Edmund Husserl’s Account of Non-Normality: Towards a Phenomenological Cartography

Over the last few years, issues related to the phenomenology of norms, normality, and normativity have been widely discussed in the scholarship. While several contributions devoted to Husserl’s account of normality exist, a systematic investigation of the categories of “non-normality” proves to be lacking. Moreover, such an investigation is necessary to grasp the essential link between Husserl’s treatment of (non-)normality and the general framework of transcendental phenomenology of reason. This paper aims to provide a preliminary cartography of non-normalities in Husserl by distinguishing three fundamental categories: anomaly, abnormality, and madness. Firstly, I examine the anomaly, which designates local disruptions in perceptual concordance, typically grounded in modifications of the lived body. Secondly, I explore the case of ‘abnormality’ through the paradigmatic case of the animal, and I show that it does not imply a mere discordance in sensations, but rather a structural difference of world-experience that nonetheless finds its teleological fulfillment in the transcendental structure of reason. Thirdly, I dwell on “madness” (Verrücktheit), which refers to the limit-situation of a global and complete disruption of experience that regards the whole of experience as such and that, for Husserl, can take two forms, namely: i) the impossibility of constituting a world or ii) the impossibility of constituting a true world. By articulating these distinctions, the paper shows that Husserl’s analyses of non-normality presuppose a teleological reduction to normality, thereby revealing its central role in the constitution of objectivity and transcendental reason.