Correcting the error

I swore under my breath (whilst reading something), not because it was revealed that a young artist - and Picasso's neighbour - had committed suicide after smoking opium, but because it was claimed that he 'hung' himself.
It is a question of values, you see...

Michel Henry

Everyone has been talking about malarkey on post-continental philosophy. Badiou, Deleuze, (Michel) Henry and (Penelope) Laruelle. Quite a Christmas list. I read the first few lines whilst standing in the bookshop (considering tucking the volume under my coat and shuffling out). Something about Henry and phenomenology without a transcendent subject. I talked to Brain and Brn.
"Tome is reading it!" they cried. An endorsement. Brain suggested the short 'Phenomenology of Life', for a summary of Henry's project.
This is an intriguing text. Lots of biblical references, which is problematic since I find that they introduce a degree of opacity.
Difficulties aside, I was able to discern two threads to Henry's analysis. On the one hand, the - negative - characterisation of the appearing of the 'world' through intentional consciousness (as that which underpins most phenomenologies), and on the other, a notion of 'life' as immanent revelation, or affectivity.

Thus: "Whereas the world unveils in the 'outside of self,' being only the 'outside of self' as such, such that everything which it unveils is exterior, other, different, the first decisive trait of the revelation of life is that, because it carries no divide or gap within it and never differs from itself, it only ever reveals itself." (p103)
Henry wishes to find a way out of a "crisis of extreme gravity" (p101) brought about by the inability of classical phenomenology to think the revealing of intentionality to itself without positing an anonymous second consciousness which is able to 'intend' intentionality. In addition, there is an equally important (and arguably more interesting) aim: Henry's attempt to ground the significance of phenomena in affectivity.

"[L]ife is marked with a radical passivity towards itself, it is a suffering of oneself or a 'self-suffering', a 'self-enduring'." (p106)
This 'me' which I carry around with myself is a peculiar creature. Henry will have it that there is a coincidence of selves, rather than another tired subject-object duality. In pain, for example, we do not 'intend' the pain. The pain is not other or external; there is no gap across which consciousness stretches. Thus pain and the presentation of pain are the same.
For Henry, the 'putting up with me' is the foundation of suffering, and thus of joy. This originary self-enduring, and the a priori possibility of passing from one tonality to another - of becoming - allows for a moment of recognition, in an explosion of joie de vivre, of the vocation of man. This is complex, but it seems to me that being born into such an originary suffering suggests a capacity for the overcoming of suffering, in joy. There is a metaphysical element too, which Henry brings out by quoting Kierkegaard: "The self plunges through its own transparency into the power which established it." (p107)

The ebb and flow of our affective tonalities determines our actions. According to Henry, we spend most of our time trying to effect a move from negative to positive modalities. The world of phenomenal objects is described by Henry as being devoid of meaning, cold, lifeless, a matter of indifference (since we have no affinity with it). It is only in 'life' that meaning surges into the world. It is only through an affective, living body - flesh - that we are forced to 'take the world personally'.
"Thus affectivity does not designate any particular sphere of our life, it penetrates and founds as a last resort the entire domain of action, of 'work' and thus of economic phenomena, which [...] cannot be separated from the realm of human existence." (p105)

Where does all this leave us? I feel particularly inclined to investigate these points:

• The 'problem' of immanence. That is to say, if pain and flesh are invisible (as Henry insists), how can we take them up in thought (without defiling them by intending them)?
• Among the resonances with Bergson, one is particularly striking. Like in Bergson's Matter and Memory, Henry articulates two heterogeneous lines of thought which meet in the moment of action (matter and memory/intentionality and affectivity). Are we always condemned to a form of dualism?
• Can a sufficiently complex account of the determining relations between affectivity and 'meaning in the world' be provided in order to distance these views from an animalism?

Sartre finally taken up by the analyticists...

"Now, Albert is unaware that the author of Nothing and Beingness [sic] moonlights by writing cheap, disgusting pornography."

- W.G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language p15.

Work

The last few days I spent some time writing someone else's essay.
"Hume and induction", they said.
"Fuck it - I'll refute him off the top of my head", I said.
Five hours later and my bravado had turned to ashes.
"Easy", I'd said, "I'll deploy the old 'conditions of possible experience' argument." This turned out to be a mind-achingly complex process. In my gusto, I'd neglected to consult the secondary material (of which one must demonstrate a suitable knowledge!). I hadn't even looked on the internet for any vague guidance. My answer of choice demanded that I reread the transcendental deduction, and even then I wouldn't be sure whether all my analyses would actually answer the question (and one must answer the question!)
What's more, the issue of 'cheating' was troubling me. Luckily, I discovered that the wiring of the computer had - conveniently - created an electromagnetic zone of indiscernability right where I was sitting. One less thing to worry about, at least.