Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrastsin the Deduction of Life as Transcendental

James Williams

Published online: 21 August 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract To address the theological turn in phenomenology, this paper sets out criticalarguments opposing the theist phenomenology of Michel Henry and Gilles Deleuze’sphilosophy of the event. Henry’s phenomenology has been overlooked in recent com-mentaries compared with, for example, Jean-Luc Marion’s work. It will be shown herethat Henry’s philosophy presents a detailed novel turn in phenomenology structuredaccording to critical moves against positions developed from Husserl, Heidegger, andMerleau-Ponty. This demonstration is done through a strong contrast with Deleuze and ashort engagement with Quentin Meillassoux. The paper presents an argument againstthe theological turn on the grounds that it misunderstands the form of affectivity whencompared to Deleuze’s work on affect and event. It will be argued that Henry’s searchfor a free-standing affect deduced as a condition for any appearance underplays the wayany affect is included in many causal and transcendentally determined series such thatany notion of the pure affect independent of other processes is a fiction. The loss of thispure affect entails the questioning of the theological turn in Henry.

Keywords Affect . Auto-affection . Event . Gilles Deleuze .Michel Henry .

Transcendental . Suffering

Introduction

In order to address the theological turn in phenomenology, this paper sets out criticalarguments opposing the theist phenomenology of Michel Henry and Gilles Deleuze’sphilosophy of the event. Henry’s phenomenology has been somewhat overlooked inrecent commentaries when compared to, for example, Jean-Luc Marion’s work (thoughthis is hardly Marion’s fault, given his work in keeping Henry’s ideas in circulationthrough a series of re-editions for Presses Universitaires de France after Henry’s death in

SOPHIA (2008) 47:265–279DOI 10.1007/s11841-008-0073-4

J. Williams (*)Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UKe-mail: j.r.williams@dundee.ac.uk

2002). Alongside these re-editions there has been a recent renewal in Henry’s work inFrance (Lavigne et al. 2006; Audi 2006; Longneaux 2001; David and Greisch 2001;see also the excellent web resource run by Anne Henry http://www.michelhenry.com)and to a lesser extent abroad (see, for example, Mullarkey 2006 and O’Sullivan 2006,and the essays on Henry in Continental Philosophy Review, Zahavi 1999). It will beargued here that Henry’s philosophy presents a detailed novel turn in phenomenologystructured through critical moves against positions developed from Husserl,Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This demonstration is done through a strong contrastwith Deleuze and a series of answers to criticisms of phenomenology put by QuentinMeillassoux. The article as a whole should be viewed as an argument against thetheological turn on the grounds that it misunderstands the form of affectivity whencompared to Deleuze’s work on affect and event. It will be argued that Henry’s searchfor a free-standing affect deduced as a condition for any appearance underplays theway any affect is included in many causal and transcendentally determined series suchthat any notion of the pure affect independent of other processes is a fiction. The loss ofthis pure affect entails the questioning of the theological turn in Henry because this turnis based on a pure auto-affectivity as suffering, which in turn allows for its interpretationas a divine manifestation, interpreted according in Christian terms by Henry.

Affect and Immanence in Deleuze and Henry

It has been argued recently by my colleague John Mullarkey that there are a number ofsignificant points of convergence between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and MichelHenry: ‘Henry’s account is surprisingly Deleuzian…’ (Mullarkey 2006, 49). Thisconvergence is far from total though since, as Mullarkey points out, the two broadsimilarities between the thinkers—deep concern with affects and commitment tophilosophies of immanence—cover far-reaching distinctions (Mullarkey 2006, 49–50).First, Deleuze stresses an affirmative version of affect. Affects are only fully registeredwhen affirmed in a creative response to them, which Deleuze often calls counter-actualization. So affects such as joy or suffering follow from complex events, but areonly affirmed when these events are replayed by whoever or whatever is subjected to theevent. The events happening to us are redoubled in a transforming affirmative actDeleuze likens to an actor replaying a script: ‘… to become the actor of one’s events,counter-actualization.’ (Deleuze 1969, 176). Henry takes an opposing direction bysingling out pathos as the essential form of affect because it is an auto-affectivity of life(Henry 2003a, 35). This is an affection of life by life, as condition for any actualexistence independent of intentionality. The term ‘auto-affection’ therefore means lifeand affect B determined by affect B, rather than affect B caused by external cause A, ordetermined by condition A. How though can something affect itself without contradictionsince the affection ought to cause change in the thing? For Henry, life is originally an auto-affection, so it is not that there is something independent of the affect changing when it isaffected, but rather that the affect is a self-relation inseparable into terms, hence avoidingthe construction of a contradiction between the start term and the end term of the relation.

Auto-affectivity is then a form of free-standing relation of self to self, or betterselfhood or ipseity, such as a pure suffering retaining an independence from externalcauses yet standing as an undeniable ground for all other activities and sensibilities

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(Henry 2003b, 167). This definition of affect explicitly rejects the Deleuzian affir-mation since its redoubling transformation and position within a series of changes arenot consistent with the ‘auto’ of Henry’s auto-affection. Note however that pathos isstill connected to activity for Henry because a sense of ‘being able’, a ‘Je peux’ in theFrench, accompanies this auto-affectivity of life. Henry develops this point in, forexample, his ‘Qu’est-ce-que cela que nous appelons la vie?’ (Henry 2003c, 54–5). It isimportant to register Henry’s critical turn from the Heideggerian question about whatwe call thinking ‘Was heiβt denken?’ to the wider question ‘What is called life? (SeeHeidegger 1976). Henry insists that his philosophy is a phenomenology of life ratherthan of appearances or Being. Thus, from Henry’s point of view, there is an essential ‘Iam able’ in a living thing such as a living hand prior to (and as a condition for) anythought about ability or any intentionality involving the movement, perception, orpresence of the hand. This pure ability is neither reducible to particular affects, nor is ita necessary condition for the affect, as it is in Deleuze’s affirmation. The hand isability, but not an ability to do this or that which would draw Henry’s philosophy into atechnological approach he is in vehement opposition to. Henry wrote against science, astechnological, in his controversial La barbarie: ‘Ignoring life and proper interests, theonly interests of the world and whose origins we never find in the world, inobjectivity, science places itself in an almost inconceivable solitude. That solitude ofscience is technology [la technique].’ (Henry 1987, 70). For a précis of many of thearguments from La barbarie, see also (Henry 2004a).

Second, in terms of their shared philosophical dedication to immanence, immanent lifeis phenomenological for Henry but planes of immanence are empirically constructed forDeleuze, to use the later definitions of immanence from Deleuze and Guattari’s AThousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). To be clear, this does not mean thatthe metaphysical reality of planes of immanence is constructed. The reality of planes ofimmanence is deduced rather than constructed. It means, though, that any singular planeis constructed and different for different actualities. In turn, this implies that the de-duction of such planes is itself variable and singular: an individual and differentlyrepeated deduction of a universal necessity. In contrast, immanence is deduced byHenry as a necessary transcendental condition following a phenomenological reductionthat is the same for any form of life. Life as condition is then neither constructed norvariable, but essentially uniform. For instance, there can be a reduction that shows thenecessity of pure life as auto-affectivity underlying any given particular suffering from agiven injury in an actual body. This immanence to life is ultimately theistic for Henrywhere he develops suffering and the mystery of auto-affection in relation to Christianity.

This Christianity is explicit and constant through most of Henry’s works and includesthe books C’est moi la vérité: pour une philosophie du Christianisme (Henry 1996)Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair (Henry 2000) and Paroles du Christ (Henry2002). Henry stresses the consistency of his philosophy with his work on Christianity. Ishall show the detail of some of his arguments for this coherence later, but another wayof seeing this intimate connection is through his careful and original interpretation ofKierkegaard, another Christian philosopher whose work he greatly admired and de-pended upon at key points in his arguments (Henry 2003c, 53; for Kierkegaard’s dis-cussion of suffering and its inspiration for Henry see, among others, Kierkegaard 1992).

John Mullarkey, kindly commenting on an earlier version of this paper, has pointedthat this Christian reference is neither ubiquitous nor perhaps necessary in Henry’s

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work. This is an important qualification since it opens up the possibility ofinterpretations of Henry’s work that bifurcate away from the later texts on Christianityand offer a more secular version of his radical phenomenology. This remark is all themore important in terms of suffering andMullarkey’s work on Deleuze and Henry seestheir versions of this affect as closer than I do: ‘Another point is the emphasis so far onsuffering—this works well vis-à-vis his Christian leanings, but it is also part of hisphenomenological empiricism that makes it less Christian, i.e., suffering understoodas test, ordeal—“experimentation” in the French (experiment or experience) or“épreuve” (test or ordeal) [Even “souffrez” has an ambiguity to it]. I see suffering ona par with life as experiment in Deleuze.’ (Mullarkey 2008, private email in responseto this paper, June 24th 2008). As I will argue later, my position is that, as implicatedin an event, suffering in Deleuze and Henry is not quite as close as Mullarkey setsthem out here, however, this is a point that I do not at all see as settled, on thecontrary, we are opening up two paths in the early reception of Henry’s work ratherthan any final view (such closed positions are inimical to philosophical interpreta-tion, anyway). It is worth noting that Henry’s philosophy risks inviting quite narrowinterpretations since he is, if not limited in his references, then at least somewhatrepetitive, thus the affect of suffering is very frequently reflected upon throughKierkegaard, aesthetics through Kandinsky (see Henry 2003d), the phenomenologyof life and the body through Maine de Biran on whom Henry wrote his first work(Henry 1965) and the missed opportunities in early modern phenomenology throughDescartes’s famous wax example and the cogito and his works on the passions of thesoul (Descartes 1989, 1996). This Descartes reference is important because itconnects Henry to the revaluation of Descartes’s position within the development ofphenomenology, a stance also taken by Jean-Luc Marion (see Henry 2003f,g; Marion1981, 1991). However, where Marion focuses on Descartes’s metaphysical and theo-logical arguments, Henry is interested in the relations between affect, perception, lifeand the subject, and in drawing the ‘ego’ away from perception and cognition insubjectivity and into an originary selfhood. (Henry 2003h, 81).

According to Mullarkey, immanence is not theistic but naturalistic for Deleuze. It is amatter of empirical description of nature rather than divine manifestation (Mullarkey2006, 69). Thus immanence is constructed experimentally by Deleuze rather thandeduced from phenomena. The commitment to immanence is however once again ashared critical tool for Deleuze and Henry. Henry’s phenomenology of life emergesalongside a long critical engagement with Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.Deleuze’s construction of fields of immanence also runs alongside many differentcritiques of transcendence, such as his well-known inversion of Platonism (Deleuze1994, 59–64). Some translations of Deleuze’s book, including the one cited here, preferoverturning to inversion, but in my view this is too strong a term for the Frenchrenverser and leads to an overly strong interpretation of Deleuze’s relation to Plato asrepudiation rather than a more subtle inflection or reversal (I discuss this in more detailin Williams 2003, 79–83). Deleuze and Henry are therefore united in a radical move-ment of philosophy identifying remnants of transcendence in traditions that explicitlyattempted to avoid it. Their closeness comes out most strongly in their treatment ofHusserl as still committed to a transcendent kernel at the heart of his philosophy. Icannot go into these critiques in great detail here but there is an extended reading ofDeleuze’s work on Husserl in Williams 2008 (99–134). I would also refer readers

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concerned to pursue Henry’s critical work on Husserl to his brilliant entry on phe-nomenology for the Encyclopédie philosophique universelle (vol IV), a piece of searingeconomy and insight (Henry 2003e). Henry’s argument is that Husserl’s phenomenol-ogy ultimately fails because it sticks to a distinction between the world of appearancesand a remnant of the self, where this minimal sense of self still transcends lifeunderstood as the life of appearances. Henry’s counter is that once we abandon thedistinction of selfhood or ipseity and life, and relinquish the identification of life withappearance, then phenomenology will arrive at life as auto-affection and as selfhood,rather than a ‘myself’ opposed to an external worldly life: ‘No one has ever seen life.The phenomenality of that auto-affection is pathos. It is in that original affectivity thatlife is given to itself: Arche-revelation, the pure phenomenological substance of whichis Flesh.’ (Henry 2003e, 187).

It is important at this point to note that although Deleuze’s philosophy is described asa form of naturalism, I include his transcendental deductions and constructions of virtualfields in this experimental naturalism. Indeed, I would prefer to emphasize theexperiment and the construction over the notion of nature which I believe vitiates theinterpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy by removing the virtual from the natural itselfredefined as the real. This removal then grounds the criticism that Deleuze’s philosophyinvolves a move away from life and towards an abstract virtual. See Peter Hallward’sinterpretation of Deleuze for a version of this critique with respect to the concept ofcreationwhere it is claimed that only the virtual is creating and the actual merely created.(Hallward 2006, 36–7). In my view, this is a misunderstanding of the different two-way processes involving virtual and actual such that, for example, there is a geneticand determining role for the actual in relation to the virtual (see Williams 2008, 194–202); this argument also applies critically to Badiou’s reading of Deleuze which makessimilar points with respect to the privileging of the virtual over the actual as Hallward(Badiou 1997, 2006). For a version of Hallward’s position developed in relation toDeleuze and phenomenology, with significance for this essay because of a carefulstudy of the role of affects in relation to events see Jack Reynolds’s study of the eventin Deleuze and in phenomenology (Reynolds 2008). Mullarkey makes this point betterthan Hallward or Badiou because he sees the necessity and place of the virtual, yetalso sees the importance of some kind of experimental naturalism as a commitment tothe actual in Deleuze: ‘In terms of ‘content’, Deleuze will always have a core ofineliminable Virtualism in his work (especially Difference and Repetition) though itco-exists alongside the actual, especially in the more concrete works co-authored withFélix Guattari.’ (Mullarkey 2006, 46). Yet I do not follow Mullarkey in seeing therelation of virtual to actual as in tension with what he understands by naturalism and,instead, I prefer to insist on complex relations of virtual and actual constituting reality,including nature. These relations make the virtual and actual inseparable and com-plementary rather than always calling for a decision to set value down on one side or theother.

Life as Transcendental Condition

These arguments are important for two connected but very different reasons. First,Mullarkey’s comparison with Deleuze allows for a reconsideration of the importance

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of Michel Henry in late-20th century phenomenology where he has been unjustly leftas a secondary figure when in fact his deepening of the methods of this tradition andhis critique of earlier thinkers such as Husserl and Heidegger should be set alongsidearguments developed by better known figures such as Ricoeur, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (not to mention Derrida or Lyotard, and others). Henry offers the most radicaldevelopment of phenomenology as philosophy of immanence and life. This criticaland original work spanned close on 50 years and his recently collected essays in thefour volumes of Phénoménologie de la vie are testament to an effort of greatconsistency but also very wide applications. Second, Mullarkey’s study of Deleuzeand Henry raises questions concerning the closeness of Deleuze to what I am goingto call Henry’s radical phenomenology, thereby also raising questions concerning theremnants of forms of transcendence and religiosity in Deleuze’s work around therole of the virtual in his philosophy. Mullarkey argues this through a study of anillegitimate role for the infinite in Deleuze and in Henry (Mullarkey 2006, 78). Myaim is not to dispute the first of these claims; indeed, I wish to support it byfollowing some of Henry’s most interesting critical and constructive steps. I viewMullarkey’s second set of points as more contentious, however, and I will try toshow how Deleuze’s philosophy provides counter points to Henry’s position whichshow a greater distance between them than might at first appear when they areconsidered to supposedly share a same philosophical ground and method.

If immanence is a central philosophical tenet for Deleuze and for Henry, it isnonetheless very difficult to characterize this in more accurate terms, in particular, interms of categories of philosophical enquiry such as epistemology and ontology. This isbecause Henry is highly critical of the role of ontology in phenomenology, even afterdistinctions between beings and Being, between the ontic and the ontological, inHeidegger’s Being and Time (Heidegger 1978, 28–35). Henry’s radical phenomenol-ogy is then a repudiation of any claim that life as transcendental condition for theexistence of beings can be represented in an identity even if this representation is onlyof an essence rather than any given existent: ‘All of Heidegger’s philosophy owns upto, even more, explicitly affirms that ultimate identity of the essence of being, withoutdoubt not its representation but its essence.’ (Henry 2003i, 17). Life as auto-affectionin Henry is multiple and immanence is to this multiplicity rather than any given set ofidentities or ‘world’. (Mullarkey 2006, 58–60). His response to the critical point thatmultiplicity is exactly one such identity is that life is an open set of ‘modalities’resistant to any overarching concept or category other than auto-affection, or a selfcontained relation: ‘This is how affectivity departs from the lack of determinacymaking it a simple concept: in primitive suffering in which the self-undergoing of lifeis accomplished, the affectivity which ultimately makes life possible receives the markof an original suffering.’ (Henry 2003j, 149).

Henry’s difficult argument and terminology require some explanation here. Whenchallenged by the fork ‘either life as multiple must be identifiable or it is indeterminateto the point of nothingness’ Henry answers with the claim that life is determined byauto-affection, a property of any case of its modalities that are themselves pre-conditionsfor any actual affect or given form of life. This property does not determine the lifeaccording to a concept, for example, according to an intensive definition of auto-affectivity (something Henry always eschews, consistently with his argument, but nodoubt in such a way as to invite rather unsophisticated accusations of evasiveness).

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Instead, auto-affectivity is originary and independent of conscious reflection. Thesuffering ‘just is’, or is always given as self-sufficient bodily event prior to any intentiontowards it. This sufficiency means that suffering doesn’t happen to us and is notdependent on an external cause, but is instead what life is for us in all its multiplemodalities or forms taken by auto-affection prior to any particular suffering registered asmine and as connected to a series of external causes. We live as the suffering: ‘Sufferingis an originary phenomenological tonality of life.’ (Henry 2003j, 149). Note how thedifficulty but also the precision and subtlety of Henry’s work come out in his shortsentence. I used property to explain how auto-affectivity characterizes life, but this isstill too close to a predicate allowing for conceptual identification. For Henry the‘property’ is itself open and resistant to identity; it is a ‘tonality’ of life defined asauto-affection.

The following important passage shows Henry’s denial of the claim that any givenphenomenon must be given for an intending consciousness. The passage also presentsthe end-point of his phenomenological reduction determining life as the essence of anygiven existence. In this reduction suffering as tonality of life is deduced as prior to ‘mysuffering in this given actual situation’. For Henry an actual suffering in a givenexperience is not only a contingent occurrence in a causal chain, such that there could beexperiences without it. Instead, any actual suffering presupposes an originary suffering:

All the sufferings that come forth at any moment of our existence, followingdetectable events or unpredictably, or even incomprehensibly, all those “livedsufferings” treated each time by psychology as contingent facts are nonesuch intheir hidden origin. They are multiple inflections of that primitive suffering andare necessarily referred to it as to a buried a priori in the invisible of life. (Henry2003j, 149).

In the passage Henry is taking on two different positions. First, he is moving from aphenomenon identified by a science, such as psychology, to a precondition in an originthat does not show itself in the phenomenon. What then is the validity of referring toit? It is that it is a common factor in all the contingent cases of phenomena: they allpresuppose life, itself determined by affect limited to cases of auto-affection. Thisauto-affectivity is invisible in the sense, once again, that it is not an appearance.

However, this life as transcendental condition is explicitly distinguished fromMerleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, despite the obvious connection throughthe role of the visible and of affection as passivity (Merleau-Ponty 1964). Henry claimscloseness to Merleau-Ponty’s arguments in favor of a bodily perception independent ofconsciousness or intentionality, but he wants to distance himself from Merleau-Pontyon the grounds of an original interiority and ‘ipseity’—self-hood or self-relation—oflife. When read by Henry, the body for Merleau-Ponty works against an ‘I’ or ‘subject’that transcends it, thereby providing a horizon that overcomes the subject (Henry2003a, 35–6). For Henry, on the other hand, life is originary for the subject but in sucha way as the subject and its self-relation is transformed and becomes ‘a radicalpassivity with respect to oneself, a being riveted to itself with no distance, noovercoming, no stepping back, a being that is its own living content, its own life,inexorably and inevitably its life, incapable of escaping it, or of taking hold of it, or ofrefusing it, or even accepting it.’ (Henry 2003a, 36–7). Henry wants a different kind ofsubject grounded in a transcendental life, rather than an overcoming of the conscious

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subject through the body. He wants life to become the ground for a new unity ofphenomena independent of vision and visual appearance, yet appearing in auto-affection, rather than what he sees as Merleau-Ponty’s more pessimistic division ofsubject and body (I owe thanks here to John Mullarkey for the insight that appearancestill matters for Henry but away from any dominance of vision, something I hadmisunderstood in an earlier version of this paper).

Henry’s position is no doubt controversial given Merleau-Ponty’s careful crossing ofconsciousness and body through the ideas of the ‘chiasmus’ and of the ‘interlacing’ offlesh and conscious perception (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 172–204). However, Henry’sargument can rest on the remark that in this interlacing the relations are ones of mutualbreakdowns rather than the deduction of an original condition in one or other of theterms (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 198). The deepest stakes of this opposition betweenHenry and Merleau-Ponty no doubt lie in different conceptions of flesh (la chair). Forthe latter, flesh is bodily and intertwined with perception and consciousness (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 192–3). For the former, flesh is life as auto-affectivity: a condition forembodiment but not embodiment proper. These distinctions are important in terms of acomparison of Deleuze and Henry because they mean that we cannot pass throughcurrent work on Deleuze’s opposition to Merleau-Ponty to understand his relation toDeleuze, despite the apparent connections through affectivity and suffering (Olkowski1999, 83–8; Reynolds 2008, 145–6; Reynolds and Roffe 2006) because the twophenomenological positions are so distinct. Thus when Henry speaks of suffering it isnever simply this ostensible suffering, but rather the transcendental condition for it inlife determined by an auto-affection of suffering. For there to be each actual sufferingthere has to be an original openness to suffering in life, a suffering that is not found inthings which do not live. This transcendental condition is the suffering of auto-affection, that is, to be auto-affected is already necessarily a form of suffering and apreparedness to suffer independent of any contingent external cause:

This signifies that an objective event—accident, professional or affective set-back,illness, loss—has produced a suffering, to the point of being identified with it.Irrespective of how dramatic it is, such an event can only produce a feeling ofsuffering in a being transcendentally constituted in such a way as to be susceptibleto undergo feelings and notably that particular one—in a being susceptible tosuffering (Henry 2003j, 147).

Some Answers to Quentin Meillassoux

Life as auto-affection is necessary, not as a particular living being capable of seeing orfeeling something, but rather as a source of affect capable of bringing the values of life toall objective phenomena. So it is not that Henry is committed to the claim that a lifelessplanet has to exist for a particular living being for it to acquire meaning, as implied bythe rather blunt critical points made by Quentin Meillassoux in his Après la finitudeunder the banners of ‘correlationism’ and of the ‘archi-fossil’ (Meillassoux 2006).Meillassoux argues that since we can have mathematical data pointing to an agebefore humanity, before life at all, philosophy has to be able to think factualityindependent of any consciousness. Phenomenology and other consciousness-centered

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philosophies fail to do this because they correlate world and, for instance, inten-tionality. In its strongest form, correlationism then ends with a form of fideism since,according to Meillassoux, when the correlationist thinker has to address what liesbeyond the scope of intentionality or consciousness, for example, in questions abouthow the world is given to us or manifested, it must then turn to kinds of mystical andpious donation, something forever beyond human thought:

The ultimate moment of fideism is indeed when it makes itself the thought ofthe superiority of piety over thought, without privileging any content of piety,because what was meant to be established by thought was that it is down topiety—and only to piety—to set out its contents. The contemporary devolutiontowards the Wholly-Other (the object that is itself empty of any profession offaith) is thus the inevitable and rigorous consequence of the interpretation of thelapsing of the principle of reason in its discovery of its essential incapacity todiscover an absolute: fideism is the other name of strong correlationism(Meillassoux 2006, 67).

I call this position blunt partly because it attacks straw men, partly because it fails toacknowledge that the idea of the archi-fossil is now a very well-worn one dating back atleast to discussions around Darwinism and around the age of the universe in thenineteenth century and partly because it fails to address its own internal incoherence.Meillassoux is giving us his interpretation of the significance of the archi-fossil whichinvolves many series of value judgments and selections based on life, for instance interms of which numbers are taken to be the significant ones and why. It is not so muchthe number that is problematic but rather its selection and interpretation among manyavailable figures and commentaries. Meillassoux’s position implies mathematics isbeyond questions of hermeneutics, but his own position is an interpretation of the roleof numbers within linguistic arguments: without doubt within the field ofhermeneutics. All the main thinkers within phenomenology have addressed theproblem of the apparent human-centered nature of their work and many havequestioned the necessity of a living focus for data indicating existence prior to humanconsciousness (for instance in questions regarding the nature of number and the role ofscience). I can think of no recent phenomenology that fails to address the problems thatstem from the apparent division between man and world implied by living perception ofthe world. Correlationism is at the heart of debates within phenomenology, not as anunseen error, but rather as the motor behind a sustained reflection on and overcoming ofthe problem. My critique of Meillassoux is that his position fails to address thiscapacious and sophisticated material before writing off vast swathes of thought asgrounded on simple errors. It is not so much that he is himself straightforwardly wrong,on the contrary, his points have considerable power, but rather that his arguments needgreater detail in order to encompass recent work in phenomenology, as I will now showfor Henry.

Henry’s version of this reflection is that we can concede that there are mathematicaldata pointing towards a time before life, indeed, more broadly he sees science andtechnology as divorced from human life or alienating, but once we have to consider thevalue and interest accorded to this scientific information or knowledge then we moveback into the sphere of an original life as precondition for particular values and goals.Anything manifesting itself as having any worth (which should not be confused with

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economic value) does so only on condition of there being a life determined as affect.Henry’s political philosophy, in particular his work on Marx is helpful here, sinceHenry’s insistence on life as precondition runs parallel to a key distinction in hisinterpretation of Marx between work as capital and work as ‘real’which itself maps onto the distinction between exchange value and use value: ‘Thus Marx’s analysisachieves a sharp break, deliberately leaving the economic field where everything isappearance and everything is explicable, abandoning that “noisy universe” to descendinto the “secret laboratory of production”, there where there are no longer exchangevalues, where life goes beyond its own conditions.’ (Henry 2004b, 57) Again, note theconsistency of Henry’s thought here. Economic activity and measurement is therealm of appearance, but like any phenomenological appearance it presupposes lifeas auto-affectivity beyond representation, instrumental reason and abstract value.

For Henry, the worker ‘setting out to work in the morning’ is an inescapablepresupposition of exchange value and use value. If the former is viewed as independent ofthe latter, then political economy becomes illegitimately opposed to life. Much of Henry’spolitical and ethical work is written to re-establish the primordial status of life as auto-affection. In the political sphere this means to revalue affects—suffering, alienation,bewilderment—in political debate. This could seem obvious and trite, but it is important toinsist that it is not only particular ostensible wrongs that he is concerned with, but rather adeeper and more pervasive one carried by the distinctions, goals and implications of theturn away from life. For instance, Henry argues against any intrinsic value to increases inwealth when these are not consistent with deeper values of life such as community. Aneconomically successful state that led to greater division between its citizens would be afailure from this point of view, since a shared original set of affects is a condition for theactual affects of all citizens. Division would be a denial of the community and would betestified to by the falseness of, for example, affects connected to wealth where these runcounter to a shared original suffering and an original equality in such shared affects:

Thus equality for example is not the product of an evaluation, nor in consequenceis it the product of a possible counter-evaluation. Men who ceaselessly fight towin against their fellow men, to seduce them or put them into submission, areborn free and equal, such that freedom and equality can only be actualized in thereactivation of the internal link that connects every living being to life. Thisreactivation of the religious link is ethics (Henry 2004c, 181).

Henry’s method is not empirical in setting out equality, since he does not believe thatany empirical work can establish it, or indeed that men are unequal. Instead, even inactual situations where inequality is striven for, underlying the strife there is a pre-condition: life as auto-affection (for instance in the suffering and predisposition toaffectivity presupposed even by the desire for the subjection of others). Ethics becomesthe struggle to reveal this precondition and value it against all positions claiming that anyactual situation or goal predicated on that situation is sufficient for understanding thehuman condition. For Henry, democracy is then not only technically difficult, but difficultbecause it is not a matter of autonomy (that we are individually free to give ourselves ourown laws) but a matter of a shared power of life to throw us into a condition ofinconsistent affects. We only emerge as individuals against the background of that life.

Yet the final sentence of the passage quoted above might well raise Meillassoux’spoints again, since the equation of the ethical with the religious might confirm the

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fideism he sees as implied by strong correlationism. This suspicion is a false one,however, because Henry’s position is explicitly and firmly opposed to any notion of the‘Wholly-Other’. Quite to the contrary, his argument for the association of transcendentallife with Christianity is based on immanence rather than absolute transcendence:

The intuitions common to a phenomenology of life and to Christianity can thus beexpressed as follows: no living being without life, certainly, but also no life withouta living being. This is because there is no life without the Ipseity of a Self effectivein life, in the same way as every living being is necessarily a living Self, given toitself in the auto-donation of life and only in it. This is as valid for us as livingbeings as for the First Living Being. (Henry 2004d, 106)

For Henry, faith is not at all a question of a mysterious transcendent donation, butrather stems from the argument that life is given to itself as auto-affectivity determininga selfhood which is given to itself. Thus God is life and not something mysteriouslyexternal to it. Flesh as auto-affectivity is born of this life and its first living being is theson of life or of God. The revelation of this living being to itself is the Word and allliving beings, including the First and life itself are united in the pathos of this auto-affectivity and auto-donation. Whether we share this Christian interpretation isirrelevant to the repudiation of Meillassoux’s overly quick implication from a supposedcorrelationism to transcendent fideism.

Auto-Affectivity: A Deleuzian Critique

Henry’s radical phenomenology is immune to accusations of a commitment to atranscendent other. It is therefore also resistant to a critique of mysterious forms of‘donation’ where appearances are given from an otherworldly source. Finally, it cannotbe criticized validly as dualist ontology or for ungrounded distinctions between beingsand Being, because his definition of life as immanent rather than finally transcendentavoids any unbridged distinctions between life (or God) and appearances. Henrydeveloped his position with an acute awareness of all of these criticisms. Indeed, hedeployed them against preceding philosophers with these problems in mind. Thiscritical stance, as well as the original ideas developed to respond to perceived errors inearlier phenomenology, led him to develop a new philosophy of life to respond to thedominance of concepts of appearance and donation in earlier works. This radicalphenomenlogy is neither dualist, nor ordered according to somemystical transcendence.

So are there further critical points to be made against this new incarnation, with itsdependence upon the difficult ideas of auto-affectivity and auto-donation? The aim ofthe conclusion to this article will be to deploy Deleuze’s concept of the event in relationto realms that reciprocally determine one another, differently as set out in Logic ofSense, to claim that if auto-affectivity is an event then Henry cannot validly deduce theipseity or selfhood he requires to construct his new philosophy of the subject and itsexplicit connection to Christianity. Aside from the shared commitments to immanenceand to transcendental philosophy already described earlier in the article, the criticalconnection to Deleuze is interesting and promising due to two consequences of theseshared factors when applied to the event. First, it could be pointed out against anycriticism of Henry that he is not making any claims with respect to the causal

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connection of actual events for his philosophy of life. Therefore, simply to trace life assuffering to actual causes would be to misunderstand his point that in order to be ableto follow such tracks we presuppose forms of life as capable of suffering. It is thiscapacity, or more properly ‘given’, that he departs from to deduce auto-affectivity. Thecritical advantage of Deleuze’s philosophy of the event is to move beyond actualcauses between events to a definition of the event as actual and virtual where virtualand actual events are transcendental conditions for one another not only in terms ofsingular occurrences but in terms of the general structure of events.

Second, it is important to note that Henry’s philosophy is in no way committed to asense of the subject as active and as available to immediate perception and inspectionthrough some kind of inner sense. Ipseity is not an awareness of subjective power nor isit any kind of apperception in the Kantian mode as ‘pure original unchangeableconsciousness’ (Kant 1982, 136). This means that familiar critical points to be madeagainst the subject on the grounds of a prior embodiment, or of a constitutive role forthe unconscious and therefore of a deconstruction of the subject on the basis ofpsychoanalytical or linguistic presuppositions are not applicable to Henry’s position.Indeed, his phenomenology is constructed with embodiment and psychoanalysis at theforefront of considerations with respect to the empirical subject—as shown in hiscritique of Merleau-Ponty, his debt to Maine de Biran and his extensive critical workon psychoanalysis (see Henry 1985). The point of transcendental life as auto-affectionis that the subject that emerges is not the empirical subject but instead a set of relationsof selfhood that provide critical and constructive guides for our reflection on empiricalsubjectivity. For instance, we know that this empirical side is supplemented by atranscendental one implying an essential role for affectivity in selfhood, a sense offreedom as an ‘I am able’ rather than an abstract liberty, and an essential embodimentthrough the affects and their transcendental forms—for instance as suffering. We alsotherefore know that our community with other subjects does not take the form of somekind of abstract and secondary inter-subjectivity, but rather the form as a priorcondition through a shared life where all subjects participate in the same relations ofselfhood not posited on a similar condition as subjects but rather as belonging to thesame life that makes them themselves and goes beyond this selfhood into the selfhoodof life itself (which, as we have seen, Henry describes as God, the Son and the Verb inhis Christian interpretation of his phenomenology).

Deleuze discusses affects and suffering, in particular, in his work on the FrenchwriterJoë Bousquet in Logic of Sense. I have discussed the wider implications of thiselsewhere (Williams 2008, 151–7) and here my attention is strictly on the potential fora critique of Henry’s ideas of auto-affection and ipseity. The simple version of thiscritique is that although Henry deduces life as auto-affection as a transcendentalcondition for actual forms of life, his version of the immanence of actual life in itscondition views the two as separate with respect to the way actual changes candetermine virtual conditions. In short, from a Deleuzian position, life as auto-affectionis determined by actual determinations and there is a relation of asymmetricalreciprocal determination between the two. The asymmetry stems for a distinctiondrawn between the eternal (and neutral or impassive) aspect of virtual relations andchanges in their intensities. (Deleuze 1969, 149) Which relations hold in the virtual—or in the later language of the work with Guattari—which becomings make up thevirtual cannot be determined by the actual. This is very important because it means

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that actual changes cannot make virtual relations disappear permanently. All they cando is dim or brighten the intensities of their relations. However, the intensity ofbecomings and hence the way they determine an actual genesis is changing in aneternal cycle of asymmetrical relations between the virtual and the actual (or betweendepth and sense, in the language of Logic of Sense). Translated into Henry’s language,this means that auto-affection as suffering is determined in the intensity of its relationto other affections by actual empirical cases of suffering.

This cyclical and asymmetrical series of determinations is important because itjustifies the Deleuzian comportment and moral value of counter-actualization drawn onat the beginning of this article. It is because actual and virtual determine each otherdifferently and asymmetrically through ongoing geneses that events must always bereplayed since we are caught in an ever-changing cycle of geneses or reciprocaldeterminations we can only participate in well when participate in them. (Deleuze 1969,217) When we do so we can determine our transcendental conditions. This means thatthere is no ipseity or satisfactory selfhood at the level of transcendental life because itis incomplete if it is not included in an active replaying in singular situations whichdetermine and express it anew (see Deleuze 1995, 3–5, for Deleuze’s late version ofthis understanding of life as immanent and transcendental). It also means that affectionis never auto-affection, but neither is it strictly a matter of actual causation. Instead,affection is always about reciprocal determinations of actual causes to one another andof virtual effects (or becomings or infinitives in sense) to one another and vice versa.

There is no event of auto-affection, not because all events are caused by other events,but because what Henry calls the modulations of auto-affection are determined by theirrelations to actual events. Thus which forms of affections are drawn to the fore or set outmost distinctly—such as suffering for Henry—is changeable and changing, fromDeleuze’s perspective. Moreover, no life, however pure or essential, is simply ipseitysince it is always becoming because of its ongoing actual and virtual relations and thechanges in intensity and significance they determine through series of counter-actualizations (Deleuze 1969, 176). Finally, this means that the theist turn in Henry’sphenomenology can be seen as contingent and historically determined. It may be theright interpretation and replaying of the events of Henry’s life and times, of theirsingularities, but it has no essential role beyond this, because the grounding of theChristian association with phenomenological life misunderstands the changeable formof that life in relation to actual events. In the stark warning from Deleuze’s‘L’immanence: une vie…’ Henry has taken a possibility and imposed it on the virtualand on life as immanent and transcendental. To do so is to render life back to thetranscendent against what Deleuze and Henry sought to achieve through their radicalphilosophies: ‘There is a great difference between the virtuals that define immanenceto a transcendental field and the possible forms that actualize them and that transformthem into something transcendent.’ (Deleuze 1995, 7).

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