Memory and Inscription

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores Husserl’s innovative conception of immanent time in three parts: retention, now-moments, and protention. It explains his advance relative to Brentano’s conception of time and memory being the result of “productive imagination.” Early on, it demonstrates that sensation, welling up from the body, both accounted for our feeling of temporal flow and depended on that same flow to be conscious at all. The chapter turns from the perplexity of how a bodily un-conscious (sensations) accounts for the possibility of intentional consciousness (emotions). It locates, in Freud’s neurological and dream investigations, a conception of the body as one of layered inscriptions, passing from a pure, physiological un-consciousness to preconsciousness to consciousness; the specifically psychoanalytic unconscious is the result of a different process, of evacuation of representations from awareness. But Freud’s model would afford phenomenology a monist conception of embodied mind and a materialist account of memory, attention, and judgment.