Introduction

Since life is a wonder and a drama, a series of encounters and catastrophes whose ground and outcome equally elude our understanding, we may be tempted to say that it is a dream. This is a dizzying image, but it could also appear to be just a play on words: the distinction between real and imaginary naturally reestablishes itself right away, providing what seems to be a solid basis on which we may regain our balance after the countless paradoxes produced by dreaming allow the specter of madness to emerge. There is thus a vast gulf between such a playing and a philosophy which, striving to remain faithful to its imperative demand for rigor and clarity, would nevertheless take this deeply disconcerting hypothesis seriously. Precisely therein lies the remarkable audacity of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy: one of its main objectives is in fact to work out an ontology of the imaginary. “Consciousness is now the ‘soul of Heraclitus’, and Being, which is around it rather than in front of it, is an oneiric Being, by definition hidden.” In an unprecedented reversal, the imaginary is thus explicitly presented as the “Stiftung [institution] of Being.” Merleau-Ponty thematizes the idea of a fundamental imaginary dimension of the real (with all the subversion of the notion of foundation that the qualifier ‘imaginary’ entails) and gives powerful expression to the radical crisis that it generates in all the traditional reference points of cognition, ethics, and ontology. Keenly aware of the profound, painful, and yet beneficial questioning of rationality that this idea implies, he endeavors to define, in imaginary glimmering [miroitement] itself, the conditions of a new rationality.