Summary: The Imaginary (page 5)

IV/ The Imaginary Life

The imaged object possesses a highly distinctive mode of existence.

- I strive to grasp it in its entirety. Unlike in perception, it does not appear from a specific angle; it is not presented from a single perspective. I am not concerned with Pierre as he appears at seven in the evening, in profile ¹. What I seek is Pierre in his totality.

Pierre will appear to me in a particular posture, yet he resembles the silhouettes drawn by children, where the face is depicted in profile, yet both eyes are shown. Pictured objects are perceived from multiple angles simultaneously.

- The imaged object is unreal. It is undoubtedly present, yet simultaneously out of reach. I cannot touch it or change its place, or can only modify it in an unreal manner ².

Sartre remarks that these objects embody pure passivity; they merely wait. The faint life we instill in them comes from us, from our spontaneity. If we turn away from them, they vanish into nothingness ³.

The space and time of the object partake in this unreality.

The spatial framework of the image differs from that of perception. Imagined Pierre does not appear to me in a fixed location. He appears five metres away from me, yet as though this distance were an absolute property: The image elevates sensible qualities ⁴ to the level of the absolute.

Time: there are unreal objects which appear to consciousness devoid of any temporal determination. If, for example, I imagine a centaur, this unreal object belongs neither to the present nor to the past or future. [...] I, who imagine the centaur, change, but the centaur himself has not varied, has not aged, has not experienced the passage of a single second: he is timeless ⁵.

Conversely, some imaged objects unfold at a pace faster than consciousness. For instance, most of our dreams are brief. Yet the unfolding of a dream can span several days.

The temporality of unreal objects is itself unreal. It lacks the defining characteristics of perceptual time: it does not flow, it can expand or contract at will while remaining the same, and it is not irreversible. It is a mere shadow of time, perfectly matching the shadow-like nature of objects and their spatial unreality. Nothing more definitively separates the real object from me. The imaginary world remains entirely self-contained; I can only access it by adopting an unreal mode of being myself ⁶.

The imaged object is marked by an essential poverty: I reduce it to a mere set of relations.

The unreal object is likewise incapable of exerting causal influence. It cannot, for instance, render me more tender. Rather, I must choose to respond to it with tenderness.

There is an essential difference in nature between feelings toward the real and feelings toward the imaginary.

For example, love itself varies depending on whether its object is present or absent.

When the beloved departs, my love changes.

Before their departure, my passionate love was subject to its object. As such, I was constantly learning; it never ceased to surprise me ⁷.

Now, it has come to a halt. It no longer sustains itself and can barely persist in the forms it has already assumed. In a sense, it has become scholastic—we can now name it, classify its manifestations ⁸.

The feeling deteriorated, for its inexhaustible richness stemmed from the object. There was always more to love in the object than I had yet loved, and I knew it.

This closely aligns with the Kantian notion of an idea: the idea of my beloved Annie remains inexhaustible, and, correspondingly, my love for her remains inexhaustible.

Through an essential reversal, feeling now produces its own object, and unreal Annie has become nothing more than the strict correlative of my feelings for her ⁹.

¹ 4ème partie, I, 1, p.239
² ibid., p.240
³ ibid.
⁴ ibid., p.245
⁵ ibid., p.249
⁶ ibid., p.253
⁷ I, 2, p.277
⁸ ibid.
⁹ ibid., p.278