Flesh, Body, World: Michel Henry on Incarnation

Abstract

Henry tirelessly insists that all flesh is an invisible, radically immanent, impressional material in which life arrives in itself. But this raises a theological problem: is the material, visible body of Christ to be excluded from what we understand by incarnation? To answer this and related questions, the problematic of the duplicity of appearing—the appearing of life and the appearing of the world—must be clarified. It is precisely through an analysis of flesh that Henry seeks to establish a rapport between the two modes of appearing, so a study of the flesh should allow us to articulate in one stroke an account of our access to the world and the thingly body. Against a simplistic reading that claims that, for Henry, an unbridgeable gorge separates life and the world, the flesh and the body, I argue that the objective, visible body is real, but that its reality is founded on the more immediate reality of the flesh. I use the results of this inquiry to argue further for two distinct but related senses of the concept “world”, one which names a phenomenological reality and another that picks out an ideological aberration endemic to modernity. While the flesh opens up the reality of the former, the latter is an imaginary and impossible world.

1. Introduction

“He who has seen me has seen the Father.”1

These words of Christ compress into a single, scandalous sentence what may well be the greatest theological challenge to Michel Henry’s philosophy. No doubt, for Henry as for Merleau-Ponty, “the incarnation changes everything” (Merleau-Ponty 1964); not content to overturn our understanding of and relationship to God, its significance ramifies beyond theology and calls the entire history of philosophy—and, more importantly here, of phenomenology—into question. But it is Henry’s tirelessly repeated contention that all flesh, be it ours or Christ’s, is “invisible flesh, intelligible in the invisible of life and only on that basis.” (Henry 2015, p. 86). This flesh is not the flesh of common sense, the pulsing, gurgling thing I carry with me, the thing that gets pimples and cramps and unwanted looks on the subway. It is not the res extensa of Descartes or the Körper of Husserl. Nor is it the totality of interlocking but distinguishable autonomic and sympathetic systems that sustain what I vaguely call “my life”. And it cannot be any of these because its way of appearing differs, and differs radically, from the way these things appear. The body, the material, extended thing to which the biologist, the anatomist, and—as Henry might add in one of his more acerbic moods—the mortician apply their techniques appears as an intentional object, held by the gaze in a phenomenological distance that cannot be bridged. But between myself and my flesh, there is no distance. I cannot get outside of it precisely because I am always undergoing it. It is, in fact, nothing but my immediate, completely immanent feeling of undergoing my life—“an impressional material undergoing experiencing impressionally and doing so unceasingly.” (Henry 2015, p. 86). Without this being-given-to-myself impressionally, I would have no experience either of myself or the world; I simply would not be alive. And since my flesh founds all experience, it cannot be made an object of experience, cannot be set outside itself and “thematized” without betraying itself. Thus, to claim that the flesh is invisible is not merely a claim about the impossibility of flesh becoming the object of a perceptive intentional act, an act of literal vision. It is the more radical claim that, in principle, flesh cannot be the object of any intentional act whatsoever without becoming something other than what it truly is. Henry will insist from first to last that it is flesh in this sense—flesh as the invisible, auto-impressional material of life—on which the Incarnation of Christ primarily bears.

On this score, the theological question obtrudes: does the flesh of the incarnate God not appear in the world? Is the material body of Christ to be excluded from what we understand by incarnation?2 Henry’s way of radicalizing the notion of flesh invites the suspicion that his philosophy can do little more than dress up an Arian Christology in phenomenological finery. And an analogous worry crops up from philosophy: am I, precisely by virtue of my incarnate condition, to be dissociated from my body as an objective or biological fact? Has Henry not merely put “a new binary … that of flesh and body” in the place of the “traditional dualism of body and soul” (Falque 2016, p. 1)? And has he not, in doing this, accorded a singular privilege to the flesh, annexing all reality to it such that, rather than dualism, idealism would seem the nearest epithet to hand? These questions and the raft of concerns that motivate them open onto some extremely difficult terrain in Henry’s work, not least of all because, to answer them responsibly, the entire problematic of the duplicity of appearing (la dualité de l’apparaître…sa duplicité) (Henry 2000)—the appearing of life and the appearing of the world—must be clarified. Only within this phenomenological configuration can the terms that organize Henry’s architectonic—Life, world, body, flesh, immanence, transcendence—be understood with a precision and clarity that is sufficiently responsible to Henry’s text to form the basis of a true response.

From a certain perspective, the problem of the relationship between the thingly, objective body and the immanent, auto-impressional flesh is only one instance of this more general problem concerning the possibility of a rapport between the two modes of appearing. It is, however, a privileged instance since the duplicity of appearing must be explicated through our originary experience of ourselves as flesh. This is, in fact, one of Henry’s subsidiary goals in Incarnation: to establish a phenomenologically determinate relationship between life and the world, and to do so by an analysis of flesh. As the principle of appearing and transcendental condition of what appears, we ought to be able to articulate an account of our access to the thingly body—and, in turn, the world—by a phenomenological investigation into our incarnate condition.

My goal in this paper is to draw out some crucial features of Henry’s thought on this point. The argument is aimed against a simplistic reading that would see an unbridgeable gorge between life and the world, the flesh and the body, and could claim that the latter in each of these pairs becomes, in Henry’s hands, roughly equivalent with illusion, death, and nihilism. Though this way of reading Henry is hardly ubiquitous in current scholarship,3 it deserves, I think, a thorough-going critique to clear up some especially deleterious confusions, especially for readers approaching Henry for the first time. I will argue that an attentive reading of Incarnation, supplemented by a study of Henry’s arguments in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, considerably complicates Henry’s own claims—so easy to misconstrue—about the heterogeneity of the appearing of life and the appearing of the world. An examination of Henry’s phenomenological analyses of the flesh will, I hope, show that “the world” in which the objective body is supposed to appear is, in fact, a two-fold concept, despite Henry’s inconsistency in holding its two meanings sufficiently well apart.

2. Life and the World

At the outset, we would do well to begin with a crude, prima facie sketch of the two modes of appearing, their nature, and their relationship. It will serve both as an initial point of orientation and as a picture that my argument will try to complicate in several respects.

The two modes of appearing, the radically immanent appearing of life and the ecstatic appearing of the world, denominate two regions of experience heterogeneous with one another, to the point of being in opposition. The first mode dwells in invisibility, meaning, again, that it cannot be made the object of an intentional act of consciousness. To explain and justify this, Henry takes up the phenomenon of pain. And this is not without reason; it not only illustrates his point, but also and just as importantly challenges a reductive view of pain that would see it as primarily or even exclusively an ordeal of the objective body. Thus, he proposes a reduction to the pure impressionality of pain, the “painful as such”, (Henry 2015, p. 58) bracketing away its traditional association with the body as a sensitive physical apparatus:

Pure pain precisely does not refer to anything other than itself; it is given over to itself, immersed in itself, submerged in itself, and crushed under its own weight. Pure pain is pure suffering [La douleur pure est une souffrance pure] (Henry 2000, p. 84), it is this suffering’s immanence to itself—a suffering without horizon […]. To slip out of itself into the salutary separation that would unburden it from itself, into a noematic unreality that would only be the representation or thought of a suffering, is something that suffering, in its suffering reality, can never do.

(Henry 2015, p. 58)

The idea, here, is relatively straightforward: my immediate feeling of pain cannot be set at a distance from me as the noematic correlate of a perceptual act without ceasing to be the pain that I feel, right here, right now. This is because my way of access to pain—the “intentional act”—and the “correlate” of this act are, in the strictest sense, identical. On this account, we can no longer speak of acts and correlates while maintaining phenomenological rigor; if it is true that we are concerned here with what is “at once the affecting and the affected”, then we have to speak of “self-affection.” (Ibid., p. 58). If I ask, “How do I know this pain? By what means do I suffer it?” it will not do to say, “because I saw the glass pierce my skin”, or “because, noticing a correlation between the hammer falling on my finger and the sweat breaking out on my brow, I inferred a causal relationship between the two”. The answer can be nothing other than this: “I know the pain, I feel it, because it hurts”. The impression impresses itself upon me always and only through itself. Auto-affection will come, in the end, to characterize every impression.4 And the impression will have its site, its place of happening, in the flesh, which is nothing more than life’s implacable arrival within itself under various but united impressional modes. The flesh, in fact, is little more than the unification of these diverse impressions. Moreover, it is precisely in its impressional character that the invisibility of the flesh consists. Flesh qua flesh cannot be thought or even, strictly speaking, perceived but only lived.

The appearing of the world, on the contrary, is not immanent but transcendent; as Henry limns, “[t]he ‘outside’ as such is the world.” (Henry 2002, p. 15). It is a kind of phenomenological opening in which what appears appears as distinct from its appearing or its mode of givenness. To prove this, one need only point out that, while the objects that appear in the exteriority of the world can vary indefinitely, their way of appearing is always the same. They appear outside me, beyond the pale of the impressional immediacy of flesh, but also outside of themselves. They appear as ob-jects—as things thrown before me at an irreducible phenomenological distance—and as objects, moreover, torn from their own reality, broken up, and distributed across a continuum of possible adumbrations. In the world, the object can only give itself to me in aspects, none of which discloses the thing in its full reality. Thus, strictly speaking, the thing, in the depth of its reality, cannot appear in the world at all:

[D]eprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world’s Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.

(Henry 2002, p. 15)

This double-exteriorization is, according to Henry, a function of time. It stems from the impossibility of the impression being given in the temporal flow of consciousness. Since, as Husserl says, “In principle, no part of what is not-flux can appear”, the now-moment of any experience of consciousness can only raise itself up by its retentional and protentional connection to a just-now-past and a soon-to-be-present (Husserl 1964, p. 153). Each of these—protention and retention—is an intentional act of consciousness and, as such, marks “the primitive form of coming outside” (Henry 2015, p. 51) whereby the present is always already separated from itself by its immersion in the unbroken flow. Thus, on Husserl’s account (according to Henry at least), the impression can never be given in intentionality because every intentional aim takes in view, not the immediacy of a present or a presence, but a “now” mediated by its relation to a past and a future (Henry 2015, p. 51). Because it is precisely in the impressional immediacy of the flesh that life comes into itself, and because it is the nature of the world’s appearing to interpose this caesura between my own secret and invisible undergoing of my life and that which my consciousness takes as its object, life cannot, in principle, appear in the world. The latter can only present us with what is lifeless, dead, dissemblant—in a word, unreal.

The objective body appears in the world. It is therefore subject to the indifference, distance, and lifelessness of that mode of appearing. Considered merely as a material thing, my body appears in the same manner as billboards and orchids and rubble. Like them, and again understood strictly as a material thing, it can only be viewed from the outside. This exteriority reigns not only over my perceptions and proprioception; more crucially, every reductively materialistic view of the body submerges it in a radical “outsideness”. Construed solely as a configuration of matter, the body can have no “inside” at all; it can be taken up by a gaze, but it, itself, cannot gaze. It cannot be alive because it cannot feel itself in the impressional immediacy of flesh.

This way of framing the matter leaves us with a straightforward schema: two modes of appearing which cleave what common sense calls the body into “flesh” and “objective body”. Two constellations of concepts, arising from immanence on the one hand and transcendence on the other, stand face-to-face in what would seem an eternal stand-off. The details, of course, are considerably more complex than all this suggests, so part of the task ahead will be to fill in this crude sketch.

3. The Tripartite Flesh and the Constitution of the Objective Body

It would seem that immanence and transcendence or self and world form what Joseph Rivera has called a “steadfast antinomy”; that the duplicity of appearing “opens up an impassable abyss between the fullness of interiority and the desolation of exteriority”; that interiority “eludes the illumination of the world”; and that, consequently, “the saint” in pursuit of the highest reality “must avoid the world at all costs, for the world is the site of the death of God.”5. But we must also try to balance this reading of Henry with some remarks, scattered throughout his work, that complicate and maybe even disqualify it. For example, there is his suggestion that a phenomenology of Life would take in exteriority as well as interiority, but only by leading the exterior back and founding it upon the interior:

Every sphere of reality must become the object of a new analysis that goes back to its invisible dimension. And this concerns material nature as well, which is a living cosmos.

(Henry 2008, p. 6)

There is also his claim that “because, in my flesh, I am the life of my organic body, I am also that of the world”, (Henry 2015, p. 151). This assertion amounts to nothing more than a flagrant absurdity if the world is and is nothing but the realm in which life is torn from itself in a kind of phenomenological dismemberment. Nor can we dismiss this claim as a rhetorical flourish since it merely recasts a parallel assertion from Henry’s first published text. There the idea is put forward in the starkest of terms: “the world is penetrated by a life that is mine: I am the life of the world.” (Henry 1975, p. 32). It is a matter, then, of determining the meaning of such a formulation while, at the same time, holding in view Henry’s more ominous claims about the mutual phenomenological exclusion of life and world. Only then will we be able to attempt an answer to the theological challenge posed to Henry’s notion of incarnation.

It is worth emphasizing that Henry’s own approach to this question takes place within a reduction to immanence—that is to say, a reduction that sets aside any reference to “representation”, broadly construed. Before considering a sensory experience, for example, as pertaining to a transcendent object, even when this object has itself been reduced to a mere ideal meaning-correlate of perceptual intention, it is a matter of describing our immediate, impressional, and, so to speak, de-polarized experience of undergoing ourselves in the immanence of the flesh. Though this maneuver reaches beyond or below Husserl’s transcendental reduction, the presupposition that motivates it accords fundamentally with the “principle of principles”6 in Ideas I, viz., “that each intuition affording [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge…”7 Henry agrees that “the originary” provides the first datum for phenomenology; however, siding with Maine de Biran over Husserl, Henry understands the originary “to be what comes in itself before every intentionality and independently of it, before the space of a gaze, and before the ‘outside itself’ for which intentionality is only a name.” (Henry 2015, p. 56). If the legitimacy and rigor of phenomenology consist in the originality of its matter, then only that which comes in itself, as itself, by itself in full immediacy can provide it with a sure foundation. Glossing Biran, Henry says that only “by way of a reduction to an original sphere of certitude” can science “raise itself up upon a true foundation, one which will not be a mere notion, but existence itself.” (Henry 1975, p. 20). This shift in the meaning of “originary”, then, marks a corresponding shift from phenomenology as an eidetic science to phenomenology as an affective science.

Thus, the best way to get at our problem is by asking a question much closer to home: in what sense is my flesh the life of my body? For to submit the body to such a reduction delivers us straightaway to flesh or what in the earlier texts Henry calls the original body, which is the most originary sphere of experience. It is from this region that we must strike out. From this original reality, we can proceed to establish a phenomenologically sure link between the flesh and the thingly body (Henry 2015, p. 136). Henry does this by unfolding the complexities of a flesh that, in its radical immanence, only seems to be utterly simple. In fact, the full reality of our incarnate condition can be parsed into three distinguishable strata: the original body (or flesh), the organic body, and the transcendent or objective body. Each is phenomenologically founded upon the one that precedes it, and Henry will insist that all are, in some sense, accessible within the reduction to immanence.

Bracketing away all exteriority and reducing the experience of the body to its most immediate reality, we are left with the residue of an invisible but unified field of ever-changing impressions. The flesh is the unification of these different impressional modes—impressionality as such. Within this reduction, several characteristics of flesh can be adduced, two of which are relevant here. First, flesh individuates or, to use Henry’s preferred term, bestows “ipseity”. Since the flesh is a feeling of itself, it cannot be “an anonymous and impersonal flesh, unconscious, feeling nothing and not feeling itself.” (Henry 2015, pp. 123–24). In order to undergo itself within itself, it must have unity and identity. Second, flesh is pathos, and this in a dual sense: it is passive to the impressions it receives since it does not produce these impressions, and it is passive to the capacity to receive them. To be alive is to have in one’s possession a capacity for being affected without bestowing this capacity on oneself (Henry 2015, p. 121). Because of this, Henry will stress the “in-” of incarnation; flesh is always receiving its impressional capacity from an Elsewhere, from Life. Flesh is being-made-flesh—not incarnate but “in-carnation.” (Henry 2019a, p. 54).

The word “capacity” or power is extremely important for Henry. Paradoxically, although flesh does not bestow its capacities on itself but receives them continuously from life, it experiences itself immediately as an ability to be able. This may be the most important thesis Henry took from Biran, for it was Biran’s affirmation that the being of the ego is essentially movement. For Henry, the self is not a substance in which certain properties or perfections would inhere. It is an activity first of all, a constant deploying of itself. This ceaseless movement, however, does not go beyond the intimacy of the immediate, even when it culminates in a specific action. It remains within immanence because it is not constituted. As Henry says:

Because it is not constituted, because it is a transcendental experience, the movement of the hand has nothing to do with a displacement in objective space or in any transcendent milieu whatever; the original and real movement is a subjective movement.

(Henry 1975, p. 59)

At no point then does movement, either in its potentiality or its effectuation, leave me. Just like the impression, movement overlaps with itself—with myself—at every point.

Both in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body and Incarnation, Henry argues that it is precisely this experience of movement that gives access to the organic body without stepping out of the reduction to immanence. For I do not experience my power for movement as an absolute power; rather, I find within all my movements, not the fluid, continuous out-going of my action, but an effort, an exertion-against. This effort, lived in each of my movements, is how I experience the counter-current of an exterior resistance and experience it within the auto-impressional life of my flesh (Henry 2015, pp. 146–47). Moreover, this effort admits of a more and a less: in lifting my arm, I feel a resistance so minor that I may not even notice it, but if my arm is pinned by a boulder, the resistance to my movement is absolute. Because of this, Henry speaks of a “resisting continuum”, a phrase he cribs from Biran to describe the variation in degrees of resistance experienced within movement. And this within is worth emphasizing. It is easy to conceive of the continuum as a something that impinges from outside upon the force I deploy. Lavigne, it seems, has made this mistake and argued the following against Henry’s claim that “all the being of what resists is…in the force which it is resisting”:

[I]t is no less phenomenologically proper to assert [Lavigne writes] that, in the very event of resisting, the encountered continuum exerts and manifests its own power—a power of its own—whose effectiveness and manifestation could by no means and in no degree have been anticipated by consciousness.

(Lavigne 2009, p. 384)

It seems to me that this argument lands wide of the mark on two counts. First, it forgets that the resisting continuum is not what I come up against, but “the experience of…a term that resists [my] effort.” (Henry 2015, p. 147). To say that the being of what resists comes from the force I exert against it means that, as thing-resisting-my-effort, I originally experience it not as an exterior thing that my effort posits in existence by some idealist legerdemain. Originally and immanently, I experience it as and only as an increased effort, a kind of phenomenological “drag” immanent to my action. As Karl Hefty reminds us, “the limit of [a given] power…is reached not on its far side, and the end of its exercise, and when it is exhausted, but rather within it.” (Hefty 2018). Even if we overlook this misunderstanding, though, there remains the problem of what it could mean phenomenologically to experience an exterior power. A characteristically Henrian response to this, I think, would point out that only my powers are given to me originally. Because of this, and to be represented to me at all as power, any representation of power exerted on me from the outside would have to be formed on an analogy from my originary experience of exerting my own powers.

The experience of relative resistance allows for the passage to the “second” body—the organic body. In fact, Henry will claim that the entire being of the organic body is exhausted in the feeling of relative resistance; it is nothing more than “[t]hat which resists the ‘I can’ of my originary corporeity, which reveals itself to it and to it alone, and whose manner of doing this is just to resist it.” (Ibid., p. 148). This way of describing the organic body, however, can be misleading, for what Henry has in mind is something far more concrete and fine-grained than this “nothing more than” attests. In fact, the different degrees to which and in which my organic body resists me allow for a kind of schematization of affectivity, which, while bypassing any kind of representation, gives my body to me as homogeneous and unified, to be sure, but also as variegated. This comes out clearer in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, where Henry defines the organic body as “the ensemble of the termini over which movement has a hold.” (Henry 1975, p. 129). These termini refer to the organs of the body felt, within immanence, as “parts” of my body that both lie within my power but also resist it; I feel them as both unified by the “I can” through which they are given over to and obey my movement, but also differentiated by the ways in which they resist me. As Henry says of the organic body:

It allows to appear in it structures to which we will attribute the names of the different parts of the body, which will be for us our members, our torso, our neck, our muscles, etc., but, which, originally, are nothing of the sort and present themselves to us only as phenomenological systems which express different ways in which it yields to our effort.8

These different ways of yielding are not enough on their own to allow for the structural differentiation of my body in representation, an attribution of different modes of resistance to localized exterior points on the objective body. By extension, at this point in the analysis, the organic body does not allow for different perceptual systems to be differentiated and referred to their corresponding sense organs. Before the body appears as something transcendent, before it appears as a being in the world that we come across and experience, it is given to us in the very experience of movement and its limitation.

How, then, do we have access, within life, to the transcendent, objective body, the body that appears in the phenomenological milieu of the world? Here we must recur back to the notion of absolute resistance, the experience in which my effort comes up against the limit of its exertion. Suppose I press my index finger into my thigh. On either side of this touch, there will be an impression of resistance, and the harder I press, the greater this resistance grows until the movement reaches its term. This absolute resistance is the manifestation within immanence of something exterior to my power. According to Henry, the exterior aspect of my body is impressed upon me at the terminal point of my organic deployment against it. What is not disclosed, however, is the mineness of this body, for it is not merely my body that absolute resistance reveals. All the bodies of the world give themselves as limit-points of my various sensitive activities, as forms of absolute resistance to my power. Absolute resistance is the immanent emergence of the contents of exteriority qua exterior.

The problem of the constitution of the objective body as structured by different organs of sensation leads Henry into meditations too dense and complex to be treated here. Yet it remains to resolve the question about the mineness of the body and the constitution of bodies in general as living bodies. Obviously, when I see another’s body, I apprehend it as living. But how can a body appear to me in the world as living if the very life of this body, its flesh, remains invisible in principle? As objective and only as objective, the body of the other appears in precisely the same way as other material objects—spread out in space, partes extra partes, in an outside from which my living flesh is shut out. If anything in this exterior is alive, I cannot feel that it is alive, cannot undergo its being alive. In Henry’s answer to this question, we encounter a solution to the relation between the body and the flesh, and consequently between the world and life, that explains the growing importance that the problem of language takes on in Henry’s later writings, culminating in Words of Christ. The solution is to appeal to a semiotics of flesh.

Imagine I am walking down the sidewalk. I have just eaten lunch with a friend who spent much of the meal confessing to me a horrible mistake she has made, a moral failure that may have disastrous professional consequences. As I walk, my tender feelings for my friend mix with a desire to relieve her guilt, all while I struggle to square this confession with my previous perception of her character. Suddenly I catch sight of myself walking in a shop window across the street. On my face, I see this tumult of sentiments and mental strain, my shoulders hunched as if I carried a weight, my heavy stride. All of this is clearly manifest on the surface of my worldly body. However, as Henry says:

Where this look looks at me, where its sadness appears to me, where this smile smiles at me, on the smooth surface of the mirror, there is no real vision, no real sadness…no flesh impressing upon itself in the effectuation of a singular life.9

Yet I see that I am sad. I see that I am moving. Henry points out that, just as in the case of language where a sign is given to me in external perception in order to refer me to an ideal meaning, these external manifestations refer me to the invisibility of flesh since “these are significations borrowed from living flesh.” (Henry 2015, p. 154). These significations mark one of the ways in which my objective body is constituted as belonging to my flesh since upon the surface of this body I read signs that correspond to my own invisible life. And, further, because I know these bodily significations correspond to and indicate the invisibility of my flesh, I understand the movements that play across the body of the other—facial expressions, for example—as signs founded on an invisible flesh like mine. Whether my body or the other’s, the true reality of the body qua living human body derives from and only from the flesh, for “only what transpires in the flesh can account phenomenologically for what we ‘observe’ in the living body.”10 The living, objective body is constituted on the basis of the invisible, and its true reality consists in signifying that place where the originary impressional life of the living churns, a place that is not a place but a way.

The body, then, is not fundamentally illusory, but neither can it be seen as a fundament of experience. The objective body is indeed real, but its reality can only be assured through a long detour that begins with our immediate experience of ourselves, proceeds through the organic body, and only then arrives at the objective body, only to lead both bodies back to the reality which founds—phenomenologically, transcendentally—their reality.

4. The Life of the World; Philosophy in the First-Person

The initial encounter with the contents of the world within the resisting continuum leaves worldhood in an ambiguous situation. The world would seem, on the one hand, to consist in the various ways in which its contents—experienced purely as limits to my power—resist me. On the other hand, we might understand the world as what lies on the far side of this experience of resistance. Possibly, Henry himself was not aware of this ambiguity, as his conflicting appraisals of the world seem to suggest. Sometimes the world seems to be accessible in life while at other times it seems to be the desert of life. How might we resolve this tension?

Many of Henry’s most searing comments on the world can be found between the covers of Barbarism. There, the concept of the world plays a disastrous role in nothing less than the decline of Western culture into decadence and nihilism. Remarkable, too, is the contiguity this concept often has with scientism in that text; it is a contiguity that Henry so frequently underlines that the world begins to take on an almost metonymic relationship with reductive materialism and positivistic science. Like Husserl before him (See especially Husserl 1970, pp. 23–59), Henry saw in Galileo’s reduction of the world to its mathematical and geometrical realities a complete dismissal of all that living subjectivity brings to bear on the world. The world, under the Galilean reduction, appears stripped of its sensible qualities, of its affective resonances, and, as Henry will say, of its reality. It does this by taking all that appears according to life and reduces it to its way of appearing in the world—and worse yet, to only one kind of appearing:

To the extent that the world of the mind, with its own laws and creations, seems to depend on nature—on a human or animal body—this nature is precisely not the world of science with its abstract idealities. It is the lifeworld—a world that can only be accessed in a sensibility like ours and which is only given to us through the endless play of its constantly changing and renewed subjective appearances. Galileo’s illusion…was to have taken the mathematical and geometrical world, which provided univocal knowledge of the real world, for this real world itself…the world that we can intuit and experience only in the concrete modes of our subjective life.

(Henry 2012a, p. 8)

It is this world, reduced to mathematical relations and material extension, that Henry seems most often to have in mind when he speaks of the world. Although the world names the outside as such, the scientific approach to reality, so long as it arrogates to itself the claim to be the only source of true knowledge, is a universalization of the logic of the world. Under the gaze of a reductive scientific materialism, what appears only and always appears as an inert ob-ject, related by exterior relationships to other ob-jects. And yet this radicalized exteriority, while continuous with what we imagine the world reduced to itself and totally divorced from life might be, does not and cannot exist. “Such a world of insensible particles”, Henry writes, “where there would be neither coolness, nor odor, nor light, nor shadow, nor sound, nor color, nor sweetness, nor pleasure, nor charm, would not be only an unlivable world—it is an impossible world.” (Henry 2015, p. 108).

This way of construing the world bears a strong resemblance to what Henry, in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, calls the “third-person perspective”—the adoption of a fundamentally self-contradictory vantage where one looks on the world and its contents from a methodological nowhere, as if one were not always already in this world because one is alive. The temptation to take up this perspective stems, Henry suggests, from a desire for assurance, a desire to escape the inherent tensions, difficulties, and ambiguities of life; Henry quips that if triangles have played a role in the history of philosophy that “is obviously out of proportion to the interest which we accord them in our concrete life, it is because the species of necessity which their properties impose on us signifies … a type of rest, an assurance” and “a sort of ecstasy within this assurance.” (Henry 1975, p. 143). But this temptation to take an external position with respect to the world cuts one off from reality. It introduces one into a world that does not and cannot exist: a world without life.

The only possible world, as the passage from Barbarism suggests, is a world of the living, a life-world, on which the idealities of the mathematical science rest. This is the world of the first-person perspective which the flesh attains while remaining in itself; its reality for us is founded on the flesh. It is a world not only shot through with sensation; it is also a world whose reality is inseparable from the living who find themselves in it. The content of this world does not appear to me as a collection of inert, extended objects, deprived of all life. I experience its contents immediately as helpful, dangerous, vitalizing, vitiating, disgusting, beautiful and thereby as sharing, so far as they are real for me, in the life which I constantly suffer within myself. “Everything”, Henry says, “bears within the heart of its being the image of a human destiny … I am the life of the world.”11

“The world”, then, does not just denote an inferior mode of appearing; much less can we hurry to zoomorphize it as a kind of “demonic power” that comes to “consume and annul all real and imagined totalities”, or as having a nihilistic and “irrepressible urge to dominate” (Rivera 2015, p. 70). Rather, we can distinguish between two concepts of world, which I will call the benign and the metastatic concepts of the world. The benign concept should be clear enough by now; it is merely one of the two modes of appearing, though a mode founded on life’s appearing. The metastatic concept refers, primarily, to an ideological mutation within life itself, whereby life tries to escape itself—for the sake of security, as I have pointed out here, but for many other reasons as well—by giving itself over to the world. The world, in this sense, does not emerge from a reduction to immanence, but from reductionism, which is always a denial of reality in all its fullness, variety, and presence.

5. Conclusions: The Body of Christ

To conclude, I want to point out a path toward answering the theological question I began with. Does Christ appear in the world, does he have an objective, thingly body? And if so, what role does it play, if any, in our salvation? Answering this question fully would require opening up an investigation into Henry’s views on fallenness, soteriology, atonement, and the relationship between God or Life and the living. Thus, what I offer here aims to do little more than offer a preliminary orientation toward such a more robust answer.

First, it is enough to point out that, if Christ is the God-man, which Henry explicitly affirms, then he has the same relationship to his earthly body as we do to ours. His objective body would be a real body, appearing in the exteriority of the world and as a mere body denuded of everything pertaining to his life. His flesh, which constitutes this body in the way I have outlined above, is what counts. The Incarnation of Christ means nothing for us if Christ is incarnate as a stone or a triangle; it is as a living body, as flesh, that his incarnation takes on its significance.

This observation, however, does not offer a satisfactory answer. It makes the material body of Christ and his visibility seem contingent and unnecessary, and doubly so if we take into account Henry’s claim that Christ is the Arch-flesh of all flesh. For, if he is Flesh itself before coming in a worldly body, what does his incarnation add? What theological meaning can it have? Henry would be hard put to answer this question if we interpret it as a question about the metaphysical ramifications of God taking on materiality as his own, not least of all because his philosophy forecloses from the outset any thinking of materiality that is not from first to last related to a flesh. To ask a question about God taking on materiality as such is, from an Henrian perspective, to ask a kind of pseudo-question. However, if we ask the more phenomenologically germane question of the salvific purpose fulfilled in the objective body of Christ, Henry can give us some kind of answer.

For Henry, we are all, to varying degrees, prey to the metastatic concept of the world. Insofar as we have alienated ourselves from God and are actively engaged in trying to tear ourselves from reality, we collaborate in the spread of the world’s cancerous logic. We pursue distraction from ourselves in all manner of diversion from the immanent experience of suffering ourselves within ourselves. All of us are lost in the world, preoccupied with the exterior in which we seek to abandon ourselves. Always held in life, always receiving it invisibly in ourselves, we are still, insofar as we are diverted by the world, inured to its perpetual call. To communicate himself to us, who live in this condition of dispersal and preoccupation, God must come into the world, enter the site of our gazes’ obsession (Henry 2002, p. 80).

But a paradox follows hard upon this answer, one that mirrors exactly the problem which made the person of Christ a scandal in his own time. God can only make himself known, as Henry says, in the invisible. How, then, can Christ, by becoming visible, make the Father known? To see him with one’s eyes is obviously not to know him as the Christ; I may very well see the man Christ and recognize nothing of the Father in him. Henry’s answer to this is striking:

What reveals itself in [Christ] is the self-revelation of this Life, which is his own revelation, his “glory”—for the revelation of life is the glory of the Father. What is done in [Christ], what he does, is what this life does; thus he does nothing himself, but everything is transmitted through him. What is said in him, what he says, is what life says. What is willed in him, what he wills, is what this life wills, and he wills only what life wills.

(Henry 2002, pp. 88–89)

The will of God, his words, his actions, are performed in the flesh of Christ and manifested as signs in the world.12 Each act of Christ, each teaching, and each miracle, though thrown into the indifference of the world’s appearing, signifies the invisible reality which brings it about in the flesh of the one who does it.13 This invisible reality does not erupt into reality for the first time in the person of Christ; it is always arriving, according to Henry, in our own flesh as the life that sustains us and, in sustaining us, sustains the world, making it a life-world. It is this arrival which the actions and words of Christ mean to call us back to, an arrival that, far from calling us to leave “the world…to its bad lot” (Bernet 1999, p. 330) beckons us back to a way of living that can convert the dead world into a life-world. Precisely in the visibility of the visible, Christ bears witness to the only truth that, for Henry, can save us—that the invisible is the very depth of the visible.14