[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

understood both as discursive thought and as the language of discursive thought, when hesays:Because the act of knowledge which divides up and yields an unreal object inotherness fails to reach the essence which is primordially in the act itself, viz., theessence of Being and life, that which the act of knowledge determines does not bearin it the characteristic of reality, it does not manifest the truth of reality. Its ‘exposure’in nothingness is not that of Being and its language is not truthful; rather it hides whatit claims to say. . . . The unhappy consciousness is not merely sensible consciousness,it is not merely to the latter, but to all knowledge, to all thought, that the question isdirected, the question which is that of the essence itself, its most essential phrase:“Why do you seek the living one among the dead?” 7Henry sustains his critique of apophantic logos, understood as thought, language, andtext, throughout the entirely of his philosophical project. Indeed, in one of his later books,Henry argues that the New Testament itself formulates the same critique of language,asserting language’s “inherent powerlessness” in contrast to that which is originarilypowerful. 8 Of the New Testament and its critique of language, Henry says:It endlessly discredits the universe of words and speech, and not simply by force ofcircumstance, according to the vicissitudes of the story, but for reasons of principle:because language, or text, leaves true reality outside itself, thus finding itself totallyimpotent with respect to that reality, whether to construct it, modify it, or destroy it. 9Henry goes on to assert that it is precisely by reason of language’s “inherent powerlessness”with respect to reality that language does have one dubious “power” that is entirely itsown:The powerlessness of language to posit a reality other than its own does not leave ittotally bereft. One power remains to it: to speak this reality when it does not exist, toaffirm something, whatever it may be, when there is nothing, to lie. Lying is not onepossibility of language alongside another with which it might be contrasted—speakingthe truth, for example. This possibility is rooted in language and is as inherent in it asits very essence. Language, as long as there is nothing else but language, can only belying. . . . To the powerlessness of language are added all the vices belonging topowerlessness in general: lying, hypocrisy, the shrouding of truth, bad faith, theoverthrowing of values, the falsification of reality in all its forms—including the mostextreme form, that is, the reduction of this reality to language and ultimately, in thissupreme confusion, their identification with each other. 10Henry thus concludes:Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. Whatcharacterizes any word is its difference from the thing—the fact that, taken in itself,7EM, 405.8Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity trans. Susan Emanuel(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8, hereafter IAT. Here Henry is citing 1Cor 4:20: “Forthe kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.”9Ibid.10Ibid., 8-9.140