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which the world is originally revealed, the primary meaning of transcendence. 54 In short,the originary impression is neither sensory nor representative, it is motional: “As foraction or movement considered in themselves, they no longer belong to the sphere of thecogito, they are no longer determinations of thought but rather determinations ofextension. The normal process that takes place, for example, from the idea of a movementto the actual accomplishment of this movement therefore poses a problem which cannotbe solved or even contemplated within the sphere of pure subjectivity, and the body whichis the milieu in which actual movements are achieved can only find its place in a philosophywhich has an ontological region other than that of subjectivity. Within the latter,there is place neither for action nor the body, and if the self were reduced to pure thought,it would only be a milieu of passive change in which our desires could be born but in noway achieved.” 55 To think about incarnation is to depart either from the resistance of thebody to the consciousness or from the impossibility to fully incorporate it.The world-of-life, of the spirit, is the world to which we only have access from withina sensitivity that is ours and only given to us through the endless game of its everchangingand renewed subjective appearances. 56 It is this subjective life that, in additionto creating the idealities and abstractions of science conveyed by language, gives shapeto the world-of-life within which our concrete existence unfolds. Following the Greco-Hellenistic period, the phenomenological determination of language was held captive bythe insurmountable boundaries attributed to the concept of phenomenality, 57 but only theapprehension of pure phenomenality in its originary mode of phenomenalization cantransform our understanding of language. The word of life speaks in every living creatureas the one it engendered at its own creation. It is on constitutive subjectivity that MichelHenry founds his philosophy of life as “auto-affection,” an affection not by the world butby oneself, and where all perception, all imagination, all conceptual thought is a heteroaffection:“It is an affection by an otherness, by this milieu of otherness whereby anythingthat is other can show itself to me, give itself to me originally as other. But if everythinggave itself to me as originally other, there would not be a Self for it to give itself to.” 58Henry plans to overcome the critique of the Husserlian aporia of the intentional constitutionof the other and develop the genetic rooting of the experience of the other asotherness to oneself, in its incarnate and reflective content. Such a return to the immanentistorder therefore leaves inter-subjectivity unresolved. The language of life is thefounder of the language of the world and it is in this relationship that the modes ofphenomenalization of phenomenality are manifested: the language of the world mergesinto the “appearance” of the world (in which everything that it says is shown), and theword of life is the Word, the originary One through which life is revealed unto oneself.In other words, “talkative” intentionality aiming at a transcendental signification cannotrefer to the latter other than on the condition that it is already in possession of oneself inthe self-givenness of the pathos that makes it a life. But the pathos that consciousnessexperiences is not ideal in itself. Pain is immanent to the One who suffers it and is54This is why Maine de Biran qualified this pole, found through the effort, of resistant continuum,which does not designate any temporal or spatial extension. According to Henry, the determination of thereal as what resists is an a priori determination which cannot, consequently, be absent from ourexperience.55Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 71-72.56Cf. ibid., 19.57Cf. Michel Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” in idem, L’épreuve de la vie (Paris:Cerf, 2001), 29.58Henry, Auto-donation, 151.161