The hypermodern self and the contemporary crisis

According to Magatti¹ and Giaccardi, to outline the framework within which to understand the orientation of hypermodern man² we must start from freedom and the link between truth and freedom. Indeed, in the last decades of the twentieth century, an unprecedented alliance took shape between an exasperated individualism and a purely negative criticism of every truth already given, strengthened by a particular anthropological model that favorably intercepts those cultural drives and leverages a certain vision of freedom. It is in this scenario that the demand for greater expressiveness and freedom on the part of individuals intersects with the demand for autonomy of choices in the name of the centrality of the Self and moral freedom.

The hypermodern phantom of freedom as the unfolding of the Self³ is the manifestation of a particular cultural conception that wants freedom uncoupled from responsibility. As Recalcati would say, our time rejects all subordination by proclaiming the “making” of man from himself.

The resulting freedom coincides with a ghost of omnipotence that wards off the finite nature of existence and expresses the will of the Ego as the will to appropriate its own foundation.

Freedom frees itself from all responsibility to support the affirmation of narcissistic enjoyment as enjoyment of the One without the Other.

The coordinates of this collective imagination consecrate the shift of the center of gravity on the individual, considered completely free when he is in the condition to choose his meanings, his bonds. In this cultural redefinition, the role played by technology has been crucial, the development of which has experienced a huge acceleration: it is the new opportunities that continue to expand before us that redefine the meanings of our experiences and the objectives of our actions, as well as our freedom.

The predominance of the signifier over the meaning reinforces the disconnect between functions and meanings, deriving from the fracture between reason understood as the faculty that orders our knowledge and experiences, recomposing the sense, and reason as mere technical instrumentality. The reason admitted is that oriented towards technical action: only that which allows us to solve a problem and achieve the goal that we have set ourselves individually is considered sensible. This is a rationality that becomes a powerful engine of fragmentation, taking into account that the recomposition of meanings is relegated to the individual level, where the individual claims to give himself his own references regardless of any constraint.

Fragmentation affects the self, so much so that there are those who speak of the Self no longer as an individuality but as a ’singularity event’: free energy, will to pure power to infinity, succession of experiences, openness to occurrence, desiring machine. Added to this is the fragmentation of the body: through the progress of biology, we can look at the phenomena of life by analyzing them at the level of the sub-microscopic region, so that the body becomes a fully bio-technical fact. At this point, however, an enormous anthropological step is taken: the moment in which technology crosses the threshold of intangibility and the human being himself is subjected to the logic of fragmentation, we ask ourselves what man is.

The logic of fragmentation combines the strength of technology that advances at an ever-increasing pace, penetrating every area of ​​our lives, and the reversibility of meanings typical of a nihilistic culture. In this context, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish some shared meaning as true. Rather, it is the technical apparatus that enjoys extraordinary solidity as long as the idea dominates that everything that is technically possible is true, and therefore endowed with meaning. The test of reality also passes through the strength of emotional involvement: we tend to recognize as true that which has the strength to grip us emotionally. The reflective component of experience is reduced to a minimum while the probability of manipulation increases since the construction of momentary intensity and the ability to make one feel become real instruments of power. The renunciation of the search for a truth that does not coincide with what we make exist means that reality is only what we affirm.

This imaginary constitutes the substratum of the current crisis, which is first and foremost a crisis of the Self as psychoanalytic clinics clearly show. The new “clinic of the void” as Recalcati would say hinges on a psychology dominated by narcissistic atomization and the fragmentation of individual enjoyments, marked by an unregulated and lawless compulsion of enjoyment itself, with an inflammation of the drive without a barrier.

The clinic of emptiness is therefore based on the incessant flow of enjoyment without knowing any stopping point and which, due to this absence of symbolic constraints, slides fatally towards destruction and death.

The contemporary death drive that pushes life to devour itself both in the form of unlimited enjoyment that ends up coinciding with life in its most desperate affirmation, and in that of the refusal of the openness of life in the name of its extreme conservation that ends up annihilating it,⁴ it is a force that intoxicates the subject, mortifies his desire, freezes him in an excess that has no relationship with the expansive character of force, but with a sort of self-combustion and pure destruction and self-hatred.

In the new forms of melancholy, worryingly present especially among young people, there is no longer moral self-flagellation and the irremediable dimension of the loss of the object, but life that withdraws from life, libido that regresses, the subject that turns inward on itself.⁵

So, the point is, as Recalcati would say,⁶ how can we still make a possible future exist?

The crisis with all its collateral effects reveals the self-referentiality of that model whose expansion has occurred regardless of reality — unless it is technical reality.

The crisis hits the heart of anthropology, like a heart attack. Which, as such, pushes it to rethink its foundations.

In fact, the crisis tells us that we have lost ourselves, in losing our sense of reality, in losing our reciprocal relationship with nature/the world, in closing ourselves off from life.

These losses are not foreign to the assumptions of the imaginary of freedom that has been the backdrop to recent decades. After having expressed itself in the rebellion and protest of the 1970s, freedom has allied itself deeply with the binomial ’power-will to power’ to the point of coinciding with its unstoppable expansion and undisputed openness. The impressive energy that has been unleashed in these decades has shown the power of freedom: the power to lose oneself, precisely. It has slipped into anarchy and perdition, purely adaptive movements, which show how difficult it is not only to conquer freedom but above all to preserve it, manage it, exercise it: freedom is a demanding process, even more so the freedom of the free.

However, this type of experience seems to be typical of the free man. Rebellion always preludes some form of confusion.

But, at this point, freedom cannot but evolve towards something else, under penalty of giving up its existence. It is a question of thinking about how to generate the future, how to make humanity evolve without letting it die, how to make freedom mature without letting it implode. Given the nature of the crisis, to overcome the impasse, on the one hand, the emergence of a new imaginary of freedom is urgently needed. Which can only arise as a criticism of the season we are living through.

In this sense, the crisis, in its various facets, teaches us that the first step of change requires giving voice to what has been removed in order to be provoked by it, in recognizing that much of reality has been excluded from the world constructed by the hypermodern subject. The first step of change requires opening up to “life” again. Only in this way can the crisis become an extraordinary opportunity to change things and build the conditions for a new season of freedom. Better than the one we have known. It is not a question of going back, of hypothesizing or hoping, so to speak, for a containment of growth or a limitation of freedom. It is a question of being within history, learning from it. The task, for mature freedom, shows itself in all its scope: supporting the positive paths that the historical phase behind us has produced, trying to change course to outline alternative paths for a new development model willing to be provoked by life.

To this end, the purpose of this paper is to return to life, offering a reflection on its original phenomenalization, or rather on its giving, through the thought of Michel Henry. The goal will be to reclaim those real questions that require real answers, allowing ourselves to be questioned by the contradictions that often herald new generative paths, capable of elevating thought and making human experience liveable. And, if we look closely, the questions that reality poses have to do first of all with the focus on the anthropological presuppositions of a freedom that is born from life and that only if taken seriously into consideration can lead to generating something new, a previously unknown world.

Life considered in its original phenomenologization. Michel Henry’s project

Henry’s speculation is born as deeply marked by the classic philosophical restlessness, that is, the one concerning the ontological question. The meaning of being questions him and in this sense his attempt to offer a thematic elucidation can be defined as “fundamental”. Even if, as the philosopher himself admits,⁷ the thought of being in general is difficult, nevertheless his project of a universal phenomenological ontology wants to be ambitious: it does not propose itself as a search for a purely formal essence, or a concept that can be extended to everything that exists, gradually impoverishing it to the point of making it empty, but as an investigation of the “living being” understood not as an analysis conducted on a particular entity, nor as a specific science, such as biology for example, but as a “search” for the principle of every thing grasped in its original phenomenalization, or in its pure manifestation.⁸

In this sense, then, Henry proposes a “reversal” of the traditional relationship between being and thought. In fact, he does not intend to use the latter as a privileged instrument to access the former; rather, he lets life offer itself in its concrete reality, in its immediate presence. Hence the project of a “phenomenology of life”⁹ or “material phenomenology” or “radical phenomenology” which, although placed within the Husserlian phenomenological tradition,¹⁰ nevertheless proposes a radical rethinking of it, as it is interested not in the phenomenon, but in its manifestation, that is, in the appearance of the appearance.

Life, for Henry, is an immanent revelation and the only access to the “how” of the original manifestation is by placing oneself within it, thus abandoning any phenomenological distance, under penalty of losing the real and its replacement with a mere conceptual abstraction. In this sense, therefore, it is possible to grasp the centrality of human reality in the ontological question. In fact, for Henry, man not only “poses” the question of being, but more fundamentally “has” and “lives” the relationship with being, of which he has an implicit and immediate understanding, even if in the first instance not conceptual. As a living being, what is revealed to him first and phenomenologically is his own life, the original “me”.

From this point of view, therefore, it is the phenomenological being of the ego that constitutes its “reality” understood as the effective presence of ontological possibility. Precisely for this reason, assuming not the ego,¹¹ but the being of the ego as a speculative starting point appears, in the eyes of the French philosopher, as an obligatory beginning.¹² The original “how” of the manifestation, therefore, is grasped in its “double emergence” expressive of “essence”, or as affectivity, and of “content”, or as embodied subjectivity.¹³

The Essence of Manifestation: Affectivity

Therefore, the investigation of life presents itself to Henry as an extremely arduous task, since it implies first of all a reflection on its giving. No one, in fact, has ever seen life; it is invisible in relation to the entity, precisely because it does not belong to the phenomenal order of what appears.¹⁴ And yet, man “has” access to life. An access that occurs in life and through it.¹⁵ A phenomenological access in a radical and founding sense understood as a relationship to phenomenality itself and to the original way in which it phenomenalizes, which in the thought of the French philosopher presents itself as “pathos”. In fact, life, enigmatic in relation to the “ideality” of its structure, reveals itself in the moment in which it affects us, or, better said, “affects” itself.

Affectivity, therefore, understood as a concrete phenomenological effectuation of life is the “essence of manifestation” and, as Henry would say, “de part en part, révélation”.¹⁶ It is real and certain knowledge,¹⁷ precisely because it is immediate and immanent. In fact, affectivity receives its content without transcending itself towards it and without receiving it as something external. Rather, it finds it in itself beyond any phenomenological distance or objectification. It is a problem of evidence for the French philosopher. In such radical immediacy, therefore, the content of revelation is inseparable from the “how” of its manifestation, since they constitute a single and identical reality. In fact, life, in the phenomenological effectuation of its primary arising, is both the content and the agent of affection. It “gives itself” to itself in a manifestation that does not imply a self-position, but the immediacy of a single act.

And it is at this point that Henry, in the absence of an adequate ontological and categorical structure to illuminate the question, introduces the notion of “self-affection”, to express the structural peculiarity of the essence of manifesting itself by affecting itself. As the author points out, only because, in the first instance, life “feels” without the intermediation of any sense is it what it is, that is, an active essence that manifests itself.¹⁸

Hence the primordial “passivity” that characterizes such knowledge. What is realized in affectivity understood as the experience of the self of being, in fact, is the self-revelation of being itself in what it is. This awareness proposes and imposes itself on man; attesting itself with the force of its effective and concrete phenomenality, it cannot be easily contested.

Furthermore, it is produced in a way in which thought is totally absent. Affectivity and knowledge for Henry differ totally in relation to their essential phenomenological structure. The act proper to the second is, in fact, exteriority, placing-in-front, opening the horizon, representing, whereas the first lets being be, receiving it in pure presence, without distance or opposition.

But what is the original meaning of affectivity, or of this immediate and passive arising that is given prior to any knowledge and any interpretative hold on it? It is the form of the essence in which it is affected by itself, in such a way that this original affection as self-affection, as feeling of self, defines it and constitutes it structurally in its indubitable and certain phenomenological effectuation.¹⁹

As a pure, immanent affection, therefore, according to Henry, affectivity is not confused with sensitivity, the latter understood as the “power to feel something”, or the reception of the entity, both worldly and internal. Rather, between the two there is an ontological hierarchy, since it is the first that allows the second to be what it is. A sensation, in fact, is real only in the moment in which it is felt, or only when it appears as a “modalization of the general feeling of existence”. The object is given in feeling and through it. Therefore, the external and transcendent reference necessary for the sensation to be a “perception of something” immediately presupposes an internal one to the concrete phenomenological context that makes it possible.

Precisely because it constitutes its “presentification”, affectivity, as it is the ontological presupposition of sensitivity, so it is of understanding, of imagining, of remembering and, in general, of every act of position, whatever the way in which it is accomplished.²⁰ It is the universal form of every possible experience in general, the ontological and transcendental dimension that establishes the reality of all that is.²¹ From the Henryan point of view, therefore, the effort of an in-depth examination of this original feeling-oneself appears essential, since it is not an opaque background, but a revelation of existence. Such an investigation, however, appears somewhat “embarrassing”, as the French scholar himself recognizes, precisely because of the absence of adequate theoretical categories. In fact, affectivity reveals in the obscurity of thought, in the invisible. Its manifestation is hidden, the phenomenological structure that constitutes it is that of the feeling-oneself of being, which dwells in the secret with itself and in this dwelling experiences itself. This obscurity, however, does not correspond to the lowest degree of a marginal and confused awareness, but is proper to its concrete phenomenological structure.

As such, affectivity in its actualization vanishes when thought is directed towards it. Under the objectifying grip of attention, feeling is no longer the same, but is completely altered, precisely because it cannot be experienced outside of its own ontological milieu. Any project of interpretation of affectivity, therefore, is doomed to failure as an “ontological contradiction”. The only way to approach feeling is feeling itself, listening to it, or, better yet, “trying” it. In fact, affectivity reveals itself as affectivity and the language of feeling is feeling itself. Hence the silence of thought, its inability to express what feeling says.

However, affect is pregnant with knowledge. A lived, experienced knowledge, the experience grasped in its primitive form. Precisely because it is felt, therefore, it is not something unconscious. It is, eventually, the representation to which the feeling is associated that can be unconscious, but not the feeling itself, which never ceases, as long as it is lived, to be known. Just as, as long as it is felt, it does not cease to be “true”. Illusion and error do not concern the feeling, but rather the interpretation that thought gives of it. A false or illusory affect, in fact, is, according to Henry, a poorly “understood” affect, since understanding is in principle incapable of grasping it, indeed, of letting it be in all its pregnant depth. The expressive modalities of feeling are totally different from the Logos of thought.²²

In short, for the French philosopher, it is a question of going beyond the prejudice of classical philosophical thought and contemporary psychology to question precisely that proving of life in its radical immanence. Both disciplines, in fact, have ignored and disavowed this ontological power of revelation, the first judging it obscure, while the second losing it in the unconsciousness of organic or vegetative life. Hence the interpretation of affectivity not as a “form” of all our possible experiences, but rather as a determined content, the ideal of a pure theoretical fiction “disinterested” in reality grasped in its immediate concreteness.

In this regard, it must be clarified that Henry’s text does not mention the fact that in man affectivity is inseparable from the dimension and judgement of thought and that if the immediacy of the former is important, it is, however, anthropologically incorrect to stop at it. Affection is a necessary condition for the occurrence of any event, but it is not the sufficient condition, nor the only one.

The content of Manifestation: the embodied subjectivity

Therefore, life reveals itself in an original proving-itself, a sort of absolute knowledge²³ that every living being possesses. From Henry’s point of view, affectivity understood as the essence of manifestation is never an empty form. In its concrete phenomenological realization as feeling-of-itself, it has an original, real and immanent content,²⁴ which is formed by being and by the ego, or rather, by the being of the ego.²⁵ In the experience that ipseity makes of itself in the pathic proving of its existence, me shows itself to itself.

The Self belongs to the feeling of existence as that which is given to it in an original and exclusive manner as constituting its reality and as that which experiences and affects it. A Self belongs to every living being, which, in this sense, is an individual. In fact, the Self is only possible as a single and specific self. Individuality, the moment of particularity, according to Henry, is not the negation of the universality of being, but rather its essence and most intimate possibility.²⁶ From this point of view, the principium individuationis²⁷ is not the simple result of external categories and conditions, such as different natural, psychic and spatio-temporal qualities. Me is distinguished from all others because it is “itself” originally, given to itself in its radical individuality.

Therefore, the being of the subject as an effective and concrete self, reveals itself in the immanence of pure affectivity and as such makes every type of affection possible.²⁸ Therefore, in Henry’s perspective, the being of the ego ends up constituting the originally deepest truth, ontologically first and fundamental, possessed in an internal experience understood as ’presence of itself to itself’, or as an original revelation that takes place in a sphere of radical immanence. This absolute knowledge is not tied to a specific moment, rather it is the sphere of existence itself and accompanies the living being in every instant. Furthermore, it is not produced in a ’horizon of visibility’ understood as a ’transcendent relationship’ of the ego towards itself, almost as if it were in front of a mirror. Rather, Henry prefers to speak about a ’transcendental immanence’ of the ego to itself, thus eliminating any suspicion of ’alienation’.²⁹

Therefore, Self-affection as an experience-of-the-self is an essentially passive revelation. In fact, what is delivered to itself is the ego itself, which, in this sense, is an original me.³⁰ As such, the Self experience of the self is characterized according to Henry by a certain primordial ’impossibility’. Impossibility that does not mean in the first instance ’impotence’, or the simple deprivation of the power to do something. Rather, it designates the relationship of being with itself as the inability for being to separate from itself, thus acquiring a fundamental ontological meaning.³¹ This impossibility, in the double meaning of ’impossibility of exiting oneself’ and ’impossibility of overcoming oneself’, that is, of establishing a hiatus, a sort of dimension of withdrawal in which the being can escape and withdraw from itself and its essence, perhaps assuming an external point of view or even severing the relationship with itself, ends up alluding positively to the primordial unity of being with itself.

Therefore, the original trying-itself unfolds phenomenologically as a feeling, which, in a sort of transparency of identity with itself, delivers to itself a self that can neither be contested, nor rejected, nor assumed, nor accepted, only announced. Precisely for this reason, it is a suffering³² understood as an experience of the self in a suffering stronger than any freedom.³³ But, given that in suffering the self is given to itself as nailed to itself and in this perfect adherence to itself it experiences itself, it is, at the same time, joy.³⁴ The dichotomous unity of suffering and joy is given, therefore, by the fact of possessing the same phenomenological content, that is, being-itself-itself.³⁵

But what is the ’being’ of the Self? Or, how does this Self appear? In the immediate revelation of itself to itself, subjectivity does not know itself³⁶ as an empty form.³⁷ It has an original transcendental content³⁸ which is in itself the consistency and concreteness of its own life³⁹ and which coincides with the internal experience of its own body.⁴⁰

In this sense, the self delivered to itself in the pathic affection of its own existence is a corporeal self. Our body, conceived as a ’transcendental body’, belongs to the sphere of subjectivity, it is an ego, or rather, in the first instance, an original ’me’. Therefore, according to Henry, the statement ’I am my body’ should be preferred to ’I have a body’, in the sense that the original being of my body is an internal transcendental experience and that, consequently, the life of this body that I am is a mode of the absolute life of the ego. Hence the particular ’right of ownership’ exercised by the ego with respect to the body that is its own and belongs to it, however not as an entity, but in an original sense. In fact, the primordial relation of my body to itself is not ecstatic. It does not take place in a feeling; rather, it manifests itself as original corporeality in the radical immanence of interiority. Precisely for this reason, according to Henry, it necessarily reveals itself as a Self.⁴¹

And it is at this point that our author introduces the category of ’flesh’⁴² to signify the real subjectivity of our body.⁴³ Therefore, our body is not comparable to the Galilean ’extended material’, of which it is possible to grasp the form and the figure geometrically. If it were so, it would have nothing different from the anonymous inert. Contrary to this, ours is rather a living human body, Leibkörper, which is an I, given to itself in a radically immanent auto-affection. An invisible original corporeality, it is not an object among objects, but rather a principle of experience that can be accessed only through phenomenological means.⁴⁴

Therefore, our carnal condition does not consist in simply having a body and being a “corporeal being”. Rather, it corresponds to having, or, better, to being flesh, or to that which, by experiencing, suffering, undergoing and tolerating itself, enjoys itself and is, thus, able to feel the body, the object, which is external to it. In other words, nothing could be further from the presumed Cartesian “distinction” of the spirit and the body, as well as from their “union”.⁴⁵ Rather, it indicates their reciprocal co-belonging, to the point that, as the author himself recognizes, in the element of one the other arises and vice versa: touching this body implies ipso facto touching the spirit itself where it is spirit, touching life where it experiences itself in its own Self irreducible to any other. From this point of view, therefore, there is no flesh that is not that of a particular and concrete Self, being its most intimate phenomenological condition of possibility, to the point of identifying with it.

Two ways of accessing our body and the duplicity of its appearance

According to Henry, the human condition is an embodied condition, characterized by the fact of having a body with which it does not have an extrinsic relationship of ownership, of a vertical type, qualified by usability and domination, but, above all, an intrinsic relationship of identification, horizontal. It has always been as such. In fact, every living being, since its coming into the womb of a woman, is earthly flesh. It is generated as such in life. This is why every dualistic discourse on man ends up appearing in the eyes of our author as a profound falsification of the given reality. From a phenomenological point of view, the living being given to itself in life is one only; in the pathic immediacy of self-certainty, it feels and enjoys itself as an individual.

However, according to our author, at least preliminarily it is possible to distinguish two ways of accessing our body, in accordance with the duplicity of its appearance. In the “outside of the world”, in fact, it is completely identical to the material extension, an object among objects, exhaustively classifiable on the basis of rigidly established spatial, temporal and causal coordinates. On the other hand, however, as experienced internally, in the pathic self-revelation of life, it is discovered as a transcendental Self, a living individual. And, as such, a single undivided body. It is an extraordinary fact: our body can be considered and described from two originally different and incompatible points of view. It seems to reunite them in itself to the point of being able to understand each other almost only starting from this dualism.

Furthermore, each manifestation appears evanescent if sought in the order of the other. The flesh escapes in the worldly horizon of the geometrical extension, just as the latter passes into the background in the suffering and joy of the pathic interior. Yet, our body, precisely because it is alive, is intelligible, according to Henry, only starting from the invisible of the original feeling-itself. In fact, it is felt, known, and known by itself in the moment in which it feels. Hence the effort to keep the two aspects theoretically united, despite the very strong temptation to dwell only either in the material consideration, in the res extensa, extensively studying its sensitive qualities, or only in the appreciation of the intense affective. In this sense we would have a body-object, felt, separated and opposed by a body-subject, which is no longer the object of experience, but its principle. That is to say, nothing could be further from the real corporeal essence of living man, who possesses himself immediately and thanks to this enjoyment of himself opens himself to the outside, guaranteeing his visibility, while never abandoning himself.

The body’s unity

Duplicity of appearance that does not imply reference to two distinct entities, but to the same one. This last theoretical acquisition, highly problematic from a strictly analytical point of view, contains in itself an inevitable reference to the relationship that exists between the flesh and its body, in order to clarify the same corporeal unity. In this regard, the author argues that such a relationship is intelligible only by establishing a sort of ontological hierarchy in the sense of a ’vital’ and ’fundamental’ primacy of one element over the other. Our body, in fact, is only one and is given to us as such in the lived experience that we have of it.

In the immediacy of auto-affection, our original corporeality is experienced as a power, which, in its multifaceted variety of being able to move, see, etc., does not mean the ecstatic correlation of a sense to the external object, but rather and above all ’power to exercise itself’. In this sense, the Self is given to itself and, finding itself in possession of itself, simultaneously discovers itself in possession of all the powers that constitute it. Not only that, but, in a more radical way, every power implies an essential immanence in it of the ego, which is preliminarily placed in it in such a way as to identify and coincide with it. The ego, thus, is known as a fundamental “Je peux”. Precisely for this reason, according to Henry, it is possible to establish a parallel between affectivity and power, since every power is effective not as a result of circumstances that would be extraneous to its essence, but because this resides in the pathic auto-affection which, by installing it within itself, gives it the possibility of exercising itself, of being the power that it is.

From the point of view of Henry’s phenomenology of life, the distinction between factual powers, such as seeing, hearing and moving, and the transcendental possibility of exercising them in an ’I can’ is essential. The possibility of being able, in fact, is identical to our freedom and is revealed to us ’brutally’ in anguish.⁴⁶ With the latter, what is placed at the centre of attention is not only a fundamental affective tone, such as suffering and joy, nor even a property, but rather a constitutive and essential trait of the transcendental Self, which in the radical immanence of life, is referred back to itself and thus possesses itself in the painful test of its own existence.⁴⁷ Anguish is not fear. The latter indicates reference to an external entity conceived as threatening and whose proximity or imminent possibility can be grasped, while the former stands out in front of ’nothingness’.

In this sense, anguish arises from a certain pleasure experienced as a new feeling and a ’search for adventure’, however, simultaneously undergoing the law of pathos and the vertigo of freedom, it is thrown back upon itself and takes on itself, becoming its own unbearable burden. In this situation, in the heart of the anguish that burns in it like a devouring fire, freedom secretly plans to escape from itself, it desires it, but it clashes with its own ontological impotence.⁴⁸ Thus, in the impossibility of getting rid of itself, thrown back upon itself, anguish simultaneously shatters on the power that it makes possible. And, at this point, the only conceivable way out that is granted to it is to move on to the act, which, precisely because of the primordial presence of anguish in it, cannot be compared to a material process.

As Henry states, on the one hand the properties of the objective body, under whose aspect our invisible flesh is shown to us, are homogeneous among themselves: they are all objective properties. They all remain before a possible gaze. Among these properties, despite their common phenomenological status, a surprising difference emerges for the person who discovers them for the first time on himself or herself: it is the body of a man or a woman. Significant is the fact that, whatever the moment in which such a discovery occurs, it is that of anguish. Sexual determination marks the body in the depths of its being and, at the same time, differentiates it radically, inserting it into a specific category of individuals, male or female, defining it for a function, that of generative. Although the sexual is given to us in a seeing, its revelation occurs in life, in pathos, and it is anguish.

The immanence of the flesh in every power, moreover, makes it a sort of original memory, the place that preserves in itself as a principled possibility from which the capacity to deploy every power is never separated.

This memory is not a thought, understood as the faculty of consciousness to give itself in representation of disappeared facts and events. Rather, it is the memory of my body that remembers each time the way of moving, seeing, etc., as a self-movement, which reveals itself in the pathic self-donation of my original corporeality. Thus, the things of the world, to which these corporeal powers are directed, are never present to my body in an experience that we could define as unique. In fact, they offer themselves, for example, as the solid whose forms will be preserved in the memory of the flesh, considered as the consubstantial possibility of moving towards them. In this sense, their memory will not be produced by the sole representation of the entity captured in its objectivity, but will also be linked to the path of the immemorial powers of my flesh.

Furthermore, our original corporeality is one with our organic body. In fact, if, from a certain point of view, the latter escapes our senses, since it cannot be touched, seen, or heard, it is nevertheless experienced internally as that which resists the I can, which, in such resistance, experiences itself. This organic continuum shows itself as a first exteriority observed in the internal deployment of our powers and against which our effort is shattered to be thrown back upon itself, thus finding and affecting itself in its greatest strength. This exteriority, therefore, is profoundly alien to that of the world, understood as “perception of external objects”. In fact, it is experienced beyond, or, better, on this side of every representation, still resulting in a modality of our flesh. Resistance to effort is experienced as a limit not spatial, but pathic. This experience, moreover, is given according to two decidedly and incontestably different modalities. The first, in fact, by realizing itself in such a way that the resistant continuum presents an absolute opposition to the original I can, defines the reality of the bodies that form the real universe, while the other, revealing itself as retreating and yielding by bending to the thrust of our movement, gives us the reality of the organic body, which only in this way is considered as ’ours’.

In this way, each area of ​​resistance immediately obedient to our movements constitutes an organ, held together with all the others by the I can of our original corporeality. Therefore the unity of our organic body, or of all our organs, is not located outside of us, but rests secretly, or, better, vitally in the unity of the powers to which they are subject and to the deployment of which they mark the limits from time to time. In other words, the unity of our body is given to us as the unity of our flesh. Precisely for this reason our organs are ’first’ and ’above all’ different from the extended anatomical structures, partes extra partes, the object of study by science. Therefore, from this point of view, the dynamics of our action will have the following deployment: the drive, or our original corporeality with its powers, moving within itself and bending the organs that yield to its power, flows into the world that opposes it with its absolute resistance.

And this is the moment in which my own organic body becomes a thing-body in me, that is, the moment in which the flesh, acting on it, still moves it, but no longer as a part of itself in which it inserts sensations that are its own (for example the sensations of its own movement), but as an opaque and inert mass in which there is no longer anything living. In this sense, therefore, even the thing-body is still and always intelligible only in its relationship with the original flesh. Indeed, in an even more radical way, it is in the mode of deployment of the internal practical relationship of my flesh with its thing-body that, according to Henry, every possible relationship with any thing-body in the universe is inscribed, as well as with the thing-body of others.⁴⁹ The flesh ’acts from the outside’, colliding with its own thing-body, when within the thrust exerted on its own organic body the latter no longer yields to it. Under the pressure exerted by this movement and no longer able to hold on, it ends up breaking against something insurmountable, almost as if it were a blind wall without cracks.

In this regard, taking up and integrating the considerations concerning Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus ’touching-touched’, the author clarifies that what is touched in me and by me, as a limit to my effort and as a continuously resistant material body, is always experienced in the interior deployment of the powers of my flesh. That is to say, the touching and the touched occur in the same phenomenological modality, which is precisely the pathic self-impressionality of the flesh and end up being a single and identical reality. In the case of the experience of one’s material body, such as that of the right hand touching the left, what is touched does not correspond only to an extended and inert quid, since it always maintains its carnal condition in it, that is, self-impressionality. In this sense, it is not simply ’object of knowledge’, since it harbours in its secret the semblance of subjectivity. Even the thing body, therefore, is as if it were ’double face’: on the outside of its surface there immediately corresponds its dynamic revelation in the flesh. From this point of view, regarding the experience of one’s own objective body, even the distinction between activity and passivity is fictitious, since, although they are given as two different and opposite phenomenological ’effectuations’, their phenomenological ’status’ is identical, since they are both modalities of the same flesh.

In this sense, in accordance with the duplicity of appearance, the impressions that are constituted in relation to one’s own body itself are of two different orders. However, between the ’original’ impressions and the ’constituted’ ones, it is possible to recognize the same distinction that exists between reality and unreality, since both are experienced as modalities of our pathic flesh. In addition to the kinaesthetic sensations or kinesthesias, globally referred to the organic body, there are those of our senses that are located on the surface of our material body. Our skin, in this sense, presents itself as a ’frontier’ between the invisible of our flesh, to which the organic body belongs, and the same body perceived from the outside. Also doubly visible and invisible, it represents the line on which the kinaesthetic sensations and those referred to our external senses converge. Thanks to it, in fact, the same impressions coming from the outside are referred to the invisible interior of the organic body. Thus, every ’thingly sensation’ immediately corresponds to the related organic impression, so that the ek-static manifestation of the sensation coincides with its revelation in the invisible flesh, on the basis of which it is recognized as one’s own.

Therefore, our skin is the place where multiple impressions intertwine, exchange and modify; thanks to it they receive a precise localization and acquire the status of my own’s. In this sense, in the unity of our corporeality, all the properties of the objective body are experienced as so many affective dispositions, given to themselves in the pathic auto-affection of the living present.

The dual experience of the limit: our condition as “sons” and the relationship with the other

Flesh, given to itself in the pathic self-revelation of life and as pure phenomenological matter of its self-impressionality, is not the origin of itself. As Henry would say, in fact, it is a natured and not a nature-giving self-impressionality. A radical passivity marks it in its deepest viscera, characterizing it both in the immanence of its own existence, as if delivered to itself in its original suffering, and vertically as regards the origin of its ontological status. Life that comes to itself by affecting itself in its flesh, making us living beings without our doing anything on our part, pours out independently of our power or will, since it is always and already, before a single instant has allowed us to turn to it to welcome it or reject it, to say yes or no to it. It is in us and we are in it, in the radical passivity that touches the impression but also our entire life. The self-possession of the flesh to itself, understood as awareness and revelation to itself in the immanence of its own phenomenological status, necessarily implies the reference to a ’coming into the flesh’ understood as the ’generation of a substance’ that precedes every corporeal existence and is its ultimate reason. In this sense, according to Henry, the phenomenology of the flesh refers to a phenomenology of In-carnation, or refers to a ’before’ of the flesh that precedes, generating it, all its essential phenomenological determinations (self-impressionality, ipseity and power).⁵⁰

Every man lives his existence practically in a sort of ’radical oblivion’. He is almost ’instinctively’ accustomed to spontaneously and easily exercising his freedom, forgetting that the self can draw its first power from the radical immanence of life in him and over which he has no faculty of disposition. He finds himself, thus, originally limited. And, nevertheless, precisely because life is given to him totally, he has the capacity to experience himself phenomenologically as a carnal Self and to be truly free. This is the profound contradiction that marks the existence of the human being at the bottom: every power in him collides with an origin towards which it can do nothing, which does not inhibit him, but promotes him, establishing it as a ’beginning’ in his very possibility. Furthermore, the gift made to the living of his life is not something from which he can separate himself. A double impossibility comes to characterize the existent who, thus placed, discovers himself ontologically in his status as ’son’. In fact, deprived of the possibility of constituting an autonomous existence for himself and for himself, he finds himself marked by an already.

But, on the other hand, the experience of the limit ’presses’ the existent in another sense. He, as Heidegger recognizes, is a Mitsein, or a being with others. And here a problem arises that has gripped the entire history of phenomenology. If the other, like me, is a living transcendental Self, a flesh, what relationship can be established with him? If, in fact, his objective body shows itself to me in the world and offers itself in an effective perception, however, it appears different to me, even in opposition, to the inert bodies of the universe. The other’s body, like mine, offers itself to me as a living body. What, then, is the relationship that can be established with him if it occurs in the absence of any real flesh? The dimension of radical immanence of life in the pathic self-donation of the transcendental Self, in fact, eludes our grasp. From this point of view, everyone has their own ’own’ without anyone else being able to experience what they themselves are experiencing at that precise moment. The experience of others, therefore, is doomed to failure, because its being present in the world, offering itself, as such, to the possibility of my gaze, of my touch, of my caress, corresponds to the elusiveness of its interior.

And yet, — it is a fact — the existent is together with others. The impossibility of possessing others must be replaced by a fundamental ’communicative possibility’. If each self is given to itself in its flesh in a before of this, so it will be for the other self. Therefore, Henry suggests, each relation of a Self with another Self does not require as its starting point a Self, an I — mine or the other’s -, but their common transcendental possibility, which is nothing other than the possibility of their own relation: absolute Life. Being-with, in this sense, is grasped in its radical phenomenological possibility, that is, as a community of individuals linked to each other by a relationship of reciprocal phenomenological intimacy, which is then that of each one with Life. Here, therefore, each community is possible for Henry only, according to the instances of reciprocity and not according to the logic of possession. As such, it will be invisible.

The challenge of generativity: the importance of form and its manifestation

Michel Henry’s reflections on the giving of life in its phenomenological realization are very important because they show how a freedom that is given as a property of an idealistically understood Self and that claims to be untied and independent from its own foundation is an imaginary and empty freedom. We are will to power and to realization, but not only that. We are debt, limit: the great repressed of a historical phase in which performance has scorned failure; self-realization and individual happiness have tended to minimize debt and commitment; the will to power has considered the limit shameful. As highlighted in the opening, the pathologies of freedom concern mainly, not by chance, the relational dimension of the human being with himself.

Here then is that the freedom that accepts the challenge of generativity implies the will of the subject, but at the same time requires the willingness to make something exist in a way that demystifies the will to power. The freedom that takes on the typical traits of generativity becomes aware first of all of its giving, recognizing an origin and the objective importance of the foundation that is not pure inert material. It is within the real life that it takes care of, with the attention to contrasting those pathologies that can always arise when a barrier occurs that transforms into closure with respect to otherness. This freedom is therefore first of all an experience of relation and responsibility, of a response that is never merely technical to questions, accepting rather to be involved, to let oneself be questioned and, in this way, to restore a meaning.

In this dynamic, generative freedom — neither merely passive nor merely active — does not find its expression, its meaning, in the total unconditional openness to events, to the point of escaping any form, but rather in the dynamics of life itself in its coming out of itself while remaining itself, thus preventing the individual from fragmenting into its products or from being absorbed by systems that overwhelm it or from closing itself in defense against what is other than itself so as not to be contaminated by it. Generative freedom finds its home in the limit. Which is a reference and only in this way becomes space for a dialectical vision of the human being, who is not first in himself and only at a later moment intentionally projected towards reality. The idea of ​​an autonomous and independent individual, supported by mere technical infrastructures, is an illusion.

The human being cannot be defined by the absolutization of a single dimension, but can be understood starting from the simultaneity and correlation of the different dimensions, even if opposed to each other, however not contradictory but correlative. A subject who is placed on the border, and whose freedom remains such as long as it does not claim to resolve the tension between objective dimension and subjective dimension, between form and life. The unity of our original corporeality with our organic body is a limit that enables us because it brings us back to the concreteness of our reality.

And it is on this basis that freedom can make a leap forward by becoming generative, which develops by continually confronting that ’undivided remainder’ that emerges when the recognition of a debt never coincides perfectly with its extinction. The management of such unity requires the adoption of a dialectical conception of freedom that, on the one hand, demands the individual and demands him as a being-for-itself and, on the other, does not proceed only in the direction of increasing personal autonomy, but also in the construction of conditions that allow freedom to develop in relation to reality safeguarded in its irreducible otherness with respect to the subject, or rather, with respect to subjective will.

Such freedom is the backdrop to one of the contemporary myths, that of the society of differences emphasized and celebrated as a distinctive sign of individual autonomy, whose absolutization can become the pretext to affirm a freedom that pursues indeterminacy so as not to have to recognize any form for which to be responsible. It is no coincidence that Anders has outlined the profile of the man here implied as a nihilist: he, wanting to escape from the shock of the contingency through which the reality of life passes — a contingency that ultimately reveals to him the provenance from an origin that is not his Ego and to which he does not correspond but with which he is asked to identify by limiting himself —, wants to perpetuate indeterminacy so as not to preclude himself from the possibility of assuming any form, of being everywhere at the same time to the point of building a counter-historical existence.

The experience of the limit constitutes one of the repressed of the contemporary imagination. However, this very experience is the condition of possibility for something to exist, for life itself to unfold. The limit can be an end but also a boundary (limes) and therefore indicate the possibility of a beginning. For something to exist it must be confined, otherwise it would be everything and therefore nothing: there can in fact be no boundary with respect to nothingness; and where a boundary is not admitted, one is on the crest of nothingness.

Even life — unless it is flattened into unreality and identified with nothingness — is structurally confronted with limits, both existentially and structurally. From an existential point of view, the two extreme moments, generation/birth and death, are particularly clarifying in this sense. And, throughout the unfolding of a life, without boundaries, each of our steps would be truly impossible. The process of continuous con-finement is the very movement inherent in the structure of life. In fact, this is given phenomenologically in a form, through which we experience it. Here we are dealing with life in its empiricism, in its factual giving within certain factual configurations. But, at the same time, with life in its metaphysicality, that is, life that raises questions relating to the meaning of things. Without form, life would not be given to us, so awareness of its continuous movement would not even be possible, and even the interpellations coming from it would remain abstract.

Since form constitutes a limit,⁵¹ life is given to us only in adhering to the limit, both in the sense of considering it not only as a mere perennial and unconditioned flow and in the sense of actively assuming the data of contingency and identification as constitutive, although not exhaustive, of human action.

The contemporary imagination has largely obscured these dimensions and their correlativity: in the push beyond the limit, it has recognized a mere projection forward, oriented to increasing opportunities, so that by going, and continually going from event to event, one has the impression of being able to distance oneself from contingency and, therefore, of being free; in form, it has simply seen a principle of limitation with respect to desire, an element of rigidity that, as such, must be undermined. Without form, however, human experience wanders in shapeless nothingness: to abdicate the limit as a point of reality means to lose the connection to the human condition.

Assuming that our access to reality does not prescind from forms implies that our very perspective on freedom is always confronted with a limit. And this is already due to the fact that freedom cannot stand without the subject of freedom, whose individuality is in itself a form that refers to the most fluid dimension of the life process in its becoming always other than itself but, at the same time, contains within itself the traits of a determined character that allows us to recognize in that individual a peculiar Self.

Looking at freedom through form not only tears it from the illusion of total ab-soluteness, but also anchors it within human experience, opening it to host, as traits of reality, otherness, the bond, the world, transcendence. The act with which freedom decides to affirm or deny the reality of life-form is also the act with which it decides about itself. In fact, freedom can be lost with an act of freedom: for this reason, the challenge of the freedom of the free has enormous depth. A time like the present, in which freedom experiences perdition because of the systematic denial of reality as life, and of this as form, can also become the occasion in which freedom matures and evolves into generative freedom that continually renews that presence to which form refers: the reality of life, in its being mystery and limit, in its being that is more than form and, at the same time, form whose definiteness refers to an infinity.