In his recent book ‘Kant and the Mind’ Andrew Brook makes a distinction between two types of selfawareness. The first type, which he calls empirical self-awareness, is an awareness of particular psychological states such as perceptions, memories, desires, bodily sensations etc. One attains this type of self-awareness simply by having particular experiences and being aware of them. To be in possession of empirical self-awareness is, in short, simply to be conscious of one’s occurrent experience. The second type of self-awareness he (...) calls apperceptive self-awareness. This type of self-awareness entails an awareness of oneself as the subject of experience. For this type of self-awareness to obtain, it would not be enough merely to be conscious of, say, an occurrent perception of a chair, one would also have to be aware that it was oneself who was perceiving the chair. And as Brook adds, when I am self-aware in this way, I am not only aware of being the subject of a single experience, but also aware of myself as the common subject of other psychological states (Brook, 1994: 55-57). I find Brook’s distinction illuminating, but it raises a question which I would like to pursue in this paper. When we speak of self-awareness, do we then necessarily also speak of a self, is there so to speak always a self involved in self-awareness, or is it rather the case, as Brook’s notion of empirical selfawareness might suggest, that there are types of self-awareness which are ‘selfless’, or to use two other related terms ‘subjectless’ or ‘non-egological’? Is self-awareness always to be understood as an awareness of a self, or can it be understood simply as the awareness which a specific experience has of itself? Ultimately, I believe an answer to these questions are important, both when it comes to an understanding of what exactly self-awareness amounts to, and also when it comes to a proper understanding of what a self is.. (shrink)

Michel Henry has renewed our understanding of life as immanent affectivity: life cannot be reduced to what can be made visible; it is – as immanent and as affectivity – radically invisible. However, if life (la vie) is radically immanent, the living (le vivant ) has nonetheless to relate to the world: it has to exist . But, since existence requires and includes intentional components, human reality – being both living and existing – implies that immanence and intentionality be related (...) to one another, even though they are conceived at the same time as radically distinct modes of appearing in Henry’s phenomenology of life. Following this line of thought, we are faced with at least two questions: First, what reality does immanent appearing have for us as existing and intentional beings? And second, from an ethical point of view, what does Henry’s opposition of “barbarism” and “second birth” mean in terms of existence? As will be shown, it follows from the standpoint of radical phenomenology itself that immanent affectivity has reality for us only insofar as it finds its expression or translation in the realm of the intentionally visible and that, with regard to ethics, both “barbarism” and its overcoming in “second birth” are effective only insofar as they are mediated through representations. Henry’s critique of representation and intentionality needs therefore to be revised, especially in the field of practical philosophy, where the essential role played by intentionality has to be acknowledged even by radical phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a central phenomenological concept in Michel Henry’s work that has often been neglected: generation. Generation becomes an especially important conceptual key to understanding not only the relationship between God and human self but also Henry’s adoption of radical interiority and his critical standpoint with respect to much of the phenomenological tradition in which he is working. Thus in pursuing the theme of generation, I shall introduce many phenomenological-theological terms in Henry’s trilogy on Christianity as (...) well as how he understands the relationship between phenomenology and theology. In the final sections of the paper, I turn to positively defining Henry’s notion of divine generation and examine the theological implications of it in light of his confrontation and rejection of the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis found in his book, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair. Humans are not created but are eternally generated, a bold claim that brings Henry to the brink of a kind of interiorized pantheism or Gnostic dualism. Finally, I offer some critical comments specifically about Henry’s doctrine of generation in light of the tension between auto-affection and hetero-affection and thus how one might think after Henry in light of the basic Augustinian theological distinction between self and God and the intentionality of faith opened up by that distinction. (shrink)

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, (...) we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)

To address the theological turn in phenomenology, this paper sets out critical arguments opposing the theist phenomenology of Michel Henry and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the event. Henry’s phenomenology has been overlooked in recent commentaries compared with, for example, Jean-Luc Marion’s work. It will be shown here that Henry’s philosophy presents a detailed novel turn in phenomenology structured according to critical moves against positions developed from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This demonstration is done through a strong contrast with Deleuze and (...) a short engagement with Quentin Meillassoux. The paper presents an argument against the theological turn on the grounds that it misunderstands the form of affectivity when compared to Deleuze’s work on affect and event. It will be argued that Henry’s search for a free-standing affect deduced as a condition for any appearance underplays the way any affect is included in many causal and transcendentally determined series such that any notion of the pure affect independent of other processes is a fiction. The loss of this pure affect entails the questioning of the theological turn in Henry. (shrink)

Even a cursory glance in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein makes it evident that one of Husserl’s major concerns in his 1917-18 reflections on time-consciousness was how to account for the constitution of time without giving rise to an infinite regress. Not only does Husserl constantly refer to this problem in Husserliana XXXIII – as he characteristically writes at one point “Überall drohen, scheint es, unendliche Regresse” – but he also takes care to distinguish between several different regresses. One (...) of the more troubling ones is the one that might be called the regress of foundation. It concerns the problem of how to avoid always having to presuppose yet another underlying constituting consciousness. As we will soon see, the attempt to avoid this specific regress is closely linked to the problem of how to come up with a satisfactory account of self-awareness. That Husserl himself was well aware of this link can be inferred from some of his reflections in the beginning of Husserliana XXXIII. As he writes at one point, consciousness exists, it exists as a stream, and it appears to itself as a stream. But how the stream of consciousness is capable of being conscious of itself, how it is possible and comprehensible that the very being of the stream is a form of self-consciousness, is the enduring problem of the entire treatise. In this article, I wish to take a closer look at some of Husserl’s attempts in the Bernau Manuscripts to account for time-consciousness without giving rise to an infinite regress. (shrink)

This project examines the concept of decision in philosophical writing, in particular the question of whether subjectivity can be said to constitute a ‘locus’ of decision. The writing of Søren Kierkegaard is the main focus of discussion. Giorgio Agamben, Michel Henry and Jacques Derrida also provide important contributions. Although for Kierkegaard ‘all decisiveness is rooted in subjectivity’, subjective agency takes the form of an active surrendering to an external unknown authority (God). Kierkegaard uses the term ‘leap of faith’ to describe (...) the moment of decision where subjective transformation occurs. For Derrida, any decision requires an undecidable leap beyond all reasoning made in preparation for that decision. He extends a reading of faith beyond the theistic by suggesting that Kierkegaard’s unknowable God could also be another name for the ‘structure of subjectivity.’ Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the concept of human life situated at the threshold of categories (socio-political, philosophical, physiological and so on), helps to further the exploration of subjectivity as the ‘locus’ of decision. Michel Henry’s work on The Essence of Manifestation provides a focus for a discussion on the ‘radical subjectivity’ that Kierkegaard proposes as the fulcrum of decision. The research project as a whole maintains a synergy between these philosophical concerns and the form of their explication. The thesis is made up of both written text and DVD documentation of live works. These instances of practice, whose form and mode of presentation were informed by a specific aspect of the research, are integrated into the thesis to constitute ‘chapters’. The practice can and does function independently in other contexts. However, what is presented in this research document constitutes the outcome of my practice-based PhD project and includes both the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practice’ elements. Supervisors: Neil Cummings and Howard Caygill. (shrink)

This article calls into question recent attempts to move beyond, to ‘post’ phenomenology by highlighting the continued relevance of key phenomenological concepts (intentionality and correlationism) for human geography. I show how these concepts are pivotal to addressing problems raised by post-phenomenologists themselves concerning affects and objects. Drawing on recent phenomenological theory, I develop a spatial account of how subject and object cohere in experience. I argue that the very relation between/entanglement of the human and more-than-/non-human can best be accounted for (...) phenomenologically. Such a phenomenological approach promises new ways of understanding various phenomena such as landscape, weather or climate. (shrink)