A part of the "return to religion" now evident in European philosophy,
this book represents the culmination of the career of a leading
phenomenological thinker whose earlier works trace a trajectory from
Marx through a genealogy of psychoanalysis that interprets Descartes's
"I think, I am" as "I feel myself thinking, I am."
In this book, Henry does not ask whether Christianity is "true" or
"false." Rather, what is in question here is what Christianity considers
as truth, what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to
communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth, but as
the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for
them, to the point that it alone is capable of ensuring them salvation.
In the process, Henry inevitably argues against the concept of truth
that dominates modern thought and determines, in its multiple
implications, the world in which we live.
Henry argues that Christ undoes "the truth of the world," that He is an
access to the infinity of self-love, to a radical subjectivity that
admits no outside, to the immanence of affective life found beyond the
despair fatally attached to all objectifying thought. The Kingdom of God
accomplishes itself in the here and now through the love of Christ in
what Henry calls "the auto-affection of Life." In this condition, he
argues, all problems of lack, ambivalence, and false projection are
resolved.
