Fantasies and Fetishes: The Erotic Imagination and the Problem of Embodiment (original) (raw)

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2009

Abstract

While the philosophical tradition from Kant to Heidegger has addressed the topic of imagination (Einbildungskraft), there has been a general tendency to exclude the individual’s pre-philosophical exercise of this power, namely, its occurrence in eroticism or what we might call the “play of fantasy.” By “fantasy” I mean a specific variation, or product of the imagination, which explicitly cultivates sexual imagery. Yet, the attempt to outline the erotic play of imagination might be particularly rewarding from a phenomenological perspective, if only by providing a springboard to address the concern for sexuality which Heidegger, or Kant for that matter, never brought to the forefront in defining the conditions of our finite nature. Indeed, imagination highlights the distinctly human capability to probe its own limits, thereby sparking the movement of self-transcendence. If there is an “ecstatic” dimension to imagination, as Heidegger emphasizes, if there is a potential for transcendence, then the enactment of these power(s) must always be coupled with a counter-possibility of our incarnality or embodiment. For if imagination is not merely to be a freefloating phenomenon, as ethereal as its content may be, its distinctive mode of openness, or play of possibility, still requires a corresponding factual site or origin. Though by its production of fantasies, imagination may be associated with a mentalistic function, we will discover that, quite the opposite, its manner of disclosedness actually implies the problem of embodiment. Conversely, the retrieval of the imagination on this concrete footing requires overcoming the metaphysical dichotomy between mind and body, and uncovering the later as a lived dimension of our being-in-the-world. The emergence of sexuality as a phenomenon implies this bodily dimension. On the one hand, imagination surpasses what is merely given within a environmental context, and hence has as its target something “hyperphysical.” On the other hand, whatever its innovativeness, the sexual character of the fantasy cannot completely detach itself from its tie to an environmental context, and hence reinstates a “reference” to the physical, albeit in a transformed and inverted way. In the guise of a “fetish,” the physical re-emerges as the creative wellspring for fantasy, as constellating the concrete point or locus of arousal. The vestige of embodiment within the sexual fantasy, then, comes to light in the corollary need for the development of fetishes. To be sure, the task of psychology is to address the dangers that are associated

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