After delivering his lectures on perception during the academic year 1964-65, Gilbert Simondon felt the need to expand his reflections in a course that would address the relationships between imagination and invention. The connection between these two courses, and therefore the starting point for the analysis of the mental image, would be that motricity precedes sensoriality. In other words, there are motor tendencies at work even before perception or encounter with the object exists. All of this leads Simondon to posit that the existence of the image can be conceived without the need for an imagining consciousness or reflexive self-awareness. In this regard, Simondon approached the poetics of Gaston Bachelard - a fundamental influence for him - and the paths opened by Gabriel Tarde and Henri Bergson, while distancing himself from Jean-Paul Sartre. Simondon presents a cycle of the mental image in four phases: the aforementioned motor tendencies, pre-perceptive images; images that arise in the encounter between the organism and the environment, in the perceptual-motor reality and its encounter with the object; and the reality of memory-images that emerge in symbols, following the encounter with the object. The cycle culminates in the saturation of symbolic reality that leads to creative invention, implying that this entire cycle begins anew at another level. There is continuity, then, between imagination and invention, but also between nature and technique. Furthermore, there is a deeper, more fundamental continuity, as all phases of the image cycle herald an expansion beyond the individual, in an amplifying projection that, culminating in the accumulation of harmonizing inventions, involves the incorporation of primarily non-human realities into a world that makes sense for human beings. It is a world of created objects, diverse yet distant from relativism and subjectivism, where there are external and superficial layers that fulfill our needs for manifestation, intermediate layers that reproduce the existing, championing the defense of consecrated forms where nothing is gained or lost, and finally (and this is more pertinent for Simondon), an intrinsic, essential layer on which the others depend - a core that overflows both the given and its formalization, always providing a superior solution to the problem at hand through amplification. This reveals the structural and functional self-correlation of the object, self-correlation in the sense that the object reunites with its own implicit forms. This article, therefore, addresses Simondon's thoughts on imagination and invention considering Bachelard's writings and paying special attention to how his conception of imagination aligns with his ideas on individuation and technique, and how this thinking decisively influenced other contemporary French thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Stiegler.
This article will analyse and critique the treatment of the concept of imagination in Iris Murdoch as a philosopher and novelist. I argue that Murdoch's philosophical treatment of imagination, based on her tendency to make a binary opposition between "good" attention and "bad" self-deluding fantasy, and involving a rejection both of certain High Romantic concepts of the Imagination and what she sees as the too broad scope given to imagination in Kantian philosophy, is fundamentally flawed, but that a more subtle and theoretically convincing treatment of imagination, similar to and influenced by Merleau-Ponty's concept of the imaginary of the real, is to be found in her fiction, in particular in the 1980 novel Nuns and Soldiers, where we may find in nuce a concept of imagination which covers both the perception of the "reality" of the visible world, the process of artistic creation, and the infinite links between the visible and the invisible.
In his 1940 essay "L'Imaginaire: psychologie de l'imagination," Jean-Paul Sartre develops a unique and original phenomenological account of imagination. Following Husserl's method of investigation, Sartre attacks the "illusion of immanence," which is the belief that imaginary objects are somehow "in" consciousness. He argues against this view by illustrating how the imaginary, as a correlate of consciousness and pure negativity, is essentially a nothing (n & eacute;ant), an irreality that does not exist "in" consciousness but rather insists as consciousness. When I form an image, its emergence out of nothing and its persistence in existence fully coincide with my intention. As soon as I cease to maintain the image, it disappears. Moreover, since the image is the spontaneous expression of my own consciousness, I cannot discover anything new in it. This marks a fundamental difference with perception, where the objects must be discovered by me and subsist independently of my intention. By distinguishing the essential traits of the imaginary and the object of perception, Sartre shows that these two modes of consciousness belong to two fundamentally different domains that are strictly separated from each other. For Sartre, the objects of imagination cannot exist in the world of perception, and an imaginary can never be confused with a perception. This thesis has generated controversy among theorists who insist on the intrusive nature of imagination with respect to perception or emphasize the entanglement between imagination and perception. The former is mainly represented by psychoanalysis and the idea that consciousness is dominated by forces not of the order of consciousness. Sartre goes to great lengths to demonstrate how phenomena such as hallucination and dreaming can be understood in terms of concepts and structures that pertain exclusively to the domain of the cogito. The latter kind of theorists, in turn, is mainly represented by Merleau-Ponty, who sees the imaginary (the invisible) as the precondition for the appearance of the world (the visible). Sartre, however, would never deny this Kantian insight into how the imaginary provides the "texture" of the real, but he would stress that such texture pertains to the constitution of reality rather than irreality, and hence involves a different phenomenon than the imaginary altogether. Finally, although Sartre drew a great deal from Husserl's work, he also fundamentally diverged from him by focusing on the essential connection between imagination and the freedom of consciousness, understood as absolute spontaneity in relation to being-in-the-world. Imagination allows us to break with the present by orienting ourselves towards the future that is not-yet. By running ahead of ourselves towards what is not, we negate the current situation in favor of an imaginary alternative. Our ability to conceive a non-existent alternative to the given present state of affairs is a form of revolt that at all times affirms our freedom in the face of the present, even if that alternative cannot be actualized. Imagination thus denotes for Sartre not only our ability to negate the world but just as much our ability to produce it.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes a transcendental use of the faculties, mainly in response to Plato and Kant, who according to him are not able to account for original thought, but only for recognition and representation. In this context, Deleuze distinguishes between an empirical and a transcendental use of the imagination. According to him, transcendental imagination constitutes a phantasteon - at the same time that which cannot be imagined and that which can only be - with the potential to trigger thought. But how should we understand Deleuze's transcendental imagination? How exactly does he distinguish between this transcendental imagination and empirical imagination? I propose to clarify this distinction through an examination of what Deleuze writes on imagination in his monographies on Hume and Kant. Deleuze here distinguishes two senses of the imagination: one, whimsical, capricious, and fanciful; the other one, a deliberate human faculty of reproduction. Deleuze's reading of Kant shows that transcendental subjectivity can be seen as a hierarchized system; a whole network of interests and of rules for the faculties to achieve these interests. At the very base of this system, Deleuze distinguishes a spontaneous, affective ground of the subject, where the faculties interact freely in a purely aesthetic contemplation. This spontaneous harmonizing of the faculties is of a different nature than the regulated use of the faculties that it conditions. For Deleuze, Kant is unable to account for this free accord of the faculties, and thus also not for the constitution of the adequate use of the faculties. This poses the question of the nature of this spontaneous aesthetic contemplation, as well as of the constitution of subjectivity. According to Deleuze, Hume's empirical philosophy allows to account for the constitution of subjectivity. Through his reading of Hume, I will further develop Deleuze's transcendental imagination in its distinction with empirical imagination. I will show how Deleuze discovers in Hume a critique of representation, which liberates the imagination from the duty of representing and determines a particular relation between the organized mind and phantasy. I will end by briefly indicating how this all relates to Deleuze's definition of thought and of the unconscious in his later works.
In this essay, Jean-Yves Lacoste examines the often-overlooked phenomenon of fatigue from a phenomenological perspective, emphasizing its distinctiveness from other states such as suffering and joy. Lacoste argues that fatigue, while a daily experience, reveals a unique mode of being-in-the-world that is not adequately captured by the notion of "everydayness" in a phenomenological sense. He explores how fatigue disrupts conventional temporalities, highlighting its subversive centrality of the present, distinct from the temporality of joy or suffering. The author also contrasts the world revealed in fatigue with the world of suffering, asserting that fatigue exposes a fundamental truth of existence by stripping away illusions and bringing us into contact with the raw reality of being. He further connects fatigue to spiritual life, suggesting that it can deepen our experience of prayer and existence before God. Ultimately, Lacoste posits that fatigue accomplishes a form of work by reducing us to bare existence, challenging the traditional valorization of labor and highlighting the vulnerability and essential truth of the human condition. This text invites a reconsideration of the role of fatigue in our understanding of existence and spiritual life.
Marcuse's espousal of the relative autonomy of aesthetic form in his late works has been interpreted as evidence of the transcendental detachment of his aesthetic theory from social praxis. Conversely, positive appraisals attribute value to Marcuse's purported utopianism, grounded in his occasional borrowings from Kant's formalist aesthetics. This paper reconstructs the evolution of Marcuse's early period aesthetic theory, aiming to elaborate his praxis-oriented perspective on art and society that surpasses Kant's transcendental exposition, a framework implied in both critical and positive appraisals. By discussing Marcuse's approach to the "art-life problem" in his first work, The German Artist-Novel, I establish a backdrop against which to assess Marcuse's aesthetic writings. In this early work, Marcuse employed a neo-Kantian methodology to demonstrate how the art form of the artist-novel genre reflects the problematic character of modern life. While surpassing Kant's reduction of aesthetics to reflective judgment by considering artworks as having exemplary validity in explaining social reality, this neo-Kantian method is still transcendental and, for this reason, inherently lacks a systematic theory of the production process in modern society. I will show that Marcuse's engagement with Hegel in Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity marks a departure from transcendental inquiry into art forms and lays the groundwork for his "aesthetic ontology," which integrates the ontology of labour. This shift from neo-Kantianism is evident in Marcuse's interpretation of Hegel, particularly in how Hegel recasts Kant's theory of imagination in terms of the historicity of the "original synthetic unity of thought and being." As I demonstrate, Marcuse situates different aspects of this ontological unity - "semblance," "appearance," and "beautiful shining-forth" - within the human productive activity in the material context of life. The article further demonstrates how Marcuse's later works on culture incorporate the framework of Hegel's Ontology into a Marxian historical critique of bourgeois art, revealing the beautiful "shining-forth" as a non-alienated labour of a "free people." This interpretation offers a renewed perspective on aesthetic ontology, contesting the mischaracterisation of Marcuse's aesthetic theory as formalistic, subjectivist, and overly utopian.
This article moves from Gilles Deleuze's impressive book about Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), to explore Henry James's fiction as an experiment in Baroque imagination. In Deleuze's reading, the fold is theorized as the central concept of Leibniz's thought. Deleuze maintains, via Leibniz, that monads are the minimal ontological units that reality is made of, each of them infinitely producing and reproducing its inner structure in the construction of the universe. Any traditional (especially Cartesian) difference between mind and body, or between material and immaterial, makes no longer sense: the progressive unfolding of the monad generates infinitely recombining worlds, which differ in their degree of intensity rather than in their ontological essence. My hypothesis is that Henry James's work can be fruitfully read as a mechanism - or a machine - that functions as Leibniz's enfolding and refolding monads. James's fiction, thus, supplies the American epistemological and aesthetic tradition with the fractal geometries of Baroque imagination that it originally lacks. Constantly engaging with European culture, James has perceived more than other authors this fundamental lack at the origins of the American subject and of the American self. The latter is generated out a metaphysics of presence that, over the centuries, has simply changed its attributes, shifting from Puritan to Enlightenment and then to Transcendentalist presence. The sense of lack deriving from the perception that, from the seventeenth century on, the world was increasingly becoming elliptic and decentered - in philosophical as well as in geopolitical terms - is absent in the formation of the American self. This article investigates Henry James's oeuvre as a crucial stage in the American literature and culture that - before and even more effectively than postmodern works - has tried to compensate for the "lack of lack" inherent in the American self. James, I argue, has provided different models of Baroque imagination that have reshaped the American self as finally aware of that subject's off-centeredness that was so crucial to a specific philosophical and artistic tradition in Europe. Among the many James's works that oppose a fragmented and enfolding genesis of the subject to the legacy of the mainstream American individualism, this article will focus on The Awkward Age (1899) as the novel that, moving from an apparently conventional quasi-dramatic form, turns out as an experiment in Baroque imagination. Each chapter of the novel, in fact, functions as a monad as Leibniz and Deleuze have theorized it. As a closed universe through which other universes - all of them possible, coextensive and simultaneous - can merely be fantasized or conjectured, each chapter/monad foregrounds the tragic finitude and, at the same time, the paradoxical incompleteness of the character it features. All characters, in fact, experience their own universe as progressively unfolding from a mere, vague perception of the self, of the outer reality, and of other characters. The novel, thus, stages the ontological precariousness of its subjects. The latter, in fact, cannot have any full grasp of the whole world they inhabit since, as monads, they can experience only one of its many possible and infinitely unfolding manifestations.
This paper will focus on Kristeva's 2015 novel L'Horloge enchant & eacute;e. Like other fictional and non-fictional works by Kristeva, L'Horloge enchant & eacute;e returns to two formative moments of European culture, namely, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in an attempt to rethink the controversial legacy of these moments in the face of contemporary challenges. The main protagonist of L'Horloge enchant & eacute;e, a psychoanalyst of Jewish origins, develops a transferential relationship with two minor figures in the reign of Louis XV at the dawn of the Enlightenment: i.e., Claude-Sim & eacute;on Passemant (an obscure artisan devoted to the King) and & Eacute;milie du Ch & acirc;telet, precocious mathematician, translator of Newton and lover of Voltaire. As I shall demonstrate, in bringing these two figures together, Kristeva introduces a new perspective on contemporary debates focusing on the nature of the human and its relation to the machine, material existence and the desire for transcendence, temporal consciousness and the possibility of happiness. On my reading, Kristeva's latest novel remobilizes our thinking about what comes after the human through changing the terms already introduced by contemporary discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. She also responds to concerns about the crisis of the Humanities by exposing the uncanny proximity between the theoretical sciences and the theoretical Humanities, both converging on the vision of a reason drunk with the spirit of the imaginary. According to Kristeva, the liberation of this vision from all sorts of technophobic and technophilic myths (sources of political or religious fundamentalisms, on the one hand and a profit-oriented techno-terrorism, on the other) is a necessity.
This essay sketches a phenomenology of existential exhaustion as the experience of a total loss or "exhaustion" of existential meaning. Putting Gilles Deleuze's late essay "The Exhausted" into conversation with readings of Martin Heidegger's account of death and anxiety as "existential world collapse," this essay argues that Deleuze's cryptic conception of exhaustion may be understood as a phenomenological construal of the extreme experience of losing all of one's existential possibilities in life, such that everyday life no longer affords one with meaning and purpose. This essay examines the similarities as well as differences between Deleuze's account of exhaustion and Heidegger's analysis of death and anxiety. It shows how Deleuze's notion of exhaustion may be regarded as a radicalized version of phenomenological reduction that reveals fundamental conditions of human experience which are even more basic than Heidegger's analysis of the basic structures of human existence and self-understanding.
This essay examines drinks for pets. Specifically, it addresses the wine that is currently being marketed for cats as the perfect way to unwind and make the most of one's break. It analyzes the language and cultural assumptions in the messages advertising catnip flavored Pinot Meow, Purrsecco, and White Kittendel, among other feline wines, in online stores Apollo Peak, Meowingtons, and TwinCritters. Drawing on Cressida Heyes' concept of "anaesthetic time" as a symptom of the ontological exhaustion that results from constant self-discipline and the accelerated temporality of modern life, the essay argues that we project our existential fatigue onto pets and look for ways to alleviate their anxiety with intoxicants. By anaesthetizing pets with wine, we liberate them from domestic disciplinarity. If discipline creates docile pets, lack of discipline frees companion animals to act according to their wild animal nature. Ultimately, the essay investigates the paradox of humanizing and animalizing pets at once and how the dichotomy of dominance vs. freedom is made palatable through practices of care and consumption.
This essay offers a cultural semiotics of the relationship between agency, work, nourishment, and social life in the contemporary dog-human relationship. The pet industry has introduced a concept - enrichment - that is supposed to alleviate the despair of captive animals. However, animal behavior studies show that the antidote to boredom is not entertainment but meaningful work and the experience of agency that accompanies it. The enrichment market literally banks on the value of exhausting your dog. In the case of such profoundly social animals as humans and dogs, real enrichment takes place and is sustained only between species. Understood ontologically, as the exhaustion of being as being, boredom and fatigue emerge as social problems, not a feature of individuals. When read as late capitalism's extraction of life itself, they emerge as essentially interspecies/ecological.
This article examines the phenomenon of fatigue in the context of contemporary capitalism as a regime of exhaustion. It combines a psychoanalytical perspective with a philosophical-anthropological approach, which does not regard the phenomenon as generally ontological, but rather as a phenomenon that extends across, or affects, several modes of being (psyche-soma, polis). The extent to which fatigue is not only a symptom but also an essential characteristic of the fading out of capitalism, which exhausts itself and human life on earth, cannot ultimately be proven, but at least hinted at.
This paper examines the socio-political implications of Michel Henry's phenomenology of life as immanent affectivity, in which life experiences itself from within and can grow weary from its own intrinsic movement. I argue that this form of tiredness has both destructive and emancipatory social and political consequences. First, it generates conditions for self-destructive politics. I draw on Henry's phenomenological study of political and economic structures - democracy, totalitarianism, capitalism, and communism - to show how this self-destructive logic can manifest within each system. Yet Henry's work also clarifies how tiredness can enable creativity, as proposed by Rollo May, and open subjects to more generous and solidaristic modes of relation, as discussed by Byung-Chul Han. These findings challenge the assumption that political structures can control life or lead humanity to ultimate harmony and happiness, highlighting the need for political and everyday practices that respect life's vitality, vulnerability, and creativity.
The focus of this paper is the phenomenological analysis of fatigue in the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas. My main argument is to present the experience of fatigue, or a heaviness of being oneself, not merely as a limit experience, but as the ontological source and condition of a meaningful present. However, in a paradoxical sense, fatigue appears in the analysis of being oneself as an experience that is not yet part of the world of phenomena. As such, the ontological nature of fatigue shows that a meaningful present is constituted by a relation to what Levinas conceives as an invisibility in a particular sense. I argue that this relation reveals a distinctive methodological approach to phenomenology in that it shows that the interplay between visibility and invisibility is the necessary form under which experience presents itself.
