Einbildungskraft

In this major work, John Sallis probes the very nature of imagination and reveals how its force extends into all spheres of human life. While drawing critically on the entire history of philosophy, Sallis's work takes up a vantage point determined by the contemporary deconstruction of the classical opposition between sensible and intelligible. Thus, in reinterrogating the nature of imagination, this work carries out a radical turn to the sensible and to the elemental in nature. Advancing through rigorous phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses, the author also draws on the poetic word of such figures as Shakespeare, Hölderlin, and Keats; thereby he offers an original and fundamental approach to the questions of the image, of time, of self and other, and of the nature of art. Above all, imagination, now liberated from subjectivity, is shown to play a decisive role both in drawing together the moments of our experience of sensible things and in opening experience to the encompassing light, atmosphere, earth, and sky.

The English edition of this work was published by Indiana University Press.