Dionysos « travaillé par la différence » ? Lire « Force et signification » à la lumière de Michel Henry

“Force and Signification” can be read as Derrida’s negative answer to the at first glance abstruse question: Can writing be “Dionysiac through and through”? In other words, does the creative impetus support the totality of the writing process or must, as experience tends to suggest, such impetus remain limited to one or several, rather exceptional moments of inspiration? Given a broader extension this question becomes even more essential: does force, or a force, whose nature would have to be specified further, continuously support subjective, i.e., living activity in general? It seems the latter can hardly be denied – for what would be an activity unsupported by any force? –, with the effect of problematizing Derrida’s thesis, insofar as it identifies force in general with the creative impetus and presupposes that force necessarily appears through that which it is not – the visible form, language –, i.e., through its own “death”. A way out can be found if one considers that the creative impetus is a specific, immanent transformation of force, and if one admits that force has an original mode of appearing, prior to any appearing of a visible form. Such is the perspective of Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life.