In his book Incarnation: A Philosophy of the Flesh, Michel Henry starts with the opposition of the sensible and living flesh, as we experience it permanently from the inside, to our inert and material body, as we can see it from the outside, similar to the other objects we can find in the world. The flesh doesn’t fit at all in his terminology with the soft part of our material and objective body, by opposition to the bones for example, but to what he called in his previous books our subjective body. For Michel Henry, an object doesn’t possess interiority, it is not living, it doesn’t feel itself and doesn’t feel that it is touched; it doesn’t do the subjective experience of being touched.

After having placed the difficult problem of the incarnation in an historical perspective going back to the thought of the Fathers of the Church, he makes in this book a critical review of the phenomenological tradition that leads to the reversal of phenomenology. He then proposes to elaborate a phenomenology of the flesh which leads to the notion of a not constituted original flesh given in the "Arch-revelation" of Life, as well as a phenomenology of Incarnation.

Although the flesh is traditionally understood as the place of sin, it is also in Christianity the place of salvation, which consists in the deification of man, that’s to say in the fact of becoming Son of God, to come back to the eternal and absolute Life we had forgotten getting lost in the world, caring only about things and ourselves. In the fault, we make the tragic experience of our powerlessness to do the good we would like to do and of our inability to avoid the evil. In this way in front of the magic body of the other, that’s the anguished desire to meet the life in it that leads to the fault. In the night of the lovers, the sexual act couples two impulsive movements, but the erotic desire fails to reach the pleasure of the other where it is experienced, in a total loving fusion. The erotic relation is however doubled by a pure affective relation, foreign to the carnal coupling, a relation made of mutual gratitude or of love. That’s this affective dimension that is denied in this way of violence that is pornography, which extracts the erotic relation from the pathos of life to abandon it to the world, and which consists in a real profanation of life.

MICHAEL HENRY (1922–2002) was a leading French philosopher and prize-winning novelist. He was born in Haiphong, Vietnam. While studying in Paris, he discovered a true passion for philosophy which led to a desire to make it his profession. From June 1943 onwards, he was committed to the French Resistance where he joined the maquis of the Haut Jura under the code name of Kant. He often had to come down from the mountains in order to accomplish missions in Nazi-occupied Lyon, an experience of clandestineness which deeply marked his philosophy. Following the war, he passed the final part of the philosophy examination, and then devoted his time to the preparation of a thesis under the direction of Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, Ferdinand Alquié and Henri Gouhier. His first book, which was on the philosophy and phenomenology of the body, was completed in 1950. His first significant published work was about the essence of manifestation, and to which he devotion long years of necessary research in order to surmount the main deficiency of all intellectualist philosophy - which is to say an ignorance of life as everyone experiences it. From 1960, Henry was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier where he patiently perfected his work, keeping himself away from philosophical fashions and far from dominant ideologies.

KARL HEFTY holds an Arthur J. Ennis, OSA, Postdoctoral Fellowship at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.