The body of imagination and the technology of imagery in the Renaissance and in Modernity

In: Thesis eleven: critical theory and historical sociology, Band 130, Heft 1, S. 43-57

Abstract

Throughout history, the concepts of phantasia (Greek) or imaginatio (Latin) have been linked to the concept of the human body and in particular to our sensory perceptions. But phantasia/imaginatio have also always been linked to the mind and how the operations of the mind are connected with bodily sensations. Functioning as interface between the senses and the mind, phantasia has predominantly been exemplified with the notion of the visual image, rather than a tactile or oral depiction. But as emphatic as discussion of the image has been, in particular throughout the Renaissance period and again in modernity, it has hardly been linked to the contemporaneous technology of imagery that accompanied the theoretical discourses on imagination. The article will flesh out central historical and systematic aspects of the concept of imagination (I), but instead of submitting them to a history of ideas it will turn to a comparative study of the first monograph on imagination by the Renaissance philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola from 1501 and Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams from 1900 (II) to investigate their respective understandings of imagination and inner images in the light of the technology of imagery (III).