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  • Is Radical Phenomenology Too Radical?Paradoxes of Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Life
  • Frédéric Seyler

Radical phenomenology is nonintentional phenomenology, and it opposes what Michel Henry has designated since The Essence of Manifestation "onto-phenomenological monism,"1 according to which appearing is always ecstatic, that is, transcendent. Contrary to monism, radical phenomenology maintains a dualism of appearing: underlying the intentionally given, life reveals itself in pure immanence. Nonetheless, this living self-affection can never appear to intentionality, although the second is grounded in the first: they are two modes of appearing that are essentially different. While the very essence of appearing or manifestation lies in immanent self-affection, intentional appearing is derived from and second to pre-intentional affectivity.

But following this line of thought, it is now the possibility of transcendental phenomenology that seems problematic: if the transcendental pertains to an entirely different order of appearing than what appears in the sphere of intentional visibility, how, then, can it be shown and made visible in a broad sense? This would be the first question or paradox. Furthermore, as a second point, this invisibility is also problematic on ethical grounds since the recognition of Life as an absolute is central to Henry's approach to ethics and religion. [End Page 277]

1. How Is Radical Phenomenology Possible? The Paradox of Henrian Discourse

Henry's radicalism calls into question its own legitimacy as a philosophical discourse: Indeed, how can we possibly know about what is presented as a radical revision of phenomenology, and even if we were able to, how could we write about it in a text that aims precisely at showing what has been unthought of in the phenomenological tradition before it? Henry himself was quite aware of the paradox implied by radical phenomenology. As we will see, his solution consists in replacing evidence with certainty as the ultimate criterion for discursive truth.2 How does this work?

Michel Henry clearly addresses this problem in sections 15 and 16 of Incarnation, published only two years before his death.3 The importance of these passages cannot be overestimated, because what is at stake through them is nothing less than the legitimacy of the Henrian phenomenology of life itself. Let us analyze therefore these sections in some detail.

Having excluded both intentionality and evidence as possible access points to life, Henrian discourse seems indeed to be trapped in an aporia, precisely to the extent that every discourse appeals to intentionality and evidence, a logos that Henry rejects as a means to access life's fundamental invisibility. As Henry states: "If life is the invisible, how can it be accessible through thought [pensée], how can a philosophy of life still be possible?"4

This leads us to the first decisive turning point in his argument: according to Henry, the question above must first be reversed. Before asking how thought can get to life, one should ask how thought can come to itself.

Through his interpretation of Descartes's videre videor in the Second Meditation, Henry states that the certainty or indubitability of thought does not rely upon any form of vision or evidence, since intentional visibility has failed to pass precisely this "test" of certainty. Therefore, Descartes's videor (i.e., the certainty of any given cogitatio) does not refer to intentionality but, rather, to what could be termed as immanent givenness radically independent of it.

But this immanent givenness stands for the process through which life reveals and engenders itself as living subjectivity. It is not intelligible, not the logos of the Greek tradition, but archintelligible, the logos of life as found in the Christian tradition, namely, in the Gospel of John. Ultimately, evidence is only possible as grounded in or founded upon certainty, which is nothing but life's self-revelation. And what applies to a single cogitatio [End Page 278] applies to cogitationes, that is, to reasoning, to text, and finally to philosophy and even phenomenology itself. As Henry writes: "The reversal of phenomenology has to be formulated as follows: It is not thought that gives us access to life, but it is life that enables thought to access itself."5

However, this reversal, which is...

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