Abstract

The issue elaborates the new frontiers of phenomenology, exploring the limit phenomena of the life of consciousness in the posthumous collection of notes and manuscripts by Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (Husserliana XLII, 2014). The protagonists are first of all the limit cases of experience: birth and death, awakening and sleep, the conscious and the unconscious. The issue offers a critical pathway to thematise drives and their relationship to animality on the one hand, and to cognitive and practical activities on the other. The fundamental methodological questions of phenomenological research – investigation of the passivity of consciousness, of affection, of the genesis of experience – are brought into a new light.