Reviews for Material Phenomenology

The average rating for Material Phenomenology based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-25 00:00:00 Glen Shepard It's odd to think that this little book - ostensively, a close reading and critique of Husserlian phenomenology - could be the electrifying and mesmerizing intellectual bombshell that it is. But my gosh is it just that. Henry writes with a fiery, hypnotic verve that makes the pull of his words almost irresistible to follow, and even at its most academic, Material Phenomenology reads as much as a philosophical manifesto as it does a treatise on Husserl. Although strictly speaking a collection of three essays, through each runs Henry's invective against the Husserlian primacy of intentionality - the founding idea of phenomenology according to which every thought is a thought 'of' something, or more generally, a representation of something. Against this, Henry instead argues for the primacy of affect - the feelings of joy, sorrow, wonder, boredom and love, which, far from being 'about' anything, instead subsist in-themselves in the 'self-givenness' or 'auto-affectivity' of their being. Thus of pain for example, Henry writes: "Pain itself teaches me about pain and not some kind of intentional consciousness that would aim at its presence, its being there now." Indeed, in Henry's customary grandiloquent terms, the occlusion of affect under the reign of intentionality amounts to nothing less than the 'philosophical death of life', insofar as Life (capital 'L' and all) is in principle is irreducible to any attempt to idealize it according to the phenomenal structures of consciousness (the 'as-structure', as Henry calls it, as in: to see something 'as' something). Hence the title of the book, 'Material Phenomenology' which, taking the 'hylectic' ('material') content of consciousness as its starting point, refuses to cede the reality of 'matter' to reality of consciousness. For Henry, material phenomenology bears not upon the visible, but the invisible, the 'unphenomenalizable' essence of phenomenality itself. Yet for all of Henry's attempts to exorcise the demon of idealization from the purity of the Husserlian edifice, his own appeal to materiality is a strange one indeed, devolving upon an immanence of 'Absolute Subjectivity'; a sort of trans-individual Life composed of nothing but affectivity (stated baldly by Henry: "Life is the absolute as an affect"). A materiality startlingly absent of matter, in other words. Ultimately then, Henry's target is any form of mediation or 'ek-static' being according to which phenomena would be placed at a remove or a distance from what should instead be the immediacy of a durationless, auto-affecting Subjectivity. In accordance with this vision of 'radical immanence', one brooking no compromise with any 'outside', Henry hunts down, with meticulous precision, the various traces of transcendence lurking within Husserl's phenomenology (Heidegger too cops a walloping as well). Despite the vociferous critique at hand however, Henry does not reject the phenomenological project so much as he sees himself as extending and correcting it, ultimately claiming a fidelity to an enterprise that he sees betrayed at every turn by the very figure who founded it. And indeed, whatever one makes of Henry's 'pathetic' (as in pathos!) revaluation of the Husserlian adventure, to bear witness to Henry's prowess as a reader of Husserl is a philosophical reward in its own right. In any case, as should be clear, not only the fate of Husserl's thought but the entire phenomenological tradition is at stake in this work too -not to mention the destiny of immanence and the travails of affectivity.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-25 00:00:00 Kenneth Pope sometimes i think i might die because she is so good.