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and ontological reality deprived of subjectivity. 37 It must also always be kept in mindthat Henry’s overall phenomenological and ontological project, the “whole” of which histheory of textuality is a “moment,” is always also an existential project inasmuch as it isthe effort to clarify the nature of authentically human beatitude. 38We find confirmation of the fact that the Seinsfrage, understood phenomenologicallyas the question concerning the Being of the ego -- of the ultimate condition of possibilityof properly human self-manifestation -- is also for Henry an existential question concerningthe effective possibility of human beatitude, in Henry’s Philosophy and Phenomenologyof the Body, the companion-volume to EM. 39 In connection with PPB’s critique of“the Cartesian theory of passion,” Henry makes it clear that for him the problem of themeaning of the Being of the incarnate human ego is intimately related to “the problem ofexistential alienation.” 40In PPB, Henry describes the philosopher’s task as one of developing “a positiveinterpretation of the real alienation of man beginning with the clarification of theexperience in which he lives this alienation.” 41 Henry’s effort to clarify the meaning ofthe Being of the human ego is accordingly also an effort to make some sense of the distressinghuman experience of alienation. Since man’s lived experience of his alienationat least seems to be an existential first-person experience, the Henryian clarification of theactually existentiell character of human reality’s experience of alienation is thereforenecessarily also the articulation of what Henry calls “a philosophy of the first person.” 42Henry’s “philosophy of the first person” refuses and does violence to any attempt toclaim that the human experience of alienation is primarily an affectively structured andontologically grounded experience of the self in its first-person mode of self-presence. Toclaim otherwise is really to reduce the ego to “the condition of an effect in the thirdperson” 43 that can exist independently of its excessive and ontological first-personfoundation. Such a reduction can only result in the loss of everything that makes the egoto be singular, concrete, living, and effectively real. It is indeed meaningful to claim thata human being can be alienated, even as it is indeed meaningless to claim that a stonecannot be alienated. 44 Only the human subject can experience alienation. But to admitthat such is the case is not to admit that the experience of alienation pertains to the veryessence of human self-manifestation.The experience of alienation is rather a founded and derivative human experience, afounded experience of the self situated in an equally founded third-person mode of37Cf. CMV, 44. Here Henry makes it clear that he disputes as being radically insufficient thetraditional philosophical understanding of the human person as an animal possessing logos, reason, andlanguage, as an animal capable of reflection. As long as man is defined by something other than himself,in this case by the animality and intentional consciousness that he shares at least with other sentientcreatures, man’s humanity is for Henry betrayed and covered over. Intentional consciousness permits thedevelopment of human “self-consciousness,” but only on the foundation of the specifically human formof self-manifestation that events in the auto-impressionality of human self-awareness, the “immanentdialectic” of suffering and joy.38The concern for the promotion of human beatitude or happiness characterizes the Henryian œuvrefrom its beginning to its end. One need only observe that Henry’s Master’s thesis that he published in1942-43 is explicitly concerned with an articulation of the meaning of human bonheur. Cf. Michel Henry,Le Bonheur de Spinoza (Beirut: L’université Saint-Joseph, 1997), 9-12 et passim, hereafter BS.39Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), hereafter PPB.40Ibid., 145.41424344Ibid., 145-46.Ibid., 146.Ibid.Ibid.147