Abstract

This article explores the notion of pain in relation to its temporal experience. The assumption that pain is something experienced exclusively consciously in the present is challenged. To carry out this enterprise, we start from the notion of Husserlian sedimentation in order to be able to account for the relationship between the temporal structure of consciousness and pain. Exploration of sedimented, implicit experiences is first analyzed phenomenologically, drawing mainly on Husserlian _C Manuscripts_. It is then applied to different medical cases, which highlights the paradoxical force of the past in the experience of pain. In another sense, it is argued that anticipation of the future can also be a painful experience. The appreciation of these aporetic situations in the experience of pain, analyzed along with two types of consciousness, explicit and implicit, raises the question of whether it is possible to experience “unnoticed pain”, purely implicit, in the present. The phenomenon is explained based on the distinction between original sedimentations and secondary sedimentations that Merleau-Ponty makes; these first ones, apparently contradictory, can nevertheless be interpreted as consciousness in its modality of inattention. As well as thematic or co-attended experiences, these also belong to the arc of intentionality. The idea of unnoticed pain makes the claim that pain is something experienced exclusively consciously in the present even more complex.