Repression and liability in Michel Henry's reading of Freud

Abstract

By taking back some fundamental notions of the Freudian metapsychology and insisting upon on the fundamental liability of life they reveal, Michel Henry re-elaborates the relation between drive, unconscious, representation and affect in order to overcome the impasses he identifies in the theory of repression. This article's aim is to analyze the decisive moments of Henry's reading of this notion in order to evaluate some consequences that this original interpretation can have either for a phenomenology that intends to reformulate the statute of subjectivity and selfhood "beneath" intentionality, as for the theory of repression itself and its clinical consequences. Keywords: Repression, unconscious, affect, drive, liability.