Affective Imagination: the Shared Awareness of Our Dreams

What is the relationship between imagination and affectivity? The hypothesis discussed in this paper is that, far from being a constant basis for our acts of imagination, affectivity rather interrupts and re-orients them toward new directions that cannot be consciously anticipated. Instead of understanding the affectivity of imagination as rooted in direct impression, I propose to understand it in terms of sudden infraction and contingent exposure to something that does not belong to the sphere of our conscious acts. While imagination and affectivity operate at two different levels of our subjective life, my aim is to show that their interference opens new world-perspectives and connects us to a larger human community. By cultivating contradiction in the life of our sensibility, imagination intensifies emotions that reveal the social and the cosmological dimension of our affectivity.