Body, Consciousness, and Violence

Abstract

To relate the theme of violence to transcendental phenomenology may seem an act of violence itself. For Husserl, though concerned with intentionality, is preoccupied with perception and awareness of perceiving. Violence lies closer to the theme of will or, at least, of action. Yet when Husserl has made the shift from eidetic to the transcendental reduction, and therewith to an emphasis on passive genesis, the way in which consciousness, through history, is already informed with implications of action becomes increasingly evident. Eventually, in the Crisis, modern science is revealed as a European form of action, even of violence within the horizon of the everyday world. Whereas Husserl had earlier turned his attention first to the noeta and then to the aistheta, he begins now to direct it toward the poieta.

Two elements of plot then, reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis), turn upon such incidents as these. A third is suffering or calamity (pathos)… A calamity is an action of a destructive or painful nature, such as death openly represented, excessive suffering, wounding and the Like. (Poetics, ch.11)¹