Pathein

Letras de vida

2024-12-31T10:35:30-03:00

Publicamos aquí dos cartas que Michel Henry le enviara a su discípulo y amigo Mario Lipsitz, en las que la sus vidas se entrelazan en la Vida asoluta a través del hilo de la palabra escrita. Como en toda experiencia en que la Vida se revela, su fruición cobra primacía por sobre todo contenido representativo. Pueda el lector, entonces, disfrutar de la expresión viva de la palabra del filósofo.

Monism, dualism, pluralism

2025-01-29T12:02:42-03:00

Throughout its history, phenomenology’s most pressing and recurring question seems to have been whether it is necessary for it to assume either the label of “idealism” or that of “realism”, or whether, on the contrary, it is possible for it to consider that its ontologic-conceptual device preserves it from either, by situating it beyond their alternative. The hypothesis put forward here is that what we owe to Michel Henry is to have introduced another question: that of knowing whether, as such, phenomenology is or must be monistic or dualistic. To understand such a question and the reasons why it is legitimate, against all expectations, to ask it of phenomenology, and to understand Michel Henry’s answer to it, requires a series of historical and conceptual clarifications, of which the present study is an outline.

De From Henry’s phenomenology of the sexual encounter to Beauvoir’s phenomenology of (female) sexuality

2025-06-07T17:15:13-03:00

Michel Henry has been one of the few phenomenologists who dared to outline a phenomenology of sexuality and eroticism. Beyond general speculations, Henry approaches the experience of the sexual encounter by elaborating a detailed descriptive phenomenology. In this paper we make a critical approach to Henry’s Phenomenology of eroticism and sexuality while questioning some of the French philosopher’s assumptions about the failure of the encounter and the impossibility of “touching” the subjectivity of the other through contact with his objective body. To carry out this critique, we turn to the works of Simone de Beauvoir and to Sara Heinämaa’s interpretation of this author, showing the irreducibility of the phenomenon of feminine sexuality as an original experience in such a way that it would be possible to characterize Henry’s description as marked by a gender

bias. We also present an alternative vision of the sexual encounter, doomed to failure according to Henry, in which it would be possible to characterize the experience as an opening to otherness based on the constitution of a community of lovers lived in their intimacy.

Brief review of the concept of body-territory through Michel Henry’s phenomenology

2025-04-12T19:51:55-03:00

With the advent of global capitalism, territory is reformulated as a political-analytical category of a counter-hegemonic nature and relevant in the discourses of the peasant-indigenous, feminist and environmentalist movements, among others. This is synthesized in one of the most used geographical concepts in research driven by this conception of corporeality as an object of exercise of power and a means of resistance: the body-territory. Faced with this panorama, the main objective of this article is to constructively review the possibilities, inconsistencies and epistemological risks underlying this concept so current in current political and academic rhetoric. This is carried out from an analysis focused on the contributions made by Michel Henry from phenomenological philosophy. In this way, in the first instance, the theoretical-conceptual position that, as a leading exponent of the body-territory, Rogério Haesbaert condenses is described. Next, the perspective that Michel Henry proposes regarding this complex subject is explored in depth. It is worth mentioning that, in both cases, the authors develop and support their respective theses through theoretical dialogue with other experts. Finally, personal reflections obtained through analytical work are recovered.

In the threads of the invisible: the communication of affections in Michel Henry and Donald Winnicott

2025-02-13T12:11:19-03:00

It is a fact: Michel Henry overwhelms us with the Phenomenology of the Invisible. Life itself, source and guardian of Pathos, would then, for Henry, be the place of the invisible, the darkness where we experience ourselves and from where the world is perceived and felt. In Psychoanalysis, Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was an author who stood out for bringing to light issues of the early development of the human being, a phase in which the mother-baby relationship is fundamentally important in the psychic constitution of the subject. In the beginning of life there is still no possibility of verbal communication, but Winnicott points out another nature of communication that can occur where only the body, affects and sensations exist: This is silent communication. In both Winnicott and Henry, it seems to us that it is in the encounter with the other where the invisible can be felt. It is in the interweaving of affects where the subjective can become objectively perceived. It is through intersubjectivity, then, that the affects of Self and Other can be understood and recognized, in the visibility of the world and in the invisibility of the darkness of Life.

TO THE WORKS THEMSELVES! Heidegger and the reception of the phenomenological method in the search for the truth of art

2025-04-30T16:42:05-03:00

Although the universe disclosed by Heidegger contains countless aesthetic considerations of the utmost importance and establishes a completely new way of reflecting on artworks, it will be discussed here the presence of Husserl’s Phenomenology in Heideggerian thought, and how this presence is traced in his early writings on the origin of art. Indeed, it will be hypothesized that in spite of Heidegger’s distancing from Constitutive Phenomenology, he stuck to Phenomenological Methodology –at least until his first writings on Aesthetics– especially to one of its main principles: to the things themselves!

The “Medieval Turn” in Michel Henry’s Phenomenology

2025-05-05T13:53:06-03:00

By echoing the title of Dominique Janicaud’s polemic book and modifying the direction of the turn from theology to the experience of medieval thought, I am going to depart a little from those who show Michel Henry as a phenomenologist and highlight the influence he received from the Middle Ages. It is well known that France has had great researchers of the Middle Ages who have certainly influenced many French thinkers. Throughout this paper I will first address some characteristics of medieval thinking, then I will limit myself to certain features of the text I am the Truth and, finally, I will try to show what could have been the reason why Henry turned from phenomenology to the Middle Ages in his eagerness to seek and find a new way of thinking.