Abstract

This introduction provides the reader with an orientation throughout the unfolding dynamics of the book, conceived as an assemblage of essays, written by renowned contemporary authors, as well as by young scholars, in an attempt to capture the manifestation of the pulsatile force of imagination in eloquent illustrations. In a complex edifice of variegated disciplinary perspectives, the essays disposed in four parts provide a rich and multifarious theoretical and analytical argumentation of this process. This reveals a rhythmic movement of emergence-resurgence of image toward more radical manifestations of the pulsatile, as an expression of the crisis in mimesis emerging as a rupture or a tearing of the image. Two conclusive ideas stand out from this phenomenological, philosophical (ur-phenomenology), and new materialist inquiry. These ideas are both original contributions of the book and themes of meditation for further research. The first idea, suggested in the newly coined term “rite of disimagination,” points out to a process, consecutively implying imagining and disimaging—an operation that both denies and validates image—it valorizes matter. This affirmation of the materiality of image we call “the reincarnation of image.” The second idea, deriving from the book, regards the archaeological strata of the intricate relationship between human and inhuman, a zone of experience that we just begin to sense, which this book puts forth as a theme of scholarly reflection in the search of the essence of the human itself.