 Michel Henry was born on January 10, 1922 in Haiphong, Vietnam (then, French Indochina). After the accidental death of his father, the family returned to Paris in 1929. In Paris, Henry became a student at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, then graduated with a Master thesis on Spinoza in 1943 with Jean Grenier as director. Soon after having turned in his thesis, partially published in the Revue d’histoire de la philosophie et d’histoire générale de la civilisation in 1944 and 1946, Henry joined the French Resistance and was assigned to the “Pericles” division in the region of Haut Jura. He returned to Paris at the end of 1944, obtaining the Agrégation in philosophy in 1945. As a researcher at the French National Research Center CNRS and the Fondation Thiers, he began working under the supervision of both Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite on his Ph.D. thesis, which would be published in 1963 and become one of his major works: The Essence of Manifestation. His second book, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, although published two years later, was already finished around 1950, having first been planned as a part of the main thesis but, due to its length, was presented as Henry’s secondary thesis (a requirement in the French academic system at that time). In 1963, the dissertation committee, composed of Jean Wahl, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, Paul Ricoeur, and Henri Gouhier, was impressed by Henry’s main Ph.D. thesis, a work that translates almost a decade of research into more than 900 pages of complex philosophical argument. Preferring a position in southern France to one at the Sorbonne, Henry had already been appointed to the University of Montpellier in 1960 where he remained a professor until his retirement in 1982. He devoted his entire philosophical career to the development of his phenomenology of life with, among other publications, Marx (1976), Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (1985), Seeing the Invisible (1988), Material Phenomenology (1990), I Am the Truth (1996), Incarnation (2000). In addition, he authored four novels, one of which—L’amour les yeux fermés—was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1976. He died on July 3, 2002 in Albi, France. 