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intentionally structured self-consciousness that itself remains always dependent upon andinseparable from the human subject’s first-person mode of self-presence. The humansubject’s self-conscious experience of alienation is possible only because humansubjectivity’s manifestation in the form of affectively structured self-awareness is alwaysand only a first-person experience that is impervious to the corrosive effects of theexistentiell experience of alienation that occurs within the third-person subjective mode ofintentionally structured self-manifestation, i.e., intentionally structured self-consciousness.The human subject is indeed truly able to be manifest to itself in the mode of alienatedself-consciousness, such that the self seems to exist as a self supremely in its experienceof being dissociated from itself; but such can be the case only on the foundation of thehuman subject’s first-person and affectively structured experience of being self-aware, ofbeing always already given to itself as itself in its first-person experience of the “immanentdialectic” of suffering and joy. A stone can never appear in a first-person form,and so a stone can never appear in an alienated third-person mode either, at least on itsown power. In and of itself, a stone can only appear in the form of an object within anontological horizon in which human subjectivity itself can never appear, no more in itsthird-person mode than in its first-person mode.Even when a human subject experiences itself in an affectively alienated third personmanner, therefore, its experience of itself as an alienated self is the lived experience ofa subject and never the ontically passive condition of an object. Furthermore, this subjectivethird-person mode of self-manifestation is not itself the human subject’s originalmanner of being manifest. I am specifically different from a stone because while a stonecan only appear to me, and this only in the mode of an object, I appear to myself, and Ido so originally in an excessive and first-person manner that excludes in principle all possibilityof my living an insurmountably alienated human existence in the third person. Itis on account of my constant lived experience of myself in the first person that I am anego, that I exercise a manner of being and appearing that remains phenomenologicallyheterogeneous to the manner of being and appearing proper to a stone. If therefore I amto be able to give a positive account of the real experience of human alienation, Henryargues, I can do so only from “within” the first-person mode of being and appearing thatI always already both live and am.Because human self-manifestation is a traumatic, first-person manner of appearing tooneself, the human “alienation” of which Henry seeks to give a positive account in PPB(and therefore also in EM) is contingent rather than necessary, surmountable rather thanontologically ultimate, precisely because this experience is intentionally rather thanaffectively structured. The human ego’s original, traumatic, and first-person manner of selfmanifestationto himself as himself, on the other hand, necessarily arrives in the form ofan “affective tonality,” a “mood,” a Stimmung. 45Henry illustrates what he means by an alienation that is primarily intentional ratherthan affective by recourse to the example of the lived experience of Maine de Biran,whose philosophy of the subjective body PPB sets out to articulate. Maine de Biran’stestimony concerning himself is paradigmatic of human self-experience in general as being“the experience of an affective life which is constantly changing, of a humor which is atone time gay, at other times sad, more often sad, and whose modifications seem to beindependent of the will of the ego which experiences them.” 4645Cf. Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: PUF, 1963), 19, where Henry equates theultimate power or essence of manifestation with “la vraie Stimmung,” hereafter M.46PPB, 154.148