THE SITE OF AFFECT IN HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY SENSATIONS AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE LIVED BODY Alia Al-Saji To discover affects within Husserl's texts designates a difficult investigation; it points to a theme of which these texts were forced to speak, even as they were explicitly speaking of regional ontologies and the foundations of sciences. For we may at first wonder: where can affection find a positive role in the rigor of a pure philosophy that seeks to account for its phenomena from within the immanence of consciousness? Does this not mean that the very passivity and foreignness of affect will be overlooked; will it not be continually linked to a Vorstellung that issues as a ray of the pure ego? That is, will the phenomenological account of affect be reduced to the cognition of an object, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests? Yet there are affects in Husserl's texts that maintain their autonomy and resist subsumption to an objectivating intentionality. We may see this in the Lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: in the longitudinal intentionality of retention, through which consciousness becomes aware of its elapsed phases without making them into objects-a passive synthesis that gives the flow of time-constituting consciousness the form of a continually deferred auto-affection.1 We find it again as early as the fifth Logical Investigation,2 providing us with the impetus to radicalize Husserlian phenomenology. Logical Investigations introduce us to the question of the structure of affect: are feelings to be conceived on the model of intentional lived experiences, explicitly related to objects, or are they to be taken as neutral hyletic contents awaiting interpretation? In Husserl's careful analyses, affect begins to take on a meaning of its own, by which it resists falling into either of these theoretical extremes. While there are affects in Logical Investigations that have an intentional structure (feeling-acts), this intentionality is not itself objectivating (though it does rely on prior objectivating presentations).3 Moreover there exist affects that omit this intentional structure, that no longer refer to an object, and that inhere simply in the embodied subject. Yet these feelings do not become meaningless as a result; they have a particular coloring, a sense that attracts or repels.4 This is the case of feeling-sensations-the Bodily sensations of pleasure and pain, but also anxiety, and such drives and desires as lack determinate objects.5 These examples bring us into contact with an important and somewhat ambiguous field of Husserlian phenomenology-that of sensations. Therein we encounter the above-mentioned sensuous feelings, as well as tactile and visual sensations, i.e., affections of the Body, and the kinaesthetic sensations involved in Bodily movement. The role of these sensations in perception and the constitution of the lived Body is specifically addressed in the Second book of Ideas, to which my essay now turns.6 In what follows we take sensation as our focus; for it is in this field that an alternative account of affection can be found, an account of affect as preintentional and yet essential to the development of intentionalities. It is here that Husserl's concern with faithful description can yield a theory of affect that his phenomenology anticipated but did not itself bring about. For the insight into the ambiguity of feeling found in Logical Investigations was eventually hidPHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2000 51 den from view, having been superseded by the intentional theory of the emotions.7 It will be our task to steer a difficult path between versions of sensation that cover over the insight of Logical Investigations in one way or another. On the one hand, sensation can be conceived as representational, as containing a copy or imprint of the thing to which it refers. At the other extreme, sensation becomes an amorphous and undifferentiated content, requiring an additional interpretative act to reach the object. Both positions can be drawn from Husserl's texts. It is our aim to take the analysis of sensation in a different direction, opened up by Husserl but left for the most part unexplored-to rethink sensation as a creative, differentiating, and dynamic multiplicity, as the way we feel our contact with the world, with others, and with our own life. Empfindnisse in the Second Book of the Ideas In Ideas II, Husserl distinguishes several kinds of sensations that have a role in the workings of the Body, in its perceptions of itself and of the world; these sensations ultimately constitute the body as lived Body (Leib).8 Among them are so-called presentational-sensations, which take part in the constitution of appearances of perceived things.9 Hence there are tactile-sensations in the hand, sensations of texture that parallel the qualities of roughness in the touched thing; there are sensations of warmth in my Body that relate to the warmth of the fire in front of me. But is this the case for all presentational-sensations, do they all share in the qualities of the sensed thing, and re-present them, as seems to be the case with touch and heat-sensations? When we speak of visual sensations, of color-sensations in the eyes, does this mean that actual colors are presented (or re-presented) in the eyes? The account of sensation becomes difficult at this point. Are we to claim "images," the copies of thingly qualities in us, as intermediaries in our perceptions of things? If so, perception becomes a mimesis; moreover, that which is genuinely perceived is not the red object in front of me, but its imprint, the sensation of redness contained in my eye. In such a theory of perception, we are stuck in immanence; our reality is limited to the surface of the Body wherein sensations lie, and the world becomes a construct, a mere projection from this surface. Husserl's account can be pushed to this extreme, but it is clear, at other places, that he seeks to avoid this. Perception is not a purely inner construction; it is an intentionality that is directed outside the subject into the world. More explicitly, Husserl rejects the assimilation of perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness, or to a symbolic-consciousness that functions by the intermediary of signs. Hence it is not the image of "redness" that I see, nor is the sensation a sign that represents for me the real color; what I perceive directly before me is the concrete, worldly red thing. As a counterpoint to presentational-sensation, there is another kind of sensation that is equally necessary to the process of perception. Thus, "in seeing, the eyes are directed upon the seen and run over its edges, surfaces, etc. When it touches objects, the hand slides over them. Moving myself, I bring my ear closer in order to hear."10 These capabilities of the lived Body are given by systems of kinaesthetic sensations. They are one's inner sense of the movements, tensions and possibilities of one's own Body. What is significant about kinaesthetic sensations is that they are cut off from the representative function ascribed to presentational-sensations. Kinaestheses play a constitutive role in perception by motivating the series of tactile and visual sensations, and so allowing a particular sequence of appearances of the perceived to unfold; however, there is no question of mimesis between kinaestheses and the qualities of the perceived thing.11 It is rather by moving around things and tracing their contours that kinaestheses make perception, as a concrete dynamic process, possible.12 In this sense, the qualitative possibilities and virtual movements of my Body (as "I can move") outPHILOSOPHY TODAY 52 line the features and possibilities of the world. Kinaesthetic sensations are hence a function of my Body's orientation in the world; they are my way of feeling the active engagement of my Body with an outside. We come to an important juncture; for what if, instead of treating kinaestheses as exceptional, they became our model for rethinking all sensations? Sensations, then, would not be representational contents, but Empfindnisse or sensings as Husserl sometimes calls them.13 This means that color and texture sensations, etc., are not copies of thingly properties contained in the eye or the hand; we cannot look in the eye to find the image of redness, or discover the roughness of the thing in the touching hand. These so-called presentational-sensations are rather the way my Body lives in, and experiences, the "redness" of the thing, the roughness of the surface-as vibrations of its own being. In other words, they express my feeling of being-affected by things, my way of resonating the qualities of the world.14 This would mean that presentational-sensations do not have a privileged role in perception; rather, a multiplicity of sensations (presentational, affective and kinaesthetic) blend in every perception, working as a dynamic whole. And this would be precisely what Husserl means by sensings (Empfindnisse).15 Thus the appearance of the thing in perception is not simply constituted by its resemblance with Bodily sensations. Perception is rather a function of the bearing of the lived Body, which at once dynamically palpates the perceived and delimits its outlines. In this sense, perception depends on the particular interaction of my Body with the world-its way of tracing the practical possibilities of this world and of living in it.16 The reversal we have effected in presentational-sensations will allow us to rethink the notion of Empfindnisse in general (be it in reference to sensuous feelings, kinaestheses, or presentations). If sensations are not copies taken from the world, then there is no necessary one-to-one correspondence with the qualities of things. There are hence no isolated color-sensations, fixed in the eyes, but a whole array of nuance is taken in every time we see. Ultimately if our model is the dynamism of kinaestheses, then we cannot speak of single sensations (except abstractly). For our inner movements are not absolutely divisible; they are experienced as moments of an entire Bodily attitude, of a total gesture or action. Our Bodily movements involve a multiplicity of changing sensations, that overlap and flow into one another. So all our sensings dynamically blend in an interpenetrating multiplicity-an organic whole that is prior to the isolation of static "sensation-contents" in the work of reflection. Sensuous Multiplicity and the Constitution of the Lived Body Sensation is not one; it is doubled, if not multiplied, within our lived experience. (We will encounter another sense in which this is true below. For sensation is not a homogeneous unity; it always figures internal differentiations.) Sensations form an overlapping and interpenetrating multiplicity. And it is this interwoven multiplicity that allows the formation and animation of the Body as Leib, i.e., which gives the embodiment of the subject. In Husserlian terms sensations are held together by a sensuous, passive synthesis-a continuous fusion in which each term calls forth others through their essential interconnectedness.17 It is not the case that external relations are imposed upon preexistent elements; for the elements are not absolutely distinct, and their synthesis is at once the condition of their genesis. Such passive syntheses of sensations refer us back to ultimate "syntheses which precede every thesis,"18 including the passive syntheses of time-constitution.19 Sensations are thus inseparable "moments" that form a systemic whole, without extrinsic parts. There are no single sensations, but systems and fields of sense. Indeed the concept of an isolated sensation proves nonsensical, once we realize that there is no moment at which our Body ceases to feel. As Husserl points out, "each new stimulation does not provoke a senTHE SITE OF AFFECT 53 sation as if for the first time, but rather, it provokes in the sensation-field a corresponding change in the sensation."20 It is also for this reason that no two concrete sensations can be identical. Not only are they differentiated within the temporal stream, but also qualitatively and intensively by their function and localization on the Body. For what is it that distinguishes one hand from the other, but the variously oriented ways in which we feel and live each one.21 The lived Body is constituted through the localization of sensations in and on it, for which touch (bound with kinaestheses) is of particular importance. My Body, as Husserl understands it, is not a material substratum. It is essential to distinguish between a physical, adamantine body (Körper), a mere object in the world, and my living, feeling Body or Leib.22 Their formative difference comes not from a difference in degrees of complexity, nor from some distinguishing material mark, but from the insertion of sensings (Empfindnisse) into the Body (Leib). As Husserl points out, "even two lifeless things can touch one another, but the touching of the Body provides sensations on it or in it."23 The lived Body senses, while the mere physical thing remains indifferent; it lacks that extra dimension of depth, of inner feeling and possibility, in its contact with the rest of the world.24 The lived Body is thus distinguished by its possession of sensations. These sensations are not free-floating feelings; for it is not some soul-like entity that feels (such an entity making do without space, and ultimately without the material world). It is precisely the Body, which is within the horizon of the world, that senses. Sensations must hence have a localization and a spread within the world-a localization which is of the world, but which is different in kind from the extension of material things or Körper in the world.25 This spread which sensations map out, this place in which they are localized outlines the shape or figure of a lived Body. Indeed this field of localized sensations is nothing but that Body.26 But how does such localization take place? This localization occurs by means of an overlap, or more precisely an intercrossing, of sensings. That is to say, where the Body turns away from its involvement with things in the world, and comes to sense itself instead of things. The Body perceives itself from the outside, and that which was only an inner sensation finds a corresponding site on or within the form that is now being perceived. This self-reflexive capacity is a particular virtue of the sense of touch, according to Husserl. It is hence in terms of the exchange of touch between two parts of the Body, between two hands for instance, that we can attempt to explicate the process of localization. Thus, "if this [touching] happens by means of some other part of one's Body, then the [touch]-sensation is doubled in the two parts of the Body, since each is then precisely for the other an external thing that is touching and acting upon it, and each is at the same time Body."27 It is the inherent instability of this situation that allows for the localization of the touch-sensations. For each sensation can be experienced in a double way; the sensation within my right hand can be apprehended as an inner feeling within that hand (e.g., "smoothness"-sensation), or as an outer perception of the left hand (e.g., as smooth surface). This doubling which can be found in all sensations is complicated in the case of one hand touching the other.28 For my left hand is also a field of sensations. As the right hand is touching it, the left hand can feel its being-touched, can sense this from within; or reversing the apprehension: the left hand can perceive the touching action of the right hand from without, as that hand pays attention to its own "touch"-sensations within.29 To make the description more concrete: the right hand is touching, is pressing and caressing, the surface of the left hand. While the right hand has the outer perception of the smooth relief of the left hand, the left hand has an inner feeling of pressure along its surface where the right hand is touching it. The reverse can also occur: the left hand can turn its attention to the properties of PHILOSOPHY TODAY 54 the right hand, to the rough tip of the index that is pressing against it, while the right hand pays attention to the way it moves over the surface of the left hand, and to the sensation of "smoothness" that it now has as a result of this touching. It is this reciprocity that allows for an internally felt sensation to be localized within the externally perceived Body. The surface of the Body is made up of such intersections and exchanges of sensations, of Empfindnisse: between the sensations of touch that give the Body as a tactile surface; between these touch-sensations and other sensings (sensations of warmth and pain, kinaesthetic sensations, as well as the visual and the acoustic, etc.). By means of the reflexivity of touch, and the partial reflexivity of other senses such as sight, these sensations are localized in the Body to different degrees-constituting it as a feeling, seeing, hearing and moving unity.30 But the sensations that make up the lived Body, also prevent this constitution from ever being fully accomplished, so that the Body is "a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing," for Husserl.31 The reflexivity of the senses is performed across a gap. For the very doubling of sensation means that, while sensations may overlap (e.g., "smoothness"-sensation and pressure-sensation), they are never identical or fused into one.32 The Body is thus a provisional unity, and the synthesis of the senses is an open-ended communication. The Ambiguous Structure of Sensation Thus each sensation is given as a multiplicity; for it has a twofold structure, a doubling by which it can be apprehended as inner or as outer (according to a reversible direction of attention). The illusion of "representational"-sensations stems from a misunderstanding of this double structure. One side of the structure eclipses the other. The outer is imposed upon the inner, so that sensation is no longer the way we feel our contact with things, but a facsimile of the appearances of things as they are presented in external perception. In this sense, the concept of "representational"-sensation gives a partial truth. For sensations are given in such a way as to contain an internal reference or directedness to the world. Their structure is that of "transcendence in immanence." Sensations are affective, for they are the way in which the world impresses itself upon my Body; but they are also indicational or constitutive of that world and the things outside my Body.33 Indeed one side of this reversible structure conditions the other; for the way in which I feel the world presents the world to me in a particular coloration, just as the relative orientation of things gives them to me in a particular order and perspective. It is important for us to note that both the so-called presentational-sensations (sensations of touch and vision, etc.) and the kinaesthetic sensations share in this double structure. For, as we have seen, kinaestheses play a necessary constitutive and motivating role in our perceptions of the world.34 Our reconceptualization of sensation not only deepens the Husserlian account of embodied subjectivity, but enables other and more radical stories of embodiment, breaking through the usual norms of what it means to be a Body. For its inherent differentiation presents sensation as an ambiguous or mixed nature. Sensation appears as an original junction of subject and object, or more precisely, subject and other. It is for this reason that sensation holds an ambiguous status within Husserlian phenomenology; for it permits, on the one hand, the formation of one's own Body (as lived, subject Body), and on the other hand, the constitution of things and the perception of a world. Sensation is at the boundary of the subjective and the alien. What is mine and what is alien may later be divided along strict lines, in light of the norm of a full-fledged Ego of intentionalities; but in the preintentional moment of sensation they remain intertwined. Thus Husserl refers to sensation as impressional, as an original foreignness that affects the Ego;35 but these same sensations are also my most subjective possessions.36 And it is through their localization in the body that this THE SITE OF AFFECT 55 body becomes my own, animated with my own life.37 The genesis of subjectivity finds its locus here. In this context, subjectivity appears as a hollowing out or an interruption within the world-there where sensation is introduced. What sensation insinuates within the plane of the world is a dimension of difference, of depth and interiority of feeling. That part of the world which is the "bearer of sensations" is transformed, constituting the lived Body and giving the beginnings of subjectivity. The subject then keeps a trace, within its constitution, of the foreign out of which it was made. Paths of Affection and the Temporality of Sensation Though our theory of sensation may seem to have taken a somewhat static view of the Body, and of the workings of sensation within it, the temporality of sensations was implicit within our account. Within kinaestheses, as well as within the passive syntheses which hold together the multiplicity of Bodily sensations, the temporal structure of sensation can be seen. With the explicit consideration of time, our picture of interwoven sensations becomes dynamic. We come to realize that sensations are not purely instantaneous; each concrete sensation involves a certain temporal condensation, a trail of retentions by which it intermeshes with other sensations, and of protentions by which it anticipates its own reenactment (which will not be a self-identity). Thus, as Husserl notes, sensations linger on in the Body, after the objects to which they refer have disappeared.38 Sensations have a dynamism of their own, an evolution and flow by which they motivate one another, and install themselves as tendencies within the lived Body. Thus the extra dimension that sensation insinuates into the body is not simply a different spatiality-that is, a dynamic envelopment and intertwining, rather than a static juxtaposition of parts. But that which distinguishes the Body of sensations from the merely material body is a particular temporality-to which lived, Bodily space owes its dynamism and its envelopment. This temporalization of sensation allows us to ask how sensations come to constitute, to evolve into, one's particular affective attitude toward the world, one's habits and dispositions. When sensations are inserted within the history and genesis of the embodied subject, motivations and associative tendencies appear within the nexus of sensations; motivations, which for Husserl, need not always be rational. Recurring sensations and patterns of movement form a kind of Bodily memory, and protend their continuation, inclining toward particular Bodily attitudes and comportments in the future. In this way "paths of affections" are opened up in the embodied subject, which define one's particular Body and the way in which one experiences and moves in the world.39 Thus my lived Body receives its characteristic coloring as my own, as bearing within it the sedimentation of my life; correlatively, the world that solicits and confronts this Body receives its own coloration, mirroring my dispositions and habits. But none of this is to say that the sedimented sensation-fields and patterns necessitate our behavior; for these sedimentations incline and motivate as a concrete style of life, without the dynamic evolution of our Body and our sensings ever coming to an end. Conclusion: Sensations and the Phenomenological Account of Embodiment Our purpose has been to present a theory of sensation that enables a more productive phenomenological account of embodiment. Sensation allows us to see beyond the materiality of the body (Körper) to a dynamic and evolving embodiment (Leib). This embodiment does not require a foundation in materiality (despite what Husserl sometimes says), but rather finds its unity in the intertwining of sensations.40 At the same time, if the Body is not given as a self-identical piece of matter, it is because sensation constitutes the Body as an PHILOSOPHY TODAY 56 original intercorporeity-open not only to its own touch, but to contact with the world, and to the touch and vision of others. Through sensation, it becomes possible to question the self-contained and clearly delimited image of the Body-the Body as seat of an Ego's will and control. Our aim, which goes beyond the scope of this essay, is to make a space for other understandings of embodiment that are shaped as much by the outside (including culture, language, history, etc.) and by others, as by the efforts of a conscious Ego. The formation of the lived Body is not a determination that would be in line with the Ego's constitution of material things. The Body is neither mere material Body, nor pure Ego. It is a hybrid-or, more precisely, a more original unity-whose properties fall outside either category, and whose nature is revealed in the study of sensations.41 ENDNOTES THE SITE OF AFFECT 57 1. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). 2. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans . J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). 3. Ibid., pp. 570–71. 4. "Sensations of pleasure and pain may continue, though the act-characters built upon them may lapse. When the facts which provoke pleasure sink into the background, are no longer apperceived as emotionally coloured, and perhaps cease to be intentional objects at all, the pleasurable excitement may linger on for a while: it may itself be felt as agreeable. Instead of representing a pleasant property of the object, it is referred merely to the feeling-subject, or is itself presented and pleases" (ibid., pp. 574–75). 5. Ibid., p. 575. 6. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, second book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). (Cited as Ideas II. References will be to the original German pagination.) 7. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l'interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 308–27. 8. See also Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). 9. "In all constitution of spatial thinghood, two kinds of sensations with totally different constitutive functions are involved, and necessarily so, if representations of the spatial are to be possible. The first kind are the sensations which constitute, by means of the apprehensions allotted to them, corresponding features of the thing as such by way of adumbration" (Ideas II, p. 57). 10. Ibid., p. 56. 11. "The second kind are the 'sensations' which do not undergo such [presentative] apprehensions but which, on the other hand, are necessarily involved in all those apprehensions of the sensations of the first kind, insofar as, in a certain way, they motivate those apprehensions and thereby themselves undergo an apprehension of a completely different type, an apprehension which thus belongs correlatively to every constituting apprehension" (ibid., p. 57). 12. "We constantly find here this two-fold articulation: kinaesthetic sensations on the one side, the motivating; and the sensations of features on the other, the motivated. . . . Perception is without exception a unitary accomplishment which arises essentially out of the playing together of two correlatively related functions" (ibid., p. 58). Moreover, "an apprehension of a thing as situated at such a distance, as oriented in such a way, as having such a colour, etc., is unthinkable . . . without these sorts of relations of motivation" (ibid., p. 58). 13. "And thus, my Body's entering into physical relations (by striking, pressing, pushing, etc.) with other material things provides in general not only the experience of physical occurrences, related to the Body and to things, but also the experience of specifically Bodily occurrences of the type we call sensings. Such occurrences are missing in 'merely' material things" (ibid., p. 146). PHILOSOPHY TODAY 58 14. This can already be seen in Husserl's claim that, with a different direction of the apprehension, presentational sensations become affective, and affects can become presentations (ibid., pp. 146–47). There is an essential doubling, as well as an ambiguity, in the structure of sensations in this regard (as we shall see below). 15. Husserl coins the term Empfindnisse (sensings) in the plural. It brings together the notions of Erlebnis and Empfindung. Empfindnisse are hence sensuous experiences that are lived through, but not objectivated. They are the lived Body's reflexive, and non-intentional, experiences of itself (while being at the same time the ground of the lived Body's intentional experiences of the world). For a detailed analysis of Husserl's neologism, see Donn Welton's excellent account in "Soft, Smooth Hands, in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 16. "The qualities of material things as aestheta, such as they present themselves to me intuitively, prove to be dependent on my qualities, the make-up of the experiencing subject, and to be related to my Body and my 'normal sensibility'" (Ideas II, p. 56). 17. Ibid., p. 19. 18. Ibid., p. 22. 19. "The sensations, perceptions, rememberings, feelings, affects, etc., are not given to us in experiences as annexes, lacking internal connection, of material Bodies, as if they were unified with one another only through the common phenomenal link of the Body. Instead, they are one by means of their very essence; they are bound and interwoven together, they flow into one another in layers and are possible only in this stream. Nothing can be torn away from this stream; nothing can be separated off as, so to say, a thing for itself" (ibid., p. 92). 20. Husserl adds: "The Body, we can say, always has states of sensation, and which particular ones it has depends on the concomitant system of real circumstances under which it senses" (ibid., p. 155). 21. "But we have two hands, and the entire surface of the Body serves as a touch surface, and the Body itself as a system of touch organs. All these furnish the touch properties, only in different degrees of perfection and also, I might say, with different 'colourings'" (Ideas II, p. 68; my italics ). 22. The distinction between Körper and Leib is stressed by Husserl, and is rendered by the terms body and Body respectively in the translation of Ideas II. (We have tried to follow this translation, employing the term lived Body were the context required additional clarification.) 23. Ideas II, p. 146. 24. "If I speak of the physical thing, 'left hand,' then I am abstracting from these sensations (a ball of lead has nothing like them and likewise for every 'merely' physical thing, every thing that is not my Body.) If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes Body, it senses" (ibid., p. 145). 25. "[L]ocalization of sensings is in fact something in principle different from the extension of all material determinations of a thing. The sensings do indeed spread out in space, cover, in their way, spatial surfaces, run through them, etc. But this spreading out and spreading into are precisely something that differs essentially from extension in the sense of all the determinations that characterize the res extensa" (ibid., p. 149). 26. "The touch-sensing is not a state of the material thing, hand, but is precisely the hand itself, which for us is more than a material thing, and the way in which it is more entails that I, the 'subject of the Body,' can say that what belongs to the material thing is its not mine" (ibid., p. 150). 27. Ibid., p. 145. 28. "And in the case in which a part of the Body becomes equally an external Object of another part, we have the double sensation (each part has its own sensations) and the double apprehension as feature of the one and of the other Bodily part as a physical object" (ibid., p. 147). 29. The touch-sensations in the two hands need not be the same type of sensation. While my right hand is sensing the smoothness of the left (i.e. my right hand is having "smoothness"-sensations), the left hand could be feeling itself tickled or pinched by the right hand. The same play can still take place (with Husserl's example becoming somewhat more complex). What is important is for there to be tactile-sensations in both hands that can alternate between outer perception and inner sensing. 30. ". . . it becomes a Body only by incorporating tactile sensations, pain sensations, etc. – in short, by the loEmory University, Atlanta, GA 30033 THE SITE OF AFFECT 59 calization of the sensations as sensations" (Ideas II, p. 151). 31. Ibid., p. 159. 32. The gap, we should note, is both temporal and spatial. Either the doubled sensations constitute different hands (e.g. the "smoothness"-sensation in the right hand, and the pressure-sensation in the left), or they constitute the same hand, but at successive moments in time (e.g. the "smoothness"-sensations and the kinaestheses of the right hand, which are attentively given at different times). 33. ". . . precisely the same sensations which function as indicational or presentational with respect to the thing, paperweight, function as touch-effects of the paperweight on the hand and as sensings produced in it" ( Ideas II, p. 146). 34. "My hand is lying on the table. I experience the table as something solid, cold and smooth. Moving my hand over the table, I get an experience of it and its thingly determinations. At the same time, I can at any moment pay attention to my hand and find on it touch-sensations, sensations of smoothness and coldness, etc.. In the interior of the hand, running parallel to the experienced movement, I find motion-sensations, etc.. Lifting a thing, I experience its weight, but at the same time I have weight-sensations localized in my Body" (ibid., p. 146). 35. "The word 'impression' is appropriate only to original sensations; the word expresses well what is 'there' of itself, and indeed, originally: namely what is pregiven to the Ego, presenting itself to the Ego in the manner of something affecting it as foreign" (ibid., p. 336). 36. Basically sensations are my most subjective possessions, according to Husserl, because they are also my first possessions, the ultimate "pregivennesses for all the Ego's operations" (ibid., p. 214). The distinction which Husserl makes here (and which allows him to navigate the ambiguities associated with sensation) is that between a subjective having, a possession of the subject, and a subjective doing, acts or states of the subject (ibid., p. 317). (But if sensations are also sensings, then should not the rigidity of this distinction be questioned?) 37. "On this surface of the hand I sense the sensations of touch, etc.. And it is precisely thereby that this surface manifests itself immediately as my Body" (ibid., p. 150). 38. "But if I attend to the hand and the finger, then they have touch sensations which still linger when the hand is withdrawn" (ibid., p. 146). 39. Ibid., p. 337. 41. In this sense the self-affection, and self-constitution, of the lived Body can be compared to that of the flow of time-constituting consciousness. The peculiarity of this consciousness is that, while responsible for the constitution of immanent time, it is not itself in time, nor does it require some other consciousness behind the flow that would hold it together (cf. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 381–82). 41. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Philosophy Department of Emory University, whose support allowed this work to come about.