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The movement to self in enjoyment and happiness marks the sufficiency of the I, although the image we have used of the spiral that coils over itself does not enable us to depict also the enrootedness of this sufficiency in the insufficiency of living from.... The I is, to be sure, happiness, presence at home with itself. But, as sufficiency in its non-suf¬ficiency, it remains in the non-I; it is enjoyment of 'something else," never of itself. Autochthonous, that is, enrooted in what it is not, it is nevertheless, within this enrootedness, independent and separated. The relationship of the I with the non-I produced as happiness which promotes the I consists neither in assuming nor in refusing the non-I. Between the I and what it lives from there does not extend the absolute distance that separates the same from the other. The acceptance or refusal of what we live from implies a prior agreement [agrément]*, both given and received, the agreement of happiness. The primary agreement, to live, docs not alienate the I but maintains it, constitutes its being at home with itself. The dwelling, inhabitation, belongs to the essence—to the egoism—of the I. Against the anonymous there is, horror, trembling, and vertigo, perturbation of the I that does not coincide with itself, the happiness of enjoyment affirms the I at home with itself. But if, in the relation with the non-I of the world it inhabits, the I is produced as self-sufficiency and is maintained in an instant torn up from the continuity of time, dispensed from assuming or refusing a past, it does not benefit from this dispensation by virtue of a privilege enjoyed from eternity.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9342-6_9

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