Spacing imagination

John Sallis

pp. 201-215

in: Paul Sars, Chris Bremmers, Koen Boey (eds), Eros and Eris, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

Although imagination is not one of the subjects treated extensively in Husserl's phenomenology, it is one of its most important `instruments'. In his phenomenology as a work of imagination, imagination even acquires for Husserl primacy over perception. But in his phenomenology of imagination as its subject matter, Husserl seems to repeat the old distinction between original and image in his differentiation between perception as the realization of full bodily presence and imagination as referring to inferior modes of presence.The author critically analyses Husserl's distinction (within imagination) between phantasy and image-consciousness. The fact that Husserl describes the image-object in image-consciousness as a "mere image" which appears only as "a nothing" on the scene of actual presence, and the fact that Husserl distinguishes phantasy from image-consciousness by its lacking any representational consciousness, leads one to suspect greatly that Husserl reverts to a content-based approach which was to have been excluded by his theory of intentionality. In the last section the author outlines a reorientation according to which imagination is thought of not in reference to presence (as has been done in the history of metaphysics), but in reference to an appearing, an imaging, a showing, that would never be a matter simply of presence, but rather of spacings that would fracture presence. This conception of imagination could explain the power of imagination to open up phenomenology.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund