The Material and the Imaginary

What could be more distant than the world of fantasy and dream and the world of material necessity without which we cannot survive? The emphasis that many currents of contemporary thought have placed on language has often risked obscuring any extralinguistic reality that might possibly constitute the place of their possible sense that goes beyond the infinite game of interpretations. Basically, a “sociology of the imaginary” wishing to ponder the issue of “depth” can only try to leave the world of images and set these in relation with the emotional sense of a historical human subject. Here, it is not a question of deciding whether “material” life is “true” with respect to the “imaginary” life; it is more a question of trying to relate the represented with the representing, the concept with the thing.