Imagination, Metaphor, Language: Derrida in Dialogue with Ricoeur

The history of western philosophy, with the exception of Aristotle and Kant, presents a treatment of imagination that can be called reproductive, meaning, reproductive of an original. Put differently, imagination is often understood to be responsible for reproducing images, and therefore, has nothing productive in it. With this background in mind, I briefly demonstrate that some initial positive and promising accounts of imagination can already be apprehended in Hegel's "Psychology, the Mind" in the Encyclopedia and in Husserl's Logical Investigations. I further contend that Derrida and Ricoeur worked off Hegel's and Husserl's insights into imagination in what they demonstrated. Derrida, on the one hand, implicates imagination in the ideality operative in signs as they are utilised in the to-and-fro of communicative discourse. Ricoeur, conversely, argues that thought and imagination are intricately related in the symbol, in thought as it is involved in endeavors of imagination in utopias and literary fiction. Moreover, in both thinkers, an attempt can be seen to link imagination to language through expanding the way metaphor is understood, from a singular word, as in Aristotle's, to full-blown statements, with a subject and a predicate. Imagination enables one to penetrate through the statement's literal meaning to the metaphorical meaning. This claim approximates imagination to language and moves it effectively away from perception, from it being conceived as a residue of perception. As such, in Derrida and Ricoeur, there is a continuity and an increasing attempt to link imagination and language, hence a positive appraisal of imagination. Keywords: Derrida, Ricoeur, imagination, metaphor, language