The Essence of Life: Drive or Desire?
Renaud Barbaras
The entirety of Michel Henry’s philosophical enterprise is constructed in opposition to what he calls ontological monism, that philosophy that sees in exposition at a distance – Gegenständlichkeit (objectivity) – the fundamental condition of appearance, and in intentionality, the law of phenomenality. In response, Henry thus tirelessly poses the question: Is the manner in which intentionality is given to itself, itself intentional? Does ek-static givenness also reign over the impression wherein it affects itself? His reply is obviously negative: Intentionality is revealed to itself in a mode that is not intentional, a mode in which no distance is established and no visibility unfolds. Henry refers here to the mode of impression that affects itself, possesses itself completely, and struggles only with itself, because, as he writes:
The impression is only possible (and thus objectification ulterior to the impression is only possible) if it touches itself at each point of its being such that, in this original embrace with itself, it impresses upon itself, and that its impressional character consists of nothing other than this first unceasing impressionality.1
It follows from this that the task of a ‘radical phenomenology’ is to dissociate these two modes of phenomenalization.2 And, specifically, to liberate impressional phenomenality from the grasp of intentionality in order to uncover the status of a ‘fundamental and a priori possibility’ that confers upon it an absolutely original and constituting character.3 However, the passivity that is experienced in the impression, or rather, of which the impression is the experience, itself refers to another passivity that is, so to speak, superior, in that, if the impression is given to itself in the sense that it is its own givenness – its own appearance – it nevertheless does not give itself as impression and as the impression that it is. The fundamental powerlessness that characterizes the impression, given that it comes to itself without being responsible for this coming, reveals a power that remains at the heart of the impression and that is the very thing that it rests within. This power is nothing other than life itself, insofar as, according to the abrupt definition that Henry proposes, ‘life is nothing other than that which experiences itself without differing from itself, such that this experience is an experience of self and not of something else, a self-revelation in a radical sense.’4 Life must be understood as this originary and transcendental affectivity that makes the experience of itself possible, without the distance that characterizes all impressions. This means that the appearance to and in itself of the impression is always at the same time a self-revelation of life: The impression remains in life because it is life itself that appears in it. Yet, saying that the impression proceeds from a life that appears in it, that its appearance refers to this originary affectivity that is life itself, is necessarily to give this impression a flesh. This flesh designates nothing other than the belonging to the life that is at work and manifests itself in the experience of this impression: The impression has, or rather is, a flesh (Leib) because its proper erleben is the reverse of an originary leben. Life, Henry tells us, is not the dead identity of a thing but an impressional matter that never ceases to experience itself: ‘This living auto-impressionality, it is a flesh. It is only because it belongs to a flesh, because it carries within it this pathetic and living auto-impressionality, that all conceivable impression can be what it is.’5 Thus the flesh is what characterizes the impression when life manifests itself within it, but insofar as the flesh is nothing other than the living auto-impressionality of the impression, this flesh is first of all the flesh of life itself. It refers both to the impression itself, given that life is attested in it, and to life itself, given that it realizes itself only in self-impressing impressions. The flesh is like the point of articulation, or the common element of impressionality and life. It is the same originary flesh that exists as life and experiences itself as impression or affection: Life is the ratio essendi of the flesh, the affection its ratio cognoscendi.
It follows that Henry’s conception of life – the absolute that underpins phenomenality – is worked out under the form of a philosophy of the flesh. But this observation is rather perplexing, as in spite of their profound co-originality, the flesh and life, at least as Henry characterizes them, seem to commit us to two phenomenologically very different paths. Life is the element of originary phenomenality. It is the absolute immanence without which nothing could appear. In other words, it is the givenness without distance without which no givenness at a distance could come to pass or be effectuated within life. Thanks to the disassociation of the two modes of phenomenalization, the realm of life is absolutely foreign to the realm of the object. This amounts to recognizing that all distance and all exteriority are absent from life, that life is concerned only with itself and that its being consists in precisely this fact. Yet, the flesh in which life both realizes and experiences itself is charged with a completely different sense. The flesh is that which, implicated as much in my perception of the world as in my action upon it, experiences itself in both of them. Put otherwise, there is no flesh without what we can only name the body – without passing judgment, of course, on its true signification and the necessity of reintegrating it or not into the realm of objectivity. It is difficult to avoid understanding the flesh and the body (my own body) as one and the same reality, understood of course under different guises or from different perspectives, even if the description of the body seems to lead us down a completely different path than that of pure auto-affection. If the essence of the flesh seems to lead us back to life, its phenomenological efficacy uncovers for us the powers of what we call the body, and it is thus in its capacity to think this body, which the flesh necessarily also is, that a phenomenology of the flesh can be put to the test.
This requirement did not escape Henry, for whom the phenomenology of life very quickly opened onto a phenomenology of the flesh:
It is now a question of seeing all that this phenomenology of the flesh, as an essential piece of the phenomenology of life, also allows us to understand concerning, on the one hand, the flesh itself, and, on the other, its relation to the body.6
However, strictly speaking, from a perspective that sets the phenomenal regime of ek-stasis, that is, the order of the object, to the side in favour, solely, of vital immanence, it is obvious that the body itself, with all its powers, can only be understood on the basis of the flesh, that is, of life. This is the theoretical wager that distinguishes Henry’s approach, even within phenomenology. It no longer understands the body on the basis of the world, but of life. This amounts to asserting that the relation between the flesh and the body becomes intelligible on the basis of the flesh and not on the basis of the body.7 Hence, the strength of Henry’s philosophy of life can be measured by its ability to give rise to an authentic philosophy of the flesh that in turn allows for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenological traits of the body that this flesh also is. In one sense, it is in the conception of the flesh, at the heart of which Henry’s conception of life realizes itself, that Henry’s conception of life must be put to the test. Yet it could be that, in its development as a form of a philosophy of the flesh, Henry’s phenomenology comes up against its own limit. For reasons that I will come back to, I accept the original theoretical path opened by Henry, which consists in approaching the body from the perspective of the flesh and thus from life. But the question is precisely that of knowing what the sense of the life that attests itself in the phenomenon of the flesh actually is, in other words, of putting the initial determination of life as affectivity and immanence to the test of this flesh that is a body. Insofar as it realizes itself in a body of flesh that, as such, is essentially capable of moving itself, should not life be construed otherwise than as this originary element that remains indifferent to the realm of exteriority?
There is no doubt that Henry’s reflections on the flesh are constituted within the framework of a radical critique of that philosophy which asserts itself as the philosophy of the flesh par excellence, that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is thus on the terrain of what presents itself to us immediately as the fundamental power of our carnal body, that is, the power of feeling, that the discussion develops. We know that Merleau-Ponty’s entire approach consists in highlighting, as constitutive of sensation itself, the belonging of sensation to what it senses, which, for this very reason, is characterized as flesh. Put otherwise, the power of sensation that is the flesh refers to a more originary process of phenomenalization, which is nothing other than the flesh of the world. We must note that the constitutive intertwining of sensation and movement that Merleau-Ponty would insist upon more and more towards the end of his life is interpreted as proof of the belonging of the sensing being to the world that it senses. To say that there is no sensation without movement, and that sensation can always reach what it sees, is to recognize that sensing is always already on the side of what appears to it. This belonging of the sensing to the world it senses, or of vision to the visible, culminates in a late, and also quite disconcerting, working note from The Visible and the Invisible:
To say that the body is a seer is, curiously enough, not to say anything else than: it is visible. When I study what I mean in saying that it is the body that sees, I find nothing else than: it is ‘from somewhere’ . . . visible in the act of looking.8
For Henry, this sort of perspective represents the accomplishment of a philosophy dominated by the ek-static sense of phenomenality, the culmination of a phenomenology that does not know any other form of appearance than intentional appearance. In effect, saying that the seer is in principle visible, that its very power of vision is inscribed in the exteriority of the world, is to recognize that the givenness of vision to itself is absolutely homogenous with that of an object in the world, to the point that vision becomes its own object, that the sensing being only senses inasmuch as it is sensible. Reversibility and the chiasm establish the realm of ontological monism:
The reversibility of touching and touched signifies nothing other than this realm of a single appearance, which deals, alternatively, with what it gives outside of the self – of the sensed – and then of itself, which gives this sensed but gives itself to itself only in this outside of self, also as sensed. Thus, there is only ever the sensed, and the power of sensation, forever displaced from one moment to another, from one hand to the other, is always presupposed elsewhere than in what only occurs to (the) appearance under the form of what is sensed.9
It is difficult not to subscribe to such a critique: Underlining that sensation can itself be sensed, under the form of the hand that sensed, never clarified the essence of the sensing itself. Displaced to the side of carnal exteriority, it is immediately also brought back to the side of the pure transcendental subject of which this carnal exteriority is necessarily correlative. Otherwise put, it is not in starting from the realm of exteriority – that is, the body, even extended to the dimensions of a flesh of the world – that we have the least possibility of clarifying the essence of the flesh. This is what completely justifies Henry’s decision to approach the body via the flesh, that is to say, from the standpoint of life, rather than approaching the flesh via the body. We should take note of the fact that in thus proceeding we provide ourselves with the means of escaping the coming and going, characteristic of Merleau-Ponty, between the empirical and the transcendental or between carnal exteriority and the consciousness that necessarily underpins it. Starting from life allows one to avoid this alternative, except of course if we prejudge the sense of this life by reducing it to the life of transcendental consciousness.
This is why Henry, in a completely consistent manner, uproots sensation from the exteriority to which it seemed it should belong as a form of behaviour, in order to return it to that which, within sensation itself, he characterizes as ‘power’, and which is, indeed, dependent on life. Henry thus employs a manoeuvre that is completely opposite to the one Merleau-Ponty makes in his last work: Rather than exteriorizing the sensing in the sensed, Henry returns to the sensing through that which constitutes its proper life, insofar as it reveals itself, first of all, in a power. In Henry’s words:
To behave in the manner of a ‘touching’ [being], to ‘touch in the sense of an act that touches’, has precisely nothing to do with a ‘behavior’, or any form of facticity, whether it is active or passive. To touch in the sense of an effective action depends necessarily on a power, a power-to-touch of which the ‘touching’ [being], the very fact of touching, is merely the application, an actualization. But this power-to-touch is not, in turn, a simple facticity, the quality, one might say, of a being endowed with such a property. Power-to-touch signifies finding oneself in possession of such a power, being already placed in it, coinciding with it, identifying with it, and, in this way and only in this way, being capable of what it can.10
This allows Henry to conclude, ‘all power emerges from an essential immanence, it is in this immanence that it deploys its force, that it is an effective power and not the simple concept of a power.’11 We are witness here, thanks to the decisive concept of power, to a transcendental regression that departs from the flesh as sensing flesh in order to arrive at a concept of life understood as pure auto-affection in such a way that the analysis of intentional sensibility confirms, unsurprisingly, the analysis of life as it gives itself in impressionality. Following the example of the latter, sensible intentionality calls for a return to the immanence of life, from the moment where it is recognized as power. It is thus with the aid of this concept that the flesh, grasped initially as a rapport with exteriority, is articulated to life: Power is the presence of life in the work [oeuvres] of the flesh. Of course, everything depends on revealing, at the heart of power, a possession of the self that is, at its core, auto-affection. Here, like elsewhere, Henry is absolutely indebted to Maine de Biran, who appears as the principal inspiration behind his rejection of Merleau-Ponty. In an older article, Henry introduces a sentence from Maine de Biran that he calls ‘one of the most laden with meaning that the philosophical tradition has produced’: ‘there is no force that is absolutely foreign.’ Henry makes the following comment on this sentence:
An absolute force, an efficient causality, a power in its efficacy, in the reality and actuality of its exercise, of what it is and what it does, cannot be in the milieu of exteriority, cannot be external to [it]self or as if external to [it]self, cannot be separated from [it]self, and cannot be a stranger to [it]self. This signifies that to all real power a first power is given, the power, precisely, to be itself, to take hold of itself, to coincide with [it]self in a sort of original coherence that rejects all types of difference and separation, in short in the immanence of its radical interiority.12
This ‘Biranian’ formula, which decisively articulates force and self, evidently has as its backdrop the theory of effort as ‘original fact’. It is in and by a ‘hyperorganic’ impulsion, insofar as it encounters a resistance (which is why it is effort), that a self constitutes itself as the subject of this impulsion. This original fact, which signifies the primordial duality of impulsion and resistance, is the fact, indistinctly psychological and metaphysical, of the sudden appearance of the self. This no longer falls within the sphere of knowing, it is not grasped in reflection, but realizes itself in an impulsion and understands itself in it as that which opposes the resistance that it meets, in short, as the negation of the not-me. That there is no absolute force that is foreign to itself signifies above all that this relation to oneself that is the self is only instituted in the exercise of a force.
Henry’s interpretation of Maine de Biran’s formula nonetheless calls for several remarks. The decisive point is that it claims to rely on the essence of power, to rediscover in it life as auto-impressionality. It proceeds by showing a sort of division of power. The power referred to here is not a simple power-to-do [pouvoir de faire], or rather, in order to be this power-to-do, it must also have the originary power to take hold, or to take possession, of itself, in short to coincide with itself: Power, understood as impulsion, refers back to auto-affection as the power of life itself. As such, power is not understood from the point of view of what it does or produces, but rather of what it is. What is proper to power is that it possesses itself and that I dispose of it, and this is why it is not foreign to itself. Yet, and this is the second remark, we can also ask ourselves if Henry is not forcing something here. Saying that force cannot be in a milieu of exteriority, that it is not foreign to itself, does not yet mean that it possesses itself according to the mode of absolute coincidence – in the immanence of a radical interiority. From the refusal to situate force as an element of exteriority, we cannot deduce its characterization as pure interiority. All that we can say is that the being of power is indeed availability [disponibilité], the fact of being at its own disposal, and that in this sense it cannot be foreign to itself. But this situation forms an original mode of relation to the self that is undoubtedly not that of pure immanence. The progression of Henry’s argument, which goes from the being in possession of itself proper to power to the affirmation of its essential immanence, is questionable to say the least: The truth concerning the ‘self’ of power most likely resides – contra Henry – in the gap that remains between ‘not being foreign to [it]self’ and ‘coinciding with [it]self’. Indeed, we cannot neglect another aspect of power, which Henry minimizes, but which nevertheless constitutes it as such, namely, its relation to doing, to the movement that it drives. It seems, at least at first glance, that it is this dimension of efficacy or production that wrenches the subject of power from itself, throws it into a different element, and prevents it from fully coinciding with itself. It follows that it is only by confronting this dimension, by confronting power as power to move itself, that Henry can test the solidity of his presuppositions. Can we refer the power of movement back to life, understood as absolute immanence? Is the being of movement susceptible to being reintegrated into an idea of life as auto-affection? Or rather, does it not instead set us down the path of contesting this radical acceptation of life? In addition, and this is my third and last remark, Maine de Biran, for his part, qualifies the impulsion where the self appears to itself as hyperorganic, which amounts to saying that it is foreign to life. According to Maine de Biran, life belongs to the objective organism and thus falls under the third-person point of view, which amounts, at the very least, to recognizing that it constitutively implies a dimension of exteriority. This force, which is not foreign to itself, is not yet, as such, a vital force. Henry’s approach is original in that it characterizes as life what, for Maine de Biran, remains a hyperorganic reality, simply put, a consciousness. He does so in order to detach life from the exteriority to which Maine de Biran had himself assigned it. We can ask, here again, if Maine de Biran is not more consistent than his successor.
Not only does Henry not back down in the face of this difficulty, but he immediately confronts it in remarking, following Merleau-Ponty himself, that the power of touch is not feasible without this more primordial power of self-movement: ‘Separated from this originary power of self-movement, in the sense of that which moves and is moved indissolubly, i.e., incapable of moving itself, the touching would hardly touch anything anymore.’13 For Henry it is a question of taking Merleau-Ponty, so to speak, in reverse, showing that the same thing that in the eyes of Merleau-Ponty justifies the insertion of sensing into exteriority, that is, its constitutive dependence vis-à-vis movement, is precisely what confirms that sensing belongs to the immanence of life. Yet, it is striking to see that Henry reiterates, concerning movement, the analysis that he had made at the level of sensation. This is completely coherent. Movement, more clearly even than sensation, refers above all else to a power, such that the analysis of power absolutely concerns the power to move, on which, in the final analysis, sensation itself rests. Thus, the power of self-movement resides in the radical immanence of life: The movements that we perform refer, by the intermediary of the power that supports them, to what Henry calls at least once the ‘process’ of life – a long way from life being thought in light of the movements that we perform. It is precisely the coincidence with itself characteristic of force, inasmuch as it possesses itself, which articulates the movement of which it is the power in the immanent life in which this movement ultimately resides. This is to say that the movement of the flesh (or the flesh as movement) is never an ‘objective displacement in space’ but always an immanent movement:
The movement, which, in its very movement, remains in itself, and itself gets carried away with itself, which itself moves in itself; the self-movement that does not separate from (it)self and does not leave itself, without allowing the smallest part of itself to become detached, to become lost outside of it, in some form of exteriority, in the exteriority of the world.14
We end up with a movement that rigorously merges with the immanence that the force that drives it apparently presupposes. Put another way, we end up with the movement by which life affects itself, that is, is its own affection. This is a very strange sort of movement, to say the least, since it has no alteration, no excess, no negativity; it does not leave itself, never detaches from itself, to the extent that it seems to be purely and simply identical to immobility.
In truth, if it rests fundamentally on the initial postulate according to which life is assimilated to auto-affection, this conclusion stems from a coherent decision concerning both the essence of movement and of power, or of the force that produces it. Henry affirms: ‘The reality of a movement is not exhausted in its singular phenomenological effectuation: it resides in the power to accomplish it.’15 We pass here, in a logically inconsistent manner, from the fact that the reality of movement is not exhausted in its effectuation, which would seem to indicate that it also consists of this effectuation, to the affirmation according to which its reality resides in the power to accomplish the movement. It is true that the movement that concerns us here, our movement, cannot be reduced to its phenomenological effectuation, in that it is irreducible to a simple objective displacement. This is exactly what distinguishes a living movement from a purely physical movement. This signifies that this movement refers to a power upon which its effectuation rests, a power in which its own subjectivity lies and which specifies the movement as ‘mine’. But the question that we must ask ourselves here, in light of this indisputable description, is that of the mode of intertwining between the subjective power, in the sense where it is not foreign to itself, and a movement that is truly a passage into exteriority.
This is precisely the question that Henry brushes aside when he passes from the participation of movement in power (on the assumption that it cannot be reduced to its effectuation) to its pure and simple reduction to this power. The being of movement is the power to accomplish, which is the same as removing the movement from all exteriority and as refusing it all forms of exteriorization. However, as strange as it appears, this affirmation still does not permit us to conclude that it can in effect be interpreted as an insistence on the dimension of ‘subjective’ power implicated in carnal movement. After all, everything depends on what we understand by ‘power’. If it is understood as in essence enveloping its realization, as a force that can only be exercised and thus passes into its other, it becomes less problematic to situate the being of movement in power: Movement can be power if it is, through and through, power to move. But this is clearly not Henry’s position. Rather, he affirms to the contrary: ‘This power, in turn, cannot be reduced to the sum of its potential actualizations. It is a fundamental and a priori possibility that dominates all its “actualizations”.’16 He summarizes this position at the beginning of the paragraph I am referring to here in writing, ‘“ I can” does not signify that now I am able to make this or that movement.’17 In effect, the ‘I can’ of power does not refer at all to a power-to-do but to this more originary power that traverses it and brings it into relation with itself, namely, the self-givenness [auto-donation] of life that puts it originarily in possession of itself. According to an approach that is manifestly more metaphysical than phenomenological, the power through which the flesh is described is not exceeded, so to speak, ‘from below’ [par le bas], towards the movement in which it realizes itself, but ‘from above’ [par le haut], towards the originary power that allows it to possess itself and that is nothing other than the auto-affection of life. Power is thus not reducible to all of its potentialities, which always involve their actualization, because it is characterized by a fundamental and a priori possibility, which is none other than the one that is given by life itself. Curiously, it is through a dimension, which is not that of its implementation, that power leads to life. It is only insofar as it does not actualize itself under the form of movements that power is really the power of a life. If the flesh testifies to life, it is not through the movements that it performs but only through the absolute self-proximity that supposedly characterizes the power from which these movements proceed. It goes without saying that such an analysis contravenes both the essence of movement and of power. What is a movement that remains within itself, that never detaches from itself, if not a simple immobility? What, if not a pure abstract possibility, could properly signify a power that is not power-to-do, and that cannot be reduced to its potential effectuations?
At the heart of Henry’s analysis of the flesh, and what allows it to return to the pure auto-affection by which its life has been characterized from the start, is the revelation of a concept of power or of force that is torn from the movement that it makes possible in favour of an immanence that characterizes it. This is accomplished by way of an unjustified displacement of Maine de Biran’s discovery and in such a manner that, counter to all plausibility, the very being of movement is returned to this immanence. Henry exploits the ambiguity of the lexicon of possession: Force can only be possessed, in the sense of a force that I have at my disposal, if it possesses itself in the sense that it appears to itself. Henry calls this intimate identity of power and auto-affection drive [pulsion]: ‘all force is in itself pathetic, and this is what, essentially, and without knowing it, the concept of drive [pulsion] expresses.’18 Drive designates this surge that I am not the source of and that does not leave itself, a surge [poussée] that is unceasingly self-affecting. It is a surge that is given as an affect or pathos, that is, one that is the sign of a force. We could easily show that Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the drive in Metapsychology also fits well into the framework of Henry’s concepts. Drive is a concept at the frontier of the psychic and somatic that refers to a force that is representation or affect, to an experience that plunges into a vital depth. In any case, all of Henry’s analyses of the power of sensation and the power of movement converge towards the same discovery: As an attestation of a life that is essentially auto-affection, and as the element in which the work of life is its own impression and its power its own possession, the flesh is essentially a pulsional flesh [chair pulsionnelle].
It is from this pulsional flesh [chair pulsionnelle] that the body is constituted. Though I will not dwell on it here, we can note that Henry’s approach is borrowed from Maine de Biran. Drive constitutes the organic body as the resistance, or the ‘resisting continuum’ that this force necessarily encounters. When this force tires, coming up against the internal limit of its surge, in other words, when the resistance becomes absolute, the body becomes an objective reality [réalité chosique]. But it is important to underline that this body remains internal to the surge of the drive. That is, it remains internal to life: There is no exteriority to this body, and life, as it is understood here, still only deals with itself. As Henry clearly explains, again shifting the meaning of Biranism:
The whole being of that which resists is thus in the force against which it resists. The way in which it resists is the way in which this force experiences itself. It reveals itself as restricted, inhibited, unable to deploy itself freely according to its own will.19
Having completed this lengthy analysis, it is time to investigate the status of the body, no longer as original flesh [chair originaire], organic body or object body [corps chosique], but rather, as purely body [purement corps], that is, as an object accessible to others within the world. In an entirely coherent but also disappointing manner, Henry refers to the duality of phenomenality in his response. The reason for this is that this body – which is also flesh even though no longer constituted in it – this body object is a visible body, subjected to the phenomenological regime of the ek-stasis. This body, however, is no different from the one previously analysed as flesh; but instead of phenomenalizing itself in life, or as life, it phenomenalizes itself as an object. Or, to put it another way, this body sees itself. Understood as such, the duality of appearance does indeed run through the body; it is the duality of the flesh (and of that which its surge constitutes in itself), on the one hand, and of a body object in the world, on the other. The same necessarily applies to the body’s movements, such that the duality of appearance also characterizes the realm of movement, which is one, but nonetheless phenomenalizes itself according to two opposing regimes:
Our action does not unfold firstly within us, to then suddenly surge forth outside. Living, it has always belonged to life, which it never leaves. It has always been objective also, under the guise, for example, of the objective displacement of our hand – a hand that is itself objective, just like our objective body of which it is a part. Living corporality and mundane objective body are both a priori. They are two a priori of the experience of our body, and are themselves nothing other than the expression of the duality of appearance, which is an Arche-fact.20
There can be no better way of asserting a radical dualism in place of ontological monism. But, despite being entirely consistent, this conclusion creates a sense of unease. We are left with the impression that the analysis has been taken as far as possible along the lines of the process of the internalization into life of that which gives itself first of all as exteriority, only to finally come up against a truly irreducible exteriority, that is, that of the body as object and of its displacements. This exteriority is reincorporated, like the hidden side of the visible suddenly revealed, in the name of a second mode of givenness of the very realities that had up until now been grasped according to the mode of pure immanence. In truth, it had seemed that the analysis of the flesh was taking place at the level of being, and that the phenomenology of life was in fact an ontology, discovering life in the self-impressionality of the flesh and encountering the being of life at the heart of its lived life. However, what we discover is that it is nothing of the sort, since this same life and this same flesh that gave themselves in impressionality can suddenly appear as body in the distance of seeing. What we had believed was their being is only a mode of its appearance. This solution, therefore, creates more problems than it solves. It is the equivalent of asserting that one reality can appear according to different regimes. But how is this possible? How are this being and these two modes of phenomenalization articulated? Just at the moment when we thought we had managed to escape the ontological level, this inevitably leads us back to it, because the task now is to understand the status of this being, that is, of this life, given that it is capable of two modes of appearance. This recourse to duality cannot ultimately be a solution, for what is still and only ever at stake is knowing how the same life can both affect itself and deploy itself in exteriority. This is what lies at the heart of the very problem of life, and it matters little whether the duality that characterizes it is to be found at the level of appearance or at the level of being. As a last word on this duality, Henry (finally) raises the problem of the essence of life, at the very moment he believed himself to have definitively solved it by reducing it to the realm of auto-affection.21 We, therefore, cannot escape the question of the mode of articulation, the question of the unity of these two phenomenalizations that Henry carefully distinguished. My flesh, in which my life attests itself, is also always a body in the sense of a reality that exposes itself in exteriority and offers itself to the gazes of others. To pose the question of the being of the flesh is to confront the problem of the mode of relation between one’s life, which self-impresses, and exteriority. To refer the latter to another regime of appearance is to avoid the problem, not to resolve it.
The difficulty culminates with the question of movement. Henry calmly tells us that the same immanent ‘movement’ of life can also present itself as displacement, as objective movement. But can movement really be marked by this duality? Is it not, on the contrary, that which radically contests it? As we have seen, the movement of life is for Henry a movement that remains in itself, a movement that allows nothing to escape from it, in other words, the immobile coincidence of the impression. If this can still be qualified as movement, then it is only in a pronounced metaphorical sense or for theological–metaphorical reasons completely unrelated to phenomenology. But – and this is where the question of being again interferes with that of appearance – it is worth inquiring how that which is immobility (according to the regime of immanence) can suddenly present itself as movement. It is here that we stumble upon a major difficulty, which leads us to contest definitively the division of appearance. Movement can only be understood as incessant tearing away or alteration, a continual leaving of, or non-coincidence with, the self. Movement is precisely that which does not remain in itself; its being is not plenitude but negativity. Of course, this does not mean (at least with regard to our movements) that it is the equivalent of a simple objective displacement, a pure change of location.22 As already shown, this movement is ours; it is the product of a force or power and, therefore, cannot be foreign to itself. Its being is not suited to the scission of appearance into pure immanence and objectivity; it is, in truth, its very contestation. But this is exactly the meaning of life, for its living signifies indistinctly a transitive living (erleben) and an intransitive living (leben). In living, the subject experiences both itself and a world of which it is simultaneously a part and with which, as a living being, it has relations. Just like movement, which is of course its privileged confirmation, life cannot be located solely on the side of immanence; like movement, it upsets the division of appearance instituted by Henry. Thus, rather than embark on a futile attempt to return all exteriority, which the flesh (and, therefore, life) comprises, to the sphere of absolute immanence, it is necessary to rethink life in light of the carnal movements through which it attests itself and in view of which Henry’s dualities shatter.
By approaching the problem in this manner, we may equip ourselves with the means to tackle the question of the articulation between the two modes of appearance identified by Henry. He adopted an ascending movement, transcendental in nature, which, in light of the important discovery that intentionality cannot give itself to itself intentionally, aims to return the ecstatic appearance to its ultimate condition of possibility. Although he discovers auto-affection at the heart of all givenness at a distance, Henry never heads down the opposite path to discover how auto-affection leads into intentionality, how we can go from immanence to transcendence. Henry is unable to even ask himself this question because the duality of appearance is an Arche-fact, ‘which nothing can explain, but which must itself form the basis for understanding it’.23 However, given that I contest this duplicity, in the very name of the phenomenon of movement and the life that it attests, perhaps we are now in a position to begin defining a solution to this problem.
It is thus necessary to pick things up at precisely the point where the difficulties crystallized, that is, at the level of the pathetic power that Henry called drive, which emerges as the operator behind the annexation of carnal movement to a life understood as immanence. What is this power-to-do [pouvoir-faire] of which Henry speaks, which he also names force, and which is nothing other than what Maine de Biran called ‘effort’? It is obvious that the being of this power is inseparable from its effectuation, from the doing through which it accomplishes itself. As such, a power that does not imply an ability to do and is reducible to the power (which it is also) to possess itself, would quite simply not be a power. In this instance, Henry’s reduction of the power-to-do to power, by which it coincides with itself, signifies, purely and simply, its ceasing to be power. Paradoxically, the return of power to life comes at the price of its very effectiveness: The life to which this power is brought back at the same time signifies its death as power. The difficulty here is identical to the one Maine de Biran exposed himself to. He postulated a hyperorganic force that comes up against the body and its movements, as relative resistance, such that the original fact is the original duality of impulsion and resistance.24 But is this duality really a duality? Can one separate the impulsion from that which it impulses and thereby situate it in an order, that of the self, which is different to the order of the body in movement? For it to impulse anything at all, must not the impulsion already belong to that which it impulses and, so to speak, pass over to the side of movement? In truth, its effectiveness demands that the impulsion leave itself in order to become other and that it exist according to the mode of being outside of self or beyond self. This means that, far from being confined to the hyperorganic sphere, it manages to disrupt both the ego-subject [sujet égoïque] and the corporeal order [ordre corporel]. This is what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka observed in the rare fragments that he dedicated to Maine de Biran. He stressed that, according to Maine de Biran, the self was not a simple representation but a centre of efforts, and he asked: ‘Yet, that which puts into motion, can it not itself be contained in the world of forces and movements? Can it not participate, from this fact, in the corporeal world?’25 Even a simple analysis of the impulse demonstrates that, far from referring to an impression from which all exteriority is absent, it necessarily involves a belonging to exteriority, a commitment in and to it, still close to the self but already in the world. This is confirmed by the phenomenological examination of what Patočka names ‘intention of movement’, which is nothing other than the lived experience of a power as power to move. Whereas according to Edmund Husserl all ‘intention’ is characterized by the fact that it can be empty [Leermeinen] or full, the specificity of the intention of movement is precisely that it cannot be empty because it cannot intend movement without effectuating it. What sets this intention apart is that its very being as intention presupposes its realization; it could not be the intention that it is without its implementation. As clearly stated by Patočka: ‘motor intentionality, insofar as it is not a quasi-intention or the intention of a quasi-movement, is here, already, the movement itself. There is no difference between intention and its fulfilment.’26 Contrary, therefore, to Henry’s claims, the essence of intention does not keep it bound within the immanence of the power to affect itself but expulses it outside of itself into the world. To assert that intention is its own fulfilment is to recognize that the lived experience of the being of the intention brings about a passage into exteriority: Its very immanence is possible only with an entry in transcendence; it is subjective only insofar as it is already mundane. Henry is thus entirely wrong, ironically, to write that ‘our action does not, first of all, unfold within us to then suddenly surge forth outside of us’, for this crossing of the apparently impenetrable border between the two regimes of appearance is precisely what the intention of movement, that is, the impulse, accomplishes. Patočka expresses it well when he says:
The ‘power over the lived body’ is thus not a mere epiphenomenon, but movement itself in its realization. In this movement, it carries out a leap into being. . . . Unlike perception or objectification, which turn around the being without completely reaching it, movement coincides perfectly with what it is experienced as: It is realization and, as such, real. If the subject and the object coincide here, it is not because it is a question of a lived experience as lived experience . . . but rather because the act does not remain within the subjective, because it has a path and a sediment in the external world.27
But it would be wrong to conclude that the impulse is nothing other than the movement that it impulses, in other words, to reduce its lived or subjective being to pure exteriority. This would be to confuse the living movement under investigation here with a simple displacement. Although the impulse does not take form beneath the movement and is, therefore, its own passage within it, the very fact that this movement was impulsed, that it proceeds from power, is precisely what distinguishes the living movements that we are responsible for. Understood in this way, movement is not foreign to itself, as the Biranian saying goes. But that does not necessarily mean that it knows itself: It is characterized by non-indifference towards itself, conferred upon it by its voluntary being, its belonging to a momentum. It follows that the movement that the impulse becomes cannot be reduced to a simple displacement. It is more than all of the positions together and more than the transition from one to the other, since, by enveloping an impulse, it is the ability to change direction at any moment, to accelerate, to stop, and so on. All of these are possibilities in which the presence of the power that engendered the movement is revealed at each of its successive phases. As such, the indisputable exteriority of movement goes hand in hand with a form of interiority, which is not immanence but the permanent excess of the power over that which it carries out at every moment. Thus, movement, because it is ours, cannot be considered as belonging to pure exteriority. However, this does not mean that it must be bound to the sphere of immanence: Movement is internal to a power that is nothing other than its own exteriorization.
As a result, the être-auprès-de-soi (being-close-to-the-self) that characterizes the living movement, its non-indifference towards itself, cannot be mistaken for pure impressional immanence. This être-auprès-de-soi is broken by the progress that tears it from itself; it can only be itself by passing outside of itself. The subject of movement, the self that reveals itself in it, seizes itself only once it is dispossessed of itself. Yet this cannot be right, for it would suggest that the self possesses a certain consistency outside of the movement that it produces. But this is not the case. As pure impulsion or intention of movement, the self is its own passage into exteriority: It is by passing outside of itself that it becomes itself, by alienating itself that it reassembles, by toppling into the world that it distinguishes itself. We are here confronted with the strange situation of a subject whose being is governed by the exteriority that it makes possible and that for this reason can never accomplish itself as subject. To say that this subject is its own passage into the exteriority of the world is to assert that this is where it can find or accomplish itself. However, given that this exteriority has no limits and that the movement is without rest, it is the same as admitting that it does not manage to do so, that it is unable to reassemble in immanence. One could say that the being of this subject is that of a task, that this being is its own horizon. This subject is always already engaged in the world where it accomplishes itself but which separates it from itself and delays its advent, so long as this world exists only as horizon. As Patočka wrote:
The living of experience is like a web pulled between two horizons: one is my self, the other, the world. Living is a manner of explicating these horizons, having this particularity that for me to explain myself to myself I must first step out onto the ground of the world and of things.28
Thus, the living of life, rediscovered within the movement in which it comes about, does not lead to an impressional immanence but to a self that is its own splitting apart, to an ‘entering into the self’ [entrer en soi] that is a ‘leaving the self’ [sortir de soi]. We must, therefore, conclude, as Henry does, that the self does not relate to itself according to the mode of knowledge, that its own appearance to itself is not reflexive. But if the self escapes its own gaze, if it is ‘invisible’, as Henry says, it is not because it is given through the tight embrace of a pure experience but, on the contrary, because it is on the horizon of its own movement in a manner such that the fate of its appearance is tied to the fate of the world’s appearance. It is due not to an excess of proximity but to an excess of distance.
This analysis of the self as the subject of movement and as the self of impulsion enables us to articulate what Henry resolutely differentiated and to follow the path he set out but in the opposite direction. As mentioned above, Henry progresses from intentionality up to its condition of possibility, which is nothing other than its self-givenness [auto-donation] in the immanence of originary impressionality. But it seems necessary to investigate how the impression is articulated along with the ek-static givenness – the lived experience along with the seeing – how to descend from absolute life to the world. Henry cannot provide answers to these questions precisely because he argues that they concern two completely impenetrable regimes of appearance. In other words, it is not possible to pass from immanence to transcendence. On the contrary, within the auto-impressional embrace, everything is in place to prevent a window from opening onto exteriority or to prevent an outside from forming. In order to articulate the impression, along with the ek-static givenness, the border must become porous, and ‘immanence’ must be thought in such a manner that transcendence may come about in and through it. To do so is to replace Henry’s duality with one single mode of appearance, yet without returning to ontological monism, since this appearance is no longer that of simple exposition from a distance, of objectivity. Rather, it is an opening to the self, which is also indiscriminately an opening to the other. It is the appearance of an immanence that accomplishes itself only as exteriorization and, therefore, as an unveiling of the world. However, this is precisely the mode of being to which the analysis of living movement has led us. The impulsive self is simultaneously a departure from the self: It exists only as its own advancement in the world. But this also implies that the advancement is not a simple displacement, that it is affected by a subjective sign, that its movement of exteriorization is just as much a movement of revelation, that its doing is a seeing. To say that the self is its own exteriorization is to say that the latter does not leave itself, that it remains close to the self. But this proximity, caught up, so to speak, in ek-stasis, is not proximity to itself but very much proximity to the world. In short, inscribed in its own movement, the self is an opening onto the self only if it is an opening onto the world: Its own mode of appearance coincides with intentionality. This implies the radical transgression of the border between the two modes of appearance, assuming of course that they mutually condition rather than exclude one another: Possession of self and the ‘impressional’ being exist only as an unveiling advancement, that is, as intentionality. It then becomes necessary to substitute Henry’s ‘pathetic force’ with what Patočka calls a ‘seeing force’ [force voyante]:
The corporeity of the self is first of all, from the perspective of our experience, the corporeity of a force. As a force it is something existing and acting. As a seeing force, it must contain something like a light, a light by which it illuminates its path. This path is a movement toward and penetration of the world, the very possibility of which is implicated in the force that takes on the title of the self.29
This force is the force of seeing, that is, the seeing that is specific to the movement that this force generates. And this seeing is in fact inherent to every force so long as its advancement remains an experience and, therefore, makes visible that towards which it advances. The path that we are following here is rigorously opposed to the one taken by Henry. Instead of annexing movement to the self-apparition of life through the intermediary of the power that it involves, it annexes power to movement in order to turn it into a power to make visible [le pouvoir de faire apparaître]. Tracing phenomenality back to a force does not mean returning it to immanence but, on the contrary, establishing an opening to transcendence in immanence.
Must one conclude that by leaving the sphere of impressionality we have also departed the sphere of affectivity? This is the same as asking: Can affectivity only be understood as auto-affection? It would seem, on the contrary, that by abandoning auto-affection in favour of a more originary co-belonging – which is the other name of life – of the self and intentionality, we are in fact brought back to affectivity and perhaps to its most original meaning. It is no longer a case of the pure auto-affection whereby the subject embraces itself without distance, an auto-affection that attests itself only in certain forms of joy or suffering. Rather, the affection in question here is one in which the subject is given to itself only to the extent that it receives an other than itself; it seizes itself only when relieved by exteriority. This fundamental affect, to which all our analyses lead, is nothing other than desire, which is, I would argue, the other name for life. This is why it is necessary to substitute Henry’s phenomenology of drive with a phenomenology of desire. How else are we to qualify this impulsion (described above at length) or more specifically, the manner in which it receives itself, if not as desire, a desire that no longer has anything in common with the surge that possesses itself and that Henry names drive? Given that its being is that of a setting in motion, this impulsion achieves itself in being thrown outside of itself: It seizes itself only through a movement of dispossession. Since the moving self [soi moteur] passes into its other and is, therefore, only ever its own horizon, it cannot seize itself as a content or a determination. Its own being, as it experiences itself, is rather that of an emptiness or a lacuna.
Consequently, it is given to itself only in the shape of this absence, which, by becoming movement, tends towards its fulfilment and for this reason is indeed an aspiration and affects itself as desire alone. Only desire can qualify the mode of being-for-self of a being that is absence-of-self, so long as, in desire, it is always the being of the self that is lacking; in desire, the subject is always separated from itself. This is why all desire is, at its heart, always desire of self. As noted above, the self, as a source of movement – the impulsive self – throws itself into the world in order to achieve itself. The self thus understood is its own search for self in the alterity of the world. But this search is destined to fail, and the self is condemned to forever remain its own horizon insofar as the world cannot be exhausted or totalized. This is, however, precisely the essence of desire: Unlike a need, nothing can satisfy it, and that which appeases it only frustrates it to the same degree. Whatever desire achieves will always manifest itself as a shortcoming vis-à-vis that for which it was truly aiming, or likewise only sketch a transcendence of which it is the negation. This is what happens to the living subject, which, due to the irreducible and unalterable depth of the world, can only find itself in the world if it again loses itself within it. Its aspiration is desire because it is destined to remain unsatisfied precisely there where it is satisfied. Finally, if it is true that the subject only affects itself in the form of this dispossession that it accompanies with its light – such that it has no alternative between seizing itself and seeing the world – it is necessary to conclude that desire, the first of the subject’s affects, is intentionality called by a different name.30 To say that nothing can satisfy it is to recognize that desire is desire of nothing (given or predetermined) and that this is precisely the reason why it can receive everything. Its incessant dissatisfaction is just as much a pure welcoming: The depth of the world that it opens can be measured by the power and indetermination of its aspiration. Desire is the very power of the welcome, the form of receptivity – the activity specific to passivity. Because its affection is the experience of a lacuna and can, therefore, only be achieved as movement, it opens the depth of the world. It is intentionality.
Translated by Darian Meacham
Notes and Works Cited
1 Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 74.
2 Ibid., 88.
3 Ibid., 175, 197, 205.
4 Ibid., 89.
5 Ibid., 90.
6 Ibid., 195.
7 Ibid., 169, 195.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 273–4.
9 Henry, Incarnation, 171.
10 Ibid., 196.
11 Ibid.
12 Henry, ‘Le concept d’â me a-t-il un sens?’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 67 (1996): 26.
13 Henry, Incarnation, 197.
14 Ibid., 203.
15 Ibid., 205.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.; see also 215, 225, 228.
18 Ibid., 204.
19 Ibid., 212.
20 Ibid., 217.
21 In truth, one could question whether there is not a hierarchy between these two modes of phenomenalization, such that the givenness from a distance would function as appearance with regard to the impressional givenness. This would bring us close to the Ruyerian conception of the body dependent on a ‘reciprocal illusion of incarnation’, that is, ultimately, an impoverishment of the body to the level of the simple appearance of a reality, which at its heart is not spatial. In short, it is difficult to break with the belief that it is indeed the being of the flesh that is brought to light through the life in which it self-impresses itself, while its exposure in objective exteriority is already a matter of appearance.
22 It is still useful to question, however, whether the mode of being specific to living movement does not release the essence of all movement.
23 Henry, Incarnation, 217.
24 It is important to note that, by positing a movement of life itself, which he sometimes names original corporeity, Henry in no way remains true to Maine de Biran, for whom movement was already related to muscular resistance, that is, to the body. However, this is not how resistance sees itself, for it gives itself as docility. This displacement is coherent, and the situation of movement does no more here than express the situation of the body. From the moment Henry posits a first body, a flesh – impulse and non-resistance – where for Maine de Biran there is only a hyperorganic force, it is normal that he should posit a movement where for Maine de Biran there is only a self seizing itself in its impulsion.
25 Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: J. Millon 1995), 60.
26 Ibid., 73.
27 Ibid., 18–19.
28 Ibid., 63.
29 Ibid., 66.
30 Not an affect that the subject receives but the affect in and through which it receives itself as subject, that is, constitutes itself.