From beginning to end, the philosophy of Michel Henry offers an original and profound reflection on life. Henry challenges the conventional understanding of life as a set of natural processes and a general classification of beings. Maintaining that our access to the meaning of life has been blocked by naturalism as well as by traditional philosophical assumptions, Henry carries out an enterprise that can rightfully be called “radical.” His phenomenology leads back to the original dimension of life—to a reality that precedes and conditions the natural sciences and even objectivity as such. The Michel Henry Reader is an indispensable resource for those who are approaching Henry for the first time as well as for those who are already familiar with his work. It provides broad coverage of the major themes in his philosophy and new translations of Henry’s most important essays. Sixteen chapters are divided into four parts that demonstrate the profound implications of Henry’s philosophy of life: for phenomenology; for subjectivity; for politics, art, and language; and for ethics and religion.

Barbarism represents a critique, from the perspective of Michel Henry's unique philosophy of life, of the increasing potential of science and technology to destroy the roots of culture and the value of the individual human being. For Henry, barbarism is the result of a devaluation of human life and culture that can be traced back to the spread of quantification, the scientific method and technology over all aspects of modern life. The book develops a compelling critique of capitalism, technology and education and provides a powerful insight into the political implications of Henry's work. It also opens up a new dialogue with other influential cultural critics, such as Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. First published in French in 1987, Barbarism aroused great interest as well as virulent criticism. Today the book reveals what for Henry is a cruel reality: the tragic feeling of powerlessness experienced by the cultured person. Above all he argues for the importance of returning to philosophy in order to analyse the root causes of barbarism in our world.

This book is a timely introduction in English to one of the most wide-ranging and imaginative philosophical projects of the last fifty years. It offers close readings of the main themes of Michel Henry's philosophy, a philosophy that has produced some of the most devastating critiques of phenomenology, Freudianism, and Marxism in this period. The author's contrasting of Henry's material phenomenology with Derridean deconstruction extends the range of recent critical theory in terms of embodiment and affectivity. In an age of rejuvenated evangelism and fundamentalism, the author's reading of Henry's later work on religion as an extension of his material phenomenology also presents a challenging examination of the foundations of Christian faith and belief. Presented in a clear and straightforward manner, with careful explication of the more difficult passages from Henry, this book also makes accessible to English readers, for the first time since their original publication, many of the texts central to Henry's phenomenology. It should be a welcome resource for researchers in the fields of French phenomenology and the phenomenology of religion.

A part of the "return to religion" now evident in European philosophy, this book represents the culmination of the career of a leading phenomenologist who investigates the multiple kinds of truth associated with Christianity.

This book is Michel Henry's most sustained investigation of Husserlian phenomenology. With painstaking detail and precision, Henry reveals the decisive methodological assumptions that led Husserlian phenomenology in the direction of Idealism. Returning to the materiality of life, Henry's material phenomenology situates central phenomenological themes--intentionality, temporality, embodiment, and intersubjectivity--within the full concreteness of life. One of the most accessible of Henry's books, Material Phenomenology is essential reading for those interested in the future of phenomenology or in a philosophy of life in the truest sense.

This book was born of a refusal, the refusal of the very philosophy from which it has sprung. After the war, when it had become apparent that the classical tradition, and particularly neo-Kantianism, was breathing its last, French thought looked to Germany for its inspiration and renewal. Jean Hyppolite and Kojeve reintroduced Hegel and the "existentialists" and phenomenologists drew the attention of a curious public to the fundamental investigations of Husserl and Heidegger. If only by being understood as a phenomenological ontology, this books speaks eloquently enough of the debt it owes to these thinkers of genius. The conceptual material which it uses, particn1arly in chapters 1 to 44, outlines the Husserlian and Heideggerian horizon of the investigations. However, it is precisely this horizon which is questioned. In spite of its profundity and achievements, I wanted to show that contemporary ontology pushes to the absolute the presuppositions and the limits of the philosophy of consciousness since Descartes and even of all Western philosophy since the Greeks. An 'External' critique, viz. the opposing of one thesis to another, wonld have no sense whatever. Rather, it is interior to these presuppositions whose insufficiency had to be shown that we placed ourselves; the very concepts which were rejected were also the ones which guided the problem initially.

Michel Henry uses the fall of communist regimes to reflect on the place of the individual in the late capitalist moment.