Saulius Geniusas’ essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online in advance of the print edition.
Saulius Geniusas – ‘Towards a Phenomenology of the Unconscious: Husserl and Fink on Versunkenheit’: JBSP (Originally published online: 15 October 2020).
Abstract: As a phenomenological concept, absorption refers to the ego’s capacity to experience the world from a displaced standpoint. The paper traces the emergence and development of this concept in Husserl’s and Fink’s writings and demonstrates that while Fink conceived of absorption as a class of intuitive re-presentations, Husserl transformed it into a limit phenomenon, whose analysis calls for a new method. A careful study of absorption compels us to rethink fundamental themes in phenomenology: it forces us to broaden our understanding of sensuous intuition, reconceptualize the nature of self-awareness, stretch the limits of intuitive re-presentations, and rethink the portrayal of phenomenology as a metaphysics of presence. The paper demonstrates that absorbed experiences are characterized by a specific form of self-awareness, that they constitute a distinct type of intuitive re-presentations, that a new method is needed to investigate them, and that their analysis leads towards a phenomenology of the unconscious.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2020.1834334
Saulius Geniusas, Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
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