on imagination

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault identifies imagination, in the Classical episteme, as "the suture between body and soul," both "the locus of error" and "the power of attaining to truth" (p 77, Routledge Classics, 2007 edition). Imagination borders the body, it is longing; it mediates between what exists in the world and what exists in the not-space (the heterotopia, could it be?) of the hoped-for, wished-for.

Imagination has the power of bringing the imaginer closer to 'truth' and of distancing her from that truth. Like a trick mirror, it distends what is, but simultaneously the imagination permits more to exist than does exist. It is thus both limiting and transgressive of limits--i.e., liberating. It is the potential tense, the subjunctive tense. What can be expressed in the space of imagination is what is contrary to lived experience, and when I do express hopes, wishes, fears that contradict that experience, what I am doing is imagining; literally, forming an image. The subjunctive mood is desirative: a tense of planning-ahead. When I make an image, I am making a plan, a possibility for experiencing the world. What is important in that moment is not that what I have imagined should come true; it is that I have been able to imagine it.

The image is not integrally or necessarily tied to the future of what I experience as 'real', although it must have some relation to my past understandings of the world (because I cannot imagine--create image--in a void; my hopes and desires come from somewhere). This is where heterotopianism belongs; the imagined body (space) both is and is not. It exists and does not exists, and, more importantly, it exists as I imagine it (because I have imagined it; it exists to me) and it exists as I do not imagine it (and it exists counter to my imaginings). Although imagining traces a limit, it ultimately cannot transgress completely; there is always a further limit, which is the edge of what can be imagined. It would be impossible for the imaginer (the lover) to imagine all the ways in which her beloved is (and is not); the fractalized, faceted nature of the human being is the limit of imagination. Time is its limit: I cannot possibly do the work of knowing every edge, every face, of my beloved, even though I devote a whole life of work to it.

So the gaps of knowledge are bridged by imagining. The danger (the integral other) of imagination is fantasy (which is not permissive to its object). Imagination, although its locus is in the subject, must respect the other. It must "make a sort of promise...to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other" ( from an interview between Jacques Derrida and Nikhil Padgaonkar). When it does this, it makes an "irreducible affirmation" (ibid)--which is the act of loving the other, watching what is known and what is imagined align and interweave.