Le Descartes de Michel Henry: Cogito, monde-de-la-vie, technoscience

This essay is an attempt to understand Michel Henry’s philosophy of technics through his ambivalent interpretation of Descartes’ cogito. On the one hand, as a direct heir of the French phenomenological tradition, he uses the two first Méditations as the very point of departure for his own criticism of Husserl. But on the other hand, he repeats Heidegger’s history of being, in the terms of his own philosophy of auto-affection. We will underline both the methodological and the practical consequences of this unresolved indecision. The aim of this text is to point out the contradictions of Henry’s argumentation, and the philosophical inconsistency of his well-known technophobia.