Michel Henry

The Affects of Thought

Jeffrey Hanson, Michael R. Kelly, Jeffrey Hanson, Michael R. Kelly

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441108333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Michel Henry (1922-2002) was a French philosopher and novelist whose work spanned decades and genres while remaining united by a singular vision. In this specially commissioned collection, eight internationally recognized experts on Henry's thought investigate his profound acquaintance with the mystery of life-which he understood as the irreducible bedrock of all reality-in its self-manifestation under the rubrics of phenomenological experience, religion, and praxis. Each chapter investigates a different aspect of Henry's remarkable range of thought, focusing on his special relevance to debates on the relationship of phenomenology and theology as well as to contemporary radical discourses on embodiment and immanence, politics and theory. Henry's phenomenology of life is both deep and demanding, and its relevance to the topics under examination in this book cannot be denied. This collection represents the first sustained effort in coming to an understanding of just how far and wide that relevance reaches. It will not only spark a resurgence in Henry studies, but resonate within that sphere for many years to come.

Part I

Phenomenology

Chapter 1

The Invisible and the Phenomenon

Jean-Luc Marion

[W]hatever is said of a nature, unchangeable, invisible . . . must not be measured after the custom of visible things.

Augustine, On the Trinity¹

I. The Unapparent and the Invisible

In its movement of expansion (as a matter of fact, not only the growth of its domain, but also and consequently of its validity) phenomenology does not cease to give rise to new fields of research for phenomenality, so as to place phenomena within it permanently that no eye has yet constituted, let alone seen. Its legitimacy consists entirely in this work of bringing into visibility what would have remained unseen and considered invisible without it and its effort. If there is a single argument in favour of the fruitfulness and coherence of this method (or non-method) of philosophy, it must be sought in the successive extensions that the great phenomenologists have achieved, by unforeseeable measures, but all the same now for about a century without interruption. Yet can and indeed should this expansion of the domain of visibility be continued indefinitely? What invisible will, then, set its limit? And, for that matter, what connection does the visible maintain with the invisible? Does the visible always increase inversely proportional to the invisible so as to end by eliminating it tangentially? Could the invisible not instead intensify the visible, as a deeper layer that would stretch equally far, because it alone would make the visible possible? In various forms, this question spans the entire history of phenomenology because phenomenality, as the definition and essence of the phenomenon, implies the invisible as much as the visible. It is even possible that all phenomenology could be judged by the measure of the dignity it grants to the invisible, just as a thinking of being is judged by the status it accords to and what it can show of the nothing.

Put differently, how should we understand the enigmatic but unavoidable expression ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’ [Phänomenologie des Unsichtbaren].² Michel Henry understood this question, bequeathed to us by Martin Heidegger, perfectly when, positing that ‘life . . . conceals itself in principle from every conceivable visualization’, he wondered: ‘Is not a phenomenology of the invisible a contradiction in terms?’³ I will try to show that not only did he confront this question in 1990 but had actually faced it squarely since the massive and masterful opening of his research in The Essence of Manifestation, which in this context begins to appear as not only a beginning but a surprising anticipation. It certainly anticipates his own final writings, but in a sense also Heidegger himself, since Heidegger does not use this expression until 1973, while its resumption by Henry in 1990 formalizes a reflection that goes back at least to 1963. Yet the unapparent and the invisible do not mean the same thing, despite the fact that they challenge the privilege given to the visible. This difference must be measured.

II. The Univocity of the Invisible and the Visible

How might one negotiate the link between the visible and the invisible in any definition of the phenomenon? Metaphysics arranges them according to greatly differing measures but which can all be summarized either in a transition of the invisible to the visible as its outcome or in a return of the visible to the invisible as its foundation. In both cases, it assumes explicitly or implicitly the continuity of a conversion, or rather of a transformation, that is to say, their univocity.

First it can be a matter of changing the invisible into the visible. For example, in René Descartes, the visible, actually the sensory (the future ‘secondary qualities’, that is to say, the only qualities, since the ‘first qualities’ are quantities) only appears in clear but still confused ideas. This confusion is marked by the impossibility of showing through concepts how one quality differs from another, so that in this way it witnesses to a lack of visibility, which only clear and distinct ideas could offset.⁴ But these ideas are only imagined as illustrations, or rather as arrangements into shapes. That is to say, these shapes are understood as translating into terms of extension, shape and movement, and they are assumed to generate the clear but confused ideas of the sensory in the name of ‘Nature’, which establishes them. Yet these composite shapes (which Descartes names ‘machines’) remain by definition doubly invisible compared to sensory experience: first, because they remain simple hypotheses from a physical point of view; second, because the original figures ‘very little resemble’⁵ their supposed sensory effects. In fact, sensory things only retain extension in common with their shapes. (This is even more the case in Nicolas Malebranche, for whom it becomes an intelligible extension, which is hence imagined and no longer physical.) More simply, one could also just say that the visible always arises from an unseen, which is itself invisible, without judging the exact nature of this latter in advance as either an intelligible (noumenal) unseen or as an unseen ‘blind’⁶ to the rhapsody of the variety of intuition.

Yet, conversely, it can be a matter of going back from the sensory, taken as a (confused) sensory, to the (visible) intelligible invisible, in such a way that only the intervention of the intelligible and as such invisible concept upon it would in the end make it visible. Either, in the radical fashion of Malebranche, one deems that my own body actually remains ‘invisible’ (this incidentally like all other sensory bodies), while their ideas, as the only thing that can be known, are only opened in the ‘real light’, namely, that of ‘universal Reason and intelligible light’.⁷ Or, in the even more radical manner of Plato, the sensory body (here the bed produced by an artisan) turns out to be ‘something which is vague [αμ υδ ρον] in regard to truth’, since ‘the more things partake of truth, the clearer they are.’⁸

Besides, it matters little whether one moves from the invisible to the visible or rather from the visible to the invisible, since this difference in meaning itself relies on a single direction, according to which ‘the teleology which animates it [i.e., ecstatic phenomenology] and whereby it defines itself is to render the invisible visible in such a way that the visible arrives only in the return of the contrary power from which it arises.’⁹ In fact, not only metaphysics, but also phenomenology in its most current sense, assumes the univocity and homogeneity of the visible and the invisible. And Henry’s entire enterprise precisely amounts to questioning this assumption, which presupposes, without really knowing or understanding it, that by moving from one to the other in this way, the invisible and the visible belong to the same world, hence to the world itself. And this is impossible because (as we will see) only the visible gives itself to the world and opens itself to it, while the invisible neither opens itself to the world nor is one with the world. Making the invisible visible (indeed making the visible invisible) assumes that a transition from one to the other would take place, hence that they remain inscribed in a univocal phenomenality that remains homogenous to them. This is without doubt a common and almost inevitable thesis, so much so that Maurice Merleau-Ponty made it his own when he defined the invisible first as ‘what is not actually visible, but could become visible’, then as ‘what would still have to be thought as a thing relative to the visible’. This homogeneity lies in the first instance in the translation of intelligible figures into sensory ideas (both clear and confused ones) and depends in the second instance on the role allocated to the categories of an a priori for the visibility of the sensory. But in either case the invisible behaves towards the visible as a ‘negation-reference’ (zero of . . .), so that it remains throughout at the inside of a single ‘dimensionality of Being’.¹⁰

Not only are the visible and the invisible inscribed into a continued and single phenomenal process, with a gradual or sudden transition (it matters little), but above all this one identical process is applied to any phenomenality without exception. This argument arises out of metaphysics, but phenomenology assumes its legacy, at least in its most decisive historical figures (that is to say, all the way to Merleau-Ponty and in conformity with Edmund Husserl).

III. The Manifestation of Essence

It is only on the basis of such a conflict of interpretations regarding the connection between the visible and the invisible that it becomes possible to understand in full force – but also (one must insist on this, since the usual readings ignore it) in all its precision – the definitive and foundational decision taken from the outset in 1963 by The Essence of Manifestation. This is particularly true of the third section, which settles ‘The Internal Structure [of Immanence] and the Problem of Its Phenomenological Determination: The Invisible’.¹¹ This is really the essential section, since Section I is limited to displaying phenomenality thought from transcendence, thus from ‘monism’. Section II, in a still mostly polemical fashion, deals with destroying the presupposition of this monism (transcendence) starting from immanence. As for Section IV, for it will be left only (if one can say it like this) the task of interpreting immanence as affectivity and obtaining for it the phenomenological determination as invisible. The heart of the research, then, really lies in Section III, which sets up the powerful if enigmatic paradox of a determination not only of immanence, but also of its phenomenality, by the invisible – a kind of manifestation of the invisible itself and as such.

Following the guiding thread of the two fundamental paragraphs of The Essence of Manifestation (§50: “The Facelessness of the Essence” and §51: “Visible and Invisible”) we wi...