of the accusation certainly can be found in Levinas' ethical articulation of obligation to the other and his judgment as unethical (if not downright hateful of the other) of the ego's claim to its own 'place in the sun'. The title of a late collection of his 170

But what if we were now entirely to bracket this assumption out—that is, this

presumption! That would no doubt entail something radical for Henry's philosophy—

something that Marion himself points to in his discussion of the pure call: namely, that

the self is indeed given to itself as this 'me', yet in its givenness it does not have to be. Its

givenness to itself as a self is a gift: the 'pure call', giving the self to itself as this

interlocuted 'me', gives the gift itself. ..

the gift of rendering oneself to or of eluding the claim of the call. . . according to no other horizon than that of the absolutely unconditional call and of the absolutely unconstrained response. The originary absence of conditions and determinations of the claim allow it to appeal, without any limit, as much to what is not objectivated as to what is objectivated, as much to what does not have to be as to what must be. The last reduction reduces to the interloque, and hence gives all that can call and be called. (ReGi, 204-5)

The interesting thing about this reduction is it that it alleviates the strained relation—and

consequently the question-begging exchange—between phenomenology and ontology. If

1'interloque does not have to be, then it need not concern itself with the question of

ground—either its own or the ground of all beings. Herein lies the significance of

Marion's thinking of Husserl's principle of givenness as donation—as gift. What he

attempts to do is to think rigorously phenomenologically the basic structure—the very possibility—of Christian charity (agape). Among his first writings on this possibility is

his now classic God Without Being, which is primarily a dialogue with two Heideggers—

the one who ceaselessly thinks Being and the other who claims in his 1953 Zurich

interviews brings out this tonality quite powerfully: Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with 171 seminars: "If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word Being would not occur in it. Faith does not need the thought of Being." The

English title of Marion's books unfortunately loses some of the force of the original Dieu sans Vetre, which could be translated either as God without Being or as God Without

Being God10—the second "God" here referring to the God of onto-theology. What

Marion is getting at specifically in this title, as well as in his articulation of the 'pure call', is that the encounter of I 'interloque with whoever or whatever calls him and gives him to himself to be a 'me' does not ultimately proceed from the horizon of being. In other words, the phenomenological articulation of / 'interloque as the one addressed in the

'pure call' unfolds a posteriori as a phenomenology outside the ontological horizon.

According to Marion, such is a phenomenology which precisely relieves theology of the burden of the tradition of onto-theology, along with Heidegger's critique of that tradition.11 But it also offers its resources in order to lift up12 the possibilities of negative theology, or Neo-platonism, from which both Marion and Henry draw deeply.

As applied to the work of Henry, Marion would emphasize the aspect of givenness and the a posteriori of being always already given to oneself to be a self—i.e.

Henry's phenomenology of 'birth'. In Henry's insights into this givenness—into the phenomenality of "the bond which unites the problem of truth with the problem of the ego

Emmanuel Levinas (ed. Jill Robbins). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 9 Marion opens his God Without Being with this quote. 10 On this see particularly Jacques Derrida's Jerusalem public lecture (in English) of June 1986, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" (trans. Ken Frieden), in Derrida and Negative Theology (eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay). Albany, NY: State University Of New York Press, 1992, pp. 73-142. (French in J. Derrida, Psyche: Inventions de I'autre. Paris: Galilee, 1987, pp. 535-95.) 11 See Marion, "Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology" (trans. Thomas A. Carlson): Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 572-91. 12 The word translated as "Relief in the title of Marion's article is the French releve, which could have either meaning. 172 at the source of the two" (EsM 6)—Marion finds "une possibility encore a peine apercue"

(PdV 8). But he would not promote the further submission of this bond to an ontology that ultimately requires phenomenologically insupportable claims—in particular, Henry's nomination of a process which, finally determining the precise source of the call, recasts it as an immovable—despite its 'processing'—and the interlocuted self as "a derivative and regional agency". In the end, in other words, Henry simply allows his phenomenological insights to be betrayed by the question of Being.

5.2 Levinas' Prophecy: 'The Other' and Diachrony

There is no question that philosophy in the late 20th - early 21st centuries has been dominated by a concern with 'the other'. This is not always a strictly ethical concern— although quite often such a concern will take on an ethical dimension, and for Levinas it always definitively does so. But overall it goes hand in hand with, is part and parcel of the whole critique of Modernity. It aims in large part at the presumption of the Kantian system to adequate thought to being, to conceptual mastering and determining of the right to appear of all phenomena by way of the categories of reason, and to assigning to the realm of non-appearing anything that cannot be so mastered. The 'other' under such a system—whatever or whoever does not coincide with reason—is thus aligned with non- being. To that extent, 'the other' is in Modernity thought (if thought at all) entirely on the basis of a negation: it is effectively denied phenomenality, denied being, or at least beingness—denied a face, as Levinas would say.

Levinas, perhaps more than anyone, has been influential in this critique of

Modernity which turns itself specifically to a concern with 'the other'. In fact, Levinas is 173 one of the few thinkers of the late 20th century who argue that not only such a concern, but the whole critique of Modernity is entirely a matter of ethics, or at least should be.

For Levinas, ethics is 'first philosophy'. But we have to appreciate here precisely how ethics is to be understood by him. It is not a matter of prescriptive systems and moral codes rooted in a definition of the neighbour as one among others gathered together under the banner of a common genus. The neighbour is not, for Levinas, first and foremost an ontic instance of a category by which he is defined ontologically. On the contrary, ontology—which Levinas defines strictly in ekstatic terms—is derivative from ethics, and itself possible only on the basis of the immediate ethical exigency of the encounter with, or revelation of—through the face of the other—the command to the other which one undergoes and which one is called to obey even before understanding it. To that extent, like Henry, Levinas founds the possibility of ekstatic intentionality on something prior which certainly in some sense involves affectivity, in that the ego is affected and decentered in the exigency of the ethical command. In this way, for Levinas, as well as for Henry, the self is originarily revealed to itself not as an T but as a 'me'. But unlike for Henry, that affectivity does not for Levinas take on the character of substantiality which affords it a fundamental ontological status. For although the self is in some sense given to itself in responsibility to the other, it is not given over to itself, but rather is given over to the other. It is in the accusative, in other words—and the accusative never rests for Levinas in the dative.13 Indeed, it never rests at all, but always unsettles the self in its tendency to self-ishly rest in itself as an ego; as such, the accusative paradoxically determines the 'me' precisely as the 'for-the-other' in responsibility. 'First philosophy' is

13 For that matter, the dative for Henry never rests entirely in itself but in the genitive, which in turn rests on the nominativity of the process of absolute Life's self-begetting in and as the Arch- 174 to that extent a matter of originary givenness—or, in Levinas' terms, a certain intelligibility—which originally determines the self as a 'me-for-the-other' in responsibility, while nevertheless allowing for no possibility of resettling or appropriating itself as an T in relation to that intelligibility. Herein, then, lies Levinas' core thought of responsibility to the other to the point of being a hostage of the other. The question of

Being is always secondary to and derived from such a responsibility. In other words, for

Levinas, there is no fundamental ontology.

How, then, is ontology possible at all for Levinas? Namely, on account of the

'third person'. According to Levinas, true ethics is always structured, if it is structured at all, as an asymmetrical relation between two: it concerns my own undoing by the face of the other in which the command to the other is revealed. But what about the third—the third person other to me as well, and other again to the other? To whom am I responsible first? Levinas argues that precisely this question is the origin of the political:

The third party is other than the neighbour, but also another neighbour, and also a neighbour of the other, and not just his counterpart. What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? Which comes before the other in my responsibility? What are they, then, the other and the third party, in relation to one another? Birth of the question. The first question in the inter-human is the question of justice.14

For Levinas, the entry upon the scene of the third person raises the question of the political; in doing so it raises the question of the ontological at the same time. For in the exigency of the ethical relation, the other is an irreducible singularity who absolves

Ipseity. 14 E. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (trans. Michael B. Smith). New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 142. 175 himself from any conceptual order and to whom one is responsible precisely as that absolved singularity. The thematization of singularities under a common genus is to that extent a sort of conceptual murder, a covering over or forgetfulness of the uniqueness of such singularities in an intentional determination. Yet precisely such a determination is necessary—although without the forgetfulness—with the raising of the question of the political. Levinas writes that the self,

. . . precisely as responsible for the other and the third, cannot remain indifferent to their interactions, and in the charity for the one, cannot withdraw its love from the other.. . . Behind the unique singularities, one must perceive the individuals of a genus, one must compare them, judge them, and condemn them. This is the hour of inevitable justice—required, however, by charity itself. The hour of justice, of the comparison between incomparables who are grouped by human species and genus. And the hour of institutions empowered to judge, of states within which institutions are consolidated, of Universal Law, and of citizens equal before the law.15

Justice, for Levinas, is reason—an ekstatic order or ordering required by the political but which must recall to itself at all times the ethical vision for the sake of which it was established. It must be vigilant in reminding itself that it is never as just as the ethics which instigates it is good; it must experience and preserve itself in a deep remorse over this fact—and be accordingly always open to an unwriting and a rewriting of its laws.

Above all it must seek the conditions for the unconditional welcome of the other: namely, a messianic culture of peace among irreducibles who absolve themselves from any ontological ordering of Being and of the human within Being.

E. Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav). New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 229. 176

Levinas is a deeply Jewish thinker for whom ethics—and hence Torah—is 'first philosophy'. Yet as a philosopher and student of the Western tradition, he is steeped also in the question of the relation of Greek thought, Greek reason, to the Jewish tradition, and especially in the phenomenological critique of the Western tradition by Husserl, with whom he studied personally in Freiburg in the late 1920's16, and by Heidegger, whom he also met at Freiburg. Levinas reads Heidegger fairly reductively, however: like Henry, he contends that Heidegger does not succeed even in his later work in articulating anything other than the traditional philosophical thinking of the West which for Levinas is inherently closed off to and not welcoming of 'the other'; it is a tradition of thinking 'the

Same', as Levinas says—a concept similar in some sense to Henry's notion of

'ontological monism'.17 For him, Being—no matter how it is spelled, whether as Sein or

Seyn (see #4.2, n. 20), Levinas does not even acknowledge such a distinction—is a concept-power of totalitarianism. Of course, Heidegger would in turn charge Levinas with thinking Being only as beingness—and in this he would be quite accurate. But there is a sense in which Levinas thinks Being narrowly as beingness—and along with that charges Heidegger with totalitarianism in his thinking—polemically: against the murderer of otherness—as he defines the Greek-inspired, Western thought of 'the Same'—Levinas places the peace and hospitality of Jewish ethics which unconditionally welcomes 'the

1 Levinas' doctoral thesis was on Husserl's concept of 'intuition' and was in fact the first book- length study of Husserl's thought published in French. See E. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (trans. Andre Orianne). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Although Levinas never mentions Henry explicitly, and although on many points he would radically disagree with Henry's thinking, he in fact taught seminars in the 1970's on Henry's L 'Essence de la manifestation, and there are distinct parallels between his own work on the interior affective life in Section II of his first great work, Totality and Infinity, and Henry's thinking on la subjectivite clandestine in L'Essence, as well as Henry's early work on Main de Biran and the body. 177 other' (the stranger, the widow, the orphan) to whom one is commanded in responsibility, and commanded precisely by the Word of God: "In my relation to the other, I hear the

Word of God. It is not a metaphor; it is not only important, it is literally true. I'm not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God." (ENTO

110)

The 'call', to that extent, plays an interesting role in Levinas' thinking. As his thought is messianic, the call issues from a future which lies outside and beyond any objectifiable horizon of Being, beyond any horizon of 'future presence', so that the relation of presence, of Being, to the messianic age is diachronous. In the present age, an ontological ordering within the horizon of Being is of course required; Greek reason is required for justice. But in fact the complete fulfillment of justice—God's Justice—will not be realized until a messianic culture of peace among irreducibles is established in an unobjectifiable future time. Such a messianic culture of peace Levinas refers to, in

Totality and Infinity , as 'fraternity', an order of universality which is above the political

Greek notion which has so influenced Western history. 'Fraternity' refers to the condition of all men and women as children of a common father. Here the father preserves the unicity of each child, recognizing each in his or her own radical uniqueness. Each is a singularity unto himself or herself, like unto the singularity that is the father, but also in each case different insofar as each is also placed side by side with all the others, one's siblings. Levinas writes that

. . . human fraternity. . . involves individualities whose logical status is not reducible to the status of ultimate differences in a genus, for their singularity consists in each referring to itself. (An individual having a common genus with

18 Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. 178

another individual would not be removed enough from it.) On the other hand, it involves the commonness of a father, as though the commonness of race would not bring together enough. Society must be a fraternal community to be commensurate with the straightforwardness, the primary proximity, in which the face presents itself to my welcome. (Tal214)

Precisely in fraternity, above a reason which universalizes by way of an abstraction, we find a higher reason: the will of a common father who brings all and holds all fast, these many numberless singularities, together in relation with one another. Ethics as 'first philosophy' is, to that extent, Levinas' response to the call of the fraternal community of the messianic era, arriving to him diachronously from beyond the horizon of Being. But it arrives to him precisely as the command to the other revealed in the other's face: the command to preserve and to watch over the unique irreducibility of the other that it might not be lost within the generalizing order of Being which is on the one hand, for Levinas, required for justice within the 'polis', while on the other hand closed to and murderous of whatever cannot be intentionally mastered in a concept. A situation of equality thus arises in the beckoning force of this call where each is commanded in responsibility to all the others, but also where each commands all others to the third, and further, where each commands the other to command the third, for there are others yet again even to this third—indeed, myself being one of them. Thus, while true ethics unfolds, for Levinas, in an asymmetrical relation between two, the call to the fraternal community demands

mutual responsibility—mutual asymmetry, as it were. " signifies this human kinship, this idea of a human race that refers back to the approach of the Other in the face, in a dimension of height, in responsibility for oneself and for the Other." (Tal 214) 179

One of the main criticisms frequently aimed at Levinas' thinking concerns the dependence upon the fraternal order which ultimately refers itself to a very specific theology. One might easily point out that this is precisely the kind of "theological turn" of which Dominique Janicaud accuses French phenomenologists in the late 20l century,

Levinas being one of the most highly implicated among them.19 Jacques Derrida's 1964 article on Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics"20, takes a similar position. The basic idea is that Levinas has merely replaced one onto-theological order (i.e. Levinas' view of

Greek reason, including Heidegger's 'Being') with another one: the tradition of Jewish monotheism, a 'higher universality' in Levinas' view. But in fact, Levinas does not at any time give us a theology proper. God is never an explicit theme in his thinking; on the contrary, God is for Levinas "the Holy One, blessed be He" who at all times precedes any subjectivity which might be capable of His thematization, and commands it to the other.

In other words, God is in no sense a 'presence' (understood ontologically) within

Levinas' ethics, nor is God strictly speaking an absence, such as might be understood in negative theology. Rather, God is "an idea signifying with a significance prior to all presence. . . prior to every origin in consciousness, and so an-archic, accessible only in its trace."21 Such a signification signifies, for Levinas, precisely as an 'infinition', a rupture of the finite horizon of presence undergone by the subject as a trauma and an exigency.

Here, the subject is affected by an originariness which precedes any possible ekstatic (i.e. finite) horizon in which God might be made into the theme of an explicit theology.

19 See D. Janicaud, TTFP, chapter 2. 20 First published in Revue de metaphysique et de morale, #3 & 4 (1964), then in J. Derrida, L'ecriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. — English in J. Derrida, Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 79-153. 21 E. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind (trans. Bettina Bergo). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 64. 180

Levinas' later work—particularly Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence — responds to the above criticism by articulating this undergoing in even more rigorously phenomenological terms:

This trauma has surprised me completely; the order has never been represented, for it has never been presented, not even in the past coming in memory, to the point that it is I that only says, and after the event, this unheard-of obligation. . . It is the possibility of being the author of what had been breathed in unbeknownst to me, of having received, one knows not from where, that of which I am the author. . . The unheard-of saying is enigmatically in the anarchic response. (OBBE 148-49)

Here ethics is the "slipping into me like a thief (OBBE 150), whereby the command comes to me in my own word, in prophecy, an inspiration whose origin is immemorial, the "trace of a wandering cause in me" (OBBE 150). This is anything but an ontological order of universality, or even an explicitly theological order; rather, it is an anarchy, an anarchic trace to which the subject who prophecies is a witness:

Witness, this way for a command to sound in the mouth of the one that obeys, of being revealed before all appearing, before all presentation before a subject, is not a psychological wonder, but the modality in which the anarchic Infinite passes its command. . . One is tempted to call this plot religious; it is not stated in terms of certainty or uncertainty, and does not rest on any positive theology. (OBBE 147)

Now this anarchic passing of the Infinite Levinas refers to throughout Otherwise than

Being as 'illeity'. "A neologism formed with il or Me, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me" (OBBE 12). In some sense, 'illeity'

Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 181 becomes in Levinas' late writings his own rigorously phenomenological way of indirectly referring to the God who is beyond Being. Or rather, 'illeity' is a prophetically inspired name for the 'infinitiori' in which the subject is "everywhere seen through"23, although without being interlocuted by God in such a way that God can be definitively pointed to as the originating source. "The subject is inspired by the Infinite, which, as illeity, does not appear, is not present, has always already passed, is neither theme, telos, nor interlocutor" (OBBE 148). In saying that the subject is not interlocuted, Levinas has

Martin Buber in mind for whom the T and the 'Thou' are mutually interlocuted in their

'I-Thou' relationship.24 Buber's is a mutual interlocution by the other in which each interlocuted one rests in the other, seeing the world in the other's light. Precisely the symmetry of the relation, according to Levinas, is what allows the subject to rest. By contrast, the asymmetry of the ethical relation in 'illeity' does not allow such a resting:

"It is identity undone to the limit, without being remade in the other, prior to a transubstantiation into another avatar and prior to the putting in place of an other. For it does not rest in the other, but remains in itself without rest" (OBBE 196). It is in this sense that the subject remains for Levinas in the accusative.

At the same time, however, Levinas speaks of "the inspired subject whose inspiration, alterity in the same, is the subjectivity or psyche of the subject" (OBBE 156, my emphasis), "a pneumatism" (OBBE 181), even "the very psyche of the soul" (GWCM

76). "This is the subject, irreplaceable for the responsibility there assigned to him, and who therein discovers a new identity" (GWCM'73). For Marion, such an inspiration, as a

See E. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (trans. Annette Aronowicz). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 167. 24 For Levinas' critique of Buber, see the first three chapters of E. Levinas, Outside the Subject (trans. Michael B. Smith). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. 182 new identity, is precisely what determines the subject as l'interloque. He argues that

Levinas fails to see that the accusative ultimately rests in the dative. That is, through its inspiration the subject becomes a 'me'—in Levinas' terms, a 'Me voici!'25—such that it becomes able to give itself, to be for the other. It is only because it is first able to be for the other that it is vigilant in its trauma—otherwise it would simply remain closed off to the other and enclosed in 'the same', encountering the other's 'otherness' as a threat. This is a significant point, as Levinas does sometimes speak of the ethical undergoing as a matter of the maturity of the subject. Section II of Totality and Infinity deals with the interior subjective life in terms of the building up of a 'psychism', i.e. the establishment of a self, a personal ipseity, separated from and self-sufficient and satisfied before the

'element' which threatens to submerge it in the impersonal 'there is'. But this establishment of the interior life is, for Levinas, not the final maturity; rather, "the human will pass through another decisive step. . . the subject, despite its satisfaction, fails to be sufficient unto itself. All exiting from self represents the fissure that opens up in the same toward the other. Desire metamorphosed into an attitude of openness to exteriority.

Openness that is appeal and response to the other. The proximity of the other, origin of all putting into question of self (AlTr 99). According to Levinas, prior to such a "decisive step", the self generally puts up barriers to the other and encounters the other's

'otherness' as a threat to the psychism that is certainly being built up but which has not yet fully taken 'birth'. Such an immature psychism would simply not be capable of ethics—and in fact it would be unethical to demand responsibility from it. For this

25 Levinas, quoting Isaiah, speaks of the "Here I am!" in which the prophet offers himself to the command before understanding it. The English loses much of the sense of the French "Me voici!", which evokes the sense in which for Levinas one is in the accusative before the other as "everywhere seen through": "Tu me vois ici." 183 reason, Marion argues poignantly that Levinas' accusative must indeed rest in the dative, in which—in its givenness to itself as inspiration—is already implied a mature psychism without which it could not be sustained in its openness to the other at all.26 The question now becomes one of how such a mature psychism which is no longer merely an interior, self-sufficient life but rather the for-the-other should be rigorously articulated phenomenologically.

Despite his sustained emphasis on the accusative and on his destitution before the other on account of the command, Levinas does actually powerfully evoke the dative in his articulation of the ethical relation as one of dis-interested love for the other, the unerotic par excellence—indeed, agape. One is reminded here of Augustine: "My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me."27 Such love is the mature psychism—for Levinas, it is the very 'flesh' of the inspired psyche. It is "the recurrence of awakening, which one can describe as a shiver of incarnation" (GWCM 73),

"a panting, a trembling of substantiality" (OBBE 180), which is both a dissolution of the

It is furthermore this very givenness, for Marion, which enables l'interloque also not to be, since in the dative it is given "the gift itself: the gift of rendering oneself to or of eluding the claim of the call" (ReGi 204-5). Marion's critique of Levinas is that his thought ultimately remains dependent upon a theology, even with his more rigorous phenomenological articulation of the undergoing in prophecy and illeity. In Levinas, the 'purity' of the 'call' is always in some sense undermined by the command: although Levinas claims that it comes from the 'Immemorial' and to that extent issues from the domain of the call itself, in illeity, the command actually comes more powerfully from the Torah; that is, in obligation to the other one is both constrained to be within an horizon of Being—"constrainfed] to give with full hands, and thus. . . constrained] to corporeality" (OBBE 142)—and accused of 'murdering' the other's uniqueness, since in subsisting ontologically as an intending corporeal ego, who in claiming 'my place in the sun' takes up space and casts a shadow over the other, one covers the other over with a theme. In the pure dative, on the other hand—a dative which does not, like Henry's dative, rest in a genitive which ultimately refers itself to a nominative theological postulate—the 'me' given to itself in its inspiration, who is able to give itself by being for-the-other, is also given over to itself to either be 'me-for-the-other' or not to be. In other words, for Marion, it is not the 'call' which ultimately accuses Levinas to the point of his destitution, but rather the Law. 7 Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 278. 184 stony core of the ego (i.e. ekstatic substantiality) and 'transsubstantiation', not to another ego, but rather to a (non-ekstatic) 'pneumatism' (OBBE 181). Indeed, it is precisely within this pneumatism which reaches the other, in this "breathing opening to the other"

{OBBE 181), that a certain relationship might be spoken of between the 'intelligibility' of

'otherness' and the 'continuity'' of 'substance' between the 'me' and all other ipseities.

Here, ipseities are not, as it were, atomic essences within a continuity called absolute

Life.28 For Levinas, one's inspiration as precisely the for-the-other, one's substitution for the other which is one's support of the other's psychism, constitutes an 'awakening' which becomes one's identity as an ipseity. Such a substitution is even described by

Levinas as 'maternity'—a passivity of undergoing in which "the oneself is hypostatized

... in a knot that cannot be undone in responsibility for others. . . [in] the gestation of the other in the same, which this responsibility for the other signifies" {OBBE 105). Precisely

'maternity' entails for Levinas a continuous psychic or pneumatic '(trans)substantiality' between 'me' and the 'other' which yet continues precisely on account of the intelligibility of the other's 'otherness' revealed in the 'infinition', in illeity. My love as the 'me-for-the-other' makes my face continuous with the other's face. It is "to be the bearer of another subject—bearer and supporter—to be responsible for this other, as if the face of the other, although invisible, continued my own face and kept me awake by its very invisibility, by the unpredictability that it threatens." {NTR 168)

It is thus not a matter for Levinas of simply overcoming one's forgetfulness in order to return to an eternal essence, as it is for Henry. The relation between the continuity of 'psychic substance', as the continuity of faces as the ''for-the-other\ and the

28 Although Henry does not actually describe ipseity as an 'atomic' essence, his articulation of it as an absolute immanence to itself (which at the very least evokes a sort of atomism) gives rise to 185 intelligibility of 'otherness' in Levinas ultimately depends upon the diachrony of the messianic culture of peace among irreducibles. The face of the other is, to that extent, something that gestates, something that is borne within 'the same', but not something born in any present that it might be grasped conceptually. The face thus opens an infinite hermeneutic, as Marion says, which recognizes "the other as the saturated phenomenon par excellence, and consequently also knows that it would take an eternity to envisage this saturated phenomenon as such—not constituting it as an object, but interpreting it in loving it. . . The face of the other person compels me to believe in my own eternity, like a need of reason or, what comes back to the same thing, as the condition of its infinite hermeneutic" (InEx 126-27). "To envisage a face requires less to see it than to wait for it, to wait for its accomplishment. . . the passage to effectivity" (InEx 122). But in the accomplishment of a face, in the effective accomplishment of a culture of peace among irreducibles, perhaps the ''for-the-othef in responsibility would no longer be required.

What, then, would become of such a relation? What would constitute in this new culture both the continuity between me's and the intelligibility of 'otherness'? What is messianic peace? Levinas himself is not able to answer:

Truth requires both an infinite time and a time it will be able to seal, a completed time. The completion of time is not death, but messianic time, where the perpetual is converted into the eternal. . . Is this eternity a new structure of time, or an extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness? The problem exceeds the bounds of this book. (Tal 284-85)

In fact, the problem exceeds the bounds of phenomenology.

the problem of transcendental solipsism in his thought. 186

Conclusion

Loving in the Mystery

The primary phenomenological difficulty for Henry remains the precise articulation of the relation between the continuity of pathetik flesh between multiples ipseities in Christ and the intelligibility of 'otherness' which allows each ipseity to recognize other ipseities in Christ as such—in other words, the articulation of the 'All-in-All' from the inside, in the non-ekstatic light which is the true light of absolute Life itself: "the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world" (John 1:9), "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it" (John 1:5). For Henry, this true light is love. It is love, however, which is first of all absolute Life's self-love in enjoying itself as a living self in and as each of the multiple ipseities: "each living lives only from the

Word of Life, inasmuch as he lives. What the Word of Life says to him is his own life.

And because this Word of Life is love—absolute Life's self-revelation in the enjoyment and love of self—what it tells him is his own love" (IAT 223). The command to love one's neighbour therefore rests in the self-love of absolute Life: "Love your neighbour as yourself, i.e. as the self which is absolute Life's grasping and enjoying of itself in you, the ipseity that you are, and to which the ego witnesses in the transmutation out of the care structure which blinds it as to its own essence. To that extent, the love of self as the love of absolute Life, not merely egoistic self-care, is already love of the other and vice versa—in that the true love is, for Henry, the true light itself, the very pathetik flesh of 187 absolute Life's self-generating, self-revealing self-enjoyment, i.e. auto-affection. In the continuity of the pathetik flesh of absolute Life's self-enjoyment and self-love in and as all ipseities, which "touches itself at every point in its being"1 in the Arch-Ipseity, lies the continuity of 'substance' (as fundamental ontology) between multiple ipseities, "the pure phenomenological substance of which life is made" (IAT 159), "the preunifying essence that precedes and preunites each of them." (IAT257)

The 'continuity' side of the relation as mentioned above is thus not the problem for Henry. The articulation of the pathetik flesh of absolute Life as love is phenomenologically sound, to which even Levinas tentatively points in the articulation of the continuity of faces, in the "gestation of the other in the same" (OBBE 105), in

'pneumatic (trans)substantiality'. The difficulty, for Henry, lies in the articulation of the

'intelligibility'—or 'signification'—which would allow one ipseity to recognize any other ipseity as such within that continuity. I say that Levinas tentatively points to the continuity of flesh. In some sense, Levinas' substantiality is as hesitating as Heidegger's ground which is ab-ground; it is always "a panting, a trembling of substantiality" (OBBE

180) which dissolves ekstatic substantiality while establishing a pneumatism, or "a shiver of incarnation" (GWCM 73) which is sensitive to the other's proximity. Here we find no spirit-body dualism but, as in Henry, an affective flesh which is itself love, which is light, an 'awakening', a "breathing opening to the other" (OBBE 181)—and which 'says' God as illeity. However, this 'continuity' as a 'saying' of God as illeity does not constitute fundamental ontology for Levinas; rather, it rests and depends upon an 'intelligibility' of

1 IAT 116 — For a powerful deconstructive treatment of the role of 'touch' and 'impressionality' in the Western tradition, particularly as it relates to Husserl's "principle of principles", see J. Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Iuc Nancy (trans. Christine Irizarry). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 188

'Otherness' which unfolds as an 'infinition', and which gestures towards its ontological closure only diachronously, in a messianic time of peace among irreducibles. If substance

"trembles" for Levinas, if Heidegger's ground "hesitates", it is undoubtedly because they both profoundly think time as non-synchronous, realizing that a fundamentally ontological thinking of time as eternity is beyond phenomenology's present grasp.

Henry, by contrast, thinks time entirely synchronously, yet as a synchrony which is not static in that it is as an "incessant coming of life [as] its eternal coming forth in itself, a process without end, a constant movement" (IAT 55). Such is a "pathetik temporality" in which "there is neither before nor after in the sense we understand them, but rather eternal movement, an eternal flux. . . an original immanent temporality [in which] there is nothing of the past nor anything that has not yet been—nothing lost and nothing anticipated" (IAT 159-60). Futhermore, the self-revelation of the eternal movement of Life in auto-referentiality (see #4.2) is precisely what makes eternity, for

Henry, phenomenologically articulable. But here again arises Henry's question-begging circularity: the positing in the nominative of the eternal process of absolute Life's self- begetting of itself in and as the Arch-Ipseity constitutes an onto-theological leap. On the basis of this leap he then interprets the 'I Am' sayings of Jesus as Life's auto- referentiality, and Jesus himself as the phenomenologist par excellence. In Henry's eyes, this gives phenomenology—and it gives phenomenologists who 'learn' to speak like

Jesus—the authority to articulate time synchronously (albeit not statically) as the eternal process of Life's coming into itself as the Arch-Ipseity, and also in and as multiple ipseities within the continuity of the Arch-Ipseity's pathetik flesh. The question is whether or not Henry (believes he) has so 'learned' to speak. 189

It is precisely this question-begging circularity of his articulation of 'pathetik temporality' which leaves Henry with the ever nagging problem of transcendental solipsism. Not only can we not be sure whether or not the 'incessant' constitutes the eternal—Levinas asks wisely: "Is this eternity a new structure of time, or an extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness?" (Tal 284-85)—but even if we stress the originary givenness to itself of the Arch-Ipseity in such a process, the question of the

'intelligibility' to one another as other of multiple ipseities is not solved. Henry comes closest to a possible approach to such a problem in articulating the "decisive transmutation" (IAT 169) which relieves the ego of its forgetful obsession with the care structure, and renders it a witness (see #4.3)—sustaining it as witness in the second 'fold' of the 'double revelation' (see #3.2)—to the Life which lives and acts through it in a sort of 'qualified otherness'. If this 'qualified otherness' is experienced by the ego as love, and if this love then opens it to the other in a "panting, trembling of substantiality", then we have a rigorously phenomenologically supportable beginning to answering the question of the relation of multiple ipseities within the Arch-Ipseity. We do not yet have, however, a completed fundamental ontology. Unless we are to follow Henry in his questioning-begging circularity, we have to admit that we have still to think the question of time very seriously as diachrony. We have to, as it were, love in the mystery.

Henry's thinking makes a potentially rich contribution to Christian theology today, in whose specific context the circularity of his thinking could be resolved in admissibly drawing its final authority from Scripture. In fact, Janicaud argues that it is not a phenomenological theology which is ultimately problematic, but the essentially theological phenomenology which Henry claims is rigorously phenomenologically 190 supportable as a fundamental ontology (see TTFP, chap. 4). Marion certainly draws from

Henry, as also from Levinas, for his own phenomenologically inspired theological thinking. The question of the effectivity of the "All-in-All" in particular might be fruitfully approached (if not entirely answered) through Henry's thought.

As to the possible use of Henry's thinking for a cross-cultural study of philosophies of subjectivity and consciousness, Henry himself suffers from a severe lack of information regarding especially classical Indian philosophies of the Self (see #3.3, n.

29 & #4.2, n. 18). A significant book on Indian philosophy and phenomenology , largely focusing on the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger, illustrates wonderfully the potentially rich field of this kind of cross-cultural study which is as of yet scarcely cultivated, let alone harvested. A more rigorous emphasis on Henry's keen interest in, and use of, Husserl's principle of'givenness' in his articulation of ipseity will no doubt make Henry's oeuvre a significant voice in the future maturation of such a harvest.

2 Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (eds. D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Lester Embree, and Jitendranath Mohanty). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. 191

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