Marx Restored: Reading Michel Henry with Jacques Derrida

Michel Henry’s reading of Marx provides a warning concerning the dangers which the crisis of Marxism has exposed: the objective and alienating abstraction of the individual living outside itself, whether in actually existing communism or in a technicised capitalism, the two forms he denounces as destructions of life. The crisis of Marxism thus stems from the disappropriation of Marx and from the error of endowing economic reality with a status of objective reality, while the crisis of capitalism derives from the primacy of the technical, which expels living work and dispossesses the worker of his own life. What is at stake in Michel Henry’s interpretation thus hinges on the meaning of the gesture of “restoring” Marx to the site of the living, which Henry establishes as the foundation of all existence and reality. The article therefore questions the possibility of such a gesture of restitution and the various meanings it can take on, by way of a deconstruction of its various implementations. The aim is to envisage a critique that no longer operates solely by way of a mere “restitution” of Marx to the category of preserved “unharmed” life.