I got to know Michel Henry long before I met him personally: by reading his books. When I was twenty, I was a Marxist-Leninist, like so many others of the "May 1968 generation". The discovery of the horrors of the Stalinist Gulag, of the massacres of China's so-called "Cultural Revolution" and the genocide of the Red Khmers in Cambodia convinced me that Marxist-Leninist doctrine was inseparable from totalitarian terror. At the end of the 70s, the "New Philosophers" had appeared in France, intellectuals who had been Maoists. Disillusioned as I was, they rejected Marx as the "father of Gulag" and refused any criticism of today's society. Their position seemed to me questionable, as it amounted to accepting the injustice and exploitation of capitalist society that had been criticized by Marx. So, I was in deep intellectual disarray. Then I discovered Michel Henry's book on Marx. He asserted that "Marxism is the sum of the misunderstandings that have been committed about Marx", and sought to extract his thought from the metaphysical gangue that imprisoned it. Reading him, I realized that it was possible to reject Marxist-Leninist dogmas without abandoning the critical dimension of Marx's thought. I then sought to understand Henry's personal philosophical position, his conception of the "living individual", which he found at the heart of Marx's work. I began reading that immense and intimidating book, L'essence de la manifestation, in which Henry lays the foundations of his phenomenology of selfhood and absolute Life. It was this reading - and a few others - that convinced me to turn to phenomenology.

At the time, it was still possible for the author of difficult philosophical books to be invited to a prime-time television program. That is how I got to see Michel Henry, who had just published La Barbarie. A few years later, I met him "in real life" in Paris, at the newly-founded Collège International de Philosophie, of which Derrida was the first president. Henry was then working on Freud, leading to his Généalogie de la psychanalyse. After his lecture, I timidly asked him why he had not mentioned the death drive. He looked at me with amazement, as if my question made no sense, and replied softly: "Every drive is an impulse of Life, and how could Life want anything other than Life itself?". I wanted to ask him how he could account for hatred, cruelty, all destructive and self-destructive inclinations; but I was still young and did not dare.

I met him again in 1991, still at the Collège de Philosophie. Dominique Janicaud had just published Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie, in which he criticized Levinas, Marion and Henry for having abandoned the "neutrality" of phenomenological approach to subject it to religious faith. The Collège wanted to organize a public debate between Janicaud and those he had criticized. Levinas was very old, perhaps ill, and Marion refused. Henry was left alone to confront him. It was a time when philosophical debates still attracted a fairly large audience: hundreds of people crowded into the room. Calmly, Henry addressed Janicaud: "You have understood nothing of my thinking. There is nothing 'theological' in my philosophy. When I speak of the Absolute, I use the term in a strictly phenomenological sense: it has nothing to do with God." Janicaud humbly apologized: "You're right: I misunderstood your thinking. I'm truly sorry. If my book is republished, I'll remove this passage"... I understood then what the sovereign word of a master was. A few years later, I met Janicaud at a symposium. In the meantime, Henry had come out: he had published C'est moi la vérité, in which he explicitly attempts to found a "Christian phenomenology" by identifying absolute Life with the God of the Gospels. "It's incredible!", Janicaud told me, "He dared to tell me that his thinking was not theological at all! And now he confesses!"… I do not think, however, that Henry had concealed his true thinking for many years. His return to the Christian faith was probably recent. In any case, he spoke of it as a "conversion", one of those caesuras that break the course of a life.

During those years, I remained for him an anonymous listener. Things changed in 1996, when I was invited to present a lecture at a conference on his thought. Several major philosophers, including Balibar and Marion, took part. Henry responded to everybody with great rigor and courtesy, and their discussions were fascinating. Things went a little awry when one of the conference organizers drew a risky parallel between Henry and Heidegger about their misunderstanding of Judaism. Henry replied very briefly, then left the room. I bumped into him in a corridor. He was furious: "When I was twenty," he said to me, "I joined the Resistance to fight the Germans. Now, someone dare to compare me to this Nazi thinker!" Indeed, he had early joined the Resistance, and in 1943 joined a communist partisan maquis. He rarely spoke of the experience of being clandestine, which had however been decisive for him: "During that period, we had to conceal what we thought and, even more so, what we did. Thanks to this permanent hypocrisy, the essence of true life was revealed to me, namely that it is invisible. In the worst moments, when the world became atrocious, I felt it inside me like a secret to be protected and which protected me (...). From that moment on, I understood that the salvation of the individual cannot come from the world". (1)

I had come to the conference with some anxiety, and after this incident, I was even more anxious. Indeed, I had chosen to focus my lecture on Antonin Artaud. (2) The poet's writing style and his virulent attacks on Jesus Christ were the very antithesis of the classical style of Henry's novels and his Christian faith. To my surprise, Henry welcomed my lecture. He thanked me warmly for highlighting the proximity between his own phenomenology of Life and Artaud's thought. At the end of the conference, he invited me to visit him in Paris. The master began then to become too a friend.

This friendship was soon to play a decisive role in my own work. In those years, I had started working on what was to become Le moi et la chair. I was thinking about the problem of the "tactile chiasm", that carnal "intertwining" spoken of by Merleau-Ponty. According to Husserl, when my right hand touches my left, each hand feels the other as an external body, but they also recognize each other as two poles of the same flesh. This enables my flesh to become a body in the world without ceasing to be a living, sensitive flesh. And yet, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the two hands are never simultaneously touching and tangible, so that the carnal chiasm is always imminent and always deferred. It seemed to me that this position led to an impasse: if this synthesis of flesh and body did not happen, we would have no body, and we would never be able to find our place in the world, with others... It was this aporia that I had to confront. It seemed to me that the crux of the aporia lay in the question of temporality. I therefore needed to understand better the phenomenology of time, and I decided to go to the Husserl Archives to consult the unpublished manuscripts in which he deals with this question. There were thousands of pages to decipher... The first time Henry invited me to dinner at his Paris apartment amidst works of art and antique paintings, he asked me what I was currently working on. I explained my project, the difficulties I was facing and my decision to spend years at the Husserl Archives. He replied: "Forget about Husserl! You've got an idea, follow your idea!". I took his advice. I deepened my initial intuitions and discovered that I had not pose the problem correctly. It is not a temporal lag -a non-simultaneity- that prevents the flesh from uniting with itself: it is a gap which is immanent to the flesh that induces lags in the flow of time. The question was then: what generates this gap between flesh and itself? And to what extent flesh would be capable of overcoming it? Moving in this direction, I was gradually building up what I call "ego-analysis". There are sentences that can change the course of a life. If Henry had not told me to "follow my idea", I might still be deciphering Husserl's grimoires, and I would never have written my own books.

He used more often to live in the South, in Montpellier, where he was Professor at the University. He liked so much the region that he had refused to apply for a prestigious post at the Sorbonne. When Levinas retired, he asked him to be his successor. However, as Henry told me, "I can't live without the hills around Montpellier, where I use to walk and think for hours". His distance from Paris enabled him too, he used to say, to stay away from the hegemonic fashions of Parisian universities, Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis: "on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, all I have to do is wait quietly for them to disappear". (3) So, he rarely went to Paris and I did not see him often. The last time was in 1999, when I invited him at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, where I was then organizing public discussions with philosophers I admired. When Derrida came, seven hundred people attended. For Henry, there were around seventy, and the great hall seemed almost empty. It was the only time I ever saw this discreet and elegant man express a certain bitterness: "I see", he told me, "that my thinking has not yet reached the banks of the Seine"… Nevertheless, the discussion had been quite inspiring. (4) He had given long and precise answers to my questions and those of my friends, Paul Audi, Natalie Depraz and François-David Sebbah. The questions I put to him concerned, firstly, the "splitting of the concept of Life" in C'est moi la vérité, which seemed to introduce the hypostasis of an anonymous Life that he had rejected in his earlier writings; secondly, his conception of a "radical oblivion of Life", which, in my opinion, prevented to understand how a philosophical, religious or aesthetic revelation of Life was possible; and thirdly, the question of death. I asked him how his thinking comes to understand death; whether he was not wrong to reject it outside, in the transcendence of the world; and whether death does not find its most original possibility in the very immanence of Life. It was, after all, the same question I had asked him years earlier about the death drive. While he patiently answered the first two questions, he dodged the last one. That confirmed what I have thought: death has no place in his philosophy. In a way, he was like Spinoza's wise who "never thinks of death, because his wisdom is meditation on life and not on death".

We did not see each other again after that debate, but we did have one last, brief and intense exchange in 2002. In the meantime, I had begun to write Le moi et la chair - a book in which I thank "the master and friend who told me to follow my idea"- and I set out some of my hypotheses in a text entitled Le chiasme et le restant, published in the journal of the Collège international de philosophie. (5) In deepening my analysis of the tactile chiasm -the intertwining of the touching and the tangible-, I had understood that the original gap between the poles of flesh could only be partially overcome. The synthesis of the flesh with itself left a "remainder": a part of my flesh that I do not recognize as my own, and which affects me like a foreign thing by generating feelings such as anguish, disgust and hatred. We had then to analyze the relationship between the ego and the remainder of its flesh, and to describe its various transformations. Two years ago, Henry had published Incarnation - une philosophie de la chair, in which he considered the same questions in a very different way. He opposed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty by situating touching, like the other senses, in the dimension of exteriority -in the "transcendence of the world"- so that my own body, when I touch it, "becomes for me something external". This is what differentiates it from flesh, which never ceases to "embrace itself", to be affected by itself without ever departing from itself. In my text, I criticized him for presupposing an insurmountable splitting between my immanent flesh and this transcendent body that no longer really belongs to me; and for enclosing the ego-flesh in an autarkic sphere, closed in on itself, forever incapable of finding a place in the world and reaching out to others. 

After the journal's publication, he sent me a letter. "You want to kill the father", he wrote, "this poor father who only has a breath of life left". And he added: "You have now your own philosophy, it is not mine. Henceforth, I no longer count you among my unfortunately small number of disciples". I had mistaken this allusion to his feeble breath of life for a mere metaphor. I did not know he was suffering from lung cancer. I wanted to reply, but I did not have the time: Michel Henry died on July 3, 2002.

NOTES

1. Interview with R. Vaschalde, in Michel Henry, l'épreuve de la vie, Éditions du Cerf, 2001, p. 491.

2. Cf. "Sans je ni lieu - la vie sans être d'Antonin Artaud", op. cit., pp. 333-357.

3. Interview with R. Vaschalde, op. cit., p. 493.

4. Our questions and his answers have been published in M. Henry, Phénoménologie de la vie, t. IV, Sur l'éthique et la religion, PUF, Paris, 2004, pp. 205-247.

5. Cf. Rue Descartes n°35, 2002, "Phénoménologies françaises", pp. 125-144.