Affectivity, the heart as the immediate pathos of living, stands at the center of human existence because it is the manner in which life first gives itself, prior to representation, objectification, or conceptual mediation. In Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life, this self-givenness is not a feeling appended to cognition but the original seat of the living subject in which anything other is touched and found real. Affective givenness is therefore the possibility for all relation and knowledge. Modernity acts as a chaotic displacement of this foundation toward death, but hope lies is God offering recovery of the primacy of the affective heart. Affectivity then enables worldly relation via life’s effort, a reality that is likewise indubitable, and which establishes effective relation with the other, not via a representation thrust into anonymity, but as a real and palpable passage of life toward life.

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.