Genealogy of modern philosophy: This week's reading TBA

We're currently reading a book from French philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002):

The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (1985)

The sections for this week will be announced later, so check back here closer to the event. See below for a few notes on the text. You can find a PDF of the text by clicking on the Google folder link at the verry BOTTOM of this event description - scroll all the way down 👇

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A FEW NOTES ON MICHEL HENRY
Henry is a fascinating, if difficult, thinker. Part of the influential post-War generation of French philosophers, he deliberately kept his distance from Parisian fashions and chose to live and work in the south of France. He trained as a phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger but from the get-go developed a powerful critique of this tradition - and, following Heidegger, of Western philosophy generally. In their striving for transcendence, Henry argues, philosophers have a tendency to conceal and evade the fundamental substance of affectivity, corporeality and life. According to him, this holds not just of classic idealism but of Husserl, Heidegger and their followers as well.

Henry accepts the basic starting points of phenomenology: the emphasis on the structure of appearance, the phenomenological reduction of objectivity to reveal its phenomenal ground, Heidegger's emphasis on a fundamental ontology. He breaks new ground by locating the essence of phenomenality in the affectivity of the living body, or what elsewhere he calls flesh. The world manifests itself to us within the light of our vision only because the radical intimacy and receptivity of embodied life lies at the root of this manifestation. Flesh is thus the transcendental condition for the possibility of appearance, a position that Henry terms material phenomenology.

What distinguishes Michel Henry from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another phenomenologist of embodiment, is his emphasis on the materiality of of the body as a site of immanence. The existentialist movement tends to see the body as our instrument of existence and our mode of being-in-the-world: only as embodied beings can we press into existential possibilities and thus transcend towards a world, from walking, riding and eating right up to perception, language and abstract thought. For Henry, by contrast, the affective body of life is altogether prior to any transcendence to a world. It is a radical immanence and self-intimacy, a pure self-affection not accessible to vision or appearance, since it is what first makes vision possible.

Henry's immanence critique of the tradition has fascinating affinities with Deleuze and Guattari - no in the least his positive references to Nietzsche in The Geneaology of Psychoanalysis. Like D&G, Henry privileges affirmative life and criticizes the philosophy of transcendence, negativity and death. His material phenomenology, much like Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, is focused on the body and affectivity as fundamental conditions of experience.

And yet, Henry's conception of immanence couldn't be more different than Deleuze's. He regards the Parisian philosophy of difference (Deleuze, also Derrida, Foucault, etc) as simply another instance of the evasion of life in favour of exteriority. Radical immanence for Henry is interiority, inwardness, self-intimacy - an abiding of life with itself that he calls ipseity. At the root of our existence there is a fundamental affective selfhood that remains identical to itself, beyond the externality of space, time and world. This ipseity was glimpsed by Descartes in his Meditations as the cogito but was soon lost in the analysis of perception and objective cognition. Heidegger too, in his concept of ek-stasis, passes over this immanence of corporeal life. It is the task of material phenomenology to uncover and affirm this fundamental self-affectivity as the essential condition of phenomenal experience.

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Art: Blue (1922) by Wassily Kandinsky