Expression de soi et création littéraire: le « rituel » du vivant

Michel Henry, founder of phenomenology of life, asked a single question throughout his work: what is the origin or, in simple words, what is life? In other words, and according to its outlook, it is the question of the pathos, in his appear invisible and immanent. Another name of pathos is the "affectivity" as a determining principle of the being of the ego, as the essence of the selfhood. Great thinker of this genealogy of the self, Michel Henry was also a novelist. To summarize the question of literature and this thought we can draw three main concepts: "contemporaneity", "repetition" and "fiction". In this paper, we propose to create a concept of literature around these three poles. This should allow us to hypothesize the necessity of fiction for the self, which would correlate the foundation, in this thought, of what is called the "ritual" of life