Imagination, a phantasm, kitsch. Example, Saul Friedländer’s historiography

Abstract

This article is an attempt to present Saul Friedländer’s considerations on the excess of historical imagination. In the first part of the text I will recall his analysis of the work of imagination on the ground of psychohistory, where he was checking its limits of descriptive and explanatory potential as well as the possibility to expand its scope by intuition. In the second part, which is at the same time a limit for psychoanalytic reflection, I refer to the historian’s meditation on the structure of imagination in the Nazi discourse based on the element of kitsch and death. Finally, in the third part, I am pursuing his afterthought on the development of the apocalyptic imagination in the nineteenth century, which constituted a turning point for the historical conditions of modern excess.