The Imaginary

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

Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville's Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk

Abstract: Desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws and stable spaces of culture in which to clarify and to cultivate them. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon? . . . . To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living. —Lauren Berlant

The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of "Ancient Properties"

Abstract: "No matter what you did," muses the unhappy Jadine in Tar Baby, "the diaspora mothers with pumping breasts would impugn your character" (288). The "diaspora mothers" are everywhere. They are the night women who visit Jadine in a dream, the imaginary women in the trees, the African woman in the Parisian bakery, and Therese on the Isle de Chevaliers. They remind Jadine, who is prey to their seduction, of that which she has chosen to forget: her African-American roots. The "diaspora mothers" are everywhere in Toni Morrison's other novels as well. Like Jadine, Morrison's texts - in particular, Sula, Beloved, and Jazz - are drawn to and repulsed by the haunting presence of the mother. At the center of these works is a literal or figurative maternal presence that dominates each one of the characters; she is the symbolic hub about which their individual stories revolve. From the "pumping breasts" issues a very curious kind of milk - narrative itself. This incessant literary return to the mother, I argue, is both an expression of a psychological desire to recover the repressed - the lost object of desire - and an expression of a political desire to recover the past. Laura Mulvey has claimed that the "lost memory of the mother's body is similar to other metaphors of a buried past or a lost history that contribute to the rhetoric of oppressed people" (167). Morrison's novels demonstrate the political potential of the mother's body. By charting a discourse of maternal desire, Morrison challenges her readers - in particular, her African-American readers, to whom, in her words, she writes - to reinvestigate their sense of self, and their relation to that which has been lost (see "Rootedness" 340). "Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field ...." Sula opens with the distorted and phantasmagoric body of Shadrack, an unfortunate war veteran. After a horrific battle experience, Shadrack lies in a hospital bed, watching his hands "grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk all over the tray and the bed" (9). His body grows out of bounds, as does his sense of self. He cannot connect his face with an identity: "... he didn't even know who he was or what he was .... he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands" (12). Morrison introduces bodies that are similarly disoriented - shellshocked, drowned, burned, or mutilated - in almost all of her works. Her novels break down proper body boundaries, thrusting the characters into a primordial chaos in which the experience of identity founders. Reading one of Morrison's novels is like entering the warm, sensuous, and overpowering ambience of a womb. Over and over again, we have characters who regress, in psychoanalytic terms, to the undifferentiated sense of self characteristic of an infant. Margaret Mahler's seminal work The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant describes the process of separation-individuation requisite "for the development and maintenance of the 'sense of identity'" (11). The infant learns to view the mother's face as other, and himself or herself as a distinct self. Critical to this process of separation is the experience of body boundaries. Since the infant's earliest perceptions are bodily sensations, it follows that the ego is "first and foremost a 'body ego'" (220). Therefore, the first step toward ego development for the infant involves bodily differentiation from the mother (65). Morrison's works track a reversal of this process; each orchestrates a return to the "symbiotic origin of the human condition" (Mahler 227). Whether we look at Shadrack retreating from society to live in his womb-like hut over the river, Son in Tar Baby allowing himself to be swallowed in Caribbean womb-water, Joe crawling back into his mother's "cave" in Jazz, or Sethe and Paul regressing to a bewildered and helpless infantile state in Beloved, we find that the womb exercises an eerie and ineluctable power over Morrison's heroes and heroines. …

Repressenting the Manimal: A Semiotic/Psychoanalytic Approach to the Strategic Importance of Anthropomorphism in Branding

Abstract: S. Brown proclaimed in 1995 that there is no representation without taxation. In an attempt to extend the same thread of reasoning this paper puts forward the argument that there is no representation without repression. By drawing on the exemplary brand identity building stratagem of the anthropomorph and by recourse to the dreamwork formative process illustrated by Freud in his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams, an account is yielded of the equivalent process involved in the formation of the brandwork. Moreover, by unlocking the potential of the faculty of imagination as constitutive of the web of metaphors and metonymies wherein the brandwork as figurative discourse is cloaked, a genealogical route is pursued with view to demonstrating that what are usually described as universally recognizable brand symbols stem from singular representations or imaginary constellations that reveal a brand’s truth inasmuch as they conceal it. By extending the interpretive findings pertaining to the imaginary status of the anthropomorphic figure, suggestions are made as to why a brand should not be viewed only in terms of manifest personality traits, but also in terms of a latent unconscious.