The Lures and The Tears of The Image

Patterns into A Pulsatile Imaginary (Rhythm, Resonance, and Reverie)

The conference grants priority not only to visual but also to poetic imagery, to all imaginative aspects of language, sound, and somaesthetics. Inspired by such works, as The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie, the conference will explore the spaces where image becomes the place for poetic and ideating intersections, of temporal ruptures. Homo imaginans is not only the logo of the conference but the premise and the guiding idea for our discussions: the belief in the inner capacity of the human imaginative creativity. Images do not only cover the visual regime but every imaginative aspect of life that grants access to “imaginary creation,” and “imaginary vitality.”
We will privilege in our discussions the material imagination over the representational imagination. Inspired by the materiality of Bachelard’s elemental imagination and Deleuze’s logic of sensation, the conference seeks to explore the energies and the forces of the image; the rhythm and the resonance that penetrate it, and by which new imaginary opportunities are opened to the image, giving the movement a vertical direction. Time no longer flows horizontally, but it hurls (leaps) up.

We encourage inquiries into possible analogies between various theorists of the imaginary, such as G. Durand, P. Fédida, J.-J. Wunenburger, G. Didi-Huberman, C. Castoriadis, or M. Maffesoli. We are especially interested to explore the pathos of the image, its forces and the rhythmical patterns of the “awakening of sensation.” We welcome specific analyses of such situations, as well as any other imaginative patterns that belong to the pulsatile imaginary.

Finally, what we should debate is not WHAT an image “means,” but rather HOW it captivates us and makes us part of its alterations; how the imagination distorts what we perceive, and how the imagination resonates with the image, intensifying the temporal rhythms of the image – itself becoming time. Bachelard has argued against the stable and complete image, issued by formal imagination, for it “causes us to fall from the state of dreaming imagination.” We want to inquire into that shimmering image borne by the elemental, specifically the image of “poetic reverie.” Here we must read the adjective “poetic” with its original etymology from Gk. Ποίησις, as a “creative” act and an opening into dim uncertainties of the image. We must search for the lures and the tearing (déchirure, zerrbild) of the image, as Didi-Huberman (P. Fédida) put it.

Keywords: Imaginary, material imagination; the elemental; water; dream; poetic reverie; resonance and reverberation of image; sonic duration; epiphanic instant; rapture; rhythm; rupture; tearing of image; zerrbild.

The conference will take place online, the deadline for request for participation is Friday the 16 April 2021 to isar@hum.ku.dk