Unpacking ‘the Imaginary Texture of the Real’ with Kant, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty

In this paper I put forward a concept of the imagination which weaves together many of the key and overlapping dichotomies around which discussions of the imagination have circled: dichotomies between the productive and reproductive, between presence and absence, between creativity or spontaneity and receptivity or passivity, between invention and disclosure, between cognition and affect. Inter-implicated with these dichotomies is that between imagination and perception. Utilising the work of Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and in critical conversation with Sartre, I distil an account of the imagination which cuts across these dichotomies, delineating a capacity which is at work in perception, as well as in the range of activities of “phantasing” or “conjuring up”, to which the term is often restricted. 1. Imagination and Image Central to the account of the imagination which I wish to defend in this paper is a recognition of the imagination working within everyday experience. Imagination is, I shall suggest, a (creative) capacity to experience the world in a certain way, in the form of images. The concept of image here is much wider than what is sometimes taken to be its standard definition: “the internal [or external] representation of a sensory object in the absence of a corresponding sensory stimulus”. What marks each of the writers that I will discuss here is the rejection of such a conception of images (deriving from 1 Brann E. T. H., 1991, The World of the Imagination, Rowman & Littlefield, p. 13.