ABSTRACT
Though intimately belonging to the twentieth-century school of phenomenology, Michel Henry (1922-2002) has not acquired the world fame of other phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, not to mention their mentor, Edmund Husserl. In spite of the sometimes severe criticisms from within or without phenomenology,2 the freshness, tenacity, and rigor of Henry’s thought cannot be missed, whilst a definitive judgment on its philosophical breadth is far from having been reached. It might not be coincidental that an author whose entire intellectual career was somewhat selfeffacing, albeit perennially incisive, had modest origins. Michel Henry was born
This article has been written with the help of a generous grant offered by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for which I am most grateful. 1 Michel Henry, Auto-donation: entretiens et conférences, ed. by Magali Uhl, Montpellier: Prétentaine 2002, p. 74. 2 See in this sense, Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry, ed. by Philippe Capelle, Paris: Éditions du Cerf 2004; Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Combas: Editions de l’éclat 1991; Antonio Calcagno, “Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 39, no. 2, 2008, pp. 117-29; John Milbank, “The Soul of Reciprocity (Part One),” Modern Theology, vol. 17, no. 3, 2001, pp. 335-91, see especially pp. 355-66; Michael Kelly, “Dispossession: On the Untenability of Michel Henry’s Theory of Self-Awareness,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 35, no. 3, 2004, pp. 261-82; James Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian Reading of C’est moi, la vérité,” Husserl Studies, vol. 15, 1999, pp. 183-230; Jeremy H. Smith, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and Husserlian Intentionality,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, pp. 191219; Jeffrey Hanson, “Phenomenology and Eschatology in Michel Henry,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, ed. by Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis,
in Haiphong in contemporary Vietnam as the son of a marine officer and a concert pianist. Ten days after his birth his father died in a car accident. In 1929, he returned with his mother and elder brother to France, where he attended the Lycée HenryIV in Paris, thriving in an environment imbued with art, literature, and philosophy. After completing a master’s thesis with the title Le Bonheur de Spinoza, he joined the French Resistance in 1943, where was nicknamed “Kant” because the only book he carried in his backpack was the Critique of Pure Reason. From 1945 on, he imparted his philosophical versatility at L’Université Paul Valéry in the quiet sunny surroundings of Montpellier, after having graciously refused a professorial position at the Sorbonne. His wide journeys led him through Eastern Europe and even to Japan. The authorial activity and conference schedule were every bit as intense. He retired in 1982 and died twenty years later.3 Henry’s indubitable contribution to phenomenology matches his novelistic authorship, the value of which was promptly noted and even valued. (The need for literary expression should not be ignored in any comparison between Henry and Kierkegaard, two authors who devoted their entire reflective energy to probing the endless depths of human inwardness.) Worthy of mention is also that the scope of Henry’s thought was broad enough to include topics as dissimilar as Marxist anthropology,4 Kandinsky’s art,5 the genesis of psychoanalysis,6 the barbarity of modern scientism,7 and the hidden philosophical treasures of Christianity.8
