Réalité, imaginaire et affectivité : perspectives pour une phénoménologie de la vie

(eng) The main objective of this thesis was to build a theory of the imagination, in the writings of the French phenomenologist Michel Henry. The notion of imagination gets, especially in the more recent comments, a true echo. However, for Henry and for his commentators, imaginary is never a specific problem. This is why the fundamental meaning of my thesis, on the one hand, consisted to make the imagination a "problem" - not only anthropological or even phenomenological or even aesthetic - but an ontological problem, part of the "phenomenological ontology of the ego" proposed by Michel Henry and which led him to think the being as the “self”. On the other hand, research has to justify this problem and its elucidation, not from "outside", but on the books of Michel Henry, taking the exact measurement of a philosophy that focusing on redefining the opposition between the "real" and "unreal", therefore restricting the precise location of the reality as the “desire" and the "force", the self and its invisible affective history, while the unreality place was named the "world", the "distance", the "death". Originally, the contribution of the thesis was to recognize in this theme of the imagination a sign of ambivalence. Very rare thing in the work of Michel Henry, in which, in my view, there is no equivalent of this kind. Indeed, Michel Henry produce a massive rejection of "imagination" and "images" and, at the same time, in other places, he claims to assimilate the concept of life to a certain "imagination" that he identifies to the related concepts "auto-modification" and "auto-transformation", "growth" and "intensification". This paradoxical opposition is not a meaning that could be simply to decline in terms of epistemological, ontological and phenomenological point of view, established between the heterogeneous systems of the world and life, as is the case for a number of other issues. In this sense, the imagination is thus became, not one question among others, in which it was possible to answer, but the question of material phenomenology and its possibility. That required to resume, since the outset, the project of this philosophy, providing, in doing so, spaces of dialogue with other thoughts.