“Affective Awakening of the Past”: an Analysis of Pre-cognitive Dimension of Recollection in the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl

The aim of this article is to examine the affective dimension of recollection on the basis of Husserl's “Analyses concerning passive synthesis”. In our view, the distinction between active and passive constitution, provided in the genetic phenomenology of E. Husserl, opens up a possibility to consider the problems of memory and subjective identity not as merely cognitive, but also as essentially affective phenomena. In this context, affectivity describes the realm of pre-predicative and pre-cognitive experience that precedes and makes possible the explicit and thematic correlation between subject and world. Our claim is that the affective level of subjective life is not limited to the sphere of the living present, but includes the dimension of past life as well, without which it would not be possible to speak of a subjectivity as having the experience. In order to investigate the affective component of recollection, the article explores the distinction between the act of recollection and the “affective awakening of the past”, the conditions of such reproductive awakening, and the phenomenological analysis of affective dimension of recollection as a means to understand the phenomenon of implicit memory.