From Affectivity to Affectedness: Sensibility, Embodiment and the Corporeal Constitution of Time

This article reconsiders the phenomenological relation between affectivity, embodiment, and temporality by examining the constitutive role of corporeality in the formation of temporal experience. Taking Enzo Paci’s material reinterpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology as its point of departure, it argues that the temporal organization of embodied existence cannot be fully understood within the framework of sensuous and affective time-consciousness alone. Through a reconstruction of Husserl’s analyses of affectivity, passive synthesis, and embodiment, the article distinguishes between affectivity as the temporal structure of self-awareness and a different dimension of bodily affectedness, grounded in the body’s material exposure to the world. It is argued that this dimension discloses a heterochronic form of corporeal temporality irreducible to the retentional-protentional synthesis of inner time-consciousness. Drawing upon Bernhard Waldenfels and Drew Leder, the article develops the concept of corporeal impermanence to describe the irreversible, heterogeneous, and materially conditioned processes through which bodily existence continually transforms and individuates itself. Finally, it is suggested that corporeal temporality provides the phenomenological condition not only of intercorporeality but also of the lifeworld’s temporal structure, thereby opening a new perspective on the embodied foundations of intersubjective and social temporality.