 Henry’s critique of contemporary culture also raises the question of social conditions and their impact on the exercise of subjective potentialities (see also Gély 2007). The issue of social organization refers here to two important fields of investigation: economics, investigated in Marx (1976), and politics, investigated mainly in From Communism to Capitalism. Theory of a Catastrophe (1990) as well as in two important articles: “La vie et la république” (“Life and the Republic”, 1989) and “Difficile démocratie” (“Difficult Democracy”, 2000). For both economics and politics, Henry’s normative critique targets the forgetting and the occultation of life as a transcendental genesis in which political organization and economy are rooted. Politics and economics are both superstructures that are necessarily tied to representation and measurement, but their legitimacy comes from what is ante-political and ante-economic, namely transcendental life. In Henry’s view, modernity turns this actual genesis upside down: superstructures seem to have become autonomous and, in reverse, tend to impose their laws on immanent life. This reversal is only possible insofar as the foundational character of life as immanent appearing remains forgotten. As Henry argues in From Communism to Capitalism, in techno-scientific capitalism, and even more in totalitarianism, the tendency toward an (albeit illusory) autonomization of superstructures becomes extreme. Despite the violence of totalitarianism, and as can be seen from the analysis of Henry’s concept of “barbarism”, alienation can never be total. It is nonetheless very real, precisely because it is able to affect individual praxis by substituting the “laws of ideality” for those of “vital teleology” (B 134). And again, it is the lack of recognition of immanent life as fundamental phenomenality that makes the reversal that characterizes “barbarism” possible. While Henry distinguishes between an original ethics—ethos itself as first ethics in which life accomplishes its essence—and ethics as normative and discursive (B 96–7), it is to the latter that the philosophical task of reminding us of the transcendental genesis and, hence, of life as fundamental appearing is assigned. Thereby, the ethics of affectivity becomes political insofar as it identifies and unmasks “hypostases” in economics and politics (VR 158). Henry’s phenomenology can then conceptualize cultural renaissance as a “reversal of the reversal” operating in figures of “barbarism”. As far as the political realm is concerned, however, such a renaissance faces the tension—the aporia even—that must exist between invisible life as ipseity and public affairs as general. This tension, which constitutes the political, underlies the democratic project as the self-foundation of communal life (DD 171). From Henry’s point of view, democracy does not necessarily promote culture: if democracy is a chance to reestablish “the true order of things, the foundation of the political in life, for which it can be nothing but a mediation”, (VR 162) it also entails the risk that the visibility necessary to public life be posited as the only possible mode of appearing. Democracy may thereby favor the occultation of its own foundation and become the objective ally of the Galilean principle (DD 175). Moreover, the prospect of political self-foundation is, in its essence, at risk of reproducing the transcendental illusion of the ego (IAT 140) on the communal level: just like the ego is victim of an illusion when it presumes to be the ultimate source of the “I can”, so is a political community misdirected if it presumes to be the ultimate constitutive power of communal life. On this political level the religious bond with absolute life can also fall into oblivion. In such a case, it is the conquest of human rights that is eventually threatened by the reduction of the human to that which scientific exteriority is able to measure and enunciate. As Henry’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity in Part III of Material Phenomenology explains, absolute life is shared by all living and provides the ground for an invisible and immanent community. The core of Henry’s political philosophy lies therefore in the principle according to which the political is only legitimate as a mediation for what is ante-political—namely life, both individual and communal.