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  • Culture or Barbarism?
  • Benjamin Noys (bio)
Michel Henry, Barbarism, Scott Davidson (introduction and translation), London, Continuum, 2012, 168pp

Michel Henry’s Barbarism was originally published in French in 1987, reissued in 2000, and now arrives in English translation. In many ways it arrives as a dead letter. It consists of a jeremiad against the dominance of abstract, Galilean science over the primacy of ‘Life’. Such a protest hardly seems original, dating back at least to William Blake’s contestation of Newtonian science in the name of ‘living proportion’, and on to the terrain of the various twentieth-century rebukes of science and technology from Heidegger to the Frankfurt School.

The emergence of Henry’s work in translation now, however, makes his intervention more timely and perhaps more strange than it might first appear. In 2008 Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude appeared in English as, in part, a robust and conceptually rigorous restatement of the Galilean worldview - that nature was a book to be read and its language is mathematics. Since then we have witnessed the seemingly unstoppable ‘movement’ of ‘speculative realism’, which has, in very different ways, restated the necessity for a consideration of science as a privileged discourse on a reality that is not limited to human access (this limit being what Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’). Various schisms and heresies have resulted from this initial construction of a tentative unity, but this dispersal has merely served to further the emergent hegemony of various forms of ‘realism’.

This context makes Michel Henry’s Barbarism perhaps the most explicit work of an enemy of this configuration. Henry is a phenomenologist, religious (specifically Christian), and unabashedly endorses Husserl’s notorious thesis that the earth (as the very ground of experience) does not move. In particular, Henry singles out the Galilean mathematicisation of the world as his target of critique and as the origin of what he calls ‘barbarism’. In a manner which I can only describe, from the clichéd position of the English, as very French, Henry states that he rejects the Galilean reduction in which: ‘The kiss exchanged by lovers is only a collision of microphysical particles’ (xiv).

Henry’s argument is relatively straightforward. He contends that science is only one mode of appearing and Galilean science is a subset of this mode. They are both derivative and secondary to the originary mode of appearing, which is life. Life is the transcendental condition of appearing from which all other forms of appearance derive. This life is an immanent experience of self-relating - life ‘feels’ life, in the first instance. The ‘auto-affection’ of life is, according to Henry, dominated by two fundamental affective tonalities: suffering and joy. It is this primary experience of sensibility which shapes any appearing, but also means that we are irreducible to the world. Therefore ‘life’ is the absolute value, a point that Henry reiterates and explores throughout this work.

In the terms of Quentin Meillassoux we could say that Henry offers an absolute correlationism. While Meillassoux insists science gives us access to knowledge of a realm [End Page 234] prior to any consciousness, Henry’s contention is that science can only be practiced by life and remains dependent on the body of the scientist. The second point of Henry’s argument is that Galilean science is a reduction or elimination of this experience of life. The result is an experience of barbarism, because culture, which is the outgrowth of life, is subjected to the ‘deadly’ effects of science that ‘kill’ life. We are therefore faced with the choice: culture or barbarism?

After setting out this argument in some dense and often repetitive chapters, Henry turns to explaining why science should emerge from this experience of life. Why does life turn against itself? Henry’s interesting argument is that the ontological suffering which is one of the tonalities of life leads to a desire to end that suffering by escaping from life. Science answers this desire to negate life, and so promises a kind of practice of ‘suicide’. The idealities and abstractions of science, or Galilean science, perform, or try to perform, the elimination of life. In fact, the ‘frenzy’ of this project is that it can...

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