Verso una topica dell'immaginazione

Abstract

In this paper I will outline a genealogy which could contribute to Siri Hustvedt’s very important statement in her essay Three Emotional Stories: Reflection on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self (2011): ‘Writing fiction is remembering what never happened.’ Hustvedt’s essay offers a wonderful analysis of the role of memory and imagi- nation in narrative. But how to situate their very space in human behaviour and mind? Can we outline a topic of imagination in its relation with memory? I suggest that an appropriate blend between the long tradition of philosophical anthropology and the new neuroscientific interpretations of embodied simulation could help us to refine our concepts of imagination and memory.