Come rain or come shine... The (neo)phenomenological will-to-presentness

Abstract

The paper aims at rehabilitating presence (present, presentification and presentness) from a spatial and temporal viewpoint and opposing against philosophies obsessed with the tendency to hermeneutically and semiotically defer the presence/present’s sense of our experience. They fatally reduce present/presence into a mere elusive moment of transition, totally negligible if compared to the alleged active transformation of the world. The paper focuses specifically on: a) Gum-brecht’s recent kulturkritisch approach to presence, b) the neophenomenological (Schmitz’s) theory of the present as the principle of subjective identity, c) a possible link between these two rehabilitation strategies through the pathic-aesthetic no-tion of felt-bodily presence.