IMAGINATION NOW: IN CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD KEARNEY

ABSTRACT

Powerfully displaying the centrality of imagination in Richard Kearney's thinking, it stimulates us to consider imagination as vital for the opening of the new horizons of our being in the world and for the creative rethinking of the traditional oppositions between reason and body, faith and atheism, word and touch, philosophy and literature, high and popular culture, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and more. If we do not, we cannot love." [...]since the narrative mode of selfhood presupposes a self that perdures over time between birth and death, it entails moral responsibility. While all traditions share an understanding of imagination as a specifically human ability to convert "absence into presence," it is the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition that, by focusing on imagination's creative (and not merely representational) potential, discloses with greatest force that freedom requires the ability to imagine-to surpass the givenness of a situation and envision and anticipate "the world as if" (cf. In his uncompromising analysis, Kearney invites us to overcome this dichotomous understanding and affirms that poetics serves ethics, since the poetic text "invites us to enter into its otherness and recognize ourselves in it, putting ourselves into question, losing ourselves in order to find ourselves" (Kearney 2020h, 42).