Temps et souvenir chez E. Husserl: Retour d’une conscience, conscience d’un retour

Abstract

More than being just another type of intentional act among others, memory holds a special place in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. This act, which occurs in the present, not only reproduces an object that is passed, but it also reproduces the past consciousness of this object. Because the whole act of apprehension of an object is represented, then the entire temporal structure of the perception of this object is also reproduced, but because the act of memory itself takes place in the now, this past consciousness of a past object is re-lived through the perspective of my present consciousness. As a consequence, memory allows me to access both a past lived experience as the unity of a past act of perception, but also to apprehend my past consciousness as an identity, as the pole of these past experiences. But both the past experience and the past consciousness can only be reproduced in the now through the memory due to the consciousness of time, which constituted them as unities in the first place. The aim of this paper is therefore to show why memory and temporality are connected in Husserl’s phenomenology and how the analysis of memory fits in the framework of the analysis of time.