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to the self – as its Logos.” 60 Life in the world can do nothing to relieve us from thesuffering and anguish 61 which are the indelible core of our feeling of existence. Theworld does not heal us from our suffering in existence unless it hides our true life fromus and obliterates in us all sense of our existence. But suffering, without ceasing to be so,can at the same time be joy insofar as, suffering from life, it opens to us the door of theexperience of the Divine in us. The unity of joy and pain is, therefore, an auto-affectionthat testifies to the double phenomenalization of phenomenality: the human and thedivine. 62 Far from being transcendence in the face of the subject, sensing is posited fromthe start in the relationship from which it is possible to identify the “sensing” and the“sensing oneself,” but the sensing, in turn, never is and can never be sensed, 63 since itdoes not ensue from what affects us. 64 Michel Henry posits affectivity itself in the dividewhere the dualist perspective would posit the nominative and the reflective subjects:“Affectivity is the essence of ipseity.” 65 The ‘being subject’ means suffering, meansbeing: “The constitutive subjectivity of the being, and identical to it, is the being-withitself,the achievement in itself of the being such that it accomplishes itself in the originalpassivity of suffering. The essence of subjectivity is affectivity.” 66 Suffering is a word becauseit is it that speaks and says, because it is in the flesh of life’s suffering and throughit that the revelation is made of what it says to us in this way: simply this suffering flesh.If it says itself to us without ever resorting to language, we may ask: “How does it sayit? In its suffering and by it.” 67 For this reason, in this pain, in this suffering, life hasalready spoken differently, in a more primitive suffering: “This suffering, in which lifeembraces itself in the process of coming to itself in the love and joy of itself – thissuffering, which inhabits every mode of life, pain or joy, because in each one it is whatgives life to itself inasmuch as it is in it, this original pathos of life belonging to it, [it isin this suffering] that absolute Life gives itself to itself.” 68 The living creature, experiencinghimself, is this Word of Life which he himself hears: “The possibility of hearingthe Word of life is for each living Self consubstantial to its birth, to its condition ofSon.” 69 In his way of living, this fundamental passivity is a concrete phenomenologicalfeature of concrete life. This is the legacy of Descartes who, in his Méditations métaphysiques,defined man as an apparatus which he calls thought, i.e., a being who feels andthis feeling is self-feeling: “Cogitatio is a subjective mode which, like suffering, cold,hunger, heat, etc. experiences itself immediately, regardless of the world, in an a-cosmicway and, if the world did not exist, it does not necessarily mean that it would disappear.In other words, suffering might well exist outside the world to the extent that it exists asit experiences itself immediately. (…) Consequently, it is in affectivity that the unshakeablefoundation sought by Descartes lies. I call this life because all that lives is ofthis order. Even seeing, to the extent that it is a living seeing, is always a pathos.” 7060Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 25-26.61Cf. Henry, C’est moi la Vérité, 137.62Cf. ibid., 257.63Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation (Paris: Puf, 1963), 579.64Ibid., 829.65Ibid., 581.66Ibid., 595.67Henry, “Phénoménologie matérielle et langage,” 27.68Ibid., 29: «ce souffrir en lequel elle s’étreint elle-même dans le procès de sa venue en soi, dansl’amour et la jouissance de soi – ce souffrir qui habite, toute modalité de la vie, souffrance ou joie, parcequ’il est en chacune ce qui la donne à elle-même pour autant que c’est en lui, dans ce pathos originel quiest le sien, que la Vie absolue se donne à soi.»69Ibid.70Henry, Auto-donation, 134-135.163