Embodiment

Phenomenological, Religious and Deconstructive

Views on Living and Dying

Edited by
Ramona Fotiade, David Jasper and
Olivier Salazar-Ferrer
 EmbodimEnt

this book examines a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship
between human and divine existence, as relected through the perception of
time and corporeal experience. Drawing together some of the best scholars in
the ield, this book provides a representative cross-section of inluential trends
in the philosophy of religion (e.g. phenomenology, existential thought, Biblical
hermeneutics, deconstruction) that have shaped our understanding of the body
in its profane and sacred dimensions as site of conlicting discourses on presence
and absence, subjectivity and the death of the subject, mortality, resurrection and
eternal life.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Embodiment
Phenomenological, Religious and Deconstructive Views
on Living and Dying

Edited by

RAMONA FOTIADE
University of Glasgow, UK

DAVID JASPER
University of Glasgow, UK

OLIVIER SALAzAR-FERRER
University of Glasgow, UK
© Ramona Fotiade, David Jasper and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Ramona Fotiade, David Jasper and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer have asserted their right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiied as the editors of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
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England

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Embodiment : phenomenological, religious, and deconstructive views on living and dying
/ edited by Ramona Fotiade, David Jasper, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-1052-8 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4724-1053-5 (ebook)
– ISBN 978-1-4724-1054-2 (epub) 1. Incarnation. 2. Human body–Religious aspects.
3. Human body, I. Fotiade, Ramona, editor of compilation.
BL510.E43 2014
202'.2–dc23
2013031534

ISBN 9781472410528 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472410535 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781472410542 (ebk-ePUB)

XV

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

introduction 1

PaRT I: MIChEL hEnRy – ThE PhEnOMEnOLOgy OF

InCaRnaTIOn

1 the Search for a new Anthropological Paradigm: michel Henry’s

Relections on Incarnation 9
Jean Leclercq

2 the incarnation of the Word and the A Priori of the Flesh:

michel Henry and the Problem of ‘Appearing through’ 21
Grégori Jean

3 Presentation of michel Henry’s notes on the Incarnation 35

Grégori Jean, Jean Leclercq and Elvira Vitouchanskaia
Preparatory notes to Incarnation: ‘the Archaeology of the Flesh,
Finitude and the Question of Salvation’ 38
Michel Henry

4 the incarnation of Life: the Phenomenology of birth in Henry

and Merleau-Ponty 49
Renato Boccali

5 Relections on the Revalorisation of the Body in the Material

Phenomenology of michel Henry 65
Olivier Salazar-Ferrer

PaRT II: JEan-LuC MaRIOn – SaCRED anD PROFanE

InTERPRETaTIOnS OF ThE BODy

6 On the Erotic Phenomenon 79

Jean-Luc Marion

7 Aesthetics and Corporal Strategies of Eros 91

Aldo Marroni
vi Embodiment

8 From Embodiment to the Saturated Language 107

Javier Bassas Vila

9 Cur Deus Homo? The Irrational Residue of Being: Relections

on Jean-Luc marion and Shestov 117
Ramona Fotiade

10 the Eucharistic body 131

David Jasper

11 being Embodied and being towards death 143

Alexander Broadie

PaRT III: JEan-LuC nanCy – a DECOnSTRuCTIVE PERSPECTIVE

12 Verbum Caro Factum 157

Jean-Luc Nancy

13 Adoration and Phenomenology: the dawn of an Adorable World 163

Pierre-Philippe Jandin

14 between ‘God’s Phallus’ and ‘the body of Christ’: the Embodied

World of Contemporary African Literature in Achille mbembe
and Jean-Luc nancy 171
Michael Syrotinski

15 ‘i don’t believe it!’: Faith, belief and Embodiment in Pascal,

Nietzsche and Heidegger 189
Paul Bishop

16 the Embodied Philosophy of Jean Grenier 217

Toby Garitt

Index 231
 notes on Contributors

Javier Bassas Vila – Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of barcelona,

translator of the works of Jean-Luc marion, he was a French interdisciplinary
Group Visiting Scholar, at the northwestern University in 2010/2011. He received
his Phd from the Université de la Sorbonne-Paris iV and the Universitat de
barcelona (2009). He specialises in phenomenology and its relation to language
and literature. more recently he has been working on phenomenology and politics.
He has translated into Spanish books by J.-L. marion, J. derrida, C. malabou, and
edited books by J. Rancière, A. Badiou and S. Žižek, among many others. He is
co-editor of the collection ‘Ensayo’ (Essay) published by Ellago Ediciones and
editor of the collection ‘Pensamiento Atiempo’ at Ediciones Casus belli.

Paul Bishop – Professor in German at the University of Glasgow, he has written

extensively on modern German thought and the interaction between philosophy,
literature and psychoanalysis. His recent publications include: Nietzsche and
Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition (2004), Analytical
Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics: Goethe, Schiller and Jung (2007)
and The Archaic: The Past in the Present (2011).

Renato Boccali – Professor of Philosophy at the University of milan and

director of the UnESCo Research department of Cultural and Comparative
Studies on the imaginary. His research interests and publications draw on the
hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition and its applications to the study of
the interaction between literature and philosophy with particular reference to
theories and practices in contemporary visual art. He has written extensively
on merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricoeur, blanchot and derrida. He is the
author of L’Eco-logia del visibile: Merleau-Ponty, teoretico del immanenza
transcendentale (2010).

alexander Broadie – Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy and

History at the University of Glasgow, he is an internationally renowned specialist
of scholastic theology, who has been at the centre of the recent revival of interest
in the Scottish Enlightenment and in the work of medieval theologians. He has
published extensively on duns Scotus, William ockham and thomas Reid, and
is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (2003).
His other recent publications include: A History of Scottish Philosophy (2009) and
Agreeable Connections: Scottish Enlightenment Links with France (2012).
viii Embodiment

Ramona Fotiade – Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, she

has written extensively on the existential philosophy of Lev Shestov and benjamin
Fondane from the point of view of their critique of Husserlian phenomenology
and their inluential conception of life and faith in the relationship between
man and God. Her publications on this topic include: Conceptions of the Absurd:
From Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Shestov and Fondane (2001),
The Tragic Discourse: Shestov’s and Fondane’s Existential Thought (2006)
and Léon Chestov et Vladimir Jankélévitch: du tragique à l’ineffable (2011).
She has been entrusted with the publication of the annotated critical edition of
Shestov’s complete works currently undertaken by Le Bruit du Temps publishers
in Paris. So far three volumes have been published: Le Pouvoir des clés (2010),
Athènes et Jérusalem (2011) and Dostoïevski et Nietzsche: La Philosophie de
la tragédie (2012).

Toby Garitt – tutorial Fellow at magdalen College (oxford), where he

teaches French Language and Literature, with a special interest in Christian
writers of the twentieth century, he has a longstanding involvement with the
Association européenne François Mauriac, and has written extensively on Jean
Grenier and Albert Camus. His recent publications include: Jean Grenier – un
écrivain et un maître (2010) and Jean Grenier–Jean Guéhenno: Correspondance
1927–1969 (2011).

Michel henry (1922–2002) – Professor of Philosophy, University of montpellier,

writer and author of a highly inluential phenomenology of life which provides
an original interpretation of Christianism and incarnation. Some of his most
celebrated books on this topic include: I Am The Truth. For a Philosophy of
Christianism (1996), Incarnation. A Philosophy of the Flesh (2000), Words
of Christ (2002), Phenomenology of Life, vol. i-iii (2003–2004). He has been
brought to the attention of the anglophone specialist audience in the wake of
the polemic sparked by dominique Janicaud’s volume, The Theological Turn in
French Phenomenology (1991), which focused on michel Henry’s philosophy of
Christianism. He has recently made the subject of monographic studies in English
such as michael o’Sullivan’s Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief –
An Introduction to the Work of Michel Henry (2006).

Pierre-Philippe Jandin – Professor of Philosophy and author of Jean-Luc

Nancy: Retracer le politique (2012), he has directed a research seminar at the
Collège international de philosophie devoted to nancy’s work on the philosophy
of religion, L’Adoration, and has written several essays on Levinas, blanchot,
derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe.

David Jasper – Professor of Literature and theology at the University of

Glasgow is the author of highly original interdisciplinary works that seek to
articulate a postmodern theology incorporating views ranging from those of the
 Notes on Contributors ix

earliest Christian theologians (the Fathers of the desert, such as St Anthony) to the
conception of the writers on the ‘deserts’ of the modern world, both geographical
and interior. His recent publications include: The Sacred Desert (2004), The
Sacred Body (2009) and The Sacred Community (2012).

grégori Jean – Professor of Philosophy and Researcher at the belgian

Scientiic Research Centre (Fonds de la Recherche Scientiique Belge FRS-
FnRS), currently working in the michel Henry Archives in Louvain and in the
Research Centre on Phenomenology at the Catholic University of Louvain.
His recent publications include: Quotidienneté et ontologie: Recherches sur la
différence phénoménologique (2011), Le Quotidien en situations: Enquête sur les
phénomènes sociaux (2012) and the preface and annotations to michel Henry’s
Notes préparatoires à L’Essence de la manifestation: la subjectivité (2012).

Jean Leclercq – Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain,

he is the director of the michel Henry Archives and has published extensively
on michel Henry and phenomenology. He has recently collaborated with olivier
Salazar-Ferrer on a volume gathering a series of previously unpublished interviews
with michel Henry that came out in a critical annotated edition with de Corlevour
Publishers in 2010. His other publications include: Phénoménologies littéraires de
l’écriture de soi (edited volume in collaboration with nicolas monseu, 2009) and
Cahiers Michel Henry (2009).

Jean-Luc Marion – Professor of theology at the Sorbonne (Paris) and at the

University of Chicago, he is a member of the prestigious Académie française
and one of the best-known living historians of religions and philosophers in both
francophone and anglophone countries. He is the author of several landmark
volumes that have prompted signiicant conceptual shifts in the study of Christian
theology gaining the reputation of the most inluential works in the ield worldwide:
The Idol and the Distance (1977), God without Being (1982, reprinted in 2013)
The Crossing of the Visible (1991), and more recently, The Erotic Phenomenon
(2004) and Certitudes négatives (2010).

aldo Marroni – Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pescara, he has

written extensively on the interactions between aesthetics, ontology and theology
with particular reference to the works of Pierre Klossowski, Friedrich nietzsche
and martin Heidegger. His recent research projects focus on the notions of the
body and of the lesh, on sensuality and eroticism in art, philosophy and literature.
His publications include: Klossowski prossimo moi (1989), Pierre Klossowski:
sessualità, vizio e complotto nella ilosoia (1999), L’Enigma dell’impuro: La
sida dell’estetico nella società (2007) and L’Arte dei simulacri: Le Possessioni
estetiche di Pierre Klossowski (2012).
x Embodiment

Jean-Luc nancy – Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and

a leading igure of contemporary French thought, he has written extensively
on continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics over the past 30 years.
His conception best resonates with the iconoclastic positioning of thinkers
such as: Jacques derrida, Georges bataille, maurice blanchot and Friedrich
nietzsche. His recent work has concentrated on an analysis of Christianism from
a deconstructive perspective: La Déclosion (2005) and L’Adoration (2010). He
has also written on the Eucharist, on the theological concept of the body and on
incarnation: Corpus (2000) and Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (2003).

Olivier Salazar-Ferrer – Lecturer in French Literature and Philosophy at

the University of Glasgow, he is the author of two monographic studies of the
existential writer, visual artist and philosopher, benjamin Fondane (1898–1944),
and of a book of interviews with michel Henry, which was prefaced by Jean
Leclercq and published with de Corlevour in 2010. He has written extensively
on the interface between literature, visual arts and philosophy, with particular
reference to merleau-Ponty, bespaloff, Jankélévitch, Levinas, Camus, Fondane,
Calaferte and René Char.

Michael Syrotinski is marshall Professor of French at the University of Glasgow.

He has published extensively on African Literature, Postcolonial theory and
Contemporary French thought, in particular the work of Jacques derrida and
Jean-Luc nancy. His book, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of
Theory (2007) explores the underlying conceptual stakes of a range of ‘encounters’
between postcolonial and deconstructive texts by theorists including Homi
bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Achille mbembe. He has recently edited a special
issue of the journal Senses and Society (2013) on ‘Jean-Luc nancy: Sense, the
Senses, and the World’.

Elvira Vitouchanskaya – is a Research Student in the Faculty of Religious

Studies at mcGill University (montreal, Canada). She is currently completing a
thesis entitled: L’Idée de l’Absolu: Kant et Fichte [The Idea of the Absolute – Kant
and Fichte], funded by the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la
Culture (FQRSC)
 introduction

this volume gathers contributions from leading scholars of world renown on the
subject of embodiment and the associated notions of living and dying in order to
examine a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship between
human and divine existence as relected through the perception of time and
corporeal experience. the rationale is to provide a representative cross-section of
inluential trends in the philosophy of religion (e.g. phenomenology, existential
thought, biblical hermeneutics, deconstruction) that have shaped our contemporary
understanding of the body in both its profane and sacred dimensions as the site of
conlicting discourses on presence and absence, subjectivity and the death of the
subject, mortality, resurrection and eternal life.
the idea for the volume grew out of discussions occasioned by an international
colloquium which was jointly organised by the School of modern Languages and
Cultures and the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow in march 2012
during which participants from France, Belgium, Spain and the UK explored a range
of themes linked to the questions of faith and certitude, living and dying.
the volume draws on the expertise of international scholars working in
cognate areas (e.g. theology, the philosophy of religion, comparative literature,
the visual arts and the history of ideas) in order to shed new light on the question
of embodiment and on the manner in which notions of corporeal experience have
evolved and informed the current, predominantly interdisciplinary, approach
to the traditional exegesis of incarnation and related questions of redemption,
resurrection and eternal life.
The irst part focuses on the work of the philosopher Michel Henry and
the phenomenology of incarnation. the editors have been graciously granted
permission to print a selection of previously unpublished documents from the
Michel Henry Archives in Louvain which shed light on the elaboration of the
philosopher’s widely celebrated work on the incarnation entitled: Incarnation: Une
philosophie de la chair (Incarnation: A Philosophy of the Flesh).1 the excerpts
from Michel Henry’s notebooks suggest the original notion of the ‘archaeology of
the lesh’ (in the sense of the search for the irst principle, for the ‘archae’ – ἀρχή).
Fundamental questions of initude and redemption are at the centre of Michel
Henry’s account of incarnation, which is accompanied by Jean Leclercq’s helpful
introductory commentary. Through an exploration of Michel Henry’s view of the

1
 Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair [Incarnation: A Philosophy
of the Flesh] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000; English translation published with Routledge
in 2003).
2 Embodiment

relationship between body and lesh, Leclercq provides a compelling account of

the elaboration of a philosophy of embodiment based on biblical exegesis and
guided by a phenomenological approach to manifestation and to the ‘reality of
the body of Christ in the Incarnation as condition of man’s identiication to God’2.
In the second essay, Grégori Jean examines how the question of language plays
a crucial part in the evolution of Michel Henry’s conception of the lesh throughout
his later work, from C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme
[I Am the Truth: For a Philosophy of Christianity] (1996) to Words of Christ
(2002).3 The distance which Michel Henry’s notions of embodied experience
and of life mark in relation to classical ontological arguments on the nature of
being is re-considered within the wider framework of his paradoxical adoption of
a-priorism in an attempt to re-deine the proper meaning of Christian incarnation.
From here we move to Renato Boccali’s comparative analysis of the views of
Michel Henry and Merleau-Ponty concerning embodied experience, which opens
up the possibility of an aesthetic interpretation of incarnation emerging from
Michel Henry’s inal statement in his essay on Wassily Kandinsky: ‘art is the
resurrection of eternal life’4.
In a deeply literary essay, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer examines how Michel Henry’s
understanding of the transcendental immanence of life, which inds expression in
visual art and in poetry, echoes Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of negative certainty
(Certitudes négatives 2010) as well as Merleau-Ponty’s approach to visual arts
in Le Visible et l’invisible [The Visible and the Invisible ] (1964), along with his
earlier account of the body as incarnated subjectivity (in the Phénoménologie de
la perception [Phenomenology of Perception, Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945).5
the possibility of a new hermeneutics of embodiment arises from the exploration
of the poetic works of René Char and Rilke, all seen through the lens of Jean-Luc
Marion’s concept of the event and through Michel Henry’s and Merleau-Ponty’s
analyses of visual aesthetic experience.
From here we move on to the second part of the book and the work of Jean-Luc
Marion himself. In his book, Le Phénomène érotique [The Erotic Phenomenon],
(2003. English translation, 2007) Jean-Luc Marion’s highly original approach to
the question of love in man’s relationship to God provides a unique opportunity of

2
 Michel Henry, ‘Introduction’, in Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair, 2000,
p. 15.
3
 Michel Henry, C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme [I Am the
Truth: For a Philosophy of Christianity] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996); Michel Henry,
Words of Christ, trans. C. Gschwandtner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
4
 Michel Henry, Voir l’invisible. Sur Kandinsky, (Paris: éd. François Bourin, 1988),
p. 244
5
 Jean-Luc Marion, Certitudes négatives (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010);
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail [The Visible and
the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes](Paris: Gallimard, 1964), trans. douglas Low
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1969); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie
de la perception [Phenomenology of Perception] (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945)
 Introduction 3

re-examining the pre-eminence of rational enquiry and the inherent depreciation

of emotions, passions and sensorial perceptions throughout the history of
modern philosophy.6 this approach allows for a reconsideration of the process
of individuation as mediated by love which in turn leads to a radical reversal
of the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, re-deined in terms of the erotic
suspension of the natural standpoint with lasting consequences for man’s ability
to expand the bounds of the possible (and therefore to envisage the possibility of
God). In his words, ‘Love opens up the horizon of subjectivity itself. […] We only
live what we envisage as possible experience whose limits are determined by the
erotic reduction. The more we love, the more we open up the possible.’7
The strategies of eros are further pursued in the essay of Aldo Marroni. In
analysing the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of Pierre Klossowski’s work
which has concentrated since the 1970s on the creation of ‘tableaux vivants’ as a
means of embodying the unique creative vision of the artist-demiurge, Marroni
highlights a strategy of appropriation and subversion of institutional codes.
Sexuality and philosophy seem to be more mutually entwined in Klossowski than
in any other writer, philosopher and artist, and their interaction leads to unexpected
results. We may assume a connection between thought and bodily suffering, and a
relationship between Eternal Return and cephalea, which Nietzsche discusses in his
letters to Gast, Overbeck and his mother between 1879 and 1881. But at the same
time, as Klossowski himself seems to admit, Nietzsche disregards this equation
to the extent that any analysis of the most obscure, hidden bodily parts, reveals
an undecipherable language that the consciousness misinterprets: ‘the body wants
to be understood’, Klossowski writes, ‘through a language that the consciousness
deciphers wrongly: It is a code of signs which inverts, falsiies and ilters all that it
expresses through the body’.8 Klossowski’s account of erotic experience ultimately
aims to uncover a radically new and iconoclastic notion of incarnation.
The next two essays continue to address the work of Marion. Javier Basas Vila
offers an analysis of the three-fold relationship between language, hermeneutics
and phenomenological analysis in marion’s critique of traditional metaphysical
and theological concepts of being. This leads to a re-examination of both Biblical
and speculative accounts of embodiment that have shaped our understanding of
inter-subjectivity, solipsistic discourse and intelligible communication. Ramona
Fotiade presents a critique of Husserlian phenomenology from the point of view
of the existential account of life (as opposed to rational knowledge), which Lev
Shestov (1866–1938) carried out during the 1920s and 1930s. This powerfully
resonates with Jean-Luc Marion’s later disengagement from the idolatrous

6
 Jean-Luc Marion, Le Phénomène érotique [The Erotic Phenomenon], (Paris:
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2003); English translation published by The University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
7
 Jean-Luc Marion, ‘On the Erotic Phenomenon’, in this volume, chapter 6, p. 88.
8
 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 26.
4 Embodiment

identiication between God and the concept of Being, in L’Idole et la distance

[The Idol and the Distance] (1977) and Dieu sans l’Etre [God without Being],
(1982).9 the comparative analysis of Shestov’s and marion’s views of life and
giving (focusing in particular on the notion of the gift), seeks to highlight the long-
lasting consequences of a radical shift in the understanding of embodiment and
redemption that privileges incalculable faith over measured rational argumentation.
Contemporary relections on the body and the erotic employ the language
of Christian Eucharist and its origins in biblical narratives. This is the theme of
David Jasper’s essay, seeking to root contemporary discussions within the ancient
theological traditions of the Church. the meditations of contemporary thinkers
in this volume, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Marion, on embodiment, the erotic,
death and resurrection – can be matched with the complex theological relections
on the early Eucharist in Tertullian, Justin Martyr and others. Since the Second
Vatican Council these discussions on the nature of the body have returned in
both Catholic and Protestant theology within the churches, from Ratzinger and
Schillebeecx to Rowan Williams and Sarah Coakley. Continuing the historical
origins of current discussions on embodiment, Alexander Broadie explores the
idea of the embodiment of our world with reference to the doctrines of thomas
d’Aquinas and David Hume. This makes apparent conlicting notions of creation
that ultimately prompt a refreshing reappraisal of the classical relation of otherness
in which the creatum stands to God. in linking the notion of God as the creator of
all being to the possibility that we create our world, Broadie’s analysis sheds new
light on the a-temporal divine creation as compatible with the view of a temporally
extended world resulting from a human act of creation.
The inal part of the book begins with one of the most compelling meditations
on the interconnected notions of embodiment, death and resurrection. Jean-Luc
Nancy’s short essay on the body of Christ, ‘Verbum Caro Factum’, offers a
thought-provoking reappraisal of incarnation as the syncope of appearance and
disappearance, syncope of enunciation and meaning, but also as syncope of desire.
As part of Nancy’s wider-encompassing relection on Christianity which he pursued
in La Déclosion (Dis-Enclosure [2005]) and L’Adoration (2010),10 this essay
aims to open up classical biblical exegesis to an interpretation of the paradoxical
encounter between a (Socratic) erotics and a (Christian) incarnation: the Word,
from this perspective, ‘has not “entered into” the lesh. It has not “descended” to
it, as has so often been repeated, superimposing onto the “incarnational” schema
a “descensional” schema with Platonic overtones’.11 As Nancy aptly points out:

9
 Jean-Luc Marion, L’Idole et la distance [The Idol and the Distance] (Paris: Editions
Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977); Dieu sans l’ȇtre [God without Being], (Paris: Communio –
Fayard, 1982), trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)..
10
 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion [Dis-Enclosure] (Paris: Galilée, 2005); L’Adoration
(Paris: Galilée, 2010).
11
 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Verbum Caro Factum’, chapter 12 in this volume, p. 159.
 Introduction 5

the Christian body is anything but a body serving as a casing (prison or tomb) to
the soul. It is … ‘spirit’ which has come out of itself, of its pure identity, in order
to identify itself not with man but as man (woman and matter)12. (emphases
in original)

The next essay continues the discussion of Nancy’s writings. Starting from an
insightful new reading of the passage from John’s Apocalypse cited in Nancy’s
recent study of Christianity, L’Adoration, Pierre-Philippe Jandin sheds light
on the dialogue between Derrida and Nancy on the notion of ‘touching’ as
related to the theological question of embodiment. He retraces the evolution
of Nancy’s thought from Corpus (1992) to Noli me tangere. Essai sur la levée
du corps (2003), including the controversy that opposed his interpretation of
embodiment and Michel Henry’s account of a philosophy of Christianity in
C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (1996).13 taking as its
theoretical frame of reference Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between globalisation
and mondialisation, Michael Syrotinski’s essay explores the relationship between
contemporary Africa, the ‘world’ and the ‘literary’. The discussion centres on a
number of present-day African novelists, and looks in particular at a controversial
recent text by the Cameroonian writer and critic, Patrice Nganang, who is inspired
by the work of the well-known theorist of postcolonial Africa, Achille Mbembe.
For both writers ‘Africa’, as a generic point of reference, is seen in terms of a
certain genealogy of Africanist thinking, from colonial times through to the
contemporary postcolonial era, and the essay relects on what a radical challenge
to this genealogy might entail. Using a more phenomenologically oriented reading
of monde (world) and immonde (abject, literally, un-world), this rupture could
be conceived in terms of the kind of ‘epistemological break’ that thinkers like
Althusser and Foucault introduced into common usage and theoretical currency in
contemporary French thought in the 1960s.
the last two essays in the book address more general questions about the nature of
embodiment. Paul Bishop places in confrontation Pascal’s and Nietzsche’s equally
vehement, if conlicting, notions of faith and belief and prompts a re-examination
of their underlying conception of embodied experience, of death, initude and
resurrection or ‘eternal return’ as part of an unprecedented re-coniguring of man’s
temporal relationship to the radical alterity of God or to the proclaimed ‘death of
God’. In the inal essay, Toby Garitt draws together the work of some of the most
signiicant contemporary thinkers and theologians whose work is addressed in this
volume. Starting from Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the coextensive notions
of ‘embodied philosophy’ and ‘embodied mind’, Garfitt examines the work of

12
 Ibid., p. 159.
13
 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailie, 1992); Noli me tangere. Essai sur
la levée du corps (Paris: Bayard, 2003); Michel Henry, C’est moi la vérité: Pour une
philosophie du christianisme [I Am the Truth: For a Philosophy of Christianity] (Paris:
Editions du Seuil,1996).
6 Embodiment

French writer and thinker, Jean Grenier, in the light of his distinctive strand of
existential phenomenology that left its imprint on Albert Camus’s conception
of the human condition. this resonates well with the postmodern approach to
faith, living and dying as it emerges from the contrasting views of Christian
thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and atheist philosophers such as Jacques
Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
 PARt i
michel Henry – the Phenomenology
of incarnation
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 1
the Search for a new Anthropological
Paradigm: Michel Henry’s Relections
on incarnation
Jean Leclercq

michel Henry wrote that he was seeking ‘a sort of exposition of the body’,1
meaning that his philosophy was in the irst instance a long and patient relection
on the body that was nonetheless situated in a transcendental perspective. indeed,
Henry’s phenomenology appears to be a ‘material’ phenomenology where the
lesh – which is in fact the feeling, subjective body – is the focal point, since
it is through it that Life is manifested. Henry considers the claim of Husserlian
phenomenology to look for the meaning of being, and establish a universal
ontology, to have succeeded only in arriving at a new formulation of ‘ontological
monism’, in other words an excessive concentration on the form of appearing
alone, that visible modality of exteriority (the world, the look, distance, ek-stase,
transcendence, etc.).
Henry’s phenomenology, therefore, in a gesture which is somewhat violent
in historical–hermeneutic terms, sets itself against a wide swath of traditional
philosophy, refusing to be held ‘prisoner’ by it, and especially in regards to what
Henry terms philosophy’s Greek modality of expression (which can be considered
the irst expression of this ‘monism’). This irreverent tendency may also explain
why he looked for a non-Greek source to stimulate his relection. He claimed
to have found this in the new testament, considering that, even if the corpus
of Christianity belongs to a religion and not a philosophy, there are nonetheless
perfectly intelligible insights and truths to be found within it. indeed, Henry
regards the Bible irst of all as a ‘text’, akin to all other texts and with similar
principles of language and comprehension.
Henry posited a ‘shared object’ for philosophy and theology and maintained
that ‘the keywords of phenomenology are in many respects those of religion
and thus of theology’.2 most importantly, it is within this framework that Henry

1
 Michel Henry, ‘Narrer le pathos’, in Phénoménologie de la vie, vol. iii (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2004), p. 323. translator’s note: translations from citations are
my own wherever a reference to a translation is not given.
2
 Michel Henry, ‘Incarnation’, in Phénoménologie de la vie, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2003), p. 165.
10 Embodiment

levelled a serious accusation at Greek thought. According to him, Greek thought

contributed precisely to a devaluing of the body, considering its reality and its
future at the level of intelligible knowledge [connaissance] alone. in Christianity,
however, according to Henry, each body receives its effective condition because
it is irst considered as a ‘living Self’, with its own powers, separate from any
understanding based upon the duality of soul and body. this Self is the only reality,
and the body is above all a ‘home’ for life, the ‘place of its incarnation’, a ‘home’
made out of pathētik and living lesh.3 before discussing what Henry means by the
notion of ‘incarnation’ and how he makes use of it to develop his thinking, it will
irst be necessary, making use of unpublished documents, to synthetically outline
what he claimed to have found in Christianity’s textual corpus (which he also
considers to be a very speciic system of action and thought) in order to propose a
new approach to one of his most important concepts.
First of all, Henry sees Christianity as a religious system, with, of course, a
non-Greek structure, which places the individual at its heart, not as a ‘variation,
as an ideation based on a Platonic model or as some specimen of an idea, but
[as] someone who belongs to life and without whom life could not be life’
(Folio 23534).4 it is obvious that he is also looking for an ‘unexpected and buried’
truth,5 capable of offering something to consider which differs from common
truth or the theoretical truth inherent to scientiic discourse. Therefore, the
truth of Christianity is a ‘phenomenologically pure truth’, which is not related
to that which is revealed, but rather the ‘fact’ and ‘way’ of revealing, that is to
say ‘pure manifestation’, and therefore radical phenomenality, because no force
[puissance] or power [pouvoir] is held to be behind that manifestation. As a result,
although, according to Henry, the phenomenological duality of appearing must
not be confused with a dualism – which would reduce his philosophy to a vulgar
psychologism – there is nonetheless a duality which occurs in the domain of ethics.
Life is a site of power and therefore of praxis, which is of the utmost importance,
if we also take into account that Henry sees Christianity as a force, as action rather
than thought – it is not at the level of thought that salvation takes place. Thus,
Henry’s approach to soteriology (notably as informed by Romans 8:19) is striking.
in his eyes it is a uniquely ethical concern, with, evidently, immense repercussions:

3
 Translator’s note: i have followed existing translations of Henry’s works such as
Susan Emanuel’s I Am the Truth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) in rendering
the French pathétique as pathētik, emphasising the relation to pathos which is no longer
salient in the common usage of the English word pathetic.
4
 References here are to Michel Henry’s unpublished manuscripts. These are
preparatory notes for the publication of his work I Am the Truth, trans. S. Emanuel (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002) and for his inal published work, Words of Christ, trans.
C. Gschwandtner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012). References to the folios, which are held
in the Fonds michel Henry at the Université Catholique de Louvain, are given in the body
of the text.
5
 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 1.
 The Search for a New Anthropological Paradigm 11

All of creation anxiously awaits this revelation of the Sons of God. it is in this
that all creation hangs on man and waits for its salvation from him, such as man
is Son and his salvation comes to him through the revelation of his condition,
and therefore that of the world in him, inasmuch as the world itself has its
essence in sensibility, i.e. life. Cf. Kandinsky. (Folio 23718)6

Henry pursues this assertion to great lengths. He afirms, irstly, for example, that
‘Life is the founder of being. the living being is not an entity [étant] but what
makes the entity exist. God is not one who is, but the living being and it is only as
living being and because he is such that we can say that he is’ (Folio 23682) and,
secondly, that ‘we do not know how far life penetrates into nature nor even if there
is a nature independent from life’ (Folio 23681). For Henry, we must therefore
not forget that the world is constituted by praxis, which is the expression of the
living sensibility of the subject. The subject cannot be reduced by a perceptual
objectivism, which, to be precise, would be a view of creation which left out
generation. It is in this sense that he rejects, on the one hand, the assimilation of
his project into that of gnosis, and, on the other hand, insists on drawing a strong
parallel between it and praxis understood as the world’s reality (in the sense of a
‘Lebenswelt’) which, of course, takes its reality from life.
As part of this stimulating relection (which avoids mixing up the disciplines of
philosophy and theology or religion), this model is conceived, or rather transferred
(though uniquely in regards to its theological modality) through recourse to the
dogma of the Son as consubstantial with the Father, which Henry interprets thus:
‘there can be no Father without the Son, even though the Son is engendered by the
Father, eternally’ (Folio 23534). this relation is of course irreversible, as it must
hold that life is originary [originaire] and that its reception matters more than its
donation. It is thus through the notions of ‘Life’ and ‘iliation’ that Henry is be able
to assert a principle of radical and fundamental levelling in terms of an originary
and of living beings.
on account of this, the truth of Christianity, therefore, turns on an essential
question – though one that is absolutely not reducible to a quest for historical
truth – the question of Christ’s divinity. Yet Henry’s Christ is an egocentric, he says
‘i’ and he says an ‘i’ whose absolute in terms of predicability is the truth, the way
and the life, to such an extent that it carries within it an ontology, an epistemology
and an anthropology. Henry, who never stopped wanting to put subjectivity back
at the heart of contemporary ontology, thinks that Christ is not the guardian of a
morality or a doctrine, or even a teacher of wisdom or the revealer of a path. this

6
 ‘La création attend anxieusement cette révélation des Fils de Dieu. C’est en cela que
toute la création est suspendue à l’homme et attend de lui son salut, en tant que l’homme est
Fils et que dans la révélation de sa condition lui advient son salut, et ainsi celui du monde
en lui, pour autant que le monde lui-même a son essence dans la sensibilité, i.e. la vie. Cf
michel Henry, ‘Kandinsky’, Preparatory notes for Incarnation, manuscript Folio 23718
(Université catholique de Louvain-la-neuve, belgium).
12 Embodiment

Christ is a knowledge [savoir] and a power, so that the kingdom is not a word but
a force. However, this force is not like the organic or corporal force, but like the
one which causes one to move from death to life, an ‘inconceivable Act’,7 around
which the whole Christian corpus is organised. The resurrection is the central act –
which allows us to qualify certain criticisms claiming that Henry supposedly never
considered the tragic aspects of Christ’s life.
this power calls for belief, and belief in it alone, redirecting any call or ‘ek-
kalein’ towards it only and never to the pathētik community which it creates through
the simple fact of its existence. We come across this again later in reference to the
related question of the Eucharist. it is in this sense that Henry places the ordeal
and experience of iliation at the centre of revelation, emphasising the aspect of
absolute immediation that may be lived by one who undergoes that pure experience
of affectivity. Henry likes to recall that:

if you wanted to question the Gospel about the salvation of your soul, then you
would not merely, as in Kierkegaard’s ironic remark, have to await the publication
of the very last book on the question, you would still have to put everything else
aside and throw yourself into study, which death would surely interrupt before
you could obtain from so many realms of knowledge and exegesis even the irst
word in an answer to the single question that matters.8

As a result, we can understand that Henry’s relationship to scripture – as

the site of revelation and inspiration – is of radical complexity, because it is
phenomenologically radicalised:

if we are talking here of religion, of faith, of theology, we do not do so as

religious believers or theologians drawing on the Scripture, but rather by
questioning the truth of the Scripture, instead of basing our thoughts on it. it is
called into question and only accepted once it is phenomenologically acceptable.
The analysis Word/Scripture = Word of God, for that matter, is irstly a question
to which we must reply negatively. (Folio 23569)

in this way, Henry vehemently discredits a certain relationship with language, since
this essential and speciic connection between God – who is essence – and Christ –
who is the witness to this life and to the life within Him – means that saying and
speaking are less of a question of scripture here, all the more so as he carries out
an epistemological operation of hyperbolic and methodological doubt upon them
(Christ could be crazy, have delusions of grandeur or be a self-deceiving mystic
caught up in a web of delirium). therefore, we are dealing with an originary
revelation of life itself, Life, of course, as we have seen, being a power, but also a
very speciic saying – and a saying of this knowledge – in this way making belief

 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 8.

7

 Ibid., p. 3.
8
 The Search for a New Anthropological Paradigm 13

into an ordeal, whose phenomenality is that of iliation, as distinguishing relation

or as ‘pros ti’, though in a sense which is the opposite of Aristotle’s.
Considering this point of methodological doubt, Henry dares to write:

Descartes doubts the entire truth of all truths, but he does not doubt the truth of
life. the truth of Christianity eludes this kind of truth and is of another kind.
Life concerns another ‘environment’. A life which is different from biological
life, from reason as opening onto the word – a reversal of Heidegger. A truth of
life’s kind is life as revelation, hence the necessary elucidation of the idea of
Revelation. (Folio 23617)

As a result, Henry discounts the question of the content and forma of the Scriptures,
as this would make them only a ‘logos’, a kind of almost psychologising
reductionism, whereas the Scriptures are to be read as the saying of life, which
implies that this is a project which goes against the Greek one! For Henry this
is indeed the case, as for Jean-Luc marion (though they each have their own
modalities). they refute the idea that the bible is a text and therefore that an
interpretation of the ‘Verba’ is only possible based on the Word. Henry states:

it is not the corpus of new testament texts that can offer us access to the truth,
to that absolute truth of which the corpus speaks. on the contrary, it is truth
and truth alone that can offer us access to itself and by the same token to that
corpus, allowing us to understand the text in which the truth is deposited and
recognise it there.9

Since I have addressed the intellectual friendship of these two major thinkers,
both of whom have made their mark on the ield of committed inquiry into the
understanding of Christianity, in order to illustrate the point i will show how
Henry reads the following key argument in the work of Jean-Luc marion, from
God without Being (1982–1991):

Hence a irst principle for the theologian: to be sure, he proceeds to a hermeneutic

of the biblical text that does not aim at the text but, through the text, at the event,
the referent. the text does not offer the original of faith, because it does not
constitute its origin. only the Word can give an authorized interpretation of the
words (written or spoken) ‘concerning him’.10

in his attentive commentary on this point, Henry writes:

9
 Ibid., p. 9.
10
 Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. t.A. Carlson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), p. 148, emphasis in original.
14 Embodiment

JL 208 ... only the Word can give an authorized interpretation of the verba which
concern it 209 (impossible to read the scriptures without hearing Christ). basic
understanding of the text requires access to the Word through (before) the text
(in addition to that idea that the Word gives us the hermeneutic of the Verba – it
does this partially in the Gospel but this hermeneutic, it is its presence in us, a
pathētik shock of which verba can be the incidental cause, inds its own power
in what it awakens). (Folio 28008)11

in this sense, what is generally (but polemically) referred to as Henry’s hyper-

transcendentalism also means that he does not set out to look at Christianity as a
historical truth, which is not something he denies but whose study he leaves to the
so-called ‘historical’ sciences, including the sciences of language. According to
him, to take this direction would be to regionalise Christianity, to reduce it down
to an intentional phenomenology, and, of course, to indeinitely postpone the act of
faith in life, as he likes to recall by bringing up Kierkegaard. Henry thus distances
himself from the general ideas of Biblical hermeneutics – those of Ricœur, for
example, who considers the Bible as a ‘poem’ – by using, in contrast, a concept
which they do not take into account in this context, that of the ‘word of Christ’.
Like Claude Tresmontant, who was highly inluential for him, with his hypothesis
of a ‘Hebrew Christ’,12 Henry seeks as originary a Christ as possible, whom he
inds in an absolute falling-short of the text, accessible to all, since he writes:

this story is punctuated with quotations that rend the simple fabric of facts
and tear it apart. When Christ himself speaks, it is the very Word of God that
we hear spoken, and this is so because Christ is deined as God’s Word, his
Spoken Word.13

Since everyday language cannot give access to life, since life alone can do this,
Henry is also able to note that ‘language is not a precondition for knowledge
[connaissance] of the new testament’ (Folio 23671). We cannot ignore the fact that
this position obviously poses some very serious problems for the understanding and
usefulness of the notions of ‘tradition’, ‘transmission’ and ‘ides ex auditu’, and, of
course, for theological hermeneutics, above all for the treatise of the sacraments.
in regards to this, i am happy to recall that Jean-Luc marion has shown, with
inesse, how a hermeneutics worthy of theology cannot be thought of without its
subordination to the moment of the Eucharist. It is at this point – in which the
Son, performing his divinity, makes himself accessible for recognition by people –
that the theologian becomes capable of going through the text to recognise in it

 Translator’s note: Michel Henry’s page references here are for the French edition,
11

see pp. 148–149 of the English translation.

12
 Claude Tresmontant, Le Christ hébreu: La langue et l’âge des Évangiles (Paris:
oEiL, 1983).
13
 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 7.