Abstract

In the form of few notes around an anthropology of the imagination, the article questions the complex relationships between imagination and perception, by carrying out a synthesis of the great traditions which concern the image. Between perceptual consciousness and imaging consciousness, the line of demarcation remains problematic, depending on whether the imagination draws from the senses the material of its images or produces new representations giving substance to an unreal, or even a surreal. Impoverished derivation and misleading revival of perception in the empiricist tradition, it precedes experience for Kant. Imagination has at least three functions: replacement, amplification and revelation of reality, each corresponding to differentiated intentions: to image, imagine, “imaginalise”. The imaginal, as a correlate of creative imagination, actualizes epiphanic images, allowing itself to be reduced neither ton reproduction nor to fiction. These are primordial images with a universal scope, not depending on the subjective conditions of the perceiver.