In this paper, I analyse Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memories from a phenomenological perspective. Prosthetic memory, while sharing similarities with both personal and collective memory, is neither exclusively personal nor strictly collective, emerging as a product of new media in mass communication. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories have four main characteristics: the recaller experiences them as firsthand accounts despite not personally living through the events, these memories often revolve around traumatic events, have a commodified form, and are ethically useful. Using Husserl’s theories on memory consciousness and image consciousness, and contemporary phenomenological research on violence, I provide a phenomenological account for the first three characteristics of prosthetic memory. The key factors contributing to their quasi-personal and quasi-collective nature lie, on the one hand, in the presence of imagistic violence and, on the other hand, in their mass-mediated image character.
Call for Papers: Studia Phaenomenologica vol. 26 (2026): “Phenomenology and Psychopathology”
Editors: Françoise Dastur and Maria Gyemant Argument: Phenomenology was conceived by Edmund Husserl as the rigorous and objective science of subjectivity. It aims to explore subjectivity in a way far more complete than empirical psychology could ever do since it does...