L’imaginaire ou la profondeur du banal: Amour, mythe et métaphore

From a cognitive and epistemological perspective, does an insurmountable distance really exist between big and small mythologies, between founding narratives on which our cultural and literary references are based, all of the metaphors that fashion and orient the depth of our linguistic expression, and the objects that surround us, which, in their own way, tell a story? A society cannot live without myths; nor would one know how to live or to signify without metaphors. If Oedipus or Philoctetus are heavily loaded with meaning and capable of generating a constellation of constantly renewing poetic configurations, Levi’s, Coca Cola or Apple do no less. Despite being at a different dimension and degree, these names have been progressively built up to the status of contemporary myths by way of a clever strategy in which image and founding story provide reciprocal reinforcement and legitimization. As a harmonizing force (without mutual exclusivity) of order and disorder, of chaos and cosmos, of symmetry and asymmetry, of the Law and the dimension of party and play, of Apollo and Dionysus, of interior life and the experience of the world, in short, as a mediating and reunifying principle of the universe, of form, and of meaning, metaphor is one possible name for the imaginary. Its other name is, obviously, Love. In fact, from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, love, as a construction growing forth from a mediating image-screen, has always been a quest for meaning, an act of signification, a dynamic process connecting the fractal elements of our world and of our experience.