Michel Henry

I'm using the notion of self-affection as an umbrella term, referring to the self-referential nature of experiencing.

the self-referential nature of the autoconstitutive structure of consciousness in Husserl, the notion of humanikite, for example, minus in Heidegger, the notion of self-affection being used by Husserl, also used by Merleau-Ponty, also used by Michel Henry, and many of us phenomenologists refer to the self-affection as basically the focal point or the most important, most original point in human experiencing.

It is basically a phenomenological appealment of self-referential nature of consciousness.

And what I would argue is that the body had been extensively dealt with from this point of view, self-affection, and the notion of heteroaffection, which also can be used as an umbrella from a pharmacology referring to exteriority, referring to otherness, to exposedness, to vulnerability, if you wish, it's always relegated in the pharmacology analysis to a second level.

So it was really a way to bring together these ideas and also sort of like Freud and Jung with the idea of the subconscious and what sort of below the surface, below the threshold of our consciousness.

And again, the work of, I think, a phenomenologist and a former dancer, Maxine Sheets-Johnson, who talked about the darkness of our bodily insides and how so much of what the body is is actually hidden from us.

So the occulted body was a way of speaking about partly the esoteric language of the body, but partly also the physical material hiddenness of so much of the body and that what people think about when they talk about bodies is actually just a surface and even then a sort of a socially presented surface.

We have our own cultural language that we can speak to now.

I'm interested in both the idea of the method and the contestation as ideas related to this.

But the pathophany is relating to illness or some disturbance or suffering.

And for me, that also relates a lot to the work of the French phenomenologist Michel Henry, who spoke about, and this is very interesting in relation to the language models and where we're going with the digital, who spoke about clandestine subjectivity.

And that, I think, came out of his experiences in the resistance era.

A lot of the

most important thinkers to me have actually been like Christian phenomenologists like Michel Henry.

So I've obviously turning upside down or inside out Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, but in a way I found fascinating because of his discussion of incarnation and how like this...

this givenness of our incarnation of the flesh, this thing which is...

The best bits of it have been achieved and it's all based on 19th century philosophy.

But as I was reading it, The idea that something in history has to make a supreme sacrifice, the proletariat, destroy the system and in the process redeem humanity and destroy itself destroy its own culture because that's part of the story as well i'm sitting there thinking age 16 do you know what i've heard this story before somewhere else actually i hear it every time i go and kneel down on one of those hard pews in the in the catholic chapel and hear a sermon the idea of the redeemer the end of history Michel Henry, who's a French philosopher, French Christian Marxist, a few years later wrote the definitive book about this.

Henry says the proletariat is Christ.

Now, that was my introduction to it.