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As Sebbah points out, the Henryian text is thus an instance of a new genre of protrepticor hortatory philosophical discourse, such that it is “less descriptive than indicative, oreven prescriptive,” prescriptive of a task that is also an experience [une épreuve] to whichthe reader must submit himself precisely in order to be himself. 28Ultimately, therefore, the “trial” to which the reader is submitted by means of the textis something more and something other than the text itself. The trying experience to whichthe reader is submitted by means of an encounter with the text is in fact the readerhimself, who necessarily experiences himself and is given to himself originally as theundergoing of an “internal ordeal.” 29As Audi explains, the self’s original experience of itself is that it is given to itself inan “irremissible passivity” that for the self is the experience of the self’s being absolutelyoverwhelmed by itself in the face of its own ontological “excessiveness.” 30 For Henry,original human self-manifestation is an experience of self as a trial always alreadyundergone; it is precisely this “agonic” character of human self-manifestation that is thesource of the human subject’s ipseity or “I-ness.” It is this “agonic” ipseity, furthermore,that constitutes the “specific difference” between human reality and everything else thatis not human. 31My experience of being given to myself as myself in a radical passivity in which I amoverwhelmed by my own ontological excessiveness is something of which I am alwaysalready aware. As self-aware, I do not simply “know the truth”; rather, I am the Truth ina participated manner with respect to the divine Ipseity. I am identically “the primordialtruth,” from which I am consciously estranged only in a contingent and surmountablemanner. The Truth that I am, as something from which I can be consciously estranged,is always also something to which I can also be consciously reunited. The excessive andviolent character of the Henryian text is intended precisely to help me “remember” myselfin a consciously achieved reunion of intentionality and affectivity. The “agonic” characterof my own original experience of self-givenness is something which I can in fact28EL, 312. Cf. CMV, 311-12: “Aussi, nous proposerions volontiers de comprendre le corpus detextes auxquels cette étude s’est intéressée comme relevant d’une protreptique d’un genre nouveau: cestextes, en cela fidèles à la tâche phénoménologique bien comprise, et malgré l’apparence de paradoxe, sontmoins descriptifs qu’indicatifs ou même prescriptifs: ils indiquent une tâche, et même—et c’est là leurspécificité dans le domaine phénoménologique—une épreuve, à laquelle le lecteur doit s’exposer.”29Cf. IAT, 38. The original French phrase employed by Henry, which Emanuel translates as an“internal ordeal,” is “épreuve intérieure.” Cf. CMV, 51. Thus do we have additional confirmation ofSebbah’s thesis that the Henryian “épreuve de soi” is an “experience of self” that is also a trial or ordeal.The concept of “ordeal” plays a very important role in CMV, since through it Henry accounts for (1) thenon-ecstatic transcendence that obtains within God himself, (2) the non-ecstatic transcendence of God withrespect to human reality, and (3) the possibility of human reality’s misuse of its freedom in order to sinand turn away from the God upon whom it remains radically dependent. Cf. ibid., 256ff and 318-19.30Cf. Audi, REP, 162. Continuing to comment on Rousseau’s understanding of amour de soi in itsradical distinction from amour-propre, and comparing this distinction to that of Henry between immanenceand transcendence, Audi writes: “Qu’est-ce qui en nous atteste de cette passivité-la? Nous disions àl’instant: la passivité du moi à l’égard de soi est un débordement absolu. De par son débordementexpansif, cette passivité se révèle à jamais plus forte que tout.” This theme of the self as a trial to beundergone, on account of the ontological excessiveness that characterizes the Being of the ego, pervadescontemporary French “theological phenomenology.” Cf. also Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable andthe Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 119, hereafter UU:“This almost unbearable test that a person becomes for himself is related not at all to evil or sin, but tothe excess of a human being over himself, an excess of what one is and can be over what one can thinkand comprehend. . . .”31Chrétien also evokes the theme of the agon with respect to that which is properly human. Cf. UU,96. Speaking of human fidelity to God as a properly human act, Chrétien says that such fidelity “alwayshas, in its very peace, something violent and agonistic about it.”145