The barbarism of Michel Henry: From an epithelial philosophy to the question concerning technology

Abstract

In the first encounter with La barbarie (Michel Henry, 1987), and without the statement pretending to be general or in any way to hide individual prejudices when approaching a text of this sort, the question arises in many of us as to whether one is before a piece of naive irrationalism, a pessimistic paraphrase of issues already treated, for example, in Die Frage nach der Technik (Heidegger, 1954), or if, on the contrary, Henry offers in this book a radically renewed vision of the risk that culture (and what he defines as life) is in before the advance of an ideology, that of barbarism, which promulgates the knowledge of science as the only knowledge. Answering this question is precisely the main motivation for this work. Suspending prejudices about Henry's book, even at the risk of losing along the way much of the undeniable pretense of provocation that is an inextricable part of this work of him, we set out to point out the essential elements discussed in La barbarie, to find the resonances that these may have with the rest of Henry's work, and, in particular, to discuss the main themes of La barbarie in relation to another key text of the phenomenological tradition: Heidegger's considerations on The question concerning technology.