Michel Henry > Quotes

“Without this original, pre-political, and pre-social community, no common project could ever come to exist. For, no project of this kind can be formed independently from its rootedness in the organic structure of desire and action.”
― Michel Henry, From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe

“For Marx, society does not exist.”
― Michel Henry, From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe

“Totalitarianism is the result of the hypostasis of the political and the correlative lowering of life as well as the individual. This term does not refer to one type of political regime that can be contrasted with other regimes. Its threat looms over any conceivable regime in which the political is taken as the essential and in which the concealment of life’s own way of appearing extends its reign over human beings, thereby determining a phase of their history. When politics appears on the center of the stage and claims to direct the plot, dangerous times are announced—the time of revolution, terror, and death. The horror of such times ought not hide their internal logic. For if public affairs are all that matters, if they are placed above the individual, and if they claim the right to their needs over those of the individual, then public affairs can also suppress the individual. The individual is considered to exist only in it, for it and by it. The individual is nothing without it.”
― Michel Henry, From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe