Abstract

This article draws on Husserl’s manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s (especially on the as-yet unpublished D-manuscripts), arguing that each concrete experience is governed by an irreducible tension between two intersecting normative dimensions: primordial and intersubjective. Husserl’s ideas of normality and normativity have gained a lot of attention in recent years, but the normative aspects of primordial constitution have not been properly taken into account. By arguing for the “normative tension” between the primordial and the intersubjective, this article contributes to filling in this lack. By doing so, it sheds new light on the debate concerning the relationship between genetic and generative phenomenology, challenging interpretations that exclusively render either the genetic-primordial or the generative-intersubjective as the constitutive absolute