[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

From the perspective of ontological monism, there is no such thing as an “immediateknowledge” of the human self by itself. All knowledge is always in fact “mediate,”constituted through the mediation of the “phenomenological distance” or transcendentalhorizon that itself is a function of transcendence. 19 In order that Being be manifest toitself, Being must be at a distance from itself. From the perspective of ontological monism,therefore, division, separation, and opposition within Being are the ultimate conditions ofpossibility for the manifestation both of Being and of beings.The human subject is therefore nothing outside of the event of alienation and distancingthat permits the subject, which is phenomenologically impotent in and of itself, to take onthe condition of an objectively structured phenomenon. 20 From the perspective of monism,therefore, there is really no such thing as an irreducibly singular and ontologicallydetermined human subject at all.The Henryian “excess” with respect to language and the text, at least insofar aslanguage and text are understood from within the perspective of ontological monism, isintended to be expressive of what Paul Audi describes as the ontological excédence oftranscendental subjectivity and ipseity with respect to transcendence and its horizon, anontological “excess” that is at once both radically foundational of and absolutely heterogeneousto the ontological excès of transcendence and objectivity with respect to the ontathat this latter permits to appear in the form of visible and insurmountably finite objects.With respect to the human subject himself, Henry seeks to use language in order toovercome the empirical self’s state of dissipation with respect to itself. 21 Over and aboveboth the empirically experienced self and the transcendental horizon of visibility withinwhich the empirically experienced self is assumed to appear, each human subject immediatelyappears to himself as himself in an affectively structured “immanent dialectic”of suffering and joy that is absolutely in excess of that which he takes himself to be whenhe naively assumes that his being manifest to himself is simply a function of the horizonof objective visibility. 22The Henryian approach to language and the text, characterized by violence and excessthus understood, is furthermore intended to be philosophically fruitful not least by reasonof its eliciting from the reader a phronē sis, a prudence, on the basis of which the reader19Ibid., 71. Cf. ibid., 60-66.20Ibid., 78, 86.21Cf. Paul Audi, Rousseau, éthique et passion (Paris: PUF, 1997), 162-63, hereafter REP. At 161-62,commenting on Rousseau’s understanding of amour de soi in its radical distinction from amour-propre,Audi writes: “Or, cela signifie également que l’amour de soi est ‘excédent’ par essence, qui’il s’excèdeen lui-même et par lui-même, et que c’est pour cette raison, parce qu’il s’excède en lui-même, queRousseau peut clairement le qualifier de passionel.” That amour de soi is “passionel,” however, does notmean that it is “excessif” in any sense: “la vérité est que l’amour de soi n’est jamais excessif, contrairementà l’amour-propre qui a toujours une tendance à l’excès. . . .” Rather, “Si l’amour de soi est passionel,c’est seulement en tant qu’il est radicalement passif, participant d’une passivité qui est sa ‘mesure’intérieure, cette mesure étant elle-même incommensurable objectivement. Aussi est-ce à cette irrémissiblepassivité que renvoie l’excédance ontologique.”22EM, 671: “With the becoming of suffering and its interior transformation into joy a new and trulyessential concept for the dialectic is revealed to us, i.e., the concept of an immanent dialectic . . . , whichis the movement of our tonalities, the passage from certain qualitative determinations to others. . . . Thedialectic does not constitute the structure of Being, it is possible only interior to Being. . . . It is upon thefoundation of the unity of Being with itself in suffering that suffering transforms itself dialectically intojoy; in existence the contrary does not proceed from opposition but from identity.”143