ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what a shift from the ideal imagination to its dysregulated cognate might tell us about the troubled intersection of pleasure, desire, and judgment. Henry Sargent’s pendant pieces and King’s work in particular are interesting in this regard because they connect with two discourses of incorporation that were particularly relevant to the imagination’s combinatory powers, namely, eating food and drinking alcohol. The chapter argues that the dark wretchedness at the heart of the dysregulated imagination was redeemed and regulated by being projected onto raced bodies that were perceived as less rational, more emotional, and less in control of their imaginative faculties. The intersections among race, imagination, and abjection form a symbolic economy, a calculus of arcs and subtended angles rather than a strictly Euclidean geometry. The 17 men sitting around the table in Sargent’s Dinner Party seem the very epitome of persons who would be able to discipline their imaginations.
