Technological Destinies of the Imagination

An exploration of Kant’s theory of imagination and the cognitive practices preceding the advent of articulated speech.

The tradition of Kant''s critical philosophy developed the concept of imagination in a rigorous and productive way. It also allows us to develop an aesthetic approach suitable to explaining and understanding the relationship between sensitivity and technology. In this book, Montani defends the reasons to place this concept in a paleo-anthropological framework, linking it to the imaginative practices that preceded and prepared the advent of articulated discourse. This event involved a profound reorganization of the technical performances that can be traced back to imagination and related internalization processes. Furthermore, the emergence of an articulated language inaugurated a singular story, that of the relationship between word and image. In this study, that story is followed through particular attention to developments in cinema and digital image formats.