Imagination Controlled: Representation and Factuality in Historical Knowledge

Abstract

This paper aims to show how Ricœur’s inquiry on memory, trace, and testimony contributes to rebalance a framework that, at the level of the dialectic between imagination and representation, would essentially present Historian’s work as a hermeneutical work. In Ricœur’s later writings, we find a differently balanced perspective by focusing the (neurobiological and psychological) substrate of representation behind trace and memory. Representation precedes interpretation. And neither the fidelity of memory nor the epistemic truth of history belong to a game that would be solely played within the communicative space of a plurality of cognitive agents who are exchanging, controlling, and sharing their own experiences. Consequently, the reality of the past itself reemerges as the corollary of the practice of memory.