1 Introduction

Prosthetic memories are closely tied to images portraying violence and the proliferation of mass media. For instance, when I mention the Charlie Hebdo shooting, readers are likely to recall the silhouettes of the terrorists as they roamed the streets of Paris, appearing as spectral figures capable of still instilling fear in those who remember them. I could also reference the crimes committed during the Russo-Ukrainian War, the brutal reprisals against government protests in Kazakhstan in 2022, or instances of extreme violence during the Yugoslav Wars, all of which evoke strong feelings of repulsion and indignation. The list of such occurrences is endless. What do all these events share in common? Undoubtedly, violence is a common thread, but these are also events that we have not (presumably) witnessed in person. We may have witnessed them on television, whether live or recorded, or we may have encountered photographs in newspapers or on websites, among other sources. Even if we did not directly experience them, they can still become embedded in our memory.

Landsberg (2004, 2009) has conceptualized these memories as prosthetic memories, which function as a kind of mental appendices that allow us to recall experiences we have not actually lived. This form of memory emerges through the assimilation of someone else’s memories via mass-mediated representations, especially visual media like photographs, documentary films, and other visual mediums. While phenomenology provides the appropriate concepts to elucidate their distinctive mode of being, prosthetic memories have yet to be examined from this perspective. Therefore, my objective is to conduct a phenomenological analysis of certain facets of prosthetic memories, employing the constitutive analysis formulated by Edmund Husserl. To achieve this, the paper is organized as follows: After a brief exposition of Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (Sects. 2 and 3), I will analyse it through the relationship between two types of re-presentational consciousness—memorial consciousness and image consciousness (Sects. 4 and 5)—and their relation with the phenomenon of violence (Sect. 6). I will also discuss the type of viewer of mass-mediated representations (Sect. 7) before reaching conclusions (Sect. 8).

2 Prosthetic memory

Landsberg (2004, p. 2) defines prosthetic memories as follows:

[…] prosthetic memory emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history […]. [T]he person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity.

Starting from this point onward, I want to emphasise that, despite sharing some similarities with both personal memory and collective memory, a prosthetic memory is neither personal nor collective (cf. Landsberg, 2004, p. 15). While the concept of personal or individual memory is easily understood, the concept of collective memory may require a brief explanation.

Collective memory was first theorized by Halbwachs (1950, 1952). He argued for the existence of a memory shared by small groups of people that is inherited from the older persons in those groups. For instance, my grandmother relates to me the actions of my great-grandfather while he was a soldier in the First World War. On my turn, I will recount to my children what my grand-grandfather went through and so on and so forth. Such narratives provide a living connection between generations. However, if this connection is broken, the living memory will be lost. Halbwachs aimed to contrast this kind of memory—collective memory—with the grand historical narratives. While the first one is meaningful at a personal level, the second one lacks any personal significance.Footnote 1 Alison Landsberg’s understanding of collective memory is not far from Halbwachs’. For her, collective memory is shared by a certain community and gives it a sort of cohesion, be it religious (as it was in the Middle Ages) or national (as it was in the modern era)—these two examples are briefly analysed by Landsberg (2004, pp. 3–8). Therefore, she talks about collective memory in terms of what is primarily grasped by us through education, when for example, we are told about our nation’s past. But we also grasp and integrate this kind of memory by actually living in the public space, where we find all sorts of historical markers, such as statues, monuments, etc. All these generate collective memories, which are (in part) responsible for the cohesion within a certain group, i.e., on a grand scale, cultural identity (Heersmink, 2023).

Prosthetic memories, on the contrary, lack this origin and were not possible prior to the emergences of mass-mediated representations. On one hand, (1) they are quasi-personal because (1.1) they arouse powerful emotions in the subject as if it has truly experienced that event, and (1.2) they are not necessarily shared by its fellow members. On the other hand, (2) they are also quasi-collective because (2.1) the subject can find other subjects who are sharing these memories, and (2.2) it has not directly experienced those events. Instead, they were experienced through some kind of mediation, such as a documentary film, a live video broadcast, etc. The last characteristic of prosthetic memories is also relevant for their name. According to Landsberg, they are prosthetic precisely because the experiences that were sedimented as memory were not lived in person. Moreover, these memories are generated by trauma. There are other features that made Landsberg label them ‘prosthetic,’ such as “their interchangeability and exchangeability” that underscore their commodified form, or their ethical usefulness (Landsberg, 2004, p. 20). Ultimately, Landsberg’s aim is to show their ethical significance. In her words, “prosthetic memory creates the conditions for ethical thinking precisely by encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognising the alterity of, the ‘other’” (cf. Landsberg, 2004, p. 9; 2009).

As some researchers have pointed out (Sobchack, 2004, pp. 205–225; Berger, 2007; Hitchcott, 2021; Hutton, 2022), there are a lot of issues with Landsberg account (see below Sect. 3). The very name—prosthetic memories—is problematic given that it can lead to certain misunderstandings. While I agree with some of the criticism, I also believe that Landsberg touches upon a unique phenomenon with this notion, and precisely this, along with a possible phenomenological account of it, interests me. Before giving a more detailed analysis of prosthetic memories, I think it is useful to have a preliminary general view of the notion developed by Landsberg. According to Landsberg (2003, pp. 149–150; 2004, pp. 20–21), prosthetic memories have four main characteristics: (i) although the experiences that underline these memories are not direct, but mediated, they are remembered as personal and genuine; (ii) they are worn on the body because they mark a trauma; (iii) they have a commodified form; (iv) they can be ethically useful. Given all these, I aim to explain the first perplexing characteristic, that is, the character of not being the product of a first-personal and direct experience but being, at the same time, in Landsberg’s (2004, p. 19) words, “memories that ‘speak’ to the individual in a personal way as if there were actually memories of lived events.” In order to do this, I will use Husserl’s analyses of memorial consciousness and image consciousness, as well as some recent phenomenological analyses of violence. I argue that imagistic violence is a special phenomenon, and its peculiarity makes possible the constitution of a prosthetic memory. Therefore, after a brief methodological Sect. (3), I will present Husserl’s account of memorial consciousness (Sect. 4) and image consciousness (Sect. 5), in order to analyse the peculiar way violence manifests itself in images, generating what is called imagistic violence (Sect. 6). For it is not at all accidental that Landsberg, when speaking about prosthetic memories, accentuates their violent and traumatic character. In fact, in a striking formulation, she asserts that prosthetic memories “derive from a person’s mass-mediated experience of a traumatic event” (2004, p. 19).

3 Preliminary clarifications

Before delving into the structure of prosthetic memory, I have to make some further distinctions. First, the notion of prosthetic memory can be ambiguous because of the ambiguity of the term ‘prosthetics.’ Given the notion of extended mind, one may understand by prosthetic memories those memories that are embodied in different artefacts, such as books, notebooks, journals, photographs, etc. (Clark, & Chalmers, 1998, pp. 12–16). For example, I might not be able to recall on my own what I did last summer. However, when I come across a cup that I bought during my most recent summer vacation, I recall some things that happened on that day. Or I can look at the photos on my phone to remember what I did on my vacation. Thus, the cup or the photos function as “evocative objects,” that is, as a part of my extended memory (Heersmink, 2018). While not ruling out this kind of memory, the latter is different from what Landsberg has in mind with her notion. For her, a prosthetic memory is one that I appropriate through the mediation of an image, even if I have not experienced the event on my own.

Second, to affirm that this is a kind of memory, even a prosthetic one, may seem like too much. For instance, Berger (2007) has pointed out that there is a clear difference between implanted memories, the sort of memories that Roy Batty from Blade Runner has, and Landsberg’s prosthetic memories: The first ones are a much stronger version of “prosthetic” memories, while the second ones are a weaker version of it.Footnote 2 However, one can distinguish between two kinds of prostheses (De Preester & Tsakiris, 2009; Ihde, 2012): extensions and incorporations. Following Ihde’s view and using one of his examples, an artificial limb is an extension, whereas a heart valve ring is an incorporation. The extensions are quasi-transparent, that is, they are partly felt as something alien to the holder, while the incorporations are fully transparent, that is, the holder does not feel them as something different from her bodily experience. From this point of view, Landsberg’s prosthetic memories are extensions, not incorporations. We should note that we are operating here with a different type of extension than the usual one, given that what is extended is not the mobility (as is the case with an artificial limb), but the mind (of course, in another sense that the term “extended mind” is used in contemporary literature). I will show below what quasi-transparent means in the case of prosthetic memories (see below Sects. 6 and 8).

Third, the label ‘prosthetic’ is very problematic because we are not dealing here with prostheses per se if we understand prosthesis as an artificial body part that replaces a missing body part. Indeed, a prosthetic memory does not replace something that is missing. However, if we understand ‘prosthesis’ in a loose sense, i.e., as “an artificial body part” (as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary), then the term is partly justified. In this case, we are dealing with an “artificial memory part.” The term ‘artificial’ refers to the fact that one has not experienced the event in person but through the mediation of an image. Perhaps, instead of ‘prosthetic memories,’ one should speak of ‘mediated memories,’ but this would create another ambiguity, given that ‘meditated memories’ is a concept of its own (see van Dijck, 2007), which has both similarities and differences compared to Landsberg’s notion.

Last, I will not analyse the fourth feature of prosthetic memories from a phenomenological point of view because I think the ethical usefulness belongs to the empirical dimension; that is, prosthetic memories can be ethically useful, but this is not necessary. Indeed, as Hitchcott (2021) showed, prosthetic memories “can have harmful consequences” (see also Barash, 2016, pp. 114–67, especially pp. 154, 235–36).

4 Memorial consciousness

Husserl has given a sophisticated account of recollection (Erinnerung),Footnote 3 even though it was not a central topic in his investigations. Memory became important for Husserl (1991, pp. 47–52) in order to make a crucial distinction between what he called the primary memory and the secondary memory. The first one, which he later called retention, belongs to the present, or, to be more precise, to the living present (lebendige Gegenwart), together with the primal impression and the protention, whereas the secondary memory is an entirely different act. A common way of exemplifying retention is through the act of listening to a melody. While listening, I do not hear only the present tones (i.e., primal impressions, as Husserl names them), but I also passively retain the just past tones (and I also passively anticipate the future notes). In this way, Husserl can account for the fact that we listen precisely to a melody, not different and separated tones. Every living present presupposes a complex whole that is composed of three non-autonomous parts: Retention (primal memory), primal impression, and protention. Thus, while retention does not presuppose recollection, recollection does presuppose retention because every act, including the act of memory, takes place in a living present.Footnote 4

In order to understand Husserl’s theory of recollection, the distinction between presentation (Gegenwärtigung) and re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung) is essential. On the one hand, the act of presentation is an act through which something is directly given to the consciousness. Something presents itself to me, as when I perceive a tree. On the other hand, the act of re-presentation is an act through which something is one way or another brought into the present, that is, something is re-presented. Re-presentation is thus secondary to presentation but, at the same time, it has its own peculiar form of intentionality. The re-presented object can be brought to the present in several ways, according to different criteria. One such criterion is time and, from this point of view, one can re-present something either from the past (we remember something) or from the future (we expect something). Moreover, all re-presentational acts have a peculiar characteristic, namely, they possess what Husserl calls “double intentionality.” In this case, two intentions are intrinsically interwoven. First, there is the act of re-presentation as such. However, what it brings into the present is not only the re-presented object but also the act aiming at that object (Husserl, 1991, pp. 131–132). For instance, when I imagine a unicorn, I also re-present the perceptual act of viewing it, not just the unicorn as such. More specifically, I imagine the unicorn from certain angles, as if I actually see it in a normal act of perception. As a result, re-presentation has several characteristics: It is possible only because there has been a prior act of presentation, it is characterized by double intentionality, and it has several forms, according to different criteria, such as time.

Memorial consciousness (Erinnerungsbewusstsein) or, as Husserl (2006, p. 456) sometimes calls it, “the consciousness once again [Wiederbewusstsein]” is precisely an act of re-presentation (Husserl, 1991, p. 101). First, it naturally presupposes a previous act that is recalled. Second, when I remember something, I do not only bring into the present the past object but also the act through which I originally intended that object, even though only the object itself is thematically intended while the act is implicitly intended (Husserl, 1991, pp. 55–57, 310). Therefore, the act of recalling presupposes two acts that are jointed together: the current act of recalling and the recalled act together with the recalled object. For instance, when I recall some police officers seizing a protester, I also recall my original act of perception, i.e., I recall the seizure from certain angles, the same angles from which I witnessed it originally. Furthermore, an act of recollection is possible precisely because there is an “original forgetting [ursprüngliche Vergessenheit]” (Husserl, 2001a, p. 525).Footnote 5 While living, I constantly intend different things or events. These experiences sink down into the past, affecting my ego and being deposited in it. They belong to what Husserl (2001a, pp. 475–77) also called “far retention,” which is different from “near retention,” which belongs to the living present. Thus, original forgetting makes possible new experiences and, at the same time, makes possible memorial consciousness. When I recollect something, I access experiences that have sunk down into the depths of consciousness, that is, the far retentions. They can be re-presented, that is, remembered. Husserl (1991, p. 39, 2001b, p. 370) speaks about several types of recalling: There are the sudden remembrances, which are spontaneously emerging in my consciousness, and the usual intentional remembrances.

5 Image consciousness

Memorial consciousness is essentially different from image consciousness. In Husserl’s (2006, p. 36) words, “[m]emory […] is not image-consciousness; it is something totally different.” Both of them are types of re-presentational consciousness, but they are nevertheless different forms of acts. In fact, image consciousness cannot be simply understood starting from time, even though, like all acts of consciousness, it presupposes it. Moreover, the structure of image consciousness is much more complex.Footnote 6 Husserl had two main conceptions of image consciousness throughout his life, but I will focus only on the last one.

Image consciousness is a special act that essentially combines a presentation and a re-presentation. Taking the object as our guide, there is (i) the image-thing that is presented to me in perception: the canvas of a painting that is there in front of me, the sheet of photographic paper that is present in person, the glass display of the smartphone, etc. However, if I had just this thing in my grasp, then it would have been a simple act of perception. In fact, when looking at an image, I notice only incidentally the physical thing, or, in Husserl’s terms, I non-actionally intend it. I rather look into (hineinschauen) the image (Husserl, 2006, p. 37). The image is like a window through which I look at something else. The object I am looking at through the image is (ii) the image-subject. For instance, I look at the figure of the real person Rembrandt, who lived and painted this self-portrait, at a protest that is live-broadcasted, etc. Thus, in image consciousness, there is also a re-presentation, the re-presentation of the image-subject, and not only the presentation of the image-thing. There is a re-presentation because the intended object is brought into the present through the image. If I look at a picture on my phone, my whole attention is aimed at the subject depicted on its screen. Thus, there is a third object, (iii) the image-object, that is, the object through which I am looking at the image-subject. For instance, in the case of the video, the image-object is the little figure of the person depicted. I can intend this little figure at any time, but usually I am engulfed by the image-subject. The last one is properly nothing without the image-object, which is presented just as the image-thing is presented. However, there is an important difference between the image-thing and the image-object. In order to fully understand the complexity of image consciousness, we need another important distinction that Husserl has made, i.e., the distinction between positionality and neutrality.

Positional consciousness is the most basic form of consciousness. It is a consciousness that takes its object as existing. It is the most basic form because every other type of consciousness, for instance, the doubting one, the supposing one, etc., are modifications of the positional one. However, there is a special modification of positional consciousness, the so-called neutrality modification (Husserl, 1983, pp. 260–262). The last one incapacitates positional consciousness, transforming it into an “as if” consciousness. It is special because positionality, together with all its possible modifications, can be modified into a neutral consciousness. For instance, when reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, someone can debate which of the two stories is the “real” one, even though the reader knows that both of them are fictious. The differences between presentation and re-presentation, and positionality and neutrality do not completely overlap. I can transform a positional presentation into a neutral presentation at any time. For instance, when I am debating with someone over the legitimacy of a protest, I can neutralise my judgement in order to better understand the other person’s argument. This kind of neutralisation does not negate my judgement, it just incapacitates it, i.e., suspends it.

Why is this second difference—the one between positionality and neutrality—important for image consciousness? In my first description of image consciousness, I have emphasised the objective part of it. Thus, using the difference between presentation and re-presentation, we have seen that image consciousness presupposes three different objects: (i) the image-thing, that is, the bearer of the image, (ii) the image-object, that is, the object through which we see (iii) the image-subject. If the image-subject is something re-presented and the image-thing and the image-object are presented, what is the difference between the image-thing and the image-object? Precisely here is where the difference between positionality and neutrality intervenes. The image-thing is something presented and positioned, whereas the image-object is something presented but neutralised. For instance, if I am looking at a photograph showing a protester attacked by police on my laptop, the laptop with its display is the image-thing. On the display, I see the shape of the protester’s body, which is much smaller than the protester themself. This is the image-object, the object depicting the depicted subject. There is a fundamental difference between this small “body” and the display of the laptop: the first one is given as if it would be there, in front of me, as really existing, while the display is really there—I can put my hand on it, I can break it, etc. The difference between the two of them is especially visible in the conflict between the surrounding space of the laptop and the “fictive” space of the image-object. The last one, although presented, nonetheless has an “as if” character. It is as if it were a real space. Of course, this way of looking at the image is artificial—made possible by a reflective consciousness—because, in everyday life, we look through the image-object at the image-subject. In other words, the image-object functions as the appearance of the depicted subject. In our example, we look through the small bodies present on the screen at the real persons with their real dimensions, colours, etc.

Now, one can rightly raise the following question: How can one speak of the neutrality of the image-subject, given that there are images, such as photos or live videos, to take the most obvious examples, that re-present us existing objects or events? If we take into consideration a fiction movie or a painting depicting some mythological figures, then we can rightly talk about the as if character of the image-subject, but, in the case of live videos, the depicted subject is positioned by the consciousness. Husserl is well aware of this issue, and he nevertheless argues for the neutral character of the image-subject as such. Indeed, the image-subject can be positional only through a posterior synthesis of identification, which relies on the (meaning) horizon. For example, when I look at a photograph of a protester being beaten by policemen, I can immediately posit the image-subject, given the entire socio-political context (the horizon) of which I am implicitly aware. Later on, after someone tells me about manipulation through AI generated images, I can start to doubt whether what I saw was truly existent, i.e., I become highly aware of the imagistic character of the violent event which I initially took for granted. Or, when I look at a mockumentary about zombies, I immediately perceive the image-subject as fictional, given that I implicitly know that zombies are a product of fantasy.

To sum up, memorial consciousness is an act of re-presentation that brings into the present a past object, whereas image consciousness is an act both of presentation and re-presentation. Image consciousness presents us a thing on which there is an object that re-presents a certain subject. If we bring together memory consciousness and image consciousness, do we obtain the consciousness of a prosthetic memory? Certainly not. For, as should be already clear, recalling an image presupposes a double re-presentation, i.e., bringing the subject’s re-presentation through an image into the present from the past. That is, when I see an image and then recall it, I am recalling precisely seeing an image. That is why we cannot yet speak about a prosthetic memory. It is just a usual individual memory of an image. In order to acquire a prosthetic memory, the image has to be special, that is, it must be traumatic in some way. That is why I have to introduce the phenomenon of violence. As I said from the very beginning, I think it is crucial that Landsberg, when theorising prosthetic memories, refers to traumatic events that become part of my memory, even if I did not witness them in person. Traumatic events are apprehended as traumatic because they are violent. Violence is a special phenomenon that must be addressed.

6 Imagistic violence

Before analysing the peculiarities of violence, first, I take what Landsberg calls traumatic events as violent events that are experienced as violent. While Landsberg discusses traumatic events extensively, she does not provide a definition of trauma. The term often suggests psychological trauma (e.g., Landsberg, 2004, pp. 19, 94, 101, 135–36, 155), even though the physiological meaning is sometimes implied (e.g., 2004, p. 20). Moreover, traumatic events are understood by Landsberg in close connection with violence (e.g. 2004, pp. 28–29, 124–28). Given all these, I take the term ‘trauma’ in a large sense, starting from its ancient Greek root, as wound. In this context, the wound pertains to the living body (Leib), the subjective body that I am before any objectivation of it, objectivation that transforms the living body into a mere material body (Körper).Footnote 7 Therefore, in this context, trauma does not have a medical meaning (be it psychological or physiological), but an existential or phenomenological meaning. Since violence essentially presupposes the possibility of being wounded (Murchadha, 2019, p. 45; Breazu, 2020, pp. 161–63), it is safe to equate a violent event that is experienced as violent by the victim or the third—“violence that has an impact,” as Endreß and Pabst (2013, p. 91) put it—with a traumatic event, or, more precisely, with a traumatizing experience, which emphasises the subjective meaning of trauma (2013, p. 96–97).Footnote 8

Second, I emphasize that violent events must be experienced as violent. This is because someone can acknowledge that photographs, such as Jabin Botsford’s photographs of the George Floyd protests, depict violent events, yet one might not truly experience them as violent. As Husserl would say, I can emptily intend something without intuiting it, without intending it “in person,” as is the case when I make a correct calculation without having the insight of how the arguments lead to the output value. There are also other cases, such as violence being perceived as beautiful in certain contexts (see Breazu, 2023), etc. Thus, not all “traumatic images” traumatize, and that is why the addition of ‘experienced as violent’ is crucial here.

Recent phenomenological studies on violence (e.g., Waldenfels, 1991, 2006, Dodd, 2009, 2017, Staudigl, 2015) revealed the complex issue of violence’s origin. The phenomenological origin of violence lies in something that does not fit into the schema of origin. On the contrary, the origin of violence is a sort of non-origin.Footnote 9 If, as Husserl does, we equate the primordial origin with the original sense-bestowing of transcendental consciousness, then the origin of violence lies in nonsense. The expression ‘violence is nonsensical’ is ambiguous because violence constitutes itself in three different ways, according to the three essential poles that compose the phenomenon of violence: The ego that is violated (the victim), the ego that violates (the perpetrator), and the ego that witnesses an act of violence (the third) (Ciocan, 2020, pp. 199–200). Consider the previously mentioned example: a group of policemen seizes a protester.Footnote 10 First, being violated. In this case, my sense-bestowal is diminished through the acts of the aggressors: my ability to move is reduced because they start to surround and isolate me, I am incapacitated by blows, I am forced to listen to offensive words, my identity as a human is disfigured, i.e., my essential “I can” is reduced. From this point of view, ‘violence is nonsensical’ means violence is sense-destroying (cf. Mensch, 2008, 2013, 2019), in this case, my very sense-bestowal is in the process of being destroyed. Second, wanting desperately to stop the protester. In this case, the usual way of stopping him through dialogue is bypassed. I attempt to force the other to obey my command, i.e., I attempt to transform my possibility to be able to (Vermöglichkeit)—my essential “I can”—into an infinite power that should transgress all the boundaries and laws of the human world. The doer of violence is someone who attempts to act as a god, as something that aspires to transcend the human world as a significative aggregate of rules, deeds, and speeches (cf. Sartre, 1992, p. 174).Footnote 11 In this case, ‘violence is nonsensical’ means violence surpasses sense. Third, as a witness to the protester being seized and beaten by the policemen: In this case, ‘violence is nonsensical’ means that the witness cannot trace its meaning, i.e., it refuses to make sense. Violence is meaningless because the third cannot grasp its raison d’être. If we incorporate violence into the web of meanings, then we will not deal with violence per se but with a form of rationalised violence, that is, with something impure. In fact, almost always, violence is understood in this way, as an intertwinement of sense and nonsense. However, in the very moment of experience, violence appears to us as something essentially strange, alien, and unrelated to our way of being in the world, even if it will later be integrated into the network of meanings (cf. Waldenfels, 1991, 2006, 2019). In the given example, we can immediately attenuate the impact of violence by pointing to a motivation: the police reacted this way because the protester disobeyed their orders. Their actions have a reason, potentially leading us to excuse their violent behaviour: They were simply following orders, merely executing them. However, the more violence is perceived as such, the more the phenomenon tends to resist rationalisation. There are numerous examples both real or fictious of people (such as those in the aftermath of the bloodshed in the 20th song of the Odyssey) who believe in some form of retributive justice involving violence, and yet, despite this, they often experience the senselessness of inflicting suffering on others. Of course, there are cases when someone grasps an event as violent while someone else does not. A good example is pugilism. Some consider boxing as violent, while others do not. For pugilism is a clearly regulated sport. These regulations function as a horizon of meaning that tends to annihilate its violent potential. In this case, boxing may be experienced as an aggressive sport, which is very different from the case in which it is experienced as violent. This has to do with the personal style of each ego, that is, with its personal history, with the way in which someone was educated, etc. However, what is relevant here is the phenomenon of violence, not the empirical cases, because the phenomenological structure of the experience is the same. Thus, the nonsense of violence shows itself through its three essential moments: for the victim, as withdrawal of sense, for the doer, as surpassing of sense, and for the third, as privation of sense.

When experiencing violence in images, we usually take the stance of the third (Ciocan, 2021).Footnote 12 There are also the stances of the victim and the agent, but these are not relevant here. As shown, for the third, violence is meaningless because it cannot be brought into the constituted world. It is contrary to the sense of things. My aim in this paragraph is to show that imagistic violence can deeply affect the third. To show this, I will argue, following Husserl’s analyses, that negation is an essential source of affection, if not the most important. Nonsense phenomena, and especially the phenomenon at issue here, violence, arouse powerful feelings. Violence is not only a limit-phenomenon in the sense indicated above (cf. Staudigl, 2015, p. 50), but it is also a limit-phenomenon because, in the terms of Jaspers (2019, pp. 219–222), it is a limit-situation. Therefore, it is natural that violence arouses powerful feelings, given its peculiar way of negating phenomenality, i.e., as something that breaks off every day experiences through its peculiar negative character. Its power of affection comes precisely from its peculiar way of being, which has to do with meaninglessness and nonsense. In order to show this, we can take into consideration the lowest strata of experience, that is, what Husserl calls the passive syntheses of receptivity. At this level, which is obtained by Husserl through a process of abstraction, associative unification is possible because of the pairs “blending-contrast,” “affinity-strangeness,” and “homogeneity-heterogeneity.” The objects are constituted starting from a field of continuities and discontinuities, the latter always having the force to affect the ego, to stimulate it, to wake up its interest through their attractive character. Going to a superior layer, where we deal with proper objects, in the case of simple perception, we can be disappointed by certain features of an object that immediately captivate our interest, and we can go further, to more complex experiences, such as the surprise. In all these cases of negation, the experience is throughout constitutive, that is, meaningful (Husserl, 1973, p. 90). In fact, Husserl (2001a, p. 197) considers that “contrast is […] to be characterized as the most original condition of affection,” while “[e]xtremes of contrast are so strong, make such a forcefully efficacious prominence that they drown out, so to speak, all competing contrasts.” Thus, the most powerful form of affection is negation, in its various forms. Essentially, the greater the negation, the more intense the affectation. Starting from here, a fortiori, a deconstitutive experience, such as violence, has all the more affective force of imposing itself to the viewer because we are not dealing with a mere contrast between different constituted phenomena by the consciousness sense-bestowal (such as a cup having a different colour on the other side), but with a contrast with sense itself. This is because, as mentioned, the third is witnessing a peculiar phenomenon involving two opposing poles engaged in an asymmetrical confrontation, each with its own intentionality. Since both are transgressing the usual activity of consciousness (sense-bestowal), the third cannot integrate either the attempt to surpass sense (the aggressor’s actions) or the withdrawal of sense (the victim’s experience) into the web of meanings. The third is experiencing precisely the incapacity of making sense, i.e., the privation of sense, which is a unique type of negation. As Waldenfels (2006, p. 76) states, “violence appears as something out of place, as a sort of foreign body, which disturbs and interrupts the economy of sense.” Therefore, the violence we are experiencing from the point of view of the third will never leave us cold. When we witness a violent event, we feel outraged, shocked, or disgusted, to name just a few of the feelings provoked by a violent deed (see Ciocan, 2020, pp. 214–217).

This characteristic is especially relevant for our issue. For violence, with its special kind of negating phenomenality, has a special power of affection, which imposes on us in a peculiar way in an image. The videos or photographs taken both by amateurs or professionals (such as the famous photograph taken by Jabin Botsford, which was first published in Stanley-Becker et al. (2020), in which he captured a protester being seized by several policemen) during the George Floyd protests, can function as an example. The violent event is indeed just depicted but, because of its special character, it can completely immerse us in the image, making us feel as if we were witnesses to the event and thus traumatising us, that is, experiencing the lack of sense of the actions viewed. Moreover, as Marinescu (2024, pp. 9–10; cf. Ciocan, 2021, p. 341) puts it, “the effect [of imagistic violence] may be that of an even stronger exposure to the poignancy of the violence, with an intensification of the viewer’s experience of violence.” Therefore, imagistic violence is able to create moods that can last a long time (cf. Ferencz-Flatz 2022) and encompass our entire world, provoking a trauma that can deeply shape our memory. The shock that the depicted event creates in the eyes of the beholder, along with the fact that we co-experience it together with other possible people watching it (see below Sect. 7), can therefore make one believe that the memory is genuine, as if the third did actually witness the violent event. However, memorial consciousness re-presents it together with image consciousness, with its multiple layers of presentation and re-presentation, positionality and neutrality (see above Sects. 4 and 5), and does not let the violent event be experienced as an event lived in person. Thus, there is tension between the two of them: Violence tends to overwhelm the subject, whereas image consciousness does not let it be fully experienced. Precisely this tension peculiar to imagistic violence can create what Landsberg calls prosthetic memories. For, on the one hand, violence intensively arouses us, while, on the other hand, the neutrality of image constantly withdraws its force. The character of being experienced through an image is displaced because the phenomenon of violence captivates the whole interest of the subject. In this sense, prosthetic memories act as a sort of false memoriesFootnote 13 because of the blending between the positionality of the event intensified by the experienced violence, and the neutrality of images. Thus, I can unreflectively relate to a brutally repressed protest as if I actually experienced it in person, but as soon as I reflect on it, I realise that the memory is just a mediated one. The strange character of prosthetic memories being both genuine and not genuine derives precisely from the second feature, that is, the trauma that violence has produced through the mediation of the image. That is why we can say that prosthetic memories are quasi-transparent: We tend to relate to them as being our memories but, in fact, they are mediated memories, just as someone who uses an artificial limb, for the most part, does not feel it as something alien to the living body, but there are also moments when the artificial limb is felt precisely as something alien to the body.

7 We-intentionality in mass-media

The analysis I have undertaken so far shows why prosthetic “memories […] ‘speak’ to the individual in a personal way as if there were actually memories of lived events” (Landsberg, 2004, p. 19). However, the other feature, i.e., that they are also quasi-collective, does not emerge at all. One can say that this character appears only a posteriori, when different people communicate with each other about the events that they have experienced through images. However, I think that this feature can also be phenomenologically analysed. Someone familiar with the phenomenological method can protest against a concept such as collective memory. What can be problematic about collective memories and, to a lesser extent, about prosthetic memories, is that memorial consciousness is first-personal. Memories are necessarily my memories, they have the first-person feature, while collective memories seem to presuppose a collective agent, something that phenomenology, at least at first glance, seems to reject. However, recent research in the so-called “collective intentionality” (Zahavi, 2021a, b) shows that from the very beginning, Husserl conceived the personal ego from the point of view of intersubjectivity. Thus, even though at the lowest level of consciousness every experience has a “for-me-ness” character (Zahavi & Kriegel, 2015; Zahavi, 2020), at a superior level, every experience involves in a peculiar way the other egos. For instance, a simple perception of a physical thing is always permeated by a possible other ego. As Husserl (1960, p. 125) says, “every natural Object experienced or experienceable by me in the lower stratum receives an appresentational stratum (though by no means one that becomes explicitly intuited), a stratum united in an identifying synthesis with the stratum given to me in the mode of primordial originality: the same natural Object in its possible modes of givenness to the other Ego.” However, prosthetic memories involve the other subjects in a more meaningful way. In order to show how it involves others so that it also becomes quasi-collective, I would like to take the third characteristic of the prosthetic memories as a guide for the following phenomenological analysis.

The third characteristic of prosthetic memories lies in the fact that they are the result of images that are commodified. This is due to the fact that, in the age of mass-media, images have lost what Walter Benjamin (2008, pp. 23–24) referred to as “the aura.” The images lost the uniqueness that the act of manual production had given them. Images are mass-produced and reproduced, whether we are talking about photographs, films, posters, etc. Thus, they become commodities that can easily travel from one part of the world to another. If we are talking about live transmissions via radio, television, or the Internet, then space is eliminated almost entirely, given that, from a first-personal point of view, an object transmitted through such channels can instantly reach the recipient. What is relevant from a phenomenological point of view is the fact that the viewer of images transmitted through television or Internet is a special viewer. For, as Ferencz-Flatz (2017) points out, in the case of television, although the viewer may actually be alone in front of the television, she nevertheless constitutes herself as one of a multitude of viewers, sharing with them something similar to what audiences share in a movie theatre (Hanich, 2017). The difference is that the other spectators, in the case of television, are only co-present in a necessarily signitive way, never being able to be physically present. As Ferencz-Flatz further remarks, this shows that, in the case of mass communication media, the concrete experience is permeated by “statistical thinking” (2017, p. 29), and this is precisely what is relevant for the possibility of prosthetic memories. The violence propagated through such media thus becomes an object whose correlate is a collective rather than a singular subject. When I watch a live video depicting the brutal repress of a protest, I am aware, as Husserl would say, in a non-actionally way of the fact that that video is addressed to an indeterminately large audience, who may at that very moment be watching with me what is happening. Thus, the prosthetic memory that has been sedimented in me has a collective character from the very beginning because of the commodified form of the image. It is precisely this feature that gives prosthetic memory its quasi-collective character, not just the fact that I can a posteriori share that memory with other subjects.

Before reaching conclusions, I want to deal with some possible misunderstandings. First, even if the very name of prosthetic memories is problematic (see above Sect. 3), the notion itself nevertheless refers to a phenomenon on its own, as I have attempted to argue above. Second, I think it is important to note that these memories are acquired through images. Of course, one can also experience violence through other types of media, e.g., texts. In this case, however, the intentionality of consciousness is different. We are dealing with a signitive or symbolic consciousness (Husserl, 2006, pp. 39, 89), not with an image consciousness. While in the latter case we have an inherent intuitive fulfilment (we look at the image-subject through the image-object that is carried by the image-thing), in the first case, the intuitive fulfilment is accomplished in a quite different way. In Husserl’s words, “[t]he symbolizing function represents something externally” (2006, p. 89). Thus, the violence represented through signs (or symbols) has a much weaker force of affection precisely because the consciousness represents it externally and not internally, as is the case with an image.

8 Conclusions

According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories first appeared in the age of mass-mediated representations. Prosthetic memory is a special kind of memory with several characteristics. First, they are both personal and collective, though they are neither entirely personal nor collective. Second, they are called “prosthetic” because they are experienced as genuine, even though they are the result of a mediated experience, they mark a trauma, they have a commodified form, and they are ethically useful. Although the ethical relevance is undeniably important, if not the most important, my aim in this paper was much more modest. I attempted to address only the first three features, given that the fourth one (prosthetic memories’ usefulness) is contextual. Thus, after presenting Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (Sect. 2) and making some prior clarifications (Sect. 3), I analysed it through Husserl’s theory of memorial and image consciousness (Sects. 4 and 5), and the contemporary phenomenological approaches to violence (Sect. 6). In this way, I showed that the paradoxical character of prosthetic memories appearing genuine to consciousness in spite of the fact that the underlying experience is mediated derives from the subject depicted in the image, i.e., violence, which has the peculiar character of powerfully affecting the subject and thus tends to come out of the image, to cancel out the necessarily neutral character that any image nonetheless assumes. This analysis clarified the personal dimension of prosthetic memories. Last, by analysing the third feature—the commodified form—I argued that the one looking at such images is non-actionally aware of the possibility of other viewers, thus making the experience also a quasi-collective one (Sect. 7). As a result, prosthetic memory is both quasi-personal and quasi-collective, that is, in postphenomenological terminology, quasi-transparent.