The Excess of Joy. An Antinomic Reinterpretation of Michel Herny's Material Phenomenology

Abstract

If Michel Henry has claimed for his philosophy the title of “material phenomenology”, it is due to his attempt to unravel the “invisible phenomenological substance” of appearing through the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. If life’s self-appearing consists in the “non-tautological unity” between “suffering” as the original passivity to itself and “joy” as the effectuation through which the experience of oneself takes place, we propose to reinterpret such unity on the basis of an “antinomic structure”. Consequently, if suffering designates the excess of original passivity as “impossibility”, joy must be understood as the excess of “transpassibility”. Such a surpassing entails that life’s “hyper-power” translates itself into a “hyper-contingency” in a double sense. On the one hand, as the contingency of every alleged “being-in-possession-of-oneself”, including the phenomenologist’s, which implies the “transgression” of its own architectonics. On the other hand, if such contingency aspires to surpass all “ontological monism”, then it can only take place as “con-tagion”, that is, as an overabundance of “contacts”.