
Michel Henry’s philosophy is the kind of thing that makes you squint at the world a little more sharply, the kind that leaves a trail of faint headaches and desperate cigarettes behind it.
He sits at a strange intersection of materialism and immaterialism, where the subject’s lived experience clashes violently with the raw weight of Marxist politics.
At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss him as a thinker too wrapped up in religious mysticism to care about the real world, too preoccupied with the soul to give a damn about the proletariat.
But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll find a thread that might just tie together a vision of how life, suffering, and politics might still be connected.
Henry is often described as a Marxist phenomenologist, but his materialism is a peculiar, almost spiritual one.
It isn’t a materialism based on the mechanical forces of Marx or the hard-edged realities of class struggle. Instead, it starts from the body itself—how we feel and experience the world in our very skin, in our emotions, and in our sensations.
If you’ve spent years drowning in Marx’s grand narrative of history, Henry might feel like a slap in the face.
The material world is not just the stuff we use, the land we till, or the sweat we shed. It’s the very flesh we inhabit, and Henry argues that this “auto-affection”—our self-experience—is at the core of any genuine politics.
That’s the thing: Henry’s not the kind of philosopher you can just trot out at a political rally. He doesn’t fit comfortably into the neat lines of “proletariat vs. bourgeoisie” or “revolutionary struggle.”
No, he’s concerned with the deepest, most intimate layers of life.
He talks about how we experience our own existence, which is all well and good if you’re stuck in a broken elevator or want to meditate on the meaning of life in the middle of a long, grueling night of smoking and drinking away your misery.
The Shifting Landscape of Materialism
In Henry’s eyes, materialism isn’t the cold, detached philosophy of gears and laborers. It’s not about the “stuff” you can touch and measure.
Instead, materialism is the flesh of experience, the tactile and the interior. For Henry, the material world isn’t separate from the subject; it’s the way the subject feels and experiences everything.
As he writes in Material Phenomenology, “The most intimate relation is not one of objects, but one of affectivity, of a life that gives itself to itself.”
It’s not just about the things around you; it’s how those things become part of your internal world.
This gets sticky when trying to tie his ideas to political theory, especially when you bring Marx into the picture.
The Marxist tradition is all about economic structures, class conflict, and historical materialism—the forces that shape society at large.
But Henry’s materialism cuts through that, diving into the depth of individual experience. In a world that’s deeply affected by capitalist forces, Henry’s insistence on the subjective, emotional, and phenomenological roots of experience seems like a retreat into solipsism.
He’s no fan of the structural determinism that you find in traditional Marxism. The subject, for Henry, is the true source of meaning.
Yet, to ignore the harshness of the material world—the suffering imposed by capitalism and political oppression—would be naïve.
Henry’s critique of capitalism, as he offers in his From Communism to Capitalism, reads almost like an esoteric critique of consumerism’s effect on the soul.
He sees capitalism as stripping away the subjective experience, commodifying the self, reducing it to labor and consumption.
A Mystical Critique of Marxism?
Where Henry’s politics really starts to get tricky is his relationship to Marx. Some readers, especially those hoping for a concrete political theory, are disappointed by his tendency to veer toward theological and religious ideas.
Henry, despite being a self-described materialist, acknowledges the importance of the sacred, the immaterial, and, yes, even God.
For a Marxist, this is uncomfortably close to sacrilege. To many, it feels like the woolly thinking of an armchair philosopher more concerned with soul-searching than revolution.
Henry’s critique of Marxist materialism revolves around what he sees as a tragic reduction of human beings to mere cogs in the machine of historical materialism, a fate he shares with critics like Hannah Arendt, who lamented the dehumanizing aspects of totalitarianism.
But this rejection of traditional Marxism doesn’t mean Henry is some sort of conservative.
His politics are deeply concerned with the restoration of subjectivity, individuality, and personal experience in a world that has all but erased them. It’s not enough to just acknowledge suffering—it’s the lived experience of that suffering that must be understood and centered.
The Simple Guide to Henry’s Philosophy
Alright, kid. So, here’s what Henry’s all about: Imagine you’re sitting in a dark room, and you’re feeling kind of lonely, maybe a little depressed.
You’re not just sitting there watching the world pass by—you’re feeling it. You can feel the chair beneath you, the cold air around you, maybe the ache in your back.
That feeling of being alive, really alive in the world, is what Henry calls auto-affection—it’s how we experience ourselves from the inside out.
That’s the true material of life, not the stuff around us but the feeling of being here in this moment.
Now, Henry doesn’t think the stuff we touch and see is unimportant, but he thinks the most important thing is how we feel about it.
In a world full of loud advertisements, government promises, and all sorts of distractions, Henry asks: what does it feel like to be?
To be in a world that’s trying to tell you who and what you are.
The Other Side of the Story: The Critics
Henry’s philosophical system isn’t without its critics. Marxists, for instance, may argue that his focus on individual experience leaves out the crucial forces that shape those experiences—things like capitalism, class struggle, and historical materialism.
Herbert Marcuse, for example, insists on the importance of analyzing social structures, not just subjective feelings. He argues in One-Dimensional Man that the material conditions of society shape desires, thoughts, and actions, which Henry seems to sidestep in favor of a more abstract, spiritual take on materialism.
Even Jean-Paul Sartre, despite sharing some of Henry’s existential concerns, emphasizes the need for politics to address the economic and social structures that define people’s lived realities.
For Sartre, human freedom can’t be detached from the political struggle—it’s only through changing the material world that we can truly free ourselves.
Other critiques point to the mystical nature of Henry’s work, as it ventures into the religious, the spiritual, and the ineffable. Where Marxists like Trần Đức Thảo focus on materialism rooted in dialectical processes, Henry’s materialism risks veering into the abstract.
This has left many people scratching their heads, wondering if Henry’s ideas could ever hold up in the real world of politics and struggle.
Scientific Explanation and the Dark Side
As you dive deeper into Henry’s work, you’ll inevitably bump into his emphasis on auto-affection—this is the core of his materialism, and, at a scientific level, it touches on neurobiological processes related to self-awareness and consciousness.
Our bodies are not just passive objects in the world; they are active participants in the creation of meaning. This aligns loosely with theories of embodied cognition, which argue that our thoughts and perceptions are deeply tied to the body’s physical presence in the world.
When you feel the world, your brain isn’t just passively receiving information; it’s actively constructing that information based on your bodily sensations.
But let’s not get too hopeful about this. The dark side is that no matter how much we feel, no matter how deeply we experience, we still live in a world where material conditions shape our existence.
The body gets sick, gets old, and dies. No amount of mystical affection can erase the brutality of time, poverty, or exploitation.
And no philosophical theory will stop the inevitable slide into nihilism when it all seems meaningless.
At the end of it all, it seems Henry’s philosophy points us into the abyss. He rejects the cold objectivity of Marxist materialism but offers no easy answers in its place.
The material world, he suggests, is not something we can ever truly possess or understand; we are always at its mercy.
And yet, within this suffering, there’s the possibility for us to experience ourselves anew. Henry gives us the ability to feel, to exist, and to struggle with the very fabric of life itself, but that might be the cruelest joke of all.
Maybe the real tragedy of Henry’s work is that, while it offers hope, it also leaves us stranded in a desert of meaning. The world is a brutal, indifferent machine, and the more we try to escape it, the deeper we sink.
But perhaps—just perhaps—our awareness of this, our refusal to submit to despair, is the only real choice we have.
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