Du rite dans la fiction au rite de la fiction. Le Fils du roi de Michel Henry

Abstract

The novel Le Fils du roi, published by the philosopher Michel Henry in 1981, depicts the life of a psychiatric institution disrupted by the arrival of a young patient named José. “Christic story”, the text narrates the overthrow of the social structure of the asylum, which promotes an exogenous singling of the individual, frozen conception of the ipse, in favor of a new ritual order, based on a dynamic construction of identity through sharing taking place within what Michel Henry calls the “pathetic community”. More than the pretext of a fiction, ritual is for the philosopher the subject of a fundamental questioning: the one of the ritual practice led by literature. Based on the ritual acts of reading and writing, literature is for Michel Henry an essential opportunity of a dynamic construction of the subject’s identity. Place of an constituent intersubjectivity, literature simultaneously convenes the formation of an “interpretative community” (Stanley Fish) of “lectants” (according Vincent Jouve’s terminology) who intellectualize and a “pathetic community” of “lus” that adhere through an immediate affectivity.