“That poverty is essential which lets go of, rather than joins itself to, the multiple configurations of Being,
the very form of its sojourn close to the earth, the Home and the Year. The very speech wherein all things are contained, name and appellation, that which designates and that which shows, these must also be renounced in this poverty which is made of silence. But then what remains ? That which remains when otherness and exteriority, the milieu of Being and all its determinations, its configurations and movement to it of thought have been rejected or suppressed is the essence itself. For nothing is taken away from the essence which is rather liberated and recognized in its integrity when there takes place in thought the retreat from transcendent Being and transcendence itself: nothing is taken away because the essence does not enclose in itself anything of ‘the other’ and because the suppression of otherness is merely the suppression of the foreign element, with respect to the essence, of that which covers it up and hides it from our eyes.”
Michel Henry – The Essence of Manifestation, 282
