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life can ultimately be defined in its specific difference from all that is not human. 53 Thisoriginal mode of Being and manifestation, which is first God and then also man in asubordinate and participated manner, is characterized for Henry by a concrete and phenomenologicallydetermined structure of “archi-impressionality” that effectively eludes allpossibility of being ontologically alienated from itself in order either to be or to appear.Whether or not one can fully accept Henry’s claim that God is manifest to the humansubject in its original and affectively structured experience of self-awareness, 54 the excessivecharacter of this claim is itself a function of Henry’s understanding of the meaningof textuality. Henry’s theory of textuality, in which the text itself can be a witness to theexcessive character of subjectively structured Being, secures the text in its ultimate conditionsof possibility even as it secures the phenomenological and ontological primacy ofman relative to the text.Everything real and living is for Henry indeed hors text; all the same, the text is notmerely an effaced trace of a transcendental signified to which the text itself cannot attain.As situated in Life, the text becomes an expressive Gestalt of this Life; the “whole” thatLife is can give itself to man in and through the “fragment” of the text. Textuality thereforeshows itself not to be dialectically and therefore violently related either to subjectivityor to Being. Subjectivity rather is itself Being, the “archi-foundation” of textuality whichsubjectivity unites to itself precisely in establishing a difference without distance betweenthe text and itself. It is on the foundation of transcendental subjectivity that the subjectivelysituated text is able to be the manifestation rather than the occultation both of Beingand of human reality.Henry’s theory of textuality thus simultaneously serves the self-disclosure of la Vie andenables human reality to resist the temptation to regard itself, because of its existentiellexperience of alienation, as a merely ontic reality related only extrinsically -- and thereforedialectically and violently -- to Being. It is human reality’s surrender to the illusion of itsontological poverty that results in what Henry decries in PC, his final work: man’swillingness to surrender himself to “everything which is less than man,” 55 in order thathe might thus be able to escape himself and so feel nothing -- be nothing -- at all. 56In truth, man can never in fact accomplish this, and the very simulacra of human lifewhich man constructs around himself in order to shield himself from himself can ultimatelyonly testify to the unconquerable power of la Vie in man. 57 The Henryian textis thus meant to lead the reader back, by means of the experience of a “traumatic experience”provoked by the text, to the simultaneously traumatic and blissful experienceof la Vie, the experience which the reader in his ultimate and therefore affective beingalways already is. The traumatizing phenomenological reduction that Henry effects provesto be at the service of a liberating existential reduction, a “leading back” of man to himselfin his “transcendental humanity” 58 via the resituated philosophical text in order that53Cf. CMV, 49: “il n’ y a qu’une seule Vie, celle du Christ qui est aussi celle de Dieu et deshommes...”54I would maintain that human reality’s experience of its ipseity or “I-ness” at the very least pointsbeyond itself to a divine, “archi-ipseical,” ontologically autonomous foundation of this ipseity.55PC, 13: “tout ce qui est moins que l’homme.”56Cf. CMV, 138, at which Henry speaks of the human ego’s desire to hide from and even destroyitself. “. . . la vie auto-affectée, c’est-à-dire constamment assaillie par soi, écrasée sous son propre poids,pour se soustraire á celui-ci, se défaire de soi.”57In particular, cf. ibid., 344: “Les hommes voudront mourir—mais non la Vie.”58Cf. Michel Henry, La barbarie (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1987), 201: “La philosophiea pour thème l’humanité transcendantale de l’homme, elle seule est capable de fonder un véritable humanisme.L’humanitas de l’homme, c’est la subjectivité reconduite à sa dimension d’immanence radicale,à son autorévélation originelle et propre, différente de celle du monde.” This passage furthermore attests150