Imaginary Love: A Necessary and Fruitful Failure. General Definition of the Imaginary as Institution

In Institution and Passivity, Merleau-Ponty resumed his consideration of the thorny problem that he had already addressed in Phenomenology of Perception and Child Psychology and Pedagogy, to wit, that of imaginary love. These lectures present a remarkable shift in that Merleau-Ponty makes major concessions to the very pessimistic theses of Sartre and Proust: Merleau-Ponty no longer distinguishes false loves from true loves in the light of which the futility of the former would be plain to see. Instead, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges in Institution and Passivity that there is “no absolute difference between real and imaginary love.” This view involves concessions that initially seem exorbitant since it leads to the conclusion that love is always a myth. However, if there is no difference between real love and imaginary love for Merleau-Ponty, it is because “all are real.” It will therefore be a question of defining a real love that is not opposed to imaginary love, and which includes an irreducible element of fable, illusion, and failure. Merleau-Ponty thus walks a fine line trying to define a nascent authenticity in the imaginary itself, in illusion and deception. This is why, in these lecture notes, the question “is that all?” comes up regularly, indicating a persistent and reasonable doubt regarding the attempt to construct a “reality” with nothing more than the seemingly inconsistent materials that Merleau-Ponty acknowledges he has at his disposal. Since all love is imaginary, the delicate task facing Merleau-Ponty in these considerations is to free the Sartrean or Proustian thesis of any pejorative connotation in order to carry out a genuine reversal: starting out from the same premises as Sartre and Proust, Merleau-Ponty wants to reach an opposite conclusion.