This paper develops a conceptualisation of analogy in the history of philosophical methodology as a pharmakon – a force that is both destructive and creative (Derrida, 2004, pp. 75-76). In so doing, it examines an exemplar of analogical methodology by interrogating the potentiality of the radical imagination in the analogical thinking of Immanuel Kant. By focussing on Kant, I am attempting to broaden the understanding of a particular tradition within philosophical methodology he revolutionised, particular in the Critique of the Theory of Judgment (1790), where analogical thinking becomes the basis of the radical collapse of otherwise distinct domains, such as beauty and morality, human and non-human animal. The claims I will make about the revolutionary force of Kant’s theory of analogy, underpinned by the function of the imagination, may appear to verge on the heterodox. While it is true that Kant appeared to adhere to a closed architectonic or grand system (A832/B860), abandoning the uncertainty of the tensional void represented by the force of the imagination which underpins analogical thinking, I will suggest that Kant also represents a destabilising force that, as Jane Kneller has traced, had a significant influence on the re-intrication of poetry and philosophy in the work of the German Romantic tradition.
