The unpursuable, or what ensues. On Roland Vaschalde's Suivant Michel Henry

Abstract

As Roland Vaschalde states in Suivant Michel Henry (2022), the title makes use of the expression «following» (suivant) both in the sense of «according to» and in the sense of «subsequent to», whereby he doesn’t intend to merely «repeat» Henry, but also to broaden the horizons of the phenomenology of living praxis. If, according to the topics of Henry, this «following» as one of the powers proper to my «I can» is based on a «persecution», that is, on a «suffering» either in the impossibility of appropriating the other, or in the feeling of being «pursued», that is, in finding oneself under the domination of the other in the impossibility of freeing oneself from the weight of my own self, which in turn «rejoices» in the oblivion of this impossibility in the transcendental illusion of its «consecution» as the coincidence between myself and life, what remains to be thought is the possibility of what «ensues» as the transformation of its own topology. In this sense, our reading will go through the figures of the oneiric, the postcolonial, psychopathology, Judaism and the cartography of the body, as the «unpursuable» of Henry’s phenomenology.