The Object of Feeling. A Husserlian Reading of the Relation between Feeling and Objectivation in the Light of Renaud Barbaras´s Seminar

Abstract

The paper takes as its point of departure Renaud Barbaras´s reference to the famous principle of the primacy of objectivation traditionally ascribed to Edmund Husserl, in order to reflect on the non-objectifying character of feeling and the complex relation between feeling and objectivation. Since the very beginnings of the phenomenological movement, the relationship between objectivation, constitution, and intentionality in the sphere of feeling was one of the main points of the phenomenological discussion on affective life. This subject, which has been critically revisited in post-husserlian phenomenology, acquires in Barbaras´s reference a new sense. After discussing Barbaras´s own position and the exact sense of this reference to Husserl in the context of his work Métaphysique du sentiment, we will deal with the following questions: how is feeling related to an object? What does it mean to “have an object”? and What can feeling teach us on the topics of the intentional correlation and the subject´s relationship with objectivity?