Affectivity, the immediate pathos of being a life, stands at the center of human existence because it is the manner in which life first feels and knows itself, prior to representation, objectification, or conceptual mediation. In Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life, this self-experience is not a feeling appended to cognition but the original seat of the living subject in which anything exterior is touched and found real. Thus affective givenness is the possibility for the experience of anything other. Modernity often acts as a chaotic displacement of this foundation. Yet the Life of God calls the living to gain remembrance of their affective heart – who they truly are. Remembered affective givenness then extends into the living also realizing their fundamental force, that the subject’s effort is similarly interior and absolute. Effort is what finally establishes effective connection beyond the self, not via representation that is thrust into anonymity, but as a real and material passage between life and the world.

My research is dedicated to promoting Henry’s phenomenology as the possibility for all existential philosophy, extending his work into relation with the world through phenomenological force.