Authenticity, Imaginary, and Reality

Like Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty calls on us to explore images in terms of their deeper imaginary, to sublimate their symbolic power, and he made this exploration the key to “authenticity”: in a sense, everything is only an image, we can only play with images, passing from one to another. But the notion of institution allows us to define this play otherwise than as a simple leap from one banal image to another.