The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Emerging from imaginary time

Abstract: Recent models in quantum cosmology make use of the concept of imaginary time. These models all conjecture a join between regions of imaginary time and regions of real time. We examine the model of James Hartle and Stephen Hawking to argue that the various ‘no-boundary’ attempts to interpret the transition from imaginary to real time in a logically consistent and physically significant way all fail. We believe this conclusion also applies to ‘quantum tunneling’ models, such as that proposed by Alexander Vilenkin. We conclude, therefore, that the notion of ‘emerging from imaginary time’ is incoherent. A consequence of this conclusion seems to be that the whole class of cosmological models appealing to imaginary time is thereby refuted.

The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory

Abstract: ing about the social functions of literature. The Fictive and the Imaginary, the culmination of his reflections about the art of representation, does not explicitly engage the question of the politics of literature, and its emphasis on the value of "play" and the "as if might seem to disengage the aesthetic experience from worldly concerns. What Iser means by "play," however, is a profoundly important social activity that would facilitate productive uses of difference to create forms of community among decentered human beings whose dissonances and dislocations resist unification. As an instrument for staging various kinds of open-ended exploratory interactions, Iser's notion of literature offers a model of the emancipatory uses of power in the service of communicative democracy. The politics of Iser's theory of nonmimetic representation foregrounds the role of the "as if in producing, questioning, and overturning different forms of life. The playful, nonteleological functioning of fictive acts of staging in turn makes possible the reciprocal but nonconsensual exchange of power on which democratic mutuality depends. The Fictive and the Imaginary engages the question of power in representation in order to affirm the liberating and community-building capacities of literature in a perpetually unstable, decentered world. It is thus an important response to the political challenges of our time. The Fictive and the Imaginary moves beyond Iser's earlier concern with reading to offer a general theory of textuality in the service of what he calls "literary anthropology." Two questions drive this anthropology: Why do human beings seem to need fictions? And what does the capacity to make fictions reveal about the being of human being? Iser approaches these questions not by undertaking a transcendental phe nomenological reflection but by looking for patterns in several histori cally and culturally specific domains that he thinks provide especially illuminating examples of how human beings have made and thought

Estranged bodies : shifting paradigms and the biomedical imaginary

Abstract: This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies.

L’Imaginaire des Pays-Bas dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle

Abstract: The imagination of the Netherlands comes close to a mythoid aggregate. The corpus transmits a superficial and picturesque imagery, based on tourist, pictorial and historical sources. The tourist conventions reinforce its stereotypical and anachronistic nature. The anachronism is also typical of the images borrowed from paintings of the Dutch school and a few art historians. Realism is most appreciated when poetically tinged, as with Rembrandt who reveals the boundary between dream and reality. History provides the authors with heroic or dramatic episodes, as well as with legends expressing national character and the struggle against the waters. At the dawn of the 20th century, the imagination of the Netherlands becomes more introspective. Societal changes and especially the industrialisation put the place of man in question. We have subjected three groups of images to a symbolical analysis. First, the group of miniaturised dwelling places, that express a unfulfilled desire for intimacy and a refuge out of the time. Then, a group related to the painting as a mirror. These boundary images of an inaccessible space express the same disappointed desire. The sea images express progressive ideas as welle as fear of mechanization at the same time. The illusion of the fantastic and the phantasmagoria make it possible to vanquish the setbacks suffered through the figures of intimacy. Against the industrialisation, against the changes of modern society, as well as against mass tourism, the author will oppose his imaginary experience of the world, and through his description will give a autoreferential image, revealing of his dreams and desires.