New and Old Approaches to the Phenomenology of Pain

Ortega y Gasset's old lament that no one had so far attempted a rigorous phenomenology of pain no longer holds since the appearance of Christian Grüny's recent monograph Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Grüny argues for the use of phenomenological categories from Mer...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Serrano de Haro, Agustín
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/260236
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/260236
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Pain
Phenomenology
Blocked movement
Self-affection
Descripción
Sumario:Ortega y Gasset's old lament that no one had so far attempted a rigorous phenomenology of pain no longer holds since the appearance of Christian Grüny's recent monograph Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Grüny argues for the use of phenomenological categories from Merleau-Ponty in order to understand physical pain as a "blocked escape-movement" ("blockierte Fluchtbewegung"), concluding that corporeal suffering makes impossible both a clean distinction and a pure identification between the lived body and the physical body that I am. In my paper, I would like to suggest some improvements to Grüny's approach through the utilization of the category of self-affection, as the material phenomenology of Michel Henry has developed it. In addition to the radical immanence in which hyle, noesis, and noema are unified into a "carnal cogito," however, I argue that it is necessary to describe the painful self-affection not only in terms of any sensitive excess whatever (überhaupt), as Grüny posits, but also in terms of a mutation of the sensitive excess into the intra-tactile sphere of sensibility. Thus I endorse the Husserlian insight that makes tactility the primordial structure of sensibility.