Abstract

Michel Henry is known to be the contemporary thinker who has given the most privileged status and the deepest philosophical significance to affectivity. His whole work—from his interpretation of Biran’s ontology of subjectivity to his reading of Marx’s philosophy of human reality and his trilogy on the phenomenology of Christianity—can be read as a prolonged clarification of the foundational role of affectivity in life’s manifestation to the living. This holds true both at an epistemological level and at a phenomenological level, as well as at an anthropological level. Ultimately, prima philosophia itself must be expressed as a philosophy of affectivity.