Publication Details

Abstract

Imagination is one of the basic concepts and even the “vital element” of phenomenology. The present article is dedicated to this topic and is mainly based on vol. XXIII of Husserliana. Imagination has played a major role in the process of abstraction, in the constitution of time, of the other, and also of fictional beings (for example, a centaur playing the flute). In this article, the focus will be on fantasia, which is close to imagination and the subject of which is fantasmata. The question concerns the image for consciousness, which is doubled first with the appearing image-object (Bildobjekt, fictum) and then with the intended but absent image-subject (Bildsujet, imaginatum). Sign-consciousness thus frees up the place of image for consciousness. These phenomena of fantasia have the multifaceted character of an “unspeakable emptiness,” with vague, discontinuous contours emerging momentarily. Although this analysis brings fantasia closer to authentic intuition, it is innovative in relation to the tradition which inspired Marc Richir in his project of re-establishing phenomenology and developing a new genetic phenomenology. Without speaking of a new phenomenology, the problem of fantasia fits into Husserl’s systematics, more precisely, noetics, as part of the formative forms. There is no choice but to give the imagination, as a pure game, rules, aesthetic rules, since aesthetics is a part of this “phenomenology of intuitive presentifications.” This is the area of fantasia no. 2, “perceptive fantasia,” which is the core of the “phenomenology of theatricality” that belongs to noematics. The ultimate purpose of these “fantastic” researches is to understand the genesis of “homo imaginans”.