The Site of Affect in Husserl's Phenomenology

Abstract

SENSATIONS AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE LIVED BODY To discover affects within Husserl's texts designates a difficult investigation; it points to a theme of which these texts were forced to speak, even as they were explicitly speaking of regional ontologies and the foundations of sciences. For we may at first wonder: where can affection find a positive role in the rigor of a pure philosophy that seeks to account for its phenomena from within the immanence of consciousness? Does this not mean that the very passivity and foreignness of affect will be overlooked; will it not be continually linked to a Vorstellung that issues as a ray of the pure ego? That is, will the phenomenological account of affect be reduced to the cognition of an object, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests? Yet there are affects in Husserl's texts that maintain their autonomy and resist subsumption to an objectivating intentionality. We may see this in the Lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: in the longitudinal intentionality of retention, through which consciousness becomes aware of its elapsed phases without making them into objects-a passive synthesis that gives the flow of time-constituting consciousness the form of a continually deferred auto-affection.1 We find it again as early as the fifth Logical Investiga tion,2 providing us with the impetus to radicalize Husserlian phenomenology. Logical Investigations introduce us to the question of the structure of affect: are feelings to be conceived on the model of intentional lived experiences, explicitly related to objects, or are they to be taken as neutral hyletic contents awaiting interpretation? In Husserl's careful analyses, affect begins to take on a meaning of its own, by which it resists falling into either of these theoretical extremes. While there are affects in Logical Investigations that have an intentional structure (feeling-acts), this intentionality is not itself objectivating (though it does rely on prior objectivating presentations).3 Moreover there exist affects that omit this intentional structure, that no longer refer to an object, and that inhere simply in the embodied subject. Yet these feelings do not become meaningless as a result-, they have a particular coloring, a sense that attracts or repels.4 This is the case of feeling-sensations-the Bodily sensations of pleasure and pain, but also anxiety, and such drives and desires as lack determinate objects.5 These examples bring us into contact with an important and somewhat ambiguous field of Husserlian phenomenology-that of sensations. Therein we encounter the above-mentioned sensuous feelings, as well as tactile and visual sensations, i.e., affections of the Body, and the kinaesthetic sensations involved in Bodily movement. The role of these sensations in perception and the constitution of the lived Body is specifically addressed in the Second book of Ideas, to which my essay now turns.6 In what follows we take sensation as our focus; for it is in this field that an alternative account of affection can be found, an account of affect as preintentional and yet essential to the development of intentionalities. It is here that Husserl's concern with faithful description can yield a theory of affect that his phenomenology anticipated but did not itself bring about. For the insight into the ambiguity of feeling found in Logical Investigations was eventually hidden from view, having been superseded by the intentional theory of the emotions.7 It will be our task to steer a difficult path between versions of sensation that cover over the insight of Logical Investigations in one way or another. On the one hand, sensation can be conceived as representational, as containing a copy or imprint of the thing to which it refers. At the other extreme, sensation becomes an amorphous and undifferentiated content, requiring an additional interpretative act to reach the object. Both positions can be drawn from Husserl's texts. …