Description
Book SynopsisIntroduction.- Section I The Husserlian legacy and the initial motivations of Merleau Ponty's thought: crisis of rationality, oneiric world, and risk of madness.- Introduction: crisis and imaginary.- The modern crisis.- Husserl's greatest discovery according to Merleau Ponty: the Heraclitean flow, between reason and unreason.- The problem of authenticity in Merleau Ponty: humanity and world dissolved by the imaginary?.- Section II Imagination, nothingness, and inauthenticity in Sartre.- Introduction.- Consciousness is nothingness.- Image, imagination, and imaginary in Sartre.- Existence and the world: a froth of nothingness at the surface of Being.- The theatrics of existence.- The overcoming of the dualism of Being and Nothingness is prefigured in Sartrean philosophy.- Section III The Merleau Pontian definition of the imaginary as a particular register of phenomena alongside the real .- Introduction: thematization of the imaginary and definition of a broadened reality.- Merleau Ponty's invocations of the Sartrean definition of the imaginary are inseparable from his critique of the opposition between Being and Nothingness.- Merleau Ponty's critique of the Sartrean conception of the imaginary.- The genuine and even enhanced presence of the real in the imaginary.- The proximity between the Merleau Pontian redefinition of the imaginary and Bachelard's philosophy.- Section IV The conquest of authenticity.- Introduction: authenticity and poetic depth.- Imaginary love: a necessary and fruitful failure General definition of the imaginary as institution.- Institutions and creative acts of taking up in an authentic deep and poetic existence.- Authenticity, imaginary, and reality.- Section V The imaginary is the true Stiftung of Being.- The imaginary as introduction to ontology and then as fundamental ontological model.- An ungraspable Urstiftung: Being as dehiscence.- Depth loves masks: Being as a play of images.- Conclusion.
