Topic
The Imaginary
About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how creatures or transfigurations can dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, and the (con)temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the order of things.
Abstract: Working with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, this essay shows how creaturely beings, or transfigurations, dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, the (con)temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the “order of things” While transitive and transversal in their potentiality for insurgency, Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology also always carry a colonial logic, a conquest paradigm, while also un-resting (if not necessarily liberating) the enjoyment of, what Borges calls, “terrible grounds” Taking up fantastical and imaginary figures, this essay aims to add to Borges’s compendium of beings; this is a tracing of fugitive forces, of pessimistic and potent provocations that break from “the Human,” “the Man,” and their enumerable agents – from the Fanonian invocation of the bestiary, to the +* value form and its racialized and erotico-, bio-, and necropolitical calculus of HIV/AIDS risk, the authors explore transfigurations at th
37 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine two paradigmatic cases in which real incest is brought into the penumbra of law and subsumed into an imaginary complex superimposed on sexual abuse.
Abstract: Based on ethnographic research in Berlin, this paper examines two paradigmatic cases in which real incest is brought into the penumbra of law and subsumed into an imaginary complex superimposed on sexual abuse. It uses them to theorize at a higher level of abstraction about the deployment of myth by the unconscious, the relation between taboo and law, male and female attachments to the child, gender conflict, and changes in the position of the father in the symbolic order of the West. One case focuses on how a child victim translates what had happened into the therapeutic and legal languages of sexual abuse, the other on the father’s evolving apprehension of his deed in the course of therapy. I argue that (1) the incest taboo increasingly regulates lineal rather than lateral relations between kin; (2) the imaginary complex construes male sexuality as a security threat to children, resulting in a negative identification with and of male difference, with serious consequences for the family, the heterosexual...
37 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Castoriadis showed how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldun was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century.
Abstract: Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berberes, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldun that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldun was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an “imaginary” by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a “restructuring of semantic fields.”
37 citations
Book•
19 Mar 1987
TL;DR: In this paper, Pater and Nietzche define art for art's sake and define human existence as art as mimesis, and define art as creation, and art and history as history.
Abstract: Foreword Part I. Introduction Section 1. Pater Criticism Section 2. Historical Preliminaries: 1. Art as creation 2. Art as mimesis Part II. Autonomous Art Section 3. The Starting Point: 1. Scepticism 2. The essay 3. Defining human existence 4. Expression Section 4. Defining Art: 1. 'Art for art's sake' 2. Impressionism 3. Style Section 5. The Problem of Orientation: 1. Beauty 2. 'Postscript' Part III. Art and History Section 6. What Is History?: 1. Hegelian schematism 2. Historicity 3. 'House Beautiful' Section 7. The Limits of Historical Legitimation: 1. Plato and Platonism 2. Glaston de Latour Part IV. Art and Myth Section 8. The Ancient Gods: 1. Cult and ritual 2. 'The myth of Demeter and Persephone' 3. 'A study of Dionysis' Section 9. The Limits of Mythical Legitimation: 1. 'Apollo in Picardy' 2. Pater and Nietzche Part V. The Aesthetic Existence Section 10. Marius the Epicurean: 1. The form 2. The problem Section 11. Imaginary Portraits: 1. The form 2. 'A Prince of Court Painters' 3. Denys l'Auxerrois' 4. 'Sebastian van Storck' 5. 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold' Conclusion Notes Bibliography Biographical addendum Index of names Index of subjects.
37 citations