ABSTRACT
In The Essence of Manifestation, Michel Henry states the methodological requirement that any philosophical research must meet: its fundamentality. In La barbarie, Michel Henry thinks of culture as life's self-transformation. "Culture means life's self-transformation, the movement by which life never ceases to modify itself in order to reach higher forms of realization and accomplishment". The “force” that emerges from this primordial and pathetic self-embracing is the origin of any power, including the power of the body. The body cannot simply be ejected out of the original manifestation—of a universal phenomenological ontology. If the affective matter that constitutes the practical power of our body is invisible—irreducible to the light of exteriority—it can still be “seen” through art; not through figurative art, which remains attached to the realm of objective representations, but through abstract art which “places before our wondering eyes an unexplored domain of new phenomena that have been forgotten”.
