1 Forthcoming in The Subject(s) of Phenomenology (ed. by I. Apostolescu, Dordrecht: Springer, 2020). Please quote from published version. What is Productive Imagination? The Hidden Resources of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy Saulius Geniusas Introduction It seems hardly promising to address productive imagination in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, and for three fundamental reasons. First, Husserl never spoke of productive imagination and he consistently qualified imagination as essentially reproductive; secondly, in the critical literature on Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination, we do not come across a single study exclusively dedicated to the analysis of productive imagination; and thirdly, according to a claim often voiced in the literature on productive imagination, classical phenomenology in general, and Husserlian phenomenology in particular, have nothing to say about productive imagination. It thus seems that, to borrow James Morley’s vivid metaphors, class ical phenomenology pushes productive imagination into “the outer darkness of intellectual irrelevance” in that it treats productive imagination as a “Mischling” — a “bastard child,” who has no place within the “image family” (Morley 1998). These reservations notwithstanding, I would like to show that Husserlian phenomenology of phantasy can make a highly significant contribution to philosophy of productive imagination. The reason for this is quite paradoxical: precisely because of its “obsession” with reproductive imagination, Husserlian phenomenology enables us to determine the concept of productive imagination with great precision. It is not so uncommon to suggest that only a paradigm shift in