Sul ruolo dell’immaginazione nella metafora dell’infinito in Emmanuel Levinas

This article focuses on demonstrating how Emmanuel Levinas’s thought can offer a significant contribution to the debate on metaphor. In particular, it attempts to describe the role of imagination in the establishment of the metaphoric sense, based on some texts of Levinas recently published in France. Thereafter, this essay intends to adopt Stéphane Mosès's interpretation in order to demonstrate how, through a comparison with Kantian Imagination, it is possible to formulate the Levinasian statement on ethics — centered on the absolute metaphor of infinity — in terms of aesthetics. The overall intention of the article is not purely to explain the role of such statement in the evolution of Lévinas’s thinking, but also to identify in that metaphor an effective instrument for the shaping of ethical unrepresentable images.