Imagination has long been considered as a creative faculty of the subject but has been subordinated to reason ever since the Enlightenment in Western thought. In western political studies, imagination can be seen as an individual or joint capacity, or societies themselves being imaginary, or the very foundation of politics and societies being imaginal without being tied to assumptions of specific realities.
In the context of planetary politics, imagination seen as an ontological register can be viewed as a universal gesture. In this sense imagination is part of “becoming-politics” a transformative collective force of a community or subject that exceeds the global-local distinction. This includes an ontological condition of excess of potential that is universal beyond Western universalism and rationalism.
My research investigates a theory of political imagination in continental and African political philosophy. By analyzing image and time critically by using Deleuze’s concept of the virtual and image of thought, we can trace a political gesture where imagination is disrupting common sense. Imagination can be considered as “reason’s other”, in which case becoming-imagination or imagination-for-itself enables the potential for being otherwise outside the dogmatic image. Through primacy of imagination as difference and beyond experience produces a paradigm of performative nature of thought, existence and creation from the outside of the self. This in turn provides us insights to processes of democratic, plural and joint political practices beyond dividing identity politics and borders such as the nation state.
POLIFA 