DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM No. 3/2015 Saulius Geniusas THE PATHOS OF TIME: CHRONIC PAIN AND TEMPORALITY ABSTRACT The paper offers a phenomenological interpretation of the temporality of chronic pain. First, I maintain that the field of presence constitutes the exhaustive horizon within which chronic pain is lived. Secondly, I argue that chronic pain is a form of depersonal- ization in that it cuts the field of presence from the past and the future. Thirdly, drawing on some recent phenomenological and neurological findings, I argue that the past and the future, despite their apparent irreality, continue to affect the present “behinds its back”: either through implicit bodily memory, or through implicit bodily anticipation. Thus despite its depersonalizing effects, chronic pain is a deeply personal experience. In my conclusion, I turn to the therapeutic significance of such a phenomenology of tem- porality. I maintain that if chronic pain is nested in implicit temporality, then to confront it, one must become conscious of its effects and, if possible, neutralize their meaning. Keywords: phenomenology, chronic pain, temporality, memory, anticipation. INTRODUCTION Any analysis of pain must make clear from the start how it understands the object of its study. Clarity is especially called for in pain research, not only be- cause different disciplines understand pain in highly diverse ways, but also because there are different types of pain, which entail significantly divergent characteristics. Thus pain is methodologically and ontologically overdeter- mined. In what follows, I will focus exclusively on chronic pain, which, follow- ing the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association, one can provisionally understand as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience arising from actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage […] without a predictable end and a duration greater than six months.” 1 We are ————————— 1 North American Nursing Diagnosis Association. Nursing Diagnoses: Definitions and Classi- fications. Philadelphia (PA): NANDA 1996, 76.