THE DIALECTIC OF LIFE:

A BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW OF MARX BY MICHEL HENRY

Abstract

In the present work, we aim to conduct a bibliographic review of the so-called Henryan Marx. In this regard, our task will follow the following steps: to understand how Michel Henry conceives the reality of our Being as radically immanent and founded in Life, performing a movement of displacing the Ego from its transcendent illusion and relocating it in the absolute immanence of Life as the foundation of its transcendental reality. By situating the Ego in the immanence of Life, we will locate its manifestation and dwelling in the world as the continuum that resists effort, tracing the limits and forms of manifestation of this Ego as living praxis. Next, we will show how Marx situates this primordial individual as the ultimate foundation of social, historical, political, and economic reality; how capitalism alienates it through labor transformed into a means of production, and how Marxist socialism does so through social class—both, therefore, products of the same process of negating individual subjective Life. Finally, we will defend the hypothesis that, in Michel Henry’s Marxian reading, the class dialectic is an unreality postulated in the economic sphere, and that the only real and possible dialectic can occur solely within Life, in a movement of desire for self-realization contrasted with the despair of projecting oneself in self-negation, creating within this dialectic of Life the social, political, economic, and historical conditions for real revolution, which can only occur through the emancipation of Life by Life in its immanent dialectic and will ultimately be revealed in the community of living beings, which Henry later develops in his Christian trilogy.