The world or Life’s Fragility. A new Critical Reading of Henry’s Phenomenology of Life
(2021) Michel Henry’s Practical Philosophy — accepted/in-press
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- Abstract
- From where does the world get its sensibility? This paper hopes to suggest that the world gets its sensibility from life’s primordial fragility. Life is taken here in Michel Henry’s sense as the primordial “how” of any phenomenality, the affectivity of that which experiences itself through a self-affection. However, life has precisely not been thought by Henry in its fragility. Life’s self-affection is an indestructible self-affection. Life’s absoluteness, which consists in feeling its own indestructibility, is what Henry thinks as its absolute autonomy. Hence the necessity of a new critical reading of Michel Henry, aiming to show that, if Henry fails to generate sensibility from life’s self-affection, it is not because of life’s subjectivity, but rather because of life’s absoluteness. The second moment of this reflection sketches the converse possibility of the world’s sensibility arising from life’s primordial fragility. Sensibility would only arise from the fragility of this bond that links life to itself. But is it not the very definition of fragility to threaten what it determines? The inherent paradox of this thesis will, then, eventually appear. Fragility, as the condition of life's and the world's shared and primordial sensibility, threatens them to the same degree with insensibility.
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Lorelle, P. (2021). The world or Life’s Fragility. A new Critical Reading of Henry’s Phenomenology of Life. In B. Harding, J. Hanson, M. Kelly (ed.), Michel Henry’s Practical Philosophy. Bloomsbury. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/123048