Imagination, our commune

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article by the renowned philosopher and art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman explores the relationship between politics and the imagination. To summarise its main hypothesis, the article argues that the imagination is not only a common faculty of knowledge but an inherently political faculty which rises up against the established political and aesthetic order and radically reimagines human existence as something that we hold in common. In a series of readings of Aristotle, Kant, Hugo and Benjamin, the essay goes on to explore imagination as a political commune or commons in the work of music, art, literature, and philosophy.