The Real, the Imaginary, and Representations as Forms of Experience: A Response to Silvano Tagliagambe

Abstract

Domenichelli’s response to Tagliagambe’s thick and powerful intervention moves from Lacan’s note on the spiderweb geometry and the wonders of the surface, and writing as the threshold of the imaginary between the real and the symbolic. The subject of Domenichelli’s response is the concept of representation as a mixture of memory and oblivion grounding the shaping of the self. The nature of representations, as Tagliagambe says, is translucent; it is semi-transparent, being both the place of Florenskji’s skvoznoj, (inner shining), as well as of opacity and darkness. Literary representations therefore, exactly because of their semitransparent nature, offer the Ansatzpunkt to Gadamer’s hermeneutic horizontverschmelzung, and a kind of impossible answer to T.S. Eliot’s radical question on the redemption of time in Burn Norton.