UCLA

This dissertation addresses the obstacle that fundamental differences present to the formation of liberatory and meaningful forms of political community. Developing a political theoretic account of Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life, the project argues for conceptualizing radical differences in how individuals relate in ontological rather than epistemological terms. The project traces Henry’s relevance for conceptions of subjectivity and community, arguing that his theorizations of auto-affection, immanence, transcendence, suffering, and praxis can provide crucial links in post-Cartesian formulations of the political subject that help political theorists better understand the problem of representing individuality within communities of difference. Situated in conversation with new materialist political theory, affect theory, and the phenomenological tradition, the chapters in turn draw on a subset of Henry’s political and philosophical writings, which call for philosophical accounts of ontology as multiple and heterogeneous and for political communities that allow individuals to live in freedom.