Des images de nuit pour vivre et pour sur-vivre. Imagination et existence dans les philosophies de Gaston Bachelard et Paul Ricœur

Abstract

This article examines how Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricœur each think the imagination as a power that not only gives to think but also helps to live and survive in situations of solitude, mourning, and existential distress. While Bachelard develops a phenomenology of rêverie and of the “right to dream”, emphasizing the nocturnal life of images and their intimate, material anchoring, Ricœur elaborates a hermeneutics of metaphor and narrative oriented toward ethical and political action. By confronting the “cogito of the dreamer” with the “wounded cogito” of the capable subject, the article shows how dark, violent images (night, lightning, fissure) can figure the effraction of grief and at the same time sustain a patient work of mourning. In this way, a “melancholic hope” emerges, capable of reopening time and reconfiguring the relation to the lost other as well as to one’s own capacity for action.