Abstract
This paper tries to reexamine the controversial difference between Heidegger's and Henry's theories of emotion or affectivity. First, we argue that the most elementary moment of the phenomenon that Heidegger in Being and Time calls “Befindlichkeit (affectedness)” is the opening of each one’s own situated perspective from which anything at all “matters” to “mine” Dasein in each case. This “mattering” of what Dasein encounters is grounded in the primordial fact that Dasein is a being “which is concerned in its being about its very being”. Second, we try to reconsider Heidegger’s analysis of the modification of this affectedness to the “Grundbefindlichkeit (primordial affectedness)” from the viewpoint of function and dysfunction of everyday language. This viewpoint gives us an appropriate angle to compare Heidegger's with Henry's argument about affectivity. Finally, Henry's dualism of “the speech of the world” and “the speech of the Life” will be reconstructed and criticized as well from the Heideggerian perspective. We make clear that despite his critique of the alleged derivative exteriority of what Heidegger considers as primary, Henry’s assertion about the other language of the auto-affective Life can be understood as his reinterpretation of Heidegger’s argument of the uncanny silence of the “call of conscience”.
