The Being in the Appearance: Aesthetics, Imaginary and Ontology in the Phenomenologies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

The present article focuses on Husserl's conception of imagination and its ontological implications, as they manifest in a particularly striking way in his genetic phenomenology. I will also analyze how Merleau-Ponty's approach can shed new light on this topic. My contention will be that Husserl, through his reflections on the quasi-presence, discovers a dimension of experience that challenges the primacy of perception. By recognizing a form of real presence in imaginative representations (both in phantasy [Phantasie] and in image-consciousness [Bildbewusstsein]), Husserl, on the one hand, breaks with the traditional definition of image as a simple projection resulting from a subjective mental faculty; and, on the other hand, more fundamentally, forces us to rethink the very notion of reality beyond the opposition between the real and the imaginary. Husserl thus suggests the possibility of an 'ontology' of the Pre-being [Vorsein] and sketches the theory of a transcendental subject diffracted into multiple images of himself.